This Post Was Exaggerated For The Sake Of Irony, But Not That Much - In Fact I'd Say Most Of It Is Pretty Accura- [title cut short by Blogger]

It dawned on me last weekend while entertaining some friends from out of town - my storytelling skills, if I ever had them in the first place, have become les shits.

I came to this realization whilst in the middle of some long-winded tale about, I dunno, our adventures in home shopping or that wedding we attended in Quebec or hikes around Cape Breton or... something. Anyway, not important. The point I am trying to make here is that my ability to take what could be a ten minute story and boil it down into a 45-second bit of casual dinner conversation is failing. A question is put to me. My mouth opens to answer. Words come out. Whatever internal system I have for summarizing and abridging and identifying important key points and speaking in concise sentences without redundant words or umms or ahhs or awkward pauses short-circuits. But my mouth keeps moving, and I can see the listener's eyes start to glaze and over and wander elsewhere, but still I can't stop because there is a definite end to my story and I can see it off in the distance, so I continue to plod along at my meandering pace - forcing my tongue to roll out superfluous word after superfluous word, and all the while I am thinking these thoughts... "this story sucks", "I'm probably embarrassing myself", "people have stopped paying attention", "I wonder what's on television", "when are those guys coming to replace the oil tank?", "I still have to pay the water bill from last month", "did I just mix up tenses?", etc etc. I don't even go onto tangents - I keep telling the saaaame story. Eventually it ends, and everyone including me is relieved. Silence follows, or a polite acknowledgment that I have just said something that must have been important because I spent so long trying to communicate it.

So - either my life has become so interesting that I can no longer communicate it in bites of 500 words or less, or I'm becoming more-and-more socially retarded.