I've missed you...

As you, my faithful readers, have no doubt noticed, I haven't posted much this year.

Okay, I've only posted once and, to be honest, that was one I'd started writing before the ball dropped. I should beg your forgiveness - I know you've come to expect at least thrice-weekly Internet lovin' from me to make it through those tedious 8-hour days in your cubicles. I have a good excuse, though!

Here it goes...

So, I went home from work on January 4th, just like it were any other day. When, in fact, it most certainly was not.

That Friday marked the last day that I, Mike Nagel, could truthfully call myself an employed man. When I re-started my computer at the end of the day, it was out of habit - I always did that when leaving at the end of the week, just to give the poor, non-Mac machine a break. But it was a futile, worthless gesture... the thing could have spontaneously combusted and it wouldn't have affected me one iota (or, less, depending on how big your particular iota is, I wouldn't know).

I woke up the next day in a cold sweat. Which, when you think about it, isn't really possible - who's actually cold when they're sweating? Unless you're talking about Tom "Terrific" Brady's icy blue eyes, that is.

Suddenly, I was without purpose. At 3 a.m. on that Saturday morning, a most inconvenient time to be awoken, I realized that even the word "Saturday" had lost its meaning. I no longer had any "weekends," because I didn't even have a "week." My week could never end because it couldn't even begin.

I freaked out and began pacing my room, which is something I'd never done before, most likely because it only takes two-and-one-quarter strides to reach either side of the room and the 180-degree pivot to turn and step the other way causes extreme rug burn after a few minutes. But I was too panicked to care that my soles (and very soul!) were bleeding... I needed to find a meaning, a purpose in my existence.

At precisely 5:42 a.m. - which was sunrise on the 5th - it dawned on me (ba-dum ching!), I would take a trip! I would search for meaning in my travels! I would wear the same pair of pants for 10 days straight!

Hastily, I gathered some belongings and shoved them, willy-nilly, into my backpack: my journal, a digital camera, a couple Clif bars, three sets of socks and underwear, a Hooters t-shirt, flip-flops, wool socks, a Sharpie, a picture of my mom, an Espanol word guide/dictionary, a flask, a paperback copy of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and my bottle of allergy medication. I flung the load onto my back, scribbled a hasty goodbye to my roomie (and an apology for using the last square of Charmin) and threw open to the door of my apartment and stepped out confidently, albeit hastily, because I slipped and fell down a flight of stairs, landing prone in front of a lawn ornament of Little Lord Fauntleroy (seriously, my landlady has lawn ornaments adorning her landing).

Recovering from my fall, I continued out the door to Logan airport...

There, I bought the second-cheapest Jet Blue ticket they had to offer - a one-way to San Juan, Puerto Rico. I could've saved 20 bucks and flown to Fort Lauderdale, instead, but one look at each destinations advertisement was all it took to convince me to spend the extra Cleveland (which is what I call 20-dollar-bills, refusing to acknowledge the switch that took place in 1928 to put the impeached Andrew Jackson on the front... read more here). The photo of Puerto Rico showed smiling couples with taut, bronze skin playing in crystal clear waters... bosoms and pectorals everywhere! Fort Lauderdale's showed the same thing, but in geriatric form - the guys all wore black socks with sandals and the gals showed off plenty of bosom-action, but it was all around their belly-buttons.

I was going to Puerto Rico! I had a plan! My mind was filled with exclamatory punctuation!

I landed without a place to stay, but I didn't care... I had decided on my flight down, in between happily enjoying the Dunkin' Donuts coffee that now comes on all Jet Blue flights and the little blue bag of pretzels, that I would sleep on the beach. I'd never done that before.

When night came, I dug myself a little bed on the beach, made a mound of sand for a pillow and curled up with my backpack to watch the sun go down. I fell asleep watching the sun painting the sky a brilliant palette of pinks, oranges and reds. The waves crashing into the shore, lulled me to sleep and a gentle breeze wafted over me.

I woke up to find the surf pounding around me, my bag nowhere to be found. The undertow had dragged it, along with one shoe, away, and was threatening to do the same to my pair of pants. I was completely soaked and a rather large piece of seaweed had wrapped itself around my head, partially blinding me.

I stumbled around the beach for a while, grasping at my pants and struggling to pull the wet jeans up to cover my bare rear, when I found about about two cups of sand had found its way into the crotch. Now THAT was comfortable.

Sputtering seaweed, I tried to figure out what to do. The entire beach was completely dark and that comfortable sea breeze I'd fallen asleep to was now freezing cold. My erect nipples were cutting twin holes in my Hooters t-shirt, which I would have found amusingly ironic, had they not been blue.

The closest apparent source of light (a neon sign) and civilization (it said, "Budweiser") was about a quarter mile down the beach, so I started walking towards that. My one bare foot leaving footprints in the sand next to my shoed foot that read "Puma" and had a cute little drawing of a cat on it. I reached the bar and tried to assess the situation. I looked like I had just washed up on shore (which I kind of had), but I still had my wallet, which albeit soggy, could be used to pay for some drinks, a spot at the bar and a chance to dry out and figure out what to do next. I took a deep breath, held my head high and walked through the door up to the bar, my bare foot leaving wet, sanding footprints on the floor, which, incidentally, was covered in peanut shells, causing me to squeal in pain every other step.

Crunch. Ouch! Crunch. Ouch! Crunch. Ouch! Crunch. Ouch!

It took eight steps to get to the bar.

I ordered a "cheapo cerveza," no doubt impressing the bartender with my fluent Spanglish, and looked around. It was about as close to a biker's bar as I'd ever been in. Everyone there was bigger than me, more leather-clad than me and harrier than me, including the chick behind the bar. I was, as the British say, scared poopless, but no one was paying any attention to me.

No one, that is, except this one scruffy dude in the corner. He was a small guy with, no joke, an eyepatch AND a wooden leg. Seriously. In 2008, someone was walking around in a bar with a wooden peg leg. It started at the floor and disappeared into his cut-off, khaki shorts. Someone had taken the time to ornately carve and paint a mermaid into the side of it. Her sea-foam tail started at the base of the leg and continued upwards to just below a pair of fantastic, wooden breasts (36 C's, I'd say). I couldn't see her face, since it disappeared into his pants (if I had a nickel for every time...), but it was quite the piece of work.

Anyway, Mr. Peg-Leg Eyepatch was staring at me. Not wanted to be rude, I didn't stare back, but tried to drink my beer in peace, which is hard to do when one eye and a wooden leg with boobs on it are fixated on you. I sipped. I pretended to read the Spanish label. I sipped again. I learned the Spanish names for the months by checking the born-on date. I sipped some more. I re-read the label, and so on.

I did this for three (tres) beers. I had no where else to go! And all the while, the weird, piratey looking dude just nursed his own beer and kept staring at me with his one good eye.

Eventually, while I was on my fourth beer and giggling without reason every time I read Junio on the bottle's label, the guy walked over. He was surprisingly smooth for a guy with a wooden leg. You couldn't even hear him striking the floor with it - just the same crunch, crunch sounds everyone else (but me) made when walking over the peanut shells.

"Ahoy, there!" he said. No, really.

"Ahoy!" I said back and saluted him with my bottle. No reason not to be friendly.

He looked at my bare foot. I looked at his mermaid's bare chest.

"You look like you could stand to have a drink bought for you. Ever had a Mind Eraser?"

Visions of roofie coladas danced in my head. But I didn't want to seem standoffish. Plus, I still had nowhere to go and I didn't want to spend all of my own money.

"Nope, what is it?"

Peg-Leg chortled heartily, if not somewhat ominously. I don't know what it was - perhaps the fact that his laugh was deep and dark and that his smile didn't reach his eyes - but I was nervous. Apparently, though, not as nervous as I should have been.

He hauled himself and his leg up onto the stool next to me.

"Betty," he said to the mustachioed bartender, "get this kid a Mind Eraser."

I tried to watch all the ingredients her tatooed hands poured into the blender, but it was impossible. Clearly, it was a popular drink and she'd made it plenty of times before, because she spun bottles, poured in syrups, crushed ice and blended it all together in a flash. She set the drink before me, condensation dripping from the outside and a deep, red, slushy mixture inside.

I took a sip.

Boy, that felt good! I started to warm up inside... and all the way down to my bare foot...

I took another sip.

"So, tell me your story," said the pirate.

I did, right from the beginning of my revelation that morning to waking up on the beach that night, sparing no detail (including my airport purchase of a grande-triple-shot-soy-extra-hot-extra-foam-no whip-latte). During which, he bought himself another beer and me another pair of Mind Erasers, laughing another dramatic har-har guaff when I drunkenly started on both at the same time (Man, if I had a nickel for that!).

Did you know they still Shanghai'd people in 2008? Yeah, um, me neither...

When I woke up the next morning, with the absolute worst headache I've ever head in my life, I was on the deck of a fishing vessel bound for Caracas in the company of Peg-Leg and a bunch of other guys I recognized from the bar. Apparently, they needed another drug mule for operations coming out of Bogotá. Their last one had burped too hard and three condoms full of coke burst in his stomach.

At the risk of self-incrimination and a life-sentence from the D.E.A., I won't tell you about the next week, except to say that if you've never pooped a balloon before, thank your parents. And, if you have, tell me where to buy the most comfortable, inflatable donut, okay?

I finally managed to escape while I was expelling the balloons into a public toilet in Havana. I pulled a Shawshank and crawled through a hundred foot pipe filled with foul, stinking, ballon-infested fecal matter and then found my way, via sewer main, to the black market, where I managed to find passage on the next ship bound for (no joke), Fort Lauderdale. It cost me quite a bundle to get on that homemade raft and I'm not proud of what I did (suffice it to say, that word "kidney" in Spanish is "riñón"), but I finally made it back.

Didn't you miss me?

-------------------------

Okay, okay, okay... so maybe I made some of that up. Or all of it. But at least it's better than telling you, "I had writer's block and not much time in front of a computer," right?


Any idiot can play greek for a day
and join a sorority or write a tragedy.
Articulate all that pain,
and maybe you'll get paid.
But it's a sin when success complains,
and your writer's block - it don't mean sh*t.
Just throw it against the wall and see what sticks.
Gonna write a hit - I think this it.

It's a hit.

-- Rilo Kiley, "It's a Hit" from More Adventurous

(Was listening to this album, which is ridiculously good and I just sorta re-discovered, while I wrote this post. You should check it out.)