Naked Christmas Dinner

Took my regular place at the "Manno Compound", Christmas Day. I'm that curiously constant houseguest, not connected by blood or law to anyone save for the delicate tendrils of friendship.

Of course, being cast as "the bad kid", I easily get swept up with other bad kids. And me, I've gotta play "Jim Morrison" and ingest absolutely ANYTHING anyone offers me without much contemplation.

Which is what led me to taking some deep hits of hashish imported from India soon after I arrived.

Of course, pot is my fucking Kryptonite. I didn't take the time to google hashish, natch, so I didn't fully appreciate that "hashish" has essentially the same effect as pot.

Meaning: it totally clouds my head and makes it much more difficult for me to interact socially.

It effectively put me out of commission for a good 7-8 hours. I didn't want anyone to know, naturally, so I fought it like the dickens. Tried extra hard to pay attention to every conversation.

I actually tried cooking something for the gathering this year, which became a separate nightmare. I'd made some dough ahead of time and planned to create a sort of Iron Chef, improvised pizza out of leftover crudités—practice cooking for an upcoming trip. Alas, being completely high and having to deal with "Dinner: Impossible" type challenges like a finicky oven that wouldn't get as hot as I needed it to get because I was sharing it with other dishes that were cooking... I kinda had to pack my knives and exit the kitchen.

The biggest hurt locker, though: I got trapped with the real-world embodiment of Grampa Simpson...

The old man narrowed in on me, seeing that I was the only person who was apparently from the Far East. He munched on a Wheat Thin and simultaneously spat out wet clumps of Wheat Thins as he spoke to me in slurred elder-speak: "Where are you from...?"

But every word and every space between words were elongated. Each word uttered like lifting a heavy weight:

"WHEEERRREE... ARRE... YOOOUUU... FFFFFROMMMMM.......?"

Light-brown spatters of partially-chewed Wheat Thins tumbling down his sweater and flying at my face.

"Are you Korean?" he proffered.
["Arrrree... yyyyyoooouuuu... KORRRREEEYINNNNNN.....????"]

After I informed him that I was Filipino, he offered me his generous assessment.

"The Filipino people are verrry hard-working...!"

["He don't know me too well," I thought.]

Like he was a fortune-teller or something. Like I needed this validation of my ethnicity to move ahead in life. I get it. I've been here. This is the bit we call, "humoring the elderly".

Of course, I'm dealing with this while I am AS HIGH AS A FREAKING KITE, which made the ensuing... hour(?!?)... twist into an eternity...

Eventually, Dave got caught in the same Grampa-Simpson-trap and we were both suffering a never-ending elderly-man monologue that would seem to boil down to one point:

THINGS CHANGE OVER TIME.

That's it. That's what it was about. A lot has changed since he was young.

End of discussion. Yet, this somehow turned into a sort of stream-of-consciousness wonderwall of slurred, Wheat-Thins-spitting words.

I felt like a woolly mammoth sinking slowly into a deep, hot tar-pit. Every sentence the old man spoke seemed to take half an hour to utter and the ideas went in figure-eights of NOWHERE. In my high-state, I was impressed that Dave somehow managed to keep with the flow of the conversation and occasionally interject something pertinent to what the old man was babbling about. What's more, Dave didn't even talk down to gramps: he spoke back to him as if he were carrying on a conversation with a person who wasn't completely deranged by old age. I was using all of my remaining brain power to keep my eyes fixed open.

Note to self: I'm a much more engaging drinker than I am a pot-smoker.