The Single Life

Last weekend I went out with a few old friends of mine. All 3 of us were feeling a little raw about a relationship that didn't work out for whatever reason, but by the end of the night I was feeling pretty happy about my solo status.

I had decided being single was actually pretty great. I could make eyes at the hottie standing at the edge of the dance floor and not feel guilty because I'm leading him on. I could be out with friends and not be the one going outside to talk to their significant other for a 'few minutes' (which is always at least 20 minutes by the time 'I love you' rolls around in the conversation) while the rest of the friends feel resentful at being ditched. Best of all, I loved that I could be as uninteresting as possible since I wasn't trying to keep or hold the interest of someone of the opposite sex.

And then I volunteered to drive the kids home.

Saturday night, a friend was holding a pasture party (I won't explain, but those savvy in farm kid lingo know what this is). I went for a drink, but since it was primarily my 15 year old brother's friends, I decided to go home and watch a movie. One of my brother's friends had approached me at the beginning of the night and asked if I could give him, his brother and their out of town friend a lift home at about 11 that night. Since he's a good kid, and he was one of my armed sentries when we had our bear problem, I agreed. I came back at about quarter to 11 to discover the out-of-towner stumbling around talking nonsense, the brother passed out in a bile/liquor soaked shirt and a questionable looking puddle and the rest of the party goers in a concerned circle around the man down.

The friend holding the party was stressed, as he usually counts on me to be the 'responsible babysitter type', and after about 10 minutes I'd finally pieced together that the brother had downed about 3/4 of the bottle of the Newfie Screech a client had given me last summer. I couldn't help but feel responsible, even if it was not me, but my 15 year old brother who had pilfered the bottle and left it unattended on the bench.

The brother, Kobe, was conscious but not overly responsive so we debated the best method of taking care of him, managed to get him down a bit of water and got him to rid a bit more of the liquor in his system.

After a few minutes of fighting with the out-of-towner friend, we managed to get him to sit in the passenger seat of my truck where he happily talked to himself and sang along with the radio, and I squatted on the ground beside Mr. Barely Conscious.

"Kobe, we're going to put you in the backseat of my truck, and I'm going to take you home, ok?"

He rolled his head back and stared at me for a second.

"You're Beautiful", he slurred, and then hiccuped. The other guys erupt into laughter and the party host winks at me, "Well, at least he's got his vision back, huh?".

But that did it for me. The realization that in the past 5 months that I've now been officially single, the only time a male has called me beautiful, it was a 16 year old in a puddle of his own puke pissed on Newfie Screech. If I didn't think it was so funny, I might cry.