Iron Fist

It sounds like the kids in LA have been rocking like a hurricane lately, so naturally we had to get a few bloggers together up here in Stumptown as well. Even if it was the middle of the week and we all had to go to work in the morning, we didn’t let that slow us down from having what can only be described as a riotously good time.

I am a lucky guy to have been in the company of so much awesome all at once. But lest you think it was all just fun and games, I can assure you we were hard at work plotting the next TequilaCon. I can’t go into details (I am strictly Research — details come from the PR department), but I will give you this hint: you’ll want to bring some duct tape with you.

Oh, and don’t view any email attachments from these people. Just…trust me on this.

Comments(7)

Mmph. Stupid alarm.What? No, I’m not going to move the blanket. It’s cold in here.

mumble mumble Whose idea was this, anyway? Jessica? Wasn’t this all your idea? Man, it is early. Don’t wanna get up yet. Please go away and stop making noise now.

Stupid hair. Why does it all have to stick straight up in the morning? Lame.

(Dear Lord, why couldn’t you make me look more like Dave2? The man has ‘sex machine’ written all over him when he first wakes up.)

….

I bet I can squeeze another twenty minutes out of this whole snooze-button set-up before I need to get out of bed.

Comments(8)

I went to a wedding of one of my best friends yesterday morning, along with Niels and Sibyl, the three of us representing the old residence hall where we’d all met. We left home early, before the clouds could get their act together and bring us April showers as we made our way to the college town where the bride and groom had decided to tie the knot.

It was a non-traditional style of wedding, which is fine with me since as a pragmatist I have little use for tradition for tradition’s sake, and since I can find weddings rather tedious it’s nice when they mix it up a little to keep me interested.

We arrived more or less right on schedule for the brunch to start, this pre-ception serving the place of a reception that might otherwise take place after the wedding, this being the time to mingle and shake hands and congratulate and reminisce and eat scrambled eggs and scones. And there was a game to play as well, where each table had questions to ask about the couple which coincided quite nicely with other questions we’d brought with us, and all the gathered friends and family with their name tags smartly in place were encouraged to fill out the questionnaires and speculate about first dates and first kisses and first meetings with parents. At last they stood hand in hand and walked us through the answers one by one, all the while the love and loyalty for my friends pulling me in different directions inside as they had all morning, the torque between their respective dipole moments making my heart ache.

Then the time came for us to share stories about the bride and groom before the assembled guests, and I thought about the bottle of Patrón Reposado I’d bought for us to drink when Joe turned twenty-one, and throwing knives at the bulletin board on the wall between our rooms and running down a dirt road in a small town in the middle of night while we laughed like happy fools with beer cans in hand; I thought about shows at Dante’s and karaoke and cigars and corned beef and carrying couches and how he’d had at least five can openers for some reason when we shared a kitchen as suite mates; I thought about parties at the end of long weeks and hanging out of truck windows and arm-wrestling in bars and any number of other adventures since we’d all known each other that I couldn’t quite bring myself to divulge in front of aging grandparents and impressionable cousins. Niels diplomatically saved the day by telling everyone that Joe kept us in line and out of trouble when we were his charges, but never so much so that we didn’t have fun. And I shook hands with Joe’s uncles and brother and father and mother and told them all that yes, Joe was our RA, and as you can see we clearly all turned out fine, just as you always expected we would.

Brunch came to an end and Joe and Dusti went off to spend some time taking pictures, and we went off together to spend some time drinking vodka, this being a college town and so surely there must be a bar nearby, but we didn’t get that much time with our vodka because we drank it down so quickly.

We sat around our table and reminisced and asked each other the questions that single people invariably ask each other when they go to weddings about whether or not we could see ourselves getting married someday, and I tried not to dwell on my answer of no, not really, not any more.

It stopped raining and the time was getting nearer so we drove back to campus with fried food in our bellies and five rounds of drinks under our belts and discovered that no imaginable force was able to get the lid off of Niels’ flask to get at the whiskey within, but we’d probably had enough already anyway and it wouldn’t do to blow our cover now, we’d already made it this far passing ourselves off as fine upstanding young people to all present.

We did a reasonably good job of sitting still for the ceremony, finding another cohort in the crowd to sit with while they read their vows. And then they were husband and wife all of a sudden, and then they were kissing, and we stood up and clapped and then they were gone, already down the aisle and out of the building and off to start their new life together.

And we left, too, back to Portland, and found we needed some more time still and so Bar of the Gods it was, until we’d said everything there was to say and were completely spent on our ups and downs and it was time to finally sleep it off.

***

I’m happy for my friends, I really am. I’m just a little maudlin today, which is no doubt a partial result of having something like a dozen drinks yesterday. Tomorrow I’ll be back to being entertaining again, but tonight I had to get this all out.

 

Comments(6)

Because Shari asked nicely.

Comments(3)

I spent the morning walking around the Chinese Gardens and, having cleansed my soul with some peaceful quiet time and cleansed my palate with some delightful Pu-erh tea, I decided that I was really hungry. Since the day that I plan to begin eating healthily is invariably ‘tomorrow’, I opted for Rocco’s Pizza on my way home.

If you’ve never been to Rocco’s, they serve slices of pizza there that are the size of a leg of lamb. And by leg of lamb, I mean the entire leg of a lamb that had been genetically-engineered to be the size of a mastodon. They aren’t fooling around here. Naturally, I ordered two slices.

“How about a nice cold beer to go with that?” the kid behind the counter asked.

“Well…” I hadn’t really been thinking about getting a beer. But it was kind of hot out, now that he mentioned it. “What do you have on tap?”

He rattled off the names of the several micro-brews they had on tap. “All those are $3.75. Or-” and he held up a plastic cup “- you could get Miller for a buck.”

Eh. I wasn’t that thirsty for beer. I could get by with water –

–and my “Inner Economist” decided to chime in…

IE: Dude. Do it. Buy a Miller.

Me: What? No. C’mon, that’s a shitty beer.

IE: It’s also a buck. Do it.

Me: No! I haven’t had a Miller since I was 19 and didn’t know any better.

IE: You’re not getting the picture here. It’s beer. For a dollar. That’s even cheaper than it was in our Tijuana days.

Me: You can’t be serious.

IE: Do it. DO IT. It’s a dollar. You know you can’t resist a bargain like that. IT’S ONE DOLLAR.

The kid behind the counter was still holding the plastic cup, looking at me questioningly.

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll take a Miller.”

I’ll start eating healthily.

Tomorrow.

Comments(8)