This weekend is the annual drinking fest/excuse to get drunk known in these here parts as "Octoberfest," which is German for "wait, we invaded Poland again? Why did we ever elect that funny-looking guy with the Chaplin moustache again?"
I do not plan to go (which is not the same thing as saying "I'm not going," because often it seems I tend to do the opposite of what I planned lately, and I'm working on that), because I have often come away from Octoberfest in the past with one of two things: an upset stomach from the questionable "German" cuisine found herewithin, or a huge sense of disappointment. It is the latter that I will address now.
For a growing boy with growing acne scars, the Octoberfest weekend seemed to offer a chance to break out of the confines of my normal, humdrum existence as "the medical oddity of the Walhalla Greater Educational System" (in that I seemed to have few friends, no game with the ladies, but plenty of pizza-reminiscent boils protruding from my face, each mini-Vesuvius tender to the touch) and perhaps become a super-stud, or at least "attractive to older girls whose boyfriends snuck them a beer." My interest in girls began to rise right as my interest in riding the rides available began to peak, though I retain a fondness to this day for the questionably-maintained "swing ride." This was a contraption that spun you around and around, rising you higher and higher until you noticed that the scary-Vietnam-Vet-looking guy who ran the machine was off on a smoke break and you'd gotten sick of the combination of fried donut holes before the ride and the repetition of Def Leppard hits during it. Good times, good vertigo-inducing times.
I spent one memorable (in a bad way) Octoberfest stuck til closing hours because the woman who was my friends' and mine ride (no, not like that; she was kinda gross looking) was busy chatting up potential serial killers who wanted a ride (yes, now I mean it like that). Another memorable (in a bad way) Octoberfest was when I drank some of the watered-down swill they sold in the tent and I realized that I'm a cheap drunk. Okay, maybe that was a good development, but it wasn't so much for my sister, who gave me a ride home and tried to cover up my drunkeness from my grands. Epic fail.
But I do have good memories, where the possibility of bliss lasted long before the eventual pin-prick of reality let all the air out of that balloon. Strangely, my favorite memory doesn't involved a failed attempt to score a hottie; one year, at the height of the Barney craze, some poor soul thought they'd dress up as the purple dinosaur to entertain the kids. My friend Chris and I were not kids, but we did have water pistols. We shot Barney a couple of times, made some kids cry. I'm not proud of it, but I actually look back on it now with whimsy. I can say that I assassinated Barney in a sense. Going up on the resume now.
But alas, most of my memories of Octoberfest (like the one immediately after my drunken one, where I went in the hope of running into yet another unobtainable beauty and came up snake-eyes) are ones of "meh." After you stop being a kid but aren't old enough to drink, it can be a post-childhood hell of mistaken signals and misheard directions that mean she will *not* be joining you in the Beer Tent after all. When you can drink but choose not to, and teenagers annoy the hell out of you, it's just about going there so the kids that you're uncle/cousin to can have a good time, and they went last night without me. So no, I don't plan on attending. Besides, the one girl I'd want to run into there isn't going to be there. She's in Greenville now. So no Octoberfest for me, bitches. At least, I don't *think* so...
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