Counting the days till Myrtle

The cheap plastic hotel window shade is pulled all the way to the right, blocking the dank and smoky room from the sun's piercing rays. But just at the end, the very last inch of sticky window pane, there's a crack. And that crack is just wide enough to allow a slicing blade of sunlight to penetrate the center of the room and come to rest across your ears, nose and swollen, irritated eyes. Of course you would have been safe from this UV attack had you actually slept on a bed with covers, rather than selecting a small parcel of stained shag carpeting and a pillow constructed from used paper towels and cardboard toilet paper rolls. You don't know if the dribble on your chin is drool or carpet puddle, and your hair is stuck to the pube-laden pink bubble gum in the carpet that looks so old it could have originally been packaged with a Robin Yount Topps baseball card. But, eh, who cares, it's Myrtle.

Later that night you find yourself wandering through another filthy room that looks like an exploded Polo warehouse, scavenging desperately for a loose beer someone might have overlooked. The fact that you have lost all of your friends and you have vomit that isn't even yours on the T-shirt that isn't even yours and you are wearing an elephant hat with a trunk and floppy ears protruding from the mesh with a button you can press to make it go "I want a peanut" doesn't tip you off that you might not really need another beer. But, eh, who cares, it's Myrtle.

Then the late night party begins and the spaghetti strings start slipping off shoulders and the collared shirts come creeping out and flowing loosely against the stained seersucker slacks or Nantucket red shorts, and you find your hand rubbing the back of some girl's neck you don't know as you wait for your turn in the rotation you didn't realize you were in. The silence is deafening and you just wish you could speak so you could ask someone else to talk, but instead you drift slowly backwards and stare at the blemished ceiling trying extremely hard to figure out whose room you are in and why your thoughts are moving so fast but your hands are moving so slowly. But, eh, it's Myrtle.

Everyone seems terrified that Myrtle will not happen this year. My poker-crazy housemates call this year's Myrtle plans very "loose." To play "loose" in Texas Hold 'Em means to throw money in the pot when you don't have a good hand, but you just shrug your shoulders and say, "What the f-ck." And when you think about it, I wouldn't have it any other way. Without irresponsible and illogical spontaneity, Myrtle Beach would be just another crappy coast town with little to offer besides mini-golf and Dick's Last Resort, the restaurant where the waiters are, well, dicks (I asked for a Diet Coke, they brought me a regular Coke with two packets of Nutrasweet floating in it). So for all you worriers: Have faith that there will be a Myrtle, and it will be as ineptly planned and poorly blueprinted as it always has been. Have faith in incompetence and organizational inadequacy and you will not be let you down. And lastly, believe in a lack of resolve and refusal to ever look ahead, because that is the woven cloth, the finely knit stitching, nay, the very fiber and soul of the worn and sticky baby blanket we clutch close to our chests at the end of each year: Myrtle Beach. Because when it comes down to it, eh, it's Myrtle.