Leaving. . . in a 98 Saturn with 134,000 Miles On It

I'm going away. I am going to the motherfriggin' BEACH and CHARLESTON and a PARTY for the WEEKEND, yeah, and y'all will just have to manage without me. I am so excited, and also I am freaking out a little, because I am leaving my children here to cope without me. Let's all remember that my "children" are 23 and 14 years old, respectively, and thus should be able to cope without me for three days just fine. However, I raised them wrong, and as a result they like to lie about the house and have me serve them regular meals. Without me here they may starve. Although I somehow doubt it. M pretty much eats at Hot Dog King anyway (shut UP. It's not THAT bad for him. Besides, he's building up valuable immunities.) and A works at a restaurant for chrissakes, you'd think she would have picked up some pointers about where food comes from. To which she would answer pertly, "it comes from sous chefs."

Anyway. I have been running around like a proverbial headless chicken all day and now I must run out the door again to go to Drinking Liberally, then come home and pack obsess over my summer clothes - everyone downtown is wearing light frilly spring dresses which I envy intensely, and you know everyone in Charleston will be better dressed than everyone in Asheville by an enormous order of magnitude, and my summer clothes will all be a) dowdy and b) too tight. But there's nothing to be done about that. Anyway I won't be downtown much; I'll be mostly standing around a campfire drinking beer and eating incredible barbecue with a whole bunch of my oldest friends. M said, meanly, when offered the choice between going to Charleston with me or staying in Asheville with his sister, that it sounded to him like a choice between watching a bunch of old people get drunk or watching a bunch of young people get drunk, and he'd take the young people because they were more likely to do something wild and insane. God I hope not, because first of all I will put my friends, aged and frail though they apparently are, up against any group of twenty somethings for sheer drunken weirdness and second of all, I will have A's guts for garters if she throws a big party in my house while I'm gone, goddamn it.