my brain hurts. i don't mean to say that i have a headache, i have one of those as well, but my brain hurts. so, the promised report...
the evening, though i expected a colossal flop started off with excellent news. the friend was driving, WOOHOO! it'd be tough for me to have a bad night after news like that, but that's beside the point. so we skipped over to the bar and it was a moderately busy night. strangely full for a Monday, but who am i to judge, eh? i have mixed emotions of repulsion and nostalgia for the place, i spent far too much time there just before the century turn, and shortly before making tracks for the east coast the place turned into a zoo for miscreants of every shape and size. now, coming from me, miscreant is an enormous insult, after all, i'm very fond of cretins in general, but as soon as ocweekly rated the joint 'best dive bar in orange county' it was all over but the shouting. my favorite place to drown an evening had become a sod-infested petri dish for moron replication. but i digress...
the crowd was nicely sized, and this has distinct advantages: 1)slinking into the shadows is much much easier, and 2)the males in attendence were far to busy doing their damndest to impress the lady-folk to trap me in vapid conversation. again, i say WOOHOO! so my old friend and i sat down for the first of three pitchers of guinness and, as ever, started talking music. he and i were in a band together a few years back, and well, it's the only music project i still look back on and wish i hadn't walked out on. things were traipsing along slowly but surely when the curse of the Knight struck again...in walks someone i haven't seen in years. this trend of seeing the "old" crowd is starting to scare me, thus far i've been very pleased to see the people i have, but statistically i'm bound to run into someone i purposely never see. at any rate, this chap was one of my favorites from school. he and i played football together, but both had much loftier ambitions off the field. he's now a professor of chemistry at a college in Irvine. it was great to see him and catching up was fun. soon his guest asked me to write her paper on Bukowski, which, of course, i offered to do but on the condition that she write me a check for 50$. "But it's only a three-page paper!" "Oh, really, I apologize...still 50$ though." she was struggling with topics, choice one was an examination of possible Marxist applications in Post Office, or an examination of sexism in the same. i was vocally supportive of choice one, after all you can go stark-raving mad with that, guy hates his job, oppressed by dumbasses whose intelligence doesn't warrant their authority, class-structure of government employment blah blah blah. but in the end, sexism got the call, and i don't blame her, a Bukowski paper about sexism, shit, you could type that in the dark, there's enough material to write a damned phd thesis. it was very nice to have a conversation of that nature, in a bar no less (i know it's not a stretch to talk Bukowski in a California bar, but the conversation usually never gets past, "BARFLY is SO about me and my friends!" which i always have to chagrin at, "Really? Um, I have to go, you and your friends suck."). plus she was pretty *insert dorky face i'd be making at myself if i were staring into a mirror*
by the time my vision got blurry i had appeared in a few camera-phone pictures which i hopefully will never see, and sold a book (i know, i'm such a whore). the night was topped off with a nice crisp gin and tonic (always balking at the beer before liquor never sicker rule). i'd say it was a perfect night, but i had to wake up this morning. my friend is still sleeping on my couch...bastard.
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