The elevator dings open and we all rush out towards the courtyard. There is a sand pathway leading down to the beach and half of it is covered with a little bridge/walkway. You can't see the actual beach from the courtyard until you stand on the bridge, meaning, you can't see any dead bodies laying face-down in a sand dune unless you get up close and personal on the path. Somebody decides to call a husband at this point, because really, in the face of a situation like this, you want to call somebody from VICTORIA hundreds of miles away. Obviously, they're gonna do us a whole lotta good. I think the advice from them was to call 911 or something responsible like that.
Keep in mind, I've never seen a fresh dead body. I've seen a few cake-faces in caskets at family nights and visitations, but never one just randomly strewn about in public. Plus, whenever I awkwardly look over a casket, I departmentalize what I'm seeing and fake myself out by thinking it's just a mannequin or a wax figure. I can't cope with the whole "let's lean over into this box and see what's in there" because my luck would be "I'm leaning over into this box to see what's in there and BAM! the fake dead person jumps up and grabs my arm". Why do we do that, anyway? We all huddle around the casket, take baby-steps towards it, leeeeean over (without touching the thing because, well, ew) and stare into whatever or whoever is inside. Then we make some off-handed remark about "Oh, she looks good". WHAT?! Stop lying! You are looking at a person who is no longer livinnnngg!!! They can not possibly look anything remotely related to the adjective "good". Do yourself a favor and remember these 3 words when at a viewing: AVOID. AVOID. AVOID. Even if you find yourself in a line heading towards the thing, when you finally get there, nobody is paying attention to you so go ahead and find something else to focus on behind the casket instead of the actual non-living body. Do this and you'll save yourself the awkwardness of having to gaze longingly into the 'box o' dead' and furthermore, save yourself from sounding like a complete moron by making a ridiculous statement for the sake of making a statement. You're welcome.
Pardon my wandering mind. The 5 of us are walking towards the path. As we get closer, we see THE blue trashcan. This means Sandy Randy is laying somewhere in the vicinity. It's funny because we practically knocked people down to get down to this point yet the closer we get, the slower our steps are. We're inching across the path when one of us hollers out, "EWWWW there he is!" We stop in our tracks and lean across one another. Sure enough, our guy is laying in a lump a few feet from the path, just past the trashcan at the end of the bridge. Lynn, who is the Matlock, CSI, NCIS queen, boldly keeps going. The rest of us are kinda frozen where we are, making "ews" and "uggghss" and "gross" comments. Lynn turns back around and says something along the lines of "bring your @$$ up here" with that crazy-lady teacher face, so I shuffle up with her.
The two of us get close enough to the guy that if we had a yard stick with us, we could poke him. Both of our faces look like we just took a shot of tequila sans lime when we realize his britches are wet. Like...pee pee wet. Being the face of maturity that I am, I start giggling. Which makes Lynn start giggling. So the both of us are standing over this potentially seriously hurt human being giggling at the face that he's wet his pants in the midst of his impending death. Somebody whisper-yells at us "what's so funny" so I turn and whisper-yell back "he's peed his pants!" Ryann (I'm assuming, since she's the most medically-inclined person in our bunch) says "dead people excrete their bowels before they die". Which shuts us up pretty quickly. At this point, I think Lynn and I are holding on to each other as we lean a little closer to the man. We're watching...we're watching...and FINALLLLY we see his back move a little, like he's slowly inhaling and exhaling.
We realize he probably could've heard our entire conversation so we turn and haul tail back towards the courtyard. Once inside, we scramble towards the front desk. We see a guy working so I walk up to the counter. I explain to him that we saw a guy laying in the weeds from our room so we went down to investigate. We thought he could've been dead, so we came down to see. I tell him he's in fact NOT dead, but is just laying out there kinda sketching us out. Front desk guy replies, "Oh. That's just our friendly-neighborhood drunk. He hangs out around here all the time. He means no harm." To which I reply, "Oh." I turn back to my people, all of us looking dumbfounded. I say the only thing one can say after that 30 minute span of insaneness: "So where're we going for dinner?"
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