Painful Awkwardity

The Left, Right, Panic- I can’t believe that this one has made it through 5 or 8 (I’m way too high on doctor-shopped Ritalin coffee to go back and count) awkward posts without being mentioned because it happens to me All The Fucking Time. I’ll be walking somewhere, minding my own business and thinking about something as innocuous as opaque labia when I see someone coming towards me. The street could be wider than Whoopi Goldberg’s vagina but this person will continue in a dead aim straight towards me.

Her vagina is probably really narrow, actually.

 

 

I’ll then make my intentions known with my eyes, head, hips, and sometimes even my hands with a freaky speed walker-like gesture, all to let the person know that I’m moving to the left thereby giving them the middle and right by which to pass me without incident. But no. The bastard, who never played a sport in his life, obviously, will also shift left, putting us right back on a collision course.

 

Now, with time and distance quickly diminishing, I’ll use the balls of my feet to gracefully bounce right. Then, they will too, but not nearly as gracefully as I did. At this point I panic and die a little bit inside. Now we have reached awkwardity and are barreling towards catastrophe. “Why couldn’t the stupid old man with the walker have watched my hips, he was supposed to watch my hips?” I ask myself.

 

The vast majority of the time I will make another darting left and that will be the end of it. Sometimes, when the situation is dire enough though, I will duck and hide in a doorway and allow the obtrusive elderly matron to shuffle by. Or sometimes, when I feel that I’ll be able to easily outmaneuver the person due to their cumbersome oxygen tank, I’ll feint left and thrust right in a stunning display of athletic prowess. Or sometimes, I’ll use the old Heisman stiff-arm to push past my enemy.

 

In the worst possible scenario, if all of the above tactics have failed and I’ve waited too long, my forward momentum will carry be just past the tipping point after I’ve tried to stop, and I’ll end up inevitably bumping chests with a stranger. When this happens I will stop whatever I’m doing, turn around, and go straight home to sit on my couch for the rest of the day. 

  

  

One of my childhood buddies

 

  

 

The Follow Through- Perhaps other people don’t feel awkward in this situation. Who’re you calling a psycho?

 

Wait what?

 

 Nevermind.

 

When I make an outlandish direct threat and the threatee still ‘wants some’ I become all conflicted and indecisive. When my daughter was really young and I’d say, “If you don’t stop kicking my seat I’m going to turn this car right around.” Then she’d continue to kick it, usually harder, but I didn’t really want to turn around because we were going somewhere that I wanted to go like the beach or the toy store or the dog track. So I’d pull over and just kind of sit there feeling assholish and trying to bluff but failing. So I’d always end up going ahead anyway and just punishing her by not allowing her to place any bets or talk to the nice ‘lady’ in the funny clothes.

 

Another, even more awkward situation occurred with my friends when I’d say something like, “Dude, if you repeat that phrase one more time I’m going to stick this bong so far up your ass we’re going to be taking ear hits for the next month.” Then the stubborn, contentious fucker would be all, “BAM! 97X, the future of Rock and Rolllll… Bam! 97X, the future of Rock and Rollllll… BAM! 97X, the future ….” staring at me all spitefully and a little autistically the whole time.

 

So I felt like I had to follow through, right? Plus, I had everybody else all looking at me expectantly so I’d knew I had to something. I could rush over and put him in a fake stranglehold, but that would have left us both feeling even more awkward. So instead, I ran into the bathroom, came out with a tub of Vaseline, liberally applied it to the rim of the bong and tried to ‘jokingly’ de-pant him and bend him over the coffee table while he ‘jokingly’ started to freak the fuck out and started making a scary mewling noise while everybody got all quiet and open mouthed. 

 

Of course, everybody pretended to treat me differently after that. Like they were scared of me or something. Like I was some kind of freak. It’s just hard to know how to follow through on a crazy threat.

 

Am I right?

Update: I accidentally liked my own post and I can’t figure out how to unlike it and now I look like a conceited and vain douchebag who likes his own posts. This is awkward. Again.