Irish Exits

Summer's Irish Exit.

It hasn't happened yet, but it will. One morning we'll wake up, go outside and notice how damn chilly it became overnight. It's so chilly that you can smell it. After a while, the sun warms everything back to 68. That sting is gone and all is well and you can forget that it ever happened. That's summer practicing it's Irish exit on us, making us forget it was even in the room and using our inattention to slip away.

Then one day, actually a night, autumn moves in on the heels of a sharp Canadian cold front with it's winds briskly blowing all night long, and then that morning you'll find the wind still hasn't abated. The sun and summer slipped away at sundown and you didn't notice it. You do now though when you find it never warms up by the afternoon anymore. That damned summer was always a fair weather friend, it takes off when things become slightly uglier, or when it's sick of you.

Sick of you? Sure! All winter long we've lamented “Where's our fun friend, summer?” He finally arrives with short and tempting visits. Then by June he finally moves in. Of course, like all personalities that are too rambunctious, summer becomes an obnoxious drunk who won't leave you alone. “HA! How do you like my nine days of 90+ degree heat? I brought my skanky, moist girlfriend Humidity along too! I'm so annoying I'll keep you up half the night, you won't be able to sleep at all! My sister? Her presence will make you feel you haven't showered in three days!” Summer has turned into blustering white trash and feels slighted when you don't give it the respect it thinks it deserves. So summer pulls it's rude exit.

OK, I'll stop. Enough of my anthropomorphizing of summer. The truth is I won't put enough effort into this to make it a well written fairy tale. It's too damn early in the day.

Irish exits are great. You can bounce from any social event that you had your full of. From what I hear, the original Irish exit meant that you were too drunk to even say good bye to your friends and you just stumbled out the door. When I get my full of people (and I do...my problem, not yours) I'll make a break for it. It's funny. I'll be in the mood to chat the shit out of people but then the beer reaches a point in my brain when a switch is thrown. “Ack! Enough! All of you will you just SHUT UP!” Too much stimulation is what it is, for me anyway. So you just act like you're going to the bathroom and hey presto, you chose the wrong door and you make a bee line to your car.

I've always been like that. Feast or famine. Either I want the quiet of a Trappist monastery where I can feel my heart rate drop below 70 or I want to party with people who are playing “tag” with roman candles. (I've done that, as an adult, with other adults...where we foolishly decide to be 11 again). Feast or famine. I gorge then I purge. Gorge, purge. You'd think I'd find a happy medium? Nope, I'm a social bulimic. That explains a lot about my romantic life too.

We meet, her and I, both starving and we see a smorgasbord before each of us. We feast upon one another till we puke later in the month.

Me: “You had enough? I have.”

Her: “Ugh..I can't take another bite.”

Me: “Ok if we don't eat(see) one another again? I'm kind of sick of you.”

Her: “I was thinking the same thing...please go away!”

A nice, equitable parting. Not quite the Irish exit but a mutually agreed upon treaty where both parties won't feel slighted at all.

Irish exits are great for pure introverts. They can flee the raucousness as they find it to, too much. The truth is we all have varying levels of extroversion/introversion. The best description of it is that extroverts get insanely bored when there's not enough stimulation around. If alone, they suffer. Introverts can survive happily without people for days. Introverts suffer when they are overloaded with too much social excitement. In me, it's not a blend of the two, mixing around. Weirdly enough, it's a an either/or situation. Either I'm up for “it” or I'm not.

The opposite of the Irish exit is the “Unwelcome Illegal Mexican Entry.” That I can excel at. I can barge into conversations with people I never met before, yank the subject they were talking about waaaay over there and then demand all attention be placed upon me. Before long, they forget that this illegal wetback has stolen their conversation and we are chatting happily with one another. That until I get sick of that too and move onto something more interesting and barge into that one too.

Currently it's 6 am on a Sunday morning which means it's Monastic Solitude time. Sunday mornings are made for it. I can discharge all the wrong voltage out of my batteries and refresh them properly. By noon, I'll be getting hungry for others and will step out into the world again.