When snoring attacks
There are modifiers I would not use to describe the beginning of my recent vacation. For instance, auspicious wouldn't make the cut. Flawless, sublime, or smooth would not be used either. Even something like "passable" seems overly generous.
Our destination was a beach in Delaware, one my family visited religiously once a year when my siblings and I were younger. And, since the traffic on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge becomes biblical sometime around mid-morning on a Saturday, I accompanied two of my family members on a drive to Annapolis, MD on Friday night, so that we might cross the bridge in the early morning on Saturday.
I have only one question about my dinner on Friday night in Annapolis: How come when a server finally decides to touch me about fourteen times during a meal, it's not a 19-year-old brunette named Ashley with girl-next-door approachability but a middle-aged dude named Kevin? Honestly, I'm not asking for the world.
I supposed that getting molested by our server was just a hiccup and that better fortunes would prevail as we moved into the weekend. But, there was a pretty substantial hurdle still to clear. My two traveling companions, with whom I would be sharing a hotel room on Friday, are notoriously powerful snorers. Fortunately, I had prepared for this situation by purchasing a 75-minute rain recording from Amazon's mp3 store. Some pre-vacation testing of the soothing ambient noise indicated that it would do a pretty good job drowning out noise pollution like the sound of the air conditioning unit, people in the hallway, or a blind, legless squirrel trying to land a Boeing 747 in your left ear canal. Unfortunately, as I discovered Friday night, my traveling companions' snoring is louder than any of these things. And, my little mp3 player with its eardrum splitting volume levels was woefully inadequate as the situation clearly called for the services of an old priest and a young priest. I'm not sure if it's possible to do justice to the noise levels we're dealing with here, but imagine the following. If you recorded a timbersports event involving chainsaws with engines larger than your average midget and slowed down the audio by a factor of 100, you'd be in the right ballpark. Alternatively, at times the snoring is reminiscent of a family of pneumonia-suffering rhinos being fed -- against their will -- into a chipper-shredder. Hopefully these are noises with which you're familiar.
It's about 6 AM on Saturday and I've been awake since 1 AM. I don't rise from bed until I hear the bathroom door open. While standing beside my bed, trying to steel myself for a busy day on only two hours of sleep, he who just left the shower remarks, "I tried to be as quiet as I could in the shower. I hope I didn't wake you up."
Given my condition, I'm convinced that this is the funniest thing that any person has ever said. I manage to get out, "No, you..." and then I start laughing so hard that tears come before the end of the sentence does.
An auspicious beginning? I think not.
