Romeo of the Road

There comes a time in the life of every bloggerist when you have to spend an entire post tooting your own horn, or, as they used to say in Shakespeare's time, "tooting thine own horn." Unfortunately, for such an obscenely talent-laden fruit canner as myself, there is so much horn-tooting material that to gratify it all, I would basically have to fellate myself, which is really hard to do in a blog post.

So what if I were to just, say, pick one of the many, many arenas in which I am the possessor of, how you say, mad skillz (holla w00t!)? You can see from that sentence that I have a gift for strategy and tact, for instance, as well as a dyn-o-mite sense of how to keep my language hip and topical. Perhaps a post on that? Or should I choose some other from among the myriad facets of my undeniable greatness, and then gush about it for 800 words or so?

The point is, this was supposed to be that post.

No, I was not going to write of my ability to translate old Saxon poetry, nor was I going to write of my fruit-canning prowess. (But more on that later, as it now appears that I am going to have to opt back into my fucking contract at Dole. Thanks a lot, Oil of Olay-Rod.) I was, instead, going to write about my ferocious wooing techniques, i.e. my mad skillz (holla w00t again!) with the ladyfolk.

And suffice it to say, you would have been astounded. You would have been dazzled. You may have gone to the length of crapping your pants with how impressed you were, not only because I am so good at tooting my horn, but because you would have seen clearly that it was a horn worth tooting, and also because you had all that bean dip at lunch. You would have been astonished - maybe not to pooping yourself lengths, but astonished nevertheless - by the tales of my trips to medieval-style castles on cold days for the sole purpose of reading poetry, or by the random and whimsical flower deliveries "just because", or by my magnanimous willingness to not fall asleep during Beauty and the Beast on Broadway, although the smell of babies filling their diapers with shit in the orchestra section had a little something to do with that. And I know, I know, that's a lot of fecal references in the same paragraph, but there's a reason for that - there's a reason for ALL of this, and the reason is this:

I have been bested.

I don't know who he was. I don't know when he struck. I do, however, have photographic evidence of what he did, taken with the camera of Knickers, my iPhone and erstwhile companion, in the men's room of a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike at 11:30 last Saturday night.

And here is that evidence:

Ignore the guys in the mirror. They're as irrelevant as Thomas Edison's third nipple. Look closer, and check out the mystery guy's handiwork. Check it OUT.

You don't see it immediately, do you? That is because, unlike me, you do not possess the quickness to assemble facts almost as fast as they register in your ocular nerve. What ostensibly appears to be merely two vases in a rest stop bathroom is actually the handiwork of a Casanova of Lotharian proportions, or maybe a Lothario of Casanovian proportions, or, well, basically someone much more romantic than me. Because clearly, what happened was that some guy - some guy with balls the size of grapefruits and a heart as big as a bowl that could hold both of those grapefruits along with some other assorted citrus fruits and perhaps a kiwi - came in here, stole the flowers from the purple vase, and then gave them to his girl under the auspices of a sweet and touching gesture.

Spec-fucking-tac-fuck-ular.

Hats off to you, bro, whoever and wherever you are. Or as they used to say in Shakespeare's time, "word."