Slumber Party

This was written and performed for the Live Girls! Theater 10th Year Anniversary Season Kick-Off Cabaret.

Dear Diary:

Well, another day is over, which means that I am another day closer to my death. I realized this at the bar yesterday as I was laying another tall frothy Guinness to rest in the shallow grave of my tummy. It's an Irish pub, and hanging above the bar is a giant digital clock which perpetually counts down the remaining days, hours, minutes, and seconds until Saint Patrick's Day. As I watched the columns of numbers recklessly racing down toward a final terminus of binge drinking and cultural appreciation, I wondered if I had such a clock up in heaven, and if angel leprechauns are dusting off their little green bowler hats and plastering everything in shamrocks in anticipation of my death. Every second that ticks by is another grain of sand draining through the smooth restriction of the present and forming an ever-growing pile of missed opportunities and under-appreciated experiences at the bottom of my earthly hourglass.

My thoughtful reflection on the inescapable and irreversible flow of time was soon replaced by sheer panic. HOLY CRAP! I can't die yet! There are so many things I haven't done! So many places I haven't gone! So many people I haven't met! So many TV shows I haven't watched! So many no-good punk kids I haven't yelled at! So much porn I haven't downloaded! So many great books I haven't not read! So many hotel soaps I haven't stolen! So much beer in my fridge that I haven't drunk!

This was clearly bothering me, so I told my friend about my sudden paralyzing awareness of my mortality, and how this caused me to drink all the beer in my house. He told me to calm down, but I was like, "there's no time for that! The angel leprechaun clock is running and I only have so much sand left, and about a third of it is sleeping sand anyway, and there are so many places to do and TV to eat and people to steal that I don't even know where to start!"

My friend told me that maybe I should make a "bucket list" to keep me from getting overwhelmed. I stared at him blankly, so he asked, "you know what a bucket list is, right?" To which I replied, "...yes."

Okay, so maybe I didn't actually know what a "bucket list" was, but I knew that I didn't have time to waste on long explanations, and I ended up figuring it out pretty quickly anyway. Heaven is full of amazing things, like pearly gates, and angel leprechauns, and stairways, and unicorns, and clouds, and dead pets, but maybe it's the smaller mundane things that you end up missing. Like, I guess, buckets. You know, because why would you need buckets in heaven when you can just carry clouds around in your arms and stuff?

Anyway, so this got me thinking-- if I should be worried about not spending enough time with my buckets before I die, should I also be worried about not having enough of the small, ordinary experiences that make life interesting? But what are these bucket-level experiences that I should be enjoying before I bite the dust? Ugh, another question I don't have time to answer.

However, dear diary, in a surprising twist, it turns out that I knew the answer to this question the whole time! You see, there is an ancient saying amongst my people that I never truly understood before. Often, while regaling me with adventurous tales of yesteryear, my Grandfather would tell me as I sat upon his lap, "Grant, there is an ancient saying amongst our people that you must always remember: Slumber parties are the Buckets of Experience." Hmmm, this makes perfect sense now, now that I am older and wiser. Maybe Grandpa wasn't so crazy after all!

So I call up the dudes on conference call and I'm like, "hey dudes, before I die, SLUMBER PARTY MY PLACE TOMORROW NIGHT NEVERENDING STORY BRING PILLOWS," but the dudes are like, "what? no." Except one of the dudes is like, "you're dying?" But the other dudes are like, "I'm not going to a stupid slumber party. You're 29." So then I have to resort to permanent plan B, which is lying. "HEY DUDES MANLY DRINKIN' PARTY MY PLACE TOMORROW NIGHT NEVERENDING STORY BRING PILLOWS," and the dudes are like, "Manly Drinking Party!? Awesome!"

The next evening the dudes come over with beer and chips and stuff for "Manly Drinkin' Party" [WINK WINK]. As I expected, most of them forgot to bring pillows, but this is okay because I had purchased a large amount of "liquid pillows", which is what I call Tequila. At first, the dudes seemed sort of confused about why I was wearing pajamas, and why I was making them watch Neverending Story, and why I had so many buckets laying around, but they seemed to warm up to it after I gave them enough "liquid explanation", which is... also what I call Tequila. Eventually, after we watched the Neverending Story a couple of times, everyone started getting sleepy, and some of the dudes were like, "time to go home," but I informed them that they were too drunk to go home, but they were like, "we'll take a taxi," so then I called them a "liquid taxi", which is... another thing I call Tequila.

Well Diary, if I didn't appreciate buckets enough before, I sure do now, if you know what I mean.

This morning I woke up with an horrible upset stomach, and an awful, skull-splitting headache, and a disgusting dry mouth, lying face-down on my living room floor. Dudes were scattered all around me, passed out draped over tables, or curled up in the corners. There were pizza crusts and napkins and half-finished cans of beer everywhere. Bottles of "liquid bad idea" lay slowly dripping next to my poor desecrated buckets. The Slumber Party was over.

And with this latest important experience, dear diary, I think I'm finally ready to accept death.

THE END.