A Vacation
Beautiful Girl Required
A girl came up to me and asked, “Where did you get those?” I heard her through my earphones blaring some kind of ‘smoothno.’ Smoothno is what I call post-emo techno that is now mainstream. I don’t know if the music elitist I know would agree with that. But come on, what do they agree with? It saturates my Spotify radio. I used to listen to smoothno on Sirius ‘Chill’ back when there was such a thing. The station had that lame name and we listened to it on satellite TV which is also lame. We thought we were hip.
I heard her but I didn’t know what she was talking about. It’s true, I was flustered. Girls do not come up to me. I’m not a circus side show, it just doesn’t happen. I wonder if there is something in the nature of them that makes them that way? I pretended to be suave. I should know better. There was a disaster of stuff on my coffee table. She could have been referring to anything. Although, I’m not that interesting. I’m also not one of those guys that lives at a coffee shop and drinks coffee until all the fluids in his body are tinted brown and smell like battery acid. I know that because I used to be that guy.
I was attempting to regain composure. She was very elegant. As per the normal fashion she saw right through my attempts to not be flustered by her. You know how a woman can fluster you?
“Your sandals. Where did you get them?”
I fantasized for a moment how I was going to turn sandals into Italy and Ibiza and a Mediterranean cruise. Climb a Scottish castle. As soon we landed on the ground in Italy and I was about to take my first sip of REAL COFFEE she starts talking about how she is into barefoot running and all this bio-mechanics stuff and what walking in shoes does to ruin your life forever. She continued on to list 6 books she had read including the one about the indigenous long distance runners in Mexico’s copper canyon and how visiting them and running with them was the first thing on her bucket list if she can ever get some time off from work and if her boss would get his head out of his ass and, . . . . . Italy was ruined. So was Ibiza. Fuck Scottish castles.
She was caustic. How had I not noticed that voice? Every runon syllable was the offspring of some fingernails and a chalkboards one night stand. Dear fucking god please let me escape this! As she went on as if I wasn’t there I wondered if she would notice if I put my earphones back on and carried her on the plane. We could go to Italy and party ‘99 style in Ibiza and climb a Scottish castle with her rattling on and me with my smoothno. It would be the perfect relationship. I’m sure people around us would say (valley girl voice), “OH — My- GOD——HE-Is not-LISTENING-to her- AT ALL!!” I have no idea why there are so many valley girls on planes, in Italy, partying in Ibiza and climbing Scottish castles but whatever; just go with it. Well, maybe Ibiza. I can see that.
“SO! Where did you get them?
Clearly this relationship wasn’t going to work out. I already have to break up with her. That is so my typical pattern. “XERO shoes. Just google ‘X E R O.’ They are from a hippie couple in Colorado.” I wondered for a minute if this girl smoked pot and what would happen to that chatterbox of hers if she was high. Nothing I think. I’m pretty sure she needs a non-smoothno loving introvert to accompany her where ever the hell she is going. Its too bad too, I can’t get a refund on my air plane tickets.
