The story behind the umbrella

I just realized, I promised a long time ago to tell the story of Umbrella. Keep in mind that it is pretty retarded, and I think it is a "you had to be there" moment.

Waaaaay back in the day, when I was a young and somewhat wild and rebellious lad, my ex-wife had a fairly important party she had to attend for work. All of the bigwigs from her work were there. I hate bigwigs. A bunch of dorks standing around thinking they are God's gift to women because they are rich, telling stupid jokes, and generally getting on my nerves. I tried like hell to get out of it, but trying to give all of the potential babysitters polio didn't work. Damn vaccines.

Plan B involved getting drunk to the gills to dull the pain. However, when I am drunk, I tend to get... well let's call it brutally honest. In other words, I would be asking her boss if he ever used that tooth of his that stuck out sideways as a can opener. She quickly informed me that my alcohol intake was going to be monitored closely. Great, so I was going to be bored and sober.

We went to this party, and it turned out I knew very few people there. I am generally pretty quiet when around people I don't know. Combine this with the fact that when I do talk, I am pretty blunt and crass, and I was told to be on my best behavior. A recipe for a miserable evening. I basically just leaned up against a wall and didn't say anything all night.

My ex was drinking, so pretty soon I was being scolded for not mingling enough. Damned if I do, damned if I don't. So I started hanging on the outside of conversations. I soon found out that I was the only one there who was probably legal to drive, which was pissing me off even more.

There was one small group of people talking that didn't look like they were total losers, so I wandered over and began listening in. Turns out, they were fairly drunk, and were talking about sex. More specifically, the wierdest stuff they had done. I think the question was what was the kinkiest thing you ever did. Now this was something I could probably get into.

Unfortunately, most of this stuff was lame. They were talking about doing it in a car, doing it in their parents bed, stuff like that. One girl mentioned that she once had sex in a closet. I must have been making faces that showed how weak I thought this was, because she looked at me and asked, "Don't you think having sex in a closet is kinky?" I answered, "I suppose it depends on whether or not you keep your umbrella in there." She got kind of flustered, and everyone else started laughing. From that point on, much to my ex's chagrin, I was always known as the umbrella guy to all of her work.

So no groundbreaking stuff, like I invented the self-drying umbrella, or anything like that. And in the early days where most people used screen names like BobR123, Umbrella was a little different. So that has been my internet identity ever since.