Happy New Year

It’s that time of the year again when you have to work through all the holidays and your wife and friends or boyfriends or girlfriends have the night off and you feel like you are the only one in the whole world without the night off.

You smile your way through Thanksgiving, then sarcastically laugh your way past Christmas Eve and Christmas Day “Another refill? Coming right away sir, NGFY!” Then New Year’s Even comes along and you had to work on your birthday the day before and you are at your wit’s end and you thank God for the small mercy that the boss opened some of the cheapest sparkling in the house to share with the staff and as you count down “5,4,3,2,1….” You start counting down the hours till your shift ends and you can go home, open a special bottle of wine you’ve been saving all year and settling in with the misses at the God awful hour of 3am.

But then seconds before they all scream “Happy New Year” your wife staggers in the door, red faced not from the cold but from a Magnum of Concha Y Toro bucket wine and instead of hurrah, you think “ah fuck!” You can see the eyes are gone and she is trying to drag you out of work to come party with her, but you know you’ve still got lots to do before you can leave and she starts nagging and walks off in a stormer. You’ve to go after her and tell her, “Hey I’m still at work, do you mind, sit in the bar and I’ll be right with you.” An hour passes and she keeps filling up at the bar and finally you are ready to take her home. But you’re not going home yet, the party is still going on at her sister’s house and she wants you to be with everybody else and you try to explain that you are tired and don’t want to go, but you are reminded that she hangs out with your friends “all the time.” So you go to her sister’s house and she can hardly talk and everybody there is ready for bed and you make small talk and you turn around and your wife is gone.

You find her outside trying to walk down Independence Ave at two o’clock in the bloody morning and you have to chase after her less a drug addict or prostitute tries to sell her something. Then she falls down and you have to carry her back to the car and you hope she just passes out in the back seat, but as you are driving down I-35 she stirs awake and opens the back door to get out. So you’ve one hand on the steering wheel, one hand on her arm and you’re screaming at her to close the door “fer fuck’s sake.” She tells you to leave her alone, ‘cause you’re in the wrong, it’s her right to open the car door and get out on I-35 at 70 miles an hour.

Eventually you get into the driveway of your house and she falls down nearly killing herself on the edge of the pavement and it’s your fault again. Then you get inside and the dogs have shit in the hallway ‘cause she never let them out earlier in the day and started celebrating a tad too early. So the house smells of shit and she starts crying and you tell her to ignore it and you’ll clean it up and for her to just lie down and take it easy.

You find her a receptacle to barf up into and get her a glass of water and fix up the bedroom for her so she can pass out safely and you can unwind, take your work clothes off have a New Year’s Eve beer for yourself and try and save some sanity from the night.

Then you turn around and there is shit all over the house! She has grabbed the dog blanket with runny shit on it and dragged it through the house and down into the basement and the washing machine is going full blast. You find her in the basement (still crying about the smell of shit) but now the washing machine is about to blow up ‘cause she over stuffed it with shitty dog blankets and the motor has ripped the drum off it’s base and the machine is full of shitty blankets and shitty water. Ahhh, you scream for God’s sake go to bed and leave the fucking shit alone!

After a struggle you get her to bed sans the shit on her pants, and it’s after three thirty in the morning and now you’ve to start cleaning up the shit that is smeared on the wall on the stairs and just about every where. So instead of feeling like shit, you now smell like shit.

After a shower you lay on the couch, crack open a beer, sit back, take one sip and completely pass out from exhaustion, Happy Fucking New Year. Let’s do this again next year.