"Entertaining"

I had a dinner party. TOG and DYS and my Christian Nut Job (CNJ) houseguest who I welcomed into my home “for a few weeks” two weeks ago tomorrow and who asked me yesterday if it was ok for her to use this address when she renewed her CA driver's license. Well, let’s just see how the dinner table conversation went.

Me:   CNJ texts that she’s an hour late and still stuck in traffic and I can’t delay dinner because my rice has already cooked itself into risotto and my peas will become pea soup. So, let’s eat.

TOG: (Driving his scooter up to the table without bashing into a single thing) What’s that smell?

DYS:  It smells like cooked meat to me. Lamb?

Me:  Yes, with shallots and pears caramelized in butter and honey. And saffron rice and fresh peas.

Time passes. The rules about conversation are that I have to start any conversation. Yeah, that’s the only rule.  I have to ask somebody something specific about their life because by the time anybody thinks to ask me how I’m doing Boko Haram will have brought our girls home along with their grandchildren. And you know how they were coming for the purpose of seeing the house fixup which has now been completed? Spoiler alert: nope.

Me:  So, how is it going with you?

DYS:  Well I have to return my rental car Sunday so I’m going down my list of survival supplies so I can huddle inside the trailer until my next court date in September.

Me:  You can’t walk to a grocery store?

WISIMH:  Of course you could, but it would involve walking uphill both ways. In fairness, it’s probably a one mile round trip to the WallMart/grocery store/dollar store mall over the hill. In fact it’s downhill almost all the way back to your trailer, except for the final uphill climb into the high-rent trailer row you inhabit at the top of the trailer park with a view overlooking the feed store and crushed gravel and stone yard.

DYS:  No.

More time passes. My dinner is delicious by the way. Amazing and lovely and perfectly seasoned and nobody notices. Pearls before cloven-hoofed fat pink people. 

Me:  So how is it going with you?

TOG:  I’m doing better but did you see that letter I brought from Chase bank with 2 credit cards saying we get 1% back on all purchases? It goes on for pages but I challenge you to find the APR.

Me:  We don’t even have accounts with them do we? I thought I told them to put me on their “Do Not Rape and Plunder” List. Why the hell would I want to play Find the APR with that despicable bank?

WISIMH:  The remainder of my life is too short to read junk mail from banks I hate because ahead of that on my honey-do list is to try to make ends meet and organize fixup and clean up details and get this money pit sold before I hang myself from the rafters. I have bought power tools that would enable me to drill a hole through one of the beams in our lovely open-beam ceilings. Just ahead of reading junk mail from Chase Bank on my to-do list is re-learning how to tie a hangman’s noose.

Me: So, what else is new? Anybody?  How’s the food?

TOG: It’s very good. And I can chew the meat because it’s soft enough. Which is good because I’ve been having some dental problems lately and I’ll now proceed to relate them to you in disgusting detail while you’re trying to eat.

And he does, and DYS embellishes with her own personal dental tragedy experiences, including how when TOG and DYS were kids they both developed pathological fear of dentists because they had permanent teeth extracted at the age of 5 without anesthetic because their permanent teeth were coming in already rotted.

WISIMH:  Pretty sure I remember your permanent teeth don’t begin to come in until you’re about six. Also, pretty sure the (primary) bacteria that causes tooth decay, which is streptococcus mutans, which sticks to teeth by colonizing in the sticky plaque that is formed when sugars in food are not regularly brushed off your teeth and thus break down and stick to your teeth, can't actually stick to your teeth until they emerge from your gums. Therefore, no matter how appalling bad your oral hygiene practices are, if the tooth is not yet erupted from beneath the gum, plaque cannot form on it and thus the bacteria cannot form and attack the tooth enamel and cause decay. Therefore, pretty sure your teeth cannot erupt already decayed. What you’re actually telling me  - besides that you probably never brushed your teeth - is that you must have been put to bed each night with a baby bottle filled with Kool-Aid and your teeth rotted within fifteen minutes of sticking their cusps above the foxhole of your gums.

But hey, we’re eating here and who wants to hear what I learned all those years ago in dental assistant school when we could be talking about other captivating details of your pathetic lives like the stuff Tex left behind in DYS's trailer and which she's holding hostage until he starts paying her some spousal support.

I re-surface to consciousness, returning from my happy place, to realize we’re now talking about DYS’s adult daughter who has Lyme Disease that she treats intermittently with antibiotics.

WISIM: Hey you incogitant idiot! Did you know antibiotics aren’t effective unless you continue the course of meds until the parasites are killed? All you do if you take meds for one week out of three is breed a strain of stronger parasites. Now we’re talking about what it feels like to have those parasites swimming around in your eyeballs and beneath the surface of your skin.

Me: Eating.

Fortunately, CNJ arrives at this moment to save the conversational day. And this is a good thing because CNJ is a sort of black hole sucking up any conversation on any topic that doest happen to be about her and her problems and how every day in every way she’s getting better. So there's no sitting down and being introduced and seeing what conversations might be underway. 

CNJ:  I had an interesting class. I’m going to a peer-counseling class so I can volunteer to be a peer counselor to other people who are as messed up as I am. Today in the class, one of the guys had a seizure. Only me and one other guy knew what to do, which is to leave the guy alone until he comes out and not to surround him and stare at him or to get hysterical and shout we should be doing something which is what everybody else did.

TOG: Yeah, one time when I was a counselor for disabled students a girl who had seizures started to have a seizure and I yelled at her “Stop that!” and she did!

DYS:  Amazing. I didn’t know you could do that.

WISIMH: You can’t do that, you brain-dead blockhead. The only way to stop a seizure is to administer antibiotics intermittently over long periods of time. Duh!

CNJ:  So we couldn’t get people to move away from seizure guy and of course he was so embarrassed when he woke up and we (!) were all (!) standing there surrounding him and looking down at him and he yelled at us to move away. He left before the paramedics arrived.

Me:  Yeah, embarrassed. And probably because they’ll take your driver’s license away if you have a seizure that is documented by paramedics.

WISIMH: And not by a bunch of panicked wackjobs.

After dinner, DYS took her leftovers and her leave and CNJ went to the dollar store to buy more bulk dried food  and five-layer bean dip to leave on my kitchen counters and TOG took his bath, leaving me to do a ton of dishes which I did resentfully and with the grace of a frustrated shrew who feels others are taking advantage of her but sees no point in trying to teach grown adults simple manners. Later, it turns out TOG had trouble in the tub and called out to me but I didn’t come to his rescue to talk him down from his panic attack cliff  because I was making too much noise slamming pots and pans back into cupboards and sweeping up broken wine glasses that I had dropped getting a plastic wine cup to take to TOG at his request when he began his bath. Praise Jesus, he managed not to die and finished up just in time to watch The Big Bang Theory because it was one of his favorite episodes.

When it was time for me to drive him home it was dark.

TOG:  Are you ok driving in the dark?

Me:  No. I have the night vision of a stone covered up by bigger stones.

TOG: Why didn’t you say so? I could have skipped The Big Bang.

Me: I did mention that, actually.

TOG:  Really?

Me:  Yeah, you missed it because you were asking me where the remote was for the fan by the comfy chair and I told you I bought a fan and didn’t realize until I got home that it doesn’t have a remote, and you were too busy telling me I was wrong and I probably threw away the remote in the packaging because surely they don’t make fans without remotes any more and I was saying apparently they do and thanks for managing to insult me without breaking a sweat.

TOG:  I was kidding!      

Me: I may have mentioned I no longer think criticizing me for fun is as funny as it used to be.  

TOG:  Geeze, you’ve got no sense of humor.

Me:  No. No, I do not.

In my head I found peaceful silence. There is a pile of ashes still smoldering in the corner of my head once filled with my respect for TOG. It gives off a soft ghostly flickering glow that illuminates other shelves in my head filled with my sense of humor, joy, compassion and conversational skills, not to mention my flair for cooking, entertaining and hosting dinner parties: long unused around TOG but well-preserved and ready for use should I ever encounter intelligent life again.