Weekend Shit Shows

Shit show.  What a wonderful phrase. Undoubtedly one of my favorite in the English language.  The most popular definition in the urban dictionary is:

A description of an event or situation which is characterized by an ridiculously inordinate amount of frenetic activity. Disorganization and chaos to an absurd degree. Often associated with extreme ineptitude/incompetence and or sudden and unexpected failure.

Several other definitions seem to demand drunken debauchery and related behavior in order to render a series of activites a shit show.  Hm.  I guess.  I suppose everyone is entitled to their own definition, but that is never the way I thought of it and certainly not why I fell in love with the phrase.  The image that has always popped into my mind is of a late 19th century type traveling circus, where you could pay a penny to access a tent where some freak of nature would drop a horse sized dump right in front of you.  To me, anything in modern day life that elicits a similar reaction to what you would have felt sitting in that tent is a bonafide shit show. 

According to the urban dictionary, my behavior two weekends prior would probably more aptly fit the traditional definition of a shit show.  Making the trip up to Sonoma wine country to attend an old Taipei friend's wedding, I arrived on Friday to the rehearsal dinner relieved to be done with the 500something mile drive, giddy to be free of parenting responsibilities for a long weekend, and just generally cheerful to see an assortment of old friends, most of whom I had seen extremely sparingly or not at all for the last 17 years.  Accordingly, I drank like an overeager 14 year old whose parents are out of town, fearlessly mixing wine, tequila, whiskey and 9% beer.  Becky had similar inclinations but smartly destroyed herself within the first two hours and made it back to the hotel while I lingered.  I got a ride to an after party at some palatial estate my friends were renting that was tucked back somewhere amongst the winding roads and endless vineyards outside of Healdsburg.  When I inevitably found myself violently ill but sufficiently refreshed by an undetermined amount of time spent face down in the front yard, I decided that the optimal play was to wander off into the darkness, using the GPS on my smart phone to guide me what I estimated to be 6-10 miles back to the hotel.  After making it barely beyond the front gate, I looked at my phone to see the battery at 2% for just a moment before the screen went dark.  Fuck it.  I took my best directional guess and began running, dress shirt, jeans and dress shoes.  I'll never know for sure, but I believe I held a damned respectable pace for those miles.  Nevertheless, after a while I decided to explore the hitchhiking option, so every few minutes when a vehicle would pass I'd do my best to indicate my need for help.  Wouldn't you know, after only 20 or so passing vehicles and a few more miles, a nice guy decided to stop for me.  Turns out I was in fact going the right direction and was less than 2 miles from the hotel!  Becky was apparently worried about me.  Why, I don't know.  I'm a big boy.  Things are under control.  And in case anyone ever stumbles upon this blog, you're obviously wondering, so yes, I had to blow the guy.  But I was getting tired, and the terrain was getting hilly.  Those last 2 miles would have been tough. 

This past weekend however better fit my personal definition of a shit show.  That was what I was originally going to write about, but now I'm over it.  So I'll save that for tomorrow or whenever I get around to it.