I am at my two year-old cousin’s birthday party telling the story of the other night’s drunken adventure to my sisters and mother and grandmother and my grandfather is staring at me with his mouth agape but I am not sure he is listening, but he is so cute nonetheless.

I tell them of the belt and the shirt and the fight and I need all of this just to have a better story than Mahalolic who was partying like a rock star with television reporters.

My family is a very competitive story market: For instance, I know I will never have better stories than Uncle Mustache who gets arrested when he is drunk and must be bailed out by his emotionally abusive father and uses his brother’s license because he no longer has his own.

His stories are the best and even if I become a famous author for telling stories, I will never be the best story-teller in my own family until I start getting so drunk and drive home and pull into my driveway, only to find the next morning that I parked one car on top of the other and now they are both destroyed.

That is the best story I have ever heard because it is completely true and has no metaphor.

It is just something stupid that he did when he was drunk that no one has ever done as stupid.

It does not teach anything about life except something we should have known already: “Do not park one car on top of the other. This will destroy both cars.”

See? That is funnier than anything I have ever written.

Go on, admit it. And I have written a lot: one memoir, one self-help book, three screenplays, one short film, countless essays, dozens of short stories, one full-time blog, a book of poems, and a partridge in a pear tree, and even if you read every word and sentence and paragraph there will not be one time you laugh as hard as you just did.

That’s my competition.

So, I am almost done with my new (mediocre) story of drunkenness, which is trying very hard to be the best story tonight, when another cousin of mine – I do not know her name because my family spits out cousins like Cookie Monster does crumbs, and she could be Jackie or Alexis or Julianna, but I am not sure – stumbles into the group of us and without knowing what she is doing, pulls at a stack of spent dinner plates.

She is a split second from knocking them over to the ground, and running tomato sauce over the living room floor, when my uncle steps in and stops her.

Then she stumbles backwards and falls on her ass.

From the floor she looks up at us in slow motion and cannot recognize anyone’s face, so she stares into the distance.

When she gets up again, she races to the corner of the room to be by herself, before she falls down again. When someone asks her what’s wrong, she mutters something incoherently. Then she puts her head in her hands and starts crying.

My uncle picks her up, changes her into her pajamas and puts her in bed.

I realize then that being a baby is pretty much exactly like being really drunk:

1) You can’t stand up straight.
2) Walking results in stumbling.
3) Everything is in slow motion.
4) All sorts of people you don’t even know are talking to you.
5) You can’t answer them because you have no language functions.
6) After awhile you get frustrated and sit down.
7) Then you get all emotional and start crying.
8) At this point, when you’ve hit the bottom, someone you know that loves you very much, brings you home, gets you changed, and puts you into bed.

All this is the same except for one thing. The next morning you do not wake up with a hangover: You wake up drunk because you are still a baby.