Le Soft Parade

Well the trip of the brother is over and done with.  As you may (or may not) have guessed, the post below this one hits on the first of, actually, not very many awkward moments.  I attribute the general success of the trip to my being a social chameleon, able to adapt to pretty much any situation on the fly.  Jess’ brother is a sports nut, so I spent the better part of two days talking sports, almost exclusively.  It was kinda nice, actually.  While Jess likes sports, she’s fairly new to the whole thing, so you can’t really delve too deeply into things. With her brother, I was able to bitch about the DH, lament the good old days of early ’90s UNLV basketball, and so on.

The only other really awkward moment came when he asked what kinds of movies I like. I replied that I like all, but mostly horror, which resulted in him asking my favorites. “Halloween and Suspiria.” Which always gets a, “What’s Suspiria?” and this time was no different. I told him it was a flick by an Italian guy named Dario Argento, and then I kinda forgot myself for a minute and enthusiastically went into some detail on how much of a lunatic Argento is and how he kills his real life girlfriend off in a ton of his flicks, killed his real life daughter off once, and then had the other daughter raped and beaten often. As I was saying this the realization hits that, this conversation sounds really odd coming from the guy who’s engaged to yer sister. The looks on the faces of both he and Jess’ mother confirmed this. But I pivoted quickly by throwing in a funny story that made everyone laugh and then quickly changed the subject. Nice!

He turned out to be a nice enough guy. An East Coaster, pretty much through and through. Our first real bond was forged while I blew up the air mattress he was to sleep on. It was big and took me about a half hour. I got a little light headed at the end, but we joked throughout, mostly at the expense of gays and former ESPN personality and current Dodgers broadcaster Charlie Steiner.

The times at Jess’ house were awkward. Jess’ father and brother are not big fans of each other. So I spent a lot of that time admiring the coffee table with a dedication I rarely have when it comes to coffee tables. But then Jess’ father broke out a bottle of really good Bushmill’s Irish whiskey, so I ignored everyone else while sipping that stuff. We also ate Indian food and drank beer. I like Chicken Tikka Masala. That might be the biggest thing we got out of this trip.

There was a lot of other stuff, that honestly, in print would come off as boring, even with my brilliant writing skills. Just know that there was tension, awkwardness, but in the end, I ended up thinking the guy was a pretty good guy. And we’ve got an open invitation to St. Louis, and really…that’s all you need.