a heartbreaking work of staggering idiocy

So, last night my wife and I went out to dinner to a pretty fancy steakhouse to celebrate some of our best friends getting hitched. The steaks were huge and they had decadent shit like lobster mashed potatoes and the manager was a friend of the bride and groom and so the wine was excellent and generally the whole thing was awesome, but really I had but one focus and that was that my wife was looking really pretty smoking hot and I wanted to take her home and take off her dress.

Now, this is a tricky proposition for a lot of reasons. First, like a lot of guys with a wife and kids, I bug her about/make references to boning probably about nineteen to twenty seven times a day more often than she’d care for, which leads to a little bit of a self fulfilling prophecy in which she doesn’t want to encourage such behavior and also has no interest in boning, an interest that wanes further each time I make some admittedly crass comment, which only makes me step it up, as though she’s just not taking the hint which furthers her revulsion, fueling my entendres and on and on.

This cycle, friends, is how guys got started whistling at women out of moving cars. That’s what it eventually comes to if left unchecked. The man, having only a split second of time to convey to the woman in question “hey, I’d really fancy a bone sesh” has no choice but to act fast and directly and the woman in question has no recourse but to walk down the street feigning obliviousness over twenty feet away.

But I’m off track here. Some other mitigating factors that make this whole thing a little tricky: We’re out eating big steaks and heaping, cheesy plates of broccoli and smores and shit. That is not really a likely belly for the rhythm of love (to borrow a phrase from the plain white T’s [thanks guys]) Also, we were drinking wine, and it was flowing freely due to the celebratory nature of the event and the courtesy of the aforementioned manager friend, and as you may or may not yet know, a little booze is great for loosening the corset strings, but too much and you’ve got a sloppy mess that you’re carrying up the stairs on your hands.

Add this last bit of information to the tandem facts that my wife has just spent a year not drinking due to pregnancy and that she is famous for just falling asleep, narcoleptic style in bars and restaurants and pretty much anywhere that you leave her for a few minutes after about 9pm, regardless of if she’s drunk or not, and you get an idea of what I’m up against. Finally, our baby has kept us both up the last few nights, pretty much all night, rendering both of us completely exhausted already. Steep mountain to climb, folks.

Nevertheless, love was in the air (it was a wedding celebration, after all) my wife was next to me in an extremely hot getup and I was determined. I paced myself with the wine and the steak. I ate until I was full and no more. I drank politely but carefully and drank lots of water. I was polite and barely ever reached over and pinched her ass under the table or anything like that.

BUUUUUT, there were further complications on the horizon. As dinner wound down, the newlyweds suggested, nay, insisted that we come back to their bar where we’d indulge in “one drink”. I looked over at my wife and flatly refused. “I’m not positive I’m getting out of HERE without her falling asleep” I thought to myself as she sipped her champagne, “there’s no way in hell we’re gonna survive the ‘one drink’ (which would quickly devolve into several cocktails and shots and so on and so forth) over at the Gingerman tavern. My wife, as I said “I think we’ll pass” said “yeah, for sure, We’ll go!”

This was totally trouble. Firstly, I started thinking to myself, “is this the action of a woman who’s sending me a clear signal, or is this simply special occasion revelry as usual? But man, no way. She’s still looking so incredible AND now she’s clearly tipsy! Our time for exit is now!” We refused desert.

They brought it anyway. We were all finished with everything. The bride suggested one more round of Champagne. I said no thanks. My wife said yes. The bride said to me, “well, if you’re not gonna go to the bar, I’m gonna take your wife.” My wife sounded fine with it. At this point, I said “no way, man” however, I’d started to see the writing on the wall. There was no boning in my evening. My wife, like me was exhausted by the three previous sleepless nights, our trip to NY last weekend and the huge steaks and wine. There was no way at all that I was getting home with an awake old lady.

I mentioned to my wife “sorry, but you’re gonna fall asleep in the car and I’m so good looking and dressed up and you’re gonna miss out” as a last ditch effort. No real response other than kind of a sweet shrug.

The bride as well gave me a quizzical look, to which I replied, “man, she’s gonna pass out in the car. You know how she does” leading to a conversation about the quickness and ease with which my wife falls asleep absolutely anywhere. The bride and groom are no strangers to seeing my wife asleep sitting up, after all.

Anyway, we walked to the car. I began to drive and started talking about some of the more pleasant features of the evening, however there was no response. She had fallen asleep in the car not 3 minutes after getting in.

I drove home in silence, listening to crappy hiphop on the radio and woke her at the house. We went upstairs and paid the babysitter. And this is where the whole thing goes off the rails. My wife, though sleepy seemed suddenly affectionate. I quickly went to the bathroom as she retired on an easychair in our living room to either watch tv or, more likely, fall asleep. I assessed my chances here at about 17%, but I’ve been up against worse odds, and she was still in her dress and looking great, so fuck, what did I have to lose?

In the bathroom, just as sort of a good night to the party, I texted the bride, one of my very best friends, the person who I felt had been unwittingly trying to sabotage my sinister plans, and said something to the effect of “a drink at the bar? This bitch didn’t even make it off the block the restaurant was on!” Now, I wasn’t pissed or anything, just goofing around about my girl passing out, as per my prediction. I’m not one to call a lady a bitch if she’s not being a bitch. You know how it goes. Among friends this kind of parlance between us is hardly rare, especially in text.

However.

I misread my dumb iphone and texted this message to not only my friend the bride, but also MY bride sitting in the next room. I realized this instantly, and saw my chances of getting laid plummet from 17% to negative ever% and I ran out, my hope being that she’d passed out again and I could erase the message from her phone without her knowing. But man, she was sitting there looking at her phone going “why the hell did you send this to me?” and all I could say was “uh, sorry. That was to Katie. Just kind of joking about how you fell asleep and all that.” And she just got up and said, “turn off the lights. I’m going to bed.”

I was fucked, or quite the opposite. I went in to our bathroom, feeling every bit the asshole for kind of weirdly calling my completely undeserving and sweet wife a bitch and tried lamely to explain. Her response was “hey, look. I understand the text and I know you don’t call me a bitch for real or anything. I just don’t know why you sent it to me.”

Yeah, I don’t know either. The moral of this story, folks, is check your fucking multiple text outgoing messages if you’ve got an iphone, because that shit will sneak up on you and bite you in the dick.
Then the baby woke up at 3 and kept us up all night/morning.

I’m off to band practice. I’ve got a show at the metro tomorrow with Propagandhi and the next day at the Metro with Bad Religion.
Oh, and I didn’t even come close to getting laid. Did that part of the story come through? Sigh.