Iron Fist

I don’t think he remembers it now, but upon parting ways after the first time I met Brandon, he shook my hand and said, “You’re much cooler than I thought you would be.” This was as heartwarming as it was flattering; usually I get “Wow, you really are a dick,” or “Please stop scratching yourself.” I had no idea then that the chance phone call that lead us to meet would lead to repeated ventures into dozens of bars and a few ill-considered cigarettes as we searched out just the right venue for the fabled TequilaCon. Nor did I have any idea that I would meet so many awesome people that I clearly need to be reading more of or that I’d wind up with an official TequilaCon name badge and lanyard and gift bag at the Kennedy School on a random Saturday in March.

And I didn’t know then that I’d get a guest post from Brandon some day about TequilaCon, which I present to you now. Thanks, Brandon. For everything.

*****

it’s so nice to wake up every morning alone, physically-emotionally spent and not have to tell you i love you because i would and that’s how tethers snap, loosing the pink balloons from their moorings, floating off into the spinning sky, reflection of dots like a constellation, pegasus, perhaps, dreaming of leather bearing stable girls and running free through the halls of their elementary days.

the moon is out there somewhere, hidden behind the roof of the bar, the clouds and light pole milkshakes transmitting my electronic mail. on friday i made nice with the kennedy school receptionist, and added a wet bar to the ample closet in classroom number 6, a recessed room, overlooking the warm waters that can only avoid the tips of my toes for so long.

i love those moments when you are lost and in a panic, you pull out your phone and start punching the numbers too quickly, only to hear the other person say, ‘turn around.’ and then jenny did something even more pleasing to my heart, she let me lead her down taylor, past the naughty marble parts of the standard insurance building, and to an old watering hole with the loosest slots in town named after my favorite water lily/sitting position.

the lotus was soon full of friends old and new, a bartendress who mistakingly confessed to the fire a few years back that nearly kept this moment from ever coming to pass, we have the best bartendresses at tequilacon, and it always rains, and i always come away with a new umbrella. and the story of the lotus fire was related so well that you could nearly smell the charred letters, smoke which turned out to be jenny’s telegraph struggling to translate jill’s text message into morse code and back into latin. i struggled similarly with my own phone, but for altogether different reasons, weighing the cruelty of sending kat a photo of a three-olive sere-dry martini, served in a stemless glass for the safety of everyone involved. i would later switch to the less-powerful version of the northern comfort, only to tremble in the universal shudder of three women with their own conflicting memories of its potency. i watered it down with rc cola, accordingly.

this was the morning yawn and stretch, still, pre-quila con, and no sooner did i experience the jess reach-around, that a new phone was in my hand, and it was time to relieve myself in conversation with sarah, and involuntarily, the guy standing in the stall next to me. i graciously left all our poker winnings to the honest barmaid, all of us come out winners.

we joined the happenings at mother’s, taking the last table standing before dee dee could make off to wisconsin with the restaurant’s doors. they appeased us with biscuits and macaroni and plied us with wine and food too pretty to eat. there was some dessert i don’t recall, but since by this time i was already well into my first hair of the dog, my lapses can be forgiven, and in any case i needed to pack these guests into my car and drive them to the kennedy school. i know what you’re thinking, and you can save your judgment, because i packed a year’s supply of DUI strips, and the color on mine hardly changed a lick.

in the lobby, a healthy cohort of pre-quila con feted the arrival of their queen, and my memory and me, we don’t get on so well, but let’s see, there was karl and hilly and adena and stacey and sizzle. and my heart sank when i saw dustin, everybody’s favorite curly-haired sibling, because he is everybody’s favorite. he cursed the whole weekend, no coincidence and people thought it was ’sweet’ and ‘precious’ and ‘you’re the best donteverchange.’ but oh how he changed.

fortunately, dave was there to sop up any excess affection that dustin would have dragged off like so much toilet paper on his bootheels, because the badges and buttons and posters and spot-on imitation of the month grew ovaries in me where none before existed, and elevated him to tequilacon executive committee status, where none before existed. i believe his official title is president in chief, whereas jenny is chief executive president and i am the designated driver and food taster. i don’t eat meat, jenny is sesame free and dave cannot even manage an appetite unless he is allowed to stab the prey in the gullet with other people watching. blood lust, they call it.

next year’s badges, apparently, will be blue-tooth enabled, with a usb port, digital camera, patriot identification device, Google Earth, the first ten chapters of Dune, alcohol content strip, their own currency based debit system and serve as the hotel room key. we’re going to call it the ‘iPhone.’

the buttons doubled as accupuncture, unfortunately, but fortunately, the lanyards doubled as tourniquets.

this of course, was all too late to help sibyl, who had previously donated 40% of her internal organs by body weight before pre-quila con, and even though she was plenty congratulated, and i’m sure the hearts broken were in excess of the kidneys she gave, vahid and i both know the real reason for the blood letting was to make more room for all the jameson’s stashed in my closet/bar. is it a coincidence that the bottle was empty almost as soon as she arrived? i think so. but in spite of the rapidly decreasing liquor stores, people soon found more reason for cheerfulness because there was a lot more liquor, too. we weren’t even forced to open the emergency vermouth.

i somehow managed to lose jenny and dee dee to downtown, and even vahid and sibyl were willing to part my ways, and i can still barely forgive myself for not flattening asia’s tires, and then there’s jill, too, and thank god for old elementary school hotel/bar conversions that still allow you to sleep fully clothed with all the lights on, this no blue law state, but Oregon territory, still encompassing the whole of Washington in the minds of many. and thank god for parking lot epiphanies and barely noticeable rain that can’t quite do much more than slow down the embers on your menthol lights, giving you just enough time to say what’s on your mind and be heard. that’s all.

in the morning, no big surprise, my head is full of hurt, and i take jill to the veritable quandary, my euphemisms only half used up on Day one. portland is a town of edible, delible eggs, and spicy, handmade bloody mary mixes and memories still too close to recall. and shoe shopping. and powells. and powells technical books. and powells world famous 2 hour free parking, complete with 4 spots, each with its own 1980s model sedan taking up 1 and a half.

neil is, disappointingly, a great guy, and not surprisingly has incredible taste in women. sofia is charming and lovely and shares my affection for winter caps and brasseries and she completed our search for a curly haired sister, so that jenny wouldn’t feel outnumbered by me and dustin, or even just dustin alone when he’s demonstrating the ’show curl.’ i will feel mightily disappointed if they do not return with fond and pleasant memories of the oregon coast, but if they did not enjoy themselves, they are oscar and emmy and bloggy worthy, surely, because they both know how to smile and laugh and make other people in their presence do the same. that’s what you should know about the two of them.

i panicked a bit slaving over PB&J sandwiches, having laid out all 30 lunch sacks, filled them with chocolate, tequila, sudoku and DUI strips, all along the ironing board/registration table, and cried on the telegraph with jenny, mostly dots, but a few dashes in between, until she said ‘half sandwiches’ and repeated ‘half sandwiches’ when i kept saying ‘WHAT DO YOU MEAN?’ what she meant was half sandwiches, and it suddenly made me realize that the reason i called her was to confess that i hadn’t counted the bread slices correctly in the grocery store, and there wasn’t enough sandwich material for all of these people who flew in from all over the world, and even those who didn’t fly in from london, were they to change their minds at the last minute. so everyone had a half peanut butter (smooth jif) and jelly (squeezable welch’s grape) sandwich, except dustin, who had 7, and colleen, whose SCD called for a fresh almonds/baby carrot/tilamook cheese medley. brenton hands down won for best hair of the night, and that was with me trying, as i mentioned to both shoo shoo and kimberly, who both arrived an hour before official registration began, and i was happy, because i got a gift bag with my favorite team in the whole world written write there onto the front, and i drank the liquor post haste and then sucked on one of those DUI strips just to monitor my progress and not go ‘overboard’ (that’s one finger quotations, for those of you at home checking my grammar).

i cried again when my stack of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches fell down, only ten high, onto dave’s lanyards/name badges, and thank god today’s lamination is water resistant, not like the old kind which basically reacted with water by exploding because it was potassium based. so not only were the badges ‘cool,’ but they were also ‘clean’ and ‘jelly scented.’ i’m so sorry.

vahid must have known this and reacted in anger by lifting me into the air, and jenny wanted to do the same to vahid, but first i had to loosen him up a bit from gravity’s hold, and that, my friends is why there are photos of jenny picking up vahid with relative ease while i appear to be using him as a pillow fort. just in time for mad william to get very mad at showing up in the most talked about shoes of the evening and robert to want to knife us with his mighty pen and chad to compare this all to a scene from 300 and lewis and blair to question if we were in fact teachers, what with this being a school for kennedys.

i tried to leave when everyone started licking each other’s tats, if only to step outside and ask the sky to please stop spinning already i’m trying to organize a blog meetup thank you.

with all the new faces, it was nice to see shari, and nicer still to see other people see shari for the first time and not quite so nice to hear them fawn all over her, hanging on her every word like so many collectible buttons hanging from so many jelly-stained lanyards, hoping that vahid might ask someone else to pick him up while we all point to shari because she has better abs than i momentarily, since ‘07 is when i work on my triceps, and my ab routine doesn’t start til ‘11.

like at every tequilacon, there was a lot of cleavage and rhetorical questions, like, ‘can i touch those?’ and ‘are you serious?’

michelle did like the most awesome thing by carting a group of people over to voodoo donuts, and dan and sass and i chatted about mutual blog reads, like tequila mockingbird and patricia and romy and greg, aplenty. there was hearts in the air.

dan was awfully cool, and i feel like i could have chatted with him for a long time, only now the DUI strip in my mouth was starting to turn pink, and that’s saying something being as how Asia dipped them into pure tequila and they didn’t do so much as look moist. i feel like i really accomplished something and i was apparenty very funny because i started offering everyone a ride home and they just laughed and laughed and laughed and then they walked away very quietly shaking their heads from side to side. i think i made an impression!

and then i get very sleepy at this point of the story, and i remember now that tequilacon is nothing that really exists, but is a figment like we all are to each other, fully weaned of truth and principality, able to sustain our days on little more than hidden messages and pretense and a vestigial ability to talk to each other using only our thoughts and our fingertips.

i think, of course, the beauty of this all is that it’s so brief, a wisp of a time, really, with no danger of ruts and healthy obsession, and then, sorry, train gone. but i know that i don’t use an umbrella, but it did rain, though so lightly as for me to cry no fair, please try harder, and i did come away with a new umbrella, and a woman’s scarf that i am hesitant to wash. and i know that on march 10, 2007, i went without anything but the very lightest, most pleasant sleep and i left my recessed room in ebullient spirit and walked around in a most welcome haze, in search of my breakfast club, the onus on me to come up with bridal shower conversation, my own duck induced priapisms, and an antidote to jenny’s hollow tears, so that next year’s conferees don’t all wind up lifeless and damp, spent like Vegas.

i also believe the children are our future.