Your front-row seat to my nervous breakdown

Gather ’round, children, and let your ol’ Grandpappy Scratches tell you about the night he realized he was no longer young and hip and cool (and those of you who are saying, “Yeah, like you ever were??”: Shut the hell up. Jerks.).

So last week, I hung out with Bossy and her Blog Posse in Philly, and that was such a hoot (←we old people say things like “such a hoot”) that I wondered if a similar Boston get-together might be possible … and when I floated the idea, The Coupon Goddess, whom I met last summer during my first-ever blogger get-together, alerted me to the Boston Blogger Holiday Happy Hour, which took place last night at The Cactus Club. (Their specialty? Margaritas … and if you’ve read this blog for more than five minutes, you know that margaritas and I are tight.)

During both last summer’s BlogHer meet-up and last week’s Philly get-together, I was made painfully aware that I needed to get some business cards, because, over the course of those two functions, I had to repeatedly answer the question “Do you have a card?” with “Duh, um, er, uh … [blink blink].” Thus, I was determined to have some for last night’s soirée … so determined, in fact, that I waited till the last minute to whip some up and order them from Staples, whose Copy & Print Center dude had apparently been under siege all afternoon and still hadn’t gotten to my cards by the time I showed up around 6 o’clock … so I did what anyone would do in that situation: I sat on one of the copiers and started Xeroxing my ass and told him I wasn’t leaving until he filled my order. Works every time.

And so it was that my new business cards and I showed up an hour and 45 minutes late for the Boston Blogger Holiday Happy Hour — which, technically, means I missed it. Fortunately, it was more like a Happy Evening, so when I finally entered the establishment at 7:15, there were still plenty of people on hand … young people … young people who live and work in the city and who aren’t married and who don’t have kids and who use their blogs to write about cool things like restaurants and bars and being a young person who lives and works in the city and isn’t married and doesn’t have kids and can therefore go to cool places like restaurants and bars in Boston, and you see how this works?

And then there was me, the Boston Blogger equivalent of Ward Cleaver (you know, if Ward Cleaver said “fuck” alot … and can you believe I’m so old that I actually just made a Ward Cleaver reference? Some of you don’t even know who that is, do you? Here. You’re welcome.)

I think after having gone to two previous blogger meet-ups that were largely populated by either a.) complete families, or b.) moms, and having Wonder Woman on my arm for both, I had been lulled into a false sense of security about my ability to blend in with the crowd. Realizing my error, I did the only sensible thing I could do under the circumstances: I started mainlining tequila.

Fortunately, there was one person there whom I had met at last summer’s BlogHer shindig: the lovely Susan Forshner — who, after I fired off a “someone throw me a lifeline” tweet upon learning that Wonder Woman and The Coupon Goddess both had to bow out, was kind enough to show me the secret handshake. So Susan, lucky gal that she is, got the honor of having me hover over her as I crowbarred my way into her conversation and introduced myself to some of the people with whom she was speaking … people like this (and here’s the part where I go way too crazy with Photoshop, as well as the part where I start referring to everyone by their Twitter handle … which probably is the kind of thing an old person would do in order to seem hip and cool, am I right?):

Now, please take particular note of @susiea in the above photo, for she became the catalyst for yet another in a long string of my epically embarrassing moments … which, paradoxically, I am going to relive right now for your entertainment. So don’t say I never did anything for you, Internet.

To make an already long story only slightly less long than it would otherwise be if I rambled on and on about every little detail (which, believe or not, isn’t what I’ve been doing, relatively speaking), I’ll hit the main points:

After arriving and latching on to Susan (not to be confused with @susiea), I spent a good 20 minutes or so talking with her, @susiea, @seeleigha and @25lifestyle. And then I moved about the room, stopping here and there to speak with still more bloggers (which, amazingly, included other male bloggers, and, no, I’m not kidding … in fact, I can prove it:

See? And though I’ve no photographic evidence to back this claim up, I also hung with the very cool @bostontweet and @peteypumpkin, both of whom are male as well. I swear.)

During my travels, I made my way down to the other end of the room, from where I had this vantage point:

And again, I shall ask you to pay close attention to the photos above, particularly the person identified as “totally not @susiea” … because, after I made my way up the other side of the crowd, and spent some time talking to some more people, I turned around and saw standing not far from me “totally not @susiea” … or so I thought. Unbeknownst to me, however, @susiea had, while I wasn’t looking, had the fucking audacity to hop off her stool and start walking around all upright and shit, thus confusing my old, addled brain, for I only knew @susiea as a sitter, not a stander, so surely the stander I was now encountering must be “totally not @susiea,” am I right?

Have you ever been around someone who is mentally ill or afflicted with dementia or Alzheimer’s, and they say something that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, and everybody feels a bit awkward for a moment, because they know that the person in question isn’t playing with a full deck anymore? Yeah, that’s the look that spread across @susiea’s face when I reached out to shake her hand and again introduced myself to her … because I thought she was “totally not @susiea” … or, as I like to call her, “@susiea’s goddamn identical twin, so gimme a freakin’ break, people; I’m old and senile and the lighting in here is really dim and my eyesight isn’t what it used to be, and have you seen how much fucking tequila they put in these drinks?” (Granted, that’s a rather long nickname, but it felt right at the time.)

And as I took a step closer, I realized that I had just reintroduced myself to @susiea, and you know how when you’re walking and you kinda trip/stumble over something and you’re like, “Man, I hope nobody saw that”? Or when you accidentally drag your front bumper down the side of an adjacent Mercedes as you’re backing out of a parking spot, and as you hunch down and drive away, you’re all, “Man, I really hope nobody saw that”? That one’s just me? Alright, go with the first one … the tripping thing. Well, as if making an ass out of myself in front of @susiea wasn’t bad enough, I did so right in front of her friend @seeleigha, whose face quickly donned that same look of “What a crazy asshole this guy is.”

Even the life-sized stuffed buffalo mounted above the bar thought I was a douche:

So that whole thing was awkward.

Fortunately, @susiea was very sweet and forgiving about it, and even put up with me totally overcompensating for the incident by joking about it for the rest of the night, and by “joking about it,” I mean completely beating it into the ground until there wasn’t a drop of humor left in it.

Still, in true narcissistic blogger fashion, I was again able to find some comfort in the fact that my latest embarrassing moment could at least be used as blog fodder … and, seriously: if you don’t have a blog, you should totally start one, because it’s really helpful when the dumb shit you do that normally would just eat away at you suddenly has an upside. Hey, it’s cheaper than therapy. Believe me. I know.

In closing, I would like thank:

@susanforshner of transient travels,

@susiea & @seeleigha of We Are Not Martha,

@beccajane (who also organized the party, so double thanks, @beccajane),

@peteypumpkin of on a clear day, you can see forever,

@25lifestyle of Quarter Lifestyle,

@bostontweet of BostonTweet,

@smsass of The Oldways Table,

@folkinz of Two Coast Table,

@eatboston of WhereToEat.In Boston!,

@ohhayitskk of oh hay, it’s kk (who, I discovered, has the same birthday as me … and by “same birthday” I mean the calendar date … because I’m pretty sure I could be her great grandfather),

@riss9 of Starving Artist,

and @cicii3 of The Clean Plate Club.

Thanks for letting Father Time hang out with you crazy kids last night.

(And apologies to anyone else I missed; I would have loved to have met you, but I was too busy introducing myself to people I’d already met. Sorry.)