March 13th 9:08pm - Metal Gate-Spanked Face

For those in the audience when I attempt Karaoke, what had been a pleasurable experience for them hastily turns atrocious as soon as my inebriated self stumbles up those stage steps. I feel it entirely necessary to inhibit my own eardrum capabilities with my preferred Rum, as my life improves the less I comprehend my own attempts at birdsong. I have to imagine the audience’s revulsion and disappointment similar to dating the idyllic woman only to ascertain she is, in fact, your cousin (an experience that truthfully transpired with a friend’s friend... in Arkansas). Anyway, after thirteen too many songs and impressively constructed cords of expletives emitting from my audience’s mouths, I retired from the stage and the bar. My friends and I restored our lives back to the apartment, where I immediately subsided into my bed and coma-sleep. 

My two roommates and another friend continued alcohol consumption and carousing and, at 4:45am, produced a plan: walk to the beach to watch the sun rise. For those of you unaware of the intimate proximity to our apartment, the beach subsisted sixty blocks away. Armed with alcohol and an astronomical attitude, one of my roommates descended the back staircase, her tone-deaf singing striking the walls. She successfully maneuvered four stairs before miss-stepping around the spiraling staircase. She plunged into an acrobatic summersault, tumbling over stairs, limbs everywhere, fluttering about like Michael Flatley’s Lord of the Dance. We had a rusted wrought-iron metal gate at the step’s base. Her forehead flung down the stairs, body and limbs catapulting down much like Ice Age's Scrat the ravenous Saber-toothed squirrel flinging himself over a cliff after an acorn. Her face converted into the bridge between her 5’11” self and the metal gate. A tender segment of skin an inch away from her eye martyred itself as the point of contact between one hundred sixty pounds of muscle and flesh and the corroded spears of the gate. The 4:45am-sixty-blocks-away-beach-scheme was abandoned. Her 6’9” black basketball-playing boyfriend refused to be seen in public with her for weeks until her face didn’t resemble the remnants of being bitch-slapped by a metal-gate wielding monk.