My dad was tricked into buying several CDs worth of drunken monologues once. The guy who sold it had come to my dad’s office for whatever reason and had brought the discs, which he said were recordings of a “peace conference”. My dad, intrigued, paid him what he was asking for, which wasn’t much, but more than you’d knowingly pay for bullshit.
The “peace conference” turned out to be The Guy and The Guy alone, and The Guy was very drunk and quite possibly under the influence of stronger drugs. There was global geopolitics and local politics so local the locals don’t care, mixed with no apparent care or order. At one point, he started talking about the mayor of his little county, a woman, and while he was praising her for her outstanding policies he intimated that once, in his youth, he had slept in the same bed as this woman, but he hadn’t slept with her.
It was glorious. Easily worth the money. I think I heard only twenty minutes, but every minute was better than the previous. Every minute was funnier, if only because every minute it got sadder and sadder and so the socially acceptable thing to do is to laugh louder and louder. Next time I visit my parents I’m going to go looking for the discs, but I fear they may be lost; my dad gave one of them to his coworkers, and it was apparently a smash hit at a party they had, and I don’t know where the other disc or dics are.
The absurdity and sadness of this whole incident is, of course, that not only did The Guy record himself giving a long drunken monologue on everything from the Olympics to his youthful nonsexual escapades with his mayor, he was, some time later, sober, actually selling them enthusiastically as if there were nothing embarrassing about them, indeed, as if they actually contained information that would be highly valuable to the outside world. The whole thing evokes a mixed response in me: I’m not sure if I should pity the man or high-five him. Drunken monologues, after all, have been under-appreciated for a long time, although I suspect they’ve enjoyed a resurgence since the coming of the blog, and I also suspect that The Guy has no clue what a blog is.
What brought this story to mind might have been something I witnessed in a convenience store last night which gave me the same “should I pity or high-five” feeling. Two men, one forty plus, maybe fifty and the other an old, bent man of probably seventy, stood bickering about some kind of lottery game. I must admit, I stereotype people I see hanging out in convenience stores, wasting money on one-armed bandits or lotteries; I imagine that if you’re middle aged and have nowhere more exciting to be nor anything more exciting to spend your money on, you must have kind of a sad life, but I know I’m not being entirely fair.
Anyway, these men and the cashier were sort of going back and forth about how this particular lottery game worked. The forty plus guy said he’d be playing it since the seventies, so he ought to know how it worked, and then one of them said to the cashier, “you weren’t around in the seventies, were you”, and she said she was born in 1989. This, apparently, excited the seventy-year-old greatly. Half stuttering, he started telling the cashier that he had a bast skirt he had “bought in Zululand” and she should try it on to see if it fit her, “in case we’re going somewhere”, nod nod wink wink.
I can’t help it. I’m probably unfair, maybe not to the drunk as much as to the old man whom I didn’t hear pour his heart out for twenty minutes, only one, but I see the bent man of 70 and the man hawking his drunken monologues on CD as part of the same tribe. I hope that when I’m middle aged, I’m not part of it.
Nov 3, 2010