Gloria

And then you have one of those days when you wake up just cursing all that lies before you, very existence itself.  "Fuck!" But that's not enough.  Not nearly.  "Fuck fuck fuck, fuck fuck fuck fuck!"  What release, and yet, that day's still there facing you down.  Those tow ten-mile bike rides.  Those eight hours of standing.  Those meals to cook.  Ugh.  Wahh.  And still no one to hold.

And it's only 8:00 a.m.  Fuck.  Fuck.  Before I know it, I'm on my bike and up the first hill.  Then, ahh.  Mother Sky felt gracious today, and the sky's all blue cottage cheese and white brush strokes.  It's something that I just need to take the time to look at.  To notice, to breathe in while I'm waiting for the light to change.  Polarized lenses make it all the prettier, and before I know it again, the smog choked air tastes just a little bit sweeter and the Hollywood hills are a hazy silhouette in the distance.  I thank God for such beauty before me with a smile and a catchy tune in my ear.  His embrace is one so soft sometimes, but if I wish to feel it, it frees me, body and mind.

And then the day is mine, and impossible is nothing, and like doesn't really get much better if only I see it so. So I do, and I try to see everything, not just myself, but life everywhere.  Maybe I'm just a guy on a bike on a bike path and no one looks upon my struggles with envy.  

But with your eyes open and your head up, you see just how good you have it.  You see the wheelchair and you see the boy being held at both arms trying to walk for the life of him, pushing one weak feeble foot before the other again and again.  Mine eyes have never showed so much determination.  

I fly by.  And there in that moment I make another little deal with God.  Because a tough day for me may be that boy's wondrous dream, and a smile on his face is intangible gold.  So give him a day of smiles, dear God, and throw me your worst.  Give me the shit, the storm, the mishap, the misstep, the ill decision of the day because I can take it, all of it, for the pile of sad that it would be.  Give him the laugh, give him the joy.  Coax his eyes away from that cracked, dirt-stained ground and towards that masterpiece above him.  Leave him in wonder of the heavens, and please let him recognize it.  Let him breathe it in, and let it warm his soul.

He most certainly could, and he should.  And I asked and offered congenially so why wouldn't he?  For his sake, I hope He does.

I'm ready for it.

Copenhagen: The Lovely Danes

If the Dutch had been nice, the Danes are positively brimming with positivity.  After switching trains in Hamburg and crossing the Baltic on a ferry that the train just trains onto and then off of, we find ourselves seated next to a couple of Danish girls, and well naturally, we get to talkin'.  They're students and they've been studying abroad in Australia.  But they're heading home now, back to Copenhagen for the first time in a year.  We tell them we're couch-surfing, and we tell them we've never been to Copenhagen before, and we tell them we don't know where exactly we're going.  Marie, our future host in Denmark's crown jewel had given us her address, but she might as well just have given a monkey a condom because we don't know what the hell to do with it.  We GPS it on Grant's phone and we're shown a little dot on a little map of a neighborhood called Norrebro, and according to the googleMaps map (and my impeccable understanding of distances between both time and space), Norrebro isn't anywhere near Copenhagen Central Station.

This is a fact only confirmed by the Danish girls. "Oh, that's far.  On the other side of the lakes."

Ah yes, the lakes.  Lovely.  Their English is perfect.  And so they tell us which bus to take from the station and which stop to get off at for the transfer to Norrebro.  And then we tell stories and laugh, and make funny faces and the noises animals make in Danish.  They speak about the tap water like one speaks about the thing they miss most from their childhood.  "Oh! You will love it!  It is so good!  So soft!"

And I cock my head because I don't think I've ever heard water referred to as "soft".  So they explain, smiling and giggling as always.  As opposed to "hard" water, soft water is apparently devoid of most or all minerals.  It's pure, and it tastes light, like the water of the gods.  "You will see!"  And we would.  Later at Marie's.  My first sip from her water would coat the throat like heaven, and I'd close my eyes and see those smiling Danish faces from the train.  At the final stop, Copenhagen Centraal, it's all fond farewells and smiles and kisses on the cheek, and we promise to meet up again in Copenhagen while we're there.  But we never do. Oh, well.

Free Day

What day is it?  Who knows anymore.  It's a day of no work.  A free day.  But those are the ones when I feel most guilty.  A day free is a day needed to be filled to my mind's thinking and satisfaction.  It's the thinking that gets me.  It's the phone calls and the texts and the messages.  Uhgh!  I'm reaching too much, but only because something is dreadfully missing.  I don't know how to look for it, and I don't even know what I'd do if I found it right before me.  I only know what it is.  Sometimes I wonder how different it would be to have not known, ever.  Or to have only thought to know.  Or to not even know what I'm talking about right now.  What an ignorant bliss that would be, so happy and complete.  I've never been one for ignorance though.  I enjoy the truth most days, fraught with its impossibilities.


"But what then becomes of the day," you say.
Well, I don't know that either.
Maybe just cut the bowlines and drift out to sea,
Resolute on solidarity.
Go to the ocean,
And I'll take what comes to me.


Because the dreams, I guess, are always prettier when they're unachievable.  And so I would be, I suppose, always the dreamer, sitting my place under the pitched sheet in that 1970s Parisian flat, rich in beautiful decor, bold color, and Bertolucci.


"But never forget.  And keep breathing when you feel it m'boy."

Amsterdam: The Enduring Soul

And the whistle blows.  It's somber faces all around.  A heart-wrenching loss.  Some wild goal by Andres Iniesta in the 116th minute.  This tense, goal-less game for ninety minutes, some questionable off-sides calls on both sides, potential goals blown, balls off the cross bar and all that; then overtime and then slam.  It's enough to knock the legs out from underneath you.  Luckily for us, we're not on our feet, or we might've been thrown for a toss, but it still hurts the same.  The whole country sounds like it got the wind knocked out of it, partly, because it has.  One big sigh, and then breathless silence.  Those few scattered Spain fans dare not celebrate, or at least not too boldly.

The bar clears out with consoling fanfare, as watery-eyed Dutch folk half-heartedly make plans for grief drinking.  We just walk home, a walk that seems so much longer in that humid Holland night.  It's this drunk, sad stumble of all twenty-something youth's mind stuck in the hypothetical.  The "what if"s and "if only"s.  What if Sneijder's shot had gone in?  What if Holland had taken the Cup?  If only.  How crazy Amsterdam would've been!  And now all we're left with is this consolation walk of defeat back to Katinka's place.  What if we'd gone to Madrid instead?  Nonsense.  We're here now.  And I fucking love these people.  I want to close my eyes and see orange.  I had certainly sweat orange through that afternoon and into the night, as my sweaty orange flannel will attest to.  When we finally get to the flat, the stairs aren't nearly as fun as I'd remembered.  Our sleeping arrangements are all laid out.  The whole of the tiny living room is almost entirely layered with air-mattresses and thin blankets and sleeping bags.  Katinka bids us "goodnight" and tiredly suggests we stay for the team coming home on Tuesday.  And we tiredly agree upon it, and then we smoke a spliff and go to bed.  But not before that forgetful, drunk pillow talk between three wide-minded Americans from California, thousands of miles from home in a sea of sad orange.  Those sweet nothings thought aloud between the click of the light and the start of some beer-soaked, smokey dream.

[stop]

Monday's a day of mourning, and the city is somber.  But it carries on under the guise of business as usual, and we romp through the canals and over the bridges and past those treacherous midday, windowed street harlots.  Treacherous?  Why yes, all the whiskey in the world can't persuade me to pay for sex with one of those gargoyles of the night, squinting in the bright sun.  But such thoughts are fleeting; after all, marijuana is a memory loss drug, in the short term anyway.  We stop into a coffee shop for a spell and spliff, and to admire the colloquialism of such a taboo-American scene carrying on before us.  It isn't quite a Starbucks, but rather some hole-in-the-wall place with stickers littering the insides like Wahoo's.  And it's packed like those amazing hole-in-wall Mexican places in California.  The really good ones always are, and the spliff we roll at the tiny corner table agrees with that fact.  And after all those years of it's illegality being thrown in my face, the terrors, the madness, the criminality.  This place and these people, and their nonchalant-ness; they find sense in logic, not fear; realism, not dogmatism; intelligence, not fervor.  Always calm and collected, smiling and helpful, but with a sharp wit, and an almost judgemental sarcasm.  The whole place carries a sort of mysticism about it; like an adult Disneyland, truly the happiest place on earth.  And no kids crying and vomiting into trashcans after Mister Toad's Wild Ride.   Our eyes redden from the pleasure.  So surreal, it is.


After, we stop into a hedge-shop (very different from a coffee shop) not far along down the road and we're greeted by innumerable displays littered with pipes and bongs and hookahs and vaporizers and t-shirts and rasta beanies and pretty much everything weed.  Not exactly a shocker.  There are hedge-shops in Los Angeles.  The shocker is tucked away in a little mini-fridge in the corner with silly names and ratings on the front.  "Whoa, are these shrooms?"

And like that, seemingly out of thin air behind us, a stoned man with a nordic accent appears and replies in easy English, "No, man.  They made mushrooms illegal here."

"Whaaat.  That sucks.  Why?"  Max is disappointed.

"I don't know, man.  They're trying to crack down I guess.  But what we got here... These here are truffles."

"Truffles?"

"Yeah, man.  They're like mushrooms, just like mushrooms.  Same high and all."

"What the hell's the difference?" I ask.

"Well see now, mushrooms grow above ground, while truffles, on the other hand, grow below ground.  So they're not really mushrooms, see?  It was a loop-hole in the new laws or whatever.  Mushrooms, illegal.  Truffles, still legal."

"So they're just like upside down mushrooms then," Grant surmises.

"Yes!" and he smiles.

"Ahh," and we smile and turn back to the fridge and re-read the silly names and silly ratings once more and wander out and the stoned nordic guy watches us go, and bids us good-day.  It's strange (and funny to me) how no matter the country, the stoner sounds the same.

[stop]

Tonight, Katinka has a treat for us.  We continue the tradition we'd started in London with Inna and in exchange for her gracious hospitality, we share with her our music libraries and a little window into our Santa Cruz lives; Grant's documentary (King St House) that he produced for his film final.  And yeah, it's on Youtube.  Katinka loves it and so she tells us about this little band, School of Seven Bells, playing the upstairs venue at Paradiso, and that we're coming with her.  Awesome.  Paradiso is a nineteenth-century church building turned hippy squat-commune turned music venue.  It's a venue steeped in musical historics, playing host to a wide variety of unforgettable performers from the Rolling Stones to Nirvana to the Cure to Amy Winehouse, and the list goes on. A place long loved by artists and audiences alike, Keith Richards said the Paradiso concerts in '95 were the best live shows the Stones ever did.  Scalped tickets for those shows reportedly sold for thousands of doll-hairs.  And now we're here to see some young up-and-comers play in the upstairs Atrium.  Tickets: 7 EUR a pop.  We arrive a bit early and Katinka suggests we take a peek at who's playing on the main stage downstairs.  There's a distantly familiar beat coming from behind the heavy wood doors.  And when Katinka opens them, who to our wondering eyes should appear?  Who else but, Billy Idol of course.  He's in the middle of his set and a song's just ended.  There's a pause and everybody on stage is chugging down water or beer or whiskey or whatever's lying around.  And then the band starts playing the intro for White Wedding and Billy, in that sixty-something looking body of his, is jumping around the stage bare-chested like a giddy little schoolboy.  When the verses come, he belts them with all the flair and glam-punk attitude of his glory days.  Absolutely delightful.  Wedding Singer reminiscing?  Of course.

After a pair of songs, we make our way up to the Atrium where School of Seven Bells is already performing and they're just fine and we're just a little buzzed so it's perfect.  The girl singer hits all the high notes and the guy on guitar plays the hell out of those one or two chords he's switching back and forth between during each song.  Grant picks up a copy of their album on vinyl.  Tomorrow the team is coming home and then we'd be on that next train to Copenhagen, so we pack it in early and get our bags ready.

[stop]

Our eyes open with a kind of excitement we haven't felt since the day we came in to the Dam on the final morn of that fateful Cup.  It isn't as tinged with glory, but really it's not so different either.  If I'd have thought for some reason that today would be a somber day, I'd be in most senses wrong. The Dutch are ever the happy people, it's like their mantra, something I like to atone to intellect, attribute to a quick mind and a confident resolve.  They're enduring souls in Holland, and always ready for a good city-wide party.  When we walk outside after breakfast, the city is once again a creature orange, writhing through the streets like the tentacles of some giant octopus of human enduring and celebration.  It's the happy, playful kind of octopus that always gets into every nook and cranny.  Into a square hole, into a round hole.  And every now and again it gets anxious and then there's orange smoke everywhere. Smoke flares.  And open-air pissing booths on every corner.

The team's coming down the canal now, and we crane our necks to see and lucky we're tall because the narrow streets straddling the canal are choked with orange.  And flags and orange and rooting people hang and pour from the windows of the houses and buildings on either side.  It's a joyous riot all around.  A riot, wild and cheering with everything, that rises ever the higher like a wake behind the national team in that head boat.  There they are in the flesh, waving and cheering and pouring champagne on one another.  I can't imagine the nature of this beast had Holland been victorious.  That impossibility.  Something to dream about, and there's always a special prettiness in the dreams of things that will never happen.  And it is so that I'd like to be, always the dreamer.

We lose track of the parade boats as they deftly scoot on and out of sight around a bend in the canal, but the people seem to know where to go, and Katinka and Grant and Max and I bustle along in the thick of it like so many suckers on a tentacle.  The octopus has a plan, and it's a brilliant one, and us tentacles scuttle on.  And like that, we're there, Dam Square.  It's an orange bed of flowers once again, except now we're in the thick of it, frolicking through and finding our way to the front as the team comes out on stage.  Sneijder, Robben, van Bommel, the whole crew.  We see every little antic they pull on the massive 15-meter wide tele-screens posted high above the crowd every 200 or so meters down the middle of the square.  When Bertje comes out and gives his spiel, the city goes wild, but we keep sliding on up to the front, through the thick forest of orange pride and body heat.  Half-way there, in the middle of the continuous Dutch blaring over the loudspeakers, there are some syllables of recognition, a name to be specific;  Armen Van Buren.  And Grant and Max and I look at each other for a pause and a pair of raised eyebrows and a dropped jaw, before we're jumping and hooting and laughing at the luck of our draw, and all at the same time at our unprepared soberness.  We slide so much faster, and like that, we're there at the front.  Well, close to it and we have some space and Armen's just started playing what turns out to be a two hour set.

Two other Dutchies, a guy and a girl, start dancing with us and yell, "California!" when we tell them where we're from.  They tell us they'd been to America, but only to Iowa.  In the winter.  "Iowa!  We love corn!"  And we talk of our travels and our hopes and America and Holland, and we dance.  It's two hours of sweat-soaked, sober day-dancing for all we're worth.  And when the last song plays and the speakers go silent, our day has just begun.  We say goodbye to our new Dutch friends.  "California!"  Then it's back to Katinka's to pick up our bags, and we're off on the first light-rail to Amsterdam Centraal and the first train to Copenhagen.

The Pigeon Hypothesis

If anyone ever tell you that all pigeons are the same - dirty, greasy, filthy rats of the sky - go ahead and open palm slap them in the face for being so stupid.  Maybe it's just me, but I've always been fond of the subtle differences.  The rust on the chain.  The ability of architecture to reflect age.  A sharp but quiet wit, an almost indiscernible sarcasm.  Maybe it's for this reason that the pigeons were so striking.  Europe's pigeon population is at its tippy-top, remarkable and never short of quirky.  In London (Hyde Park, anyways), the pigeons have a sort of majesty about them.  They are larger than life, which is to say they're bigger, prettier, and cleaner than any other pigeons I'd previously encountered.  There was a wisdom there as well that was beyond American pigeons.  If I caught their eye, it was like trading thoughts with an elephant. 

[work]

"And what, pray tell, were they thinking?" you may ask.  Well, my fair idiot, they were thinking about food of course.  They did not regard people with hesitation; these weren't they pussy-footed sky rats of LA, afraid of their own reflections, wallowing in the shadows waiting for vacant restaurant plates and abandoned Doritos bags.

These were prim and proper beasts.  Calculating and brash.  As for humans, to them, we were merely one of two entities: a being with no food to offer, or one come to feed.  And if you happened to be the latter, there was no fear and no pause.  They perched on the hand by the two or three and pecked without hurry.  No stuffing of the bird cheeks.  Calm and collected, they were.  Birds that carried themselves with poise and grace of one of her majesty's creatures.  Colonialists be damned.

I Wanna Write About Food

When it's your birthday you eat out.  And it was her's so we did.  It was a place she was familiar with because she worked across the street, but I'd never been and I was in the mood for something unique and palatable.

"It's so good," she promised, and it was agreed upon.  And it was so good, probably due at least in part to the mid-morning birthday spliff.  But do not think for one minute that the savory satisfaction was lost.  No, it was only amplified and the flavors tingled on the taste-buds.

It was a Japanese burger fusion place and we had a seat outside at the sunny end of a long shared table.  And finally, this is what we ordered.  For some reason, specials always jump out at me.  I don't know why, but there's this natural attraction to specialness in all forms, and today the special was the lamb burger, so that's what I got.  It's not enormous, which for a split second is disappointing.  That is, until I take a bite.  Euphoria.  It's perfect.  I never want to stop chewing to save the flavors in my mouth forever.  The lamb, the lettuce, the caramelized onions, the spread, it's all perfect and delicious in the utmost.  I want more.

Beer?  Why, of course.  Hoegaarden, please.  I take stock in the fact that they serve it on tap because it's absolutely delicious.  And for the lady, the birthday girl with her seared ahi tuna burger and tempura onion rings?  What else, but the Chimay.  Blue label in the big bottle.  The server brings the bottle out with a deep wine glass and pours her the first helping. There's a little head.

[work]

Quote of the Day: I Think I'll Go To Paris

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do.  So throw off the bowlines.  Sail away from the safe harbor.  Catch the trade winds in your sails.  Explore.  Dream.  Discover."

~ Mark Twain

Winning

Why is this heaven so perfect?  Wind-whipped and sun-bleached with that salty tang in the air.  It's more of a strong breeze than a wild wind, the sand's barely moving.  I have a chair, and a foot-stool even, and this is my lunch break.  But still, my mind is restless.  I'm not on the winning side of life yet.  Yet.  And yet, if this is losing, I believe winning should be an immaculate dream.  It should be a life so much more than this present one.  Something with meaning and purpose and fulfillment, a thing awashed in self-satisfaction.  I should have the capacity to look back endearingly, but also down from that atmospheric pedestal.  It's something that's been built upon, not abandoned.  I won't try to find comfort in that euphemistic breakdown because, well, I haven't really defined it at all now have I?  What wonder...


[time for work]

Lovefest and the Gateway: Part 2

Standing, no longer walking.  Jenn was living in a cozy, three-bedroom, third-floor flat just north of the park off Fulton.  It consisted of a single hallway (arrived at by a single, straight staircase that angled left at the very end) that reached all bedrooms and cul de sac-ed at the living room and kitchen.  It was the kind of flat you would think to see a small family living in, but instead, it housed three girls all recently graduated from USF.  Their minds were focused on grad school and work and cleanliness and were, for that matter, understandably high-strung.  And the flat reflected that.  The kitchen was clean, with new pots and pans (Jenn worked part-time at Sur la Table).  The bathrooms were that girly kind of clean that you see in interior decorating magazines, and remarkably dustless.  The living room furniture set was something handed down from a grandmother of somebody's; solid wicker couches with too many throw pillows.  And the whole place looked quaintly and comfortably colonial; luxurious, but not lavish.  From the street, there were steep stairs up to a small landing with three weathered, but refined, heavy wood doors.  Her's was the middle one.  And there we were, just set at the top of those stairs on Jenn's welcome mat.  Taylor and I passed a few moments silent, eerily aware of each and every breath we took.  It was now an hour or so after sunset and that cold autumn city air blew down the deserted street in gusts; a stark polarizing sensation compared to the wild raucous of the day.  Orgasmic euphoria was replaced with a primitive, animalistic alertness that I was unfamiliar with.  We were both in shorts and sleeveless t-shirts (I had on some pink tights as well), and we were shaking, but it was not a shiver from the cold.  It was from an inability to stay still.  The shaking was more of a sway as the heavy beat of bass still reverberated through my eardrums.  I never wanted to stop dancing and moving and my eyes flitted this way and that looking for something curious to focus on.  We both rattled off silly, forgettable inquiries at each other, about our moods, about the sensations of this new reality and how it felt.  I don't remember a word we shared, but the general consensus was that we felt good.  Like really good.  The best.

And as each car we saw approached and pulled up to the stop sign at the corner, we thought aloud to each other, "Is that Monster?"  Five minutes passed.  Ten minutes.  The first handful of times our hopes were dashed as some nameless BMW or Mercedez passed by without stopping.  Then a Camry came to a stop at the corner, but it wasn't her.  A tinge disconcerting, it was.  And as the minutes fell away that fear that had subsided at her phone call was slowly creeping it's way back to the forefront.  Then some skinny guy in a in tank-top and a white minivan pulled over to the other side of the street by the corner, right after coasting through the stop sign.  Taylor and I looked at each other and then back at the van just in time to see the flash of Monster's red mane and her blue tutu as she stumbled out on the passenger side and crossed the street into our open arms.  We gave the driver an acknowledgment and a thanks with a wave of the arm as cordially as we could.  He looked the part of a tweaked out tweaker so much so that he put our previous gay antics impressions to shame, made it look like whimsical child's play.  And as he drove off the two of us looked Monster squarely in the face, trying super hard not to laugh, and said, "Seriously?  You got a ride with that guy?"

"Ughh, don't get me started," replied Erica.

"Well, you really can pick 'em.  I'm pretty sure that was the only guy in a 'Hi, can I rape you?' van that's been down this street since you called." And we all laughed and we opened the door and bumbled up stairs to Jenn's living room, and I said to myself, "Thank God you're alive, Monster."

I'm sure Taylor was saying the same thing.  We wanted retribution for this unwonted anxiety, and so we got her started.  All the couch space was taken, so Taylor and I took seats on the floor.

"Tell us a story child," demanded Conor regally.

As her story unfolded, the scene in Jenn's living room became something of a madhouse.  It was like the party scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.  Just a bunch of crazies laughing without control or care for anything except the hilarity of it all.  The all of life, and those lives being acted out around us in some grand comedy.  Jenn, always the gracious host (even when drunk), got beers out for everyone, and if she was at all put off by the presence of seven strange, crazy men now whooping and walloping in her living room, she hid it well.  Dylan sparked up some fast talking, overly engaged conversation with her on the couch.  You know the one.  That "Hi, we don't know each other at all and I'm here in your living room now high on acid.  So like, where'd you go to college?  Who do you know here?" conversation.  Meanwhile, on the other couch (the love-seat of the pair), Cameron, Conor, Uncle Jack, and Sam Hillard had all mashed themselves into a human acid melt belting varying degrees of devious and maniacal laughter as Monster carried on before them.

"Ok, so.  Yeah, I got a little lost maybe. So I just dgaf-ed ("don't give a fuck"-ed) it and tried to get on one of those floats.  Which I did.  But then I fell off and I think that's how I got this boo-boo," she said pointing at her bloody elbow.  "And then it started getting dark and I started sobering up a little and was like, 'Fuck, where the hell am I?' And I didn't have a phone because... well, you know.  So I just kept grabbing random guys' phones, calling Corinne trying to get Taylor's number.  Which I did.  And that's when I called.  But then all the cabs were packed solid and I didn't have any money so I just kept trying to jump into cars asking for rides until that sketchy dude said he'd take me.  By the way, super sketchy.  He asked me if I wanted to hit his pipe, but fuck that.  I just made him give me a cigarette.  And then he asked if I wanted to make out with him.  Ugh, no.  And then I finally saw Taylor and Brian on the steps and - and I'm just so glad to be back with you guys!"  Who was this girl?!  Regardless, it was one of the best stories I'd ever heard from an eighteen-year-old skinny redhead girl in a black onesies bathing suit and a blue tutu.  And Matt was just jumping up and down, bouncing off the walls like a goddamn super ball.  He was in tears from laughter.  And so was I.  My sides hurt from laughing so long without a proper breath, but I couldn't stop.  None of us could.  The whole thirty-minutes of Monster's montage was ridiculous to the utmost.  And we loved her for it.

[stop]

But there was a new storming brewing on that midnight horizon.  An after-party.  And Monster wasn't coming.  She was on a group-imposed timeout under the watchful eye of dear Jenn, who was taking the rest of the night easy.  Captain Jack and his swash-buckling crew of merry men, myself included, were off, on to adventures unknown, pointing our compasses towards the city center and a little dance joint called Ruby Skye.  We took off on foot down the skinny park peninsula, the whole time Taylor and I talked madly, asking each other if we sounded cracked out.  We were headed east towards the city's soul and about a block or so down a taxi pulled over, and Conor and Dylan and Jack jumped in.

"Catch the next one lads!" said Conor hanging out the window.  "Driver!  To the Ruby Skye!"

The rest of us would catch the next one.  What the rest of us didn't know was that there wouldn't be a next one.  Not another taxi stopped for us in the next forty-five minutes.  Maybe it was because our ridiculous garments.  Maybe because we were still wearing sunglasses.  Maybe it was because Matt and Sam looked like two blonde-wigged trannie hookers.  Maybe it was because Cameron looked like a blue dot on the Megan's Law website.

"We're not pretty enough!" Sam would curse at the misting night sky after each taxi sped by.  It was really quite depressing considering the fact that Conor, Jack, Dylan were probably gallavanting around Ruby Skye like a bunch of giddy little school boys that got Lunchables for lunch instead of peanut butter sandwiches.  And what were we doing?  Getting rejected by taxi after taxi, pouting under one of those portable orange arrow signalers the city uses to to merge lanes for construction, and finally finding our way to a bus line that would take us to where we needed to go.  I would've been sad, if only I wasn't so awesomely high and entralled by the whole scene.  The bus was mostly empty, and the bus driver chuckled as we stumbled aboard and took seats near the front, giggling and swaying and moving in our seats the whole time.  It'd hit a bump and we'd bump.  The thing rounded a turn and we went falling into each other like a bunch of bowling pins on laughing gas.

Our stop was a couple blocks from the club, a nothing walk compared to the night's previous travails.  Still, we didn't make it without Sam getting stopped by a bachelorette and her friends and convinced to pose for a photo with all them while holding a giant clown-balloon penis.  To our wondrous surprise, the other boys were still in line at Ruby Skye.  They had gotten more drinks at Slide bar before (it was a bar with a slide entrance, no big deal).  We were reunited, and it felt so good.  Good enough for the last dosing of the night.  This time we all chomped down little capsules of white powdery Molly about ten or so minutes from the front of the line.  At the entrance, Uncle Jack got turned away because he was wearing shorts, not the long-legged attired required by such a pristine establishment.  It was awful news, but we were all really too high to argue, and the thing about that high, is that nothing really matters.  So Jack hailed a cab, tail between his legs, and hung up his yellow and green Brazil speedo a little earlier than expected that night.

The rest of us romped inside and made a right proper night of it, and to be honest, it wasn't nearly as fun as the day.  ATB was spinning. He's been around for a while, and the vibe was different.  You know, club-like.  And when I say club-like, what I really mean is mob club-like.  All button down shirts and cologne and huddled groups of menacing, older Asians and Eastern Europeans.  We still danced our faces off, which included blonde wig hand-offs and hair-flipping and jumping with our hands in the air because it felt so good.  But we were becoming deliriously tired, worn thin by the day, and I couldn't tell you how Taylor and I got back to Jenn's place because I don't remember.  I just remember trying to fall asleep on the couch in front of the television and all the late-night ESPN highlight reels looking like they were in fast-motion.  It was a trip.

Quote of the Day: I Want To Be Roy Pilgrim

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind." 


~ Dr. Seuss

Montpellier: You's All

Montpellier was a queer little place, and not in the gay way.  It was queer in that French way, which init of itself is not the easiest thing to elaborate upon, but Lord knows I'll try my hardest.  Not since our time with Inna in London had we couch-surfed with someone that wasn't native to the city we were staying in.  Here on the French Riviera, we found ourselves in the residence of two someones, neither of which called Montpellier home. Their names were Elsabeth and Aina and they were both students studying abroad for a year.  Elsabeth was a fair-skinned, skinny Irish girl with sparse light freckles and and the kind of dark-red hair that almost looks brown and that some would call auburn.  She was from a small town just outside Dublin and carried with her a thick rural Irish accent.  She spoke soft though, and so it was pretty and very endearing, especially because she seemed to always speak with a smile.  And she had a natural inclination to saying "you's all" like some Southern belle.


Aina was from Madagascar, a former French colony, and her English was just slightly better than my French (still not very good) so Elsabeth often times played the part of translator.  It was a task she greeted with open arms and the cutest French accent.  Since it was summer and school was out, they both worked jobs during the day, and Elsabeth sometimes played basketball at a nearby park court.  This was something Max was mighty keen on joining in on but, regrettably, never did.  Still, he's quite confident he would've dominated, Dirk style.  And, I mean, come on.  It was France.  And it was basketball, not poetry.  Needless to say, we had those few days in Montpellier mostly to ourselves.