The Drunken Blog

By all accounts, this weekend should have been awesome. Hell, if I just listed off all of my activities, you would be in awe of how awesome my weekend was, and yet somehow I managed to wet-blanket it. I’m going to blame it on my cold, which in retrospect, seems like a viable excuse, but it still sucks, because I did some awesome stuff this weekend.

On Friday, a journey to find some jumbo slice pizza, or JS as we started to call it (we were saying that we wanted jumbo slice so much that it was actually worthwhile for us to abbreviate it), turned into us making it into a club with a $20 cover for free, just the three of us guys, seeing Tito Ortiz of UFC fame, going to a gentleman’s club, and then, the next day, I went to Atlantic City. Like I said, it sounds like a pretty awesome weekend.

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If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s taking really bad pictures; that and being able to toss a ball straight up in the air and catch it when it falls down, of course. But there was to be no ball tossing at this installment of Country Music Concerts That I Only Go to Because I like Drinking and I like My Friends but I Don’t like the Music. I’m still working on a more succinct title for the series.

This time it was Toby Keith who we would be viewing live in concert in a drunken state of euphoria. It was Mary, Jake, his friend from high school Jules, and of course me that attended the concert. I was skeptical at first, at our last concert it was only a few of us, but a lot more people wandered over to our car. This was not the case this time. I had serious doubts about how much fun I would be able to have for the next five hours or so with just these four people. Of course, all of these reservations quickly vanished as soon as I was about 3 beers in.

I think my unfounded fear of having a lousy time was exacerbated by our grilling situation. Jake had still not replaced his grill from the first concert of the season so we had to borrow Jules’ dad’s grill, which was a propane grill. I much prefer charcoal to propane; I feel more like a man cooking over a pit of hot things that takes at least 30 minutes before you’re actually able to cook on them, as opposed to the 5 minutes it takes before you’re ready to cook over a propane grill. It almost seems like cheating.

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I have a subtle competitiveness that most don’t seem to notice. Or, if they do notice, they seem to call it something else more along the lines of “let the other person win.” Of course, that’s not actually the case, but in my long and eventful life, I’ve learned that when somebody is really good at something, and they are able to completely trounce you, you have much less incentive to continue competing with that person in that event. The problem here is that I like competing in events in which I do well, but if I do too well, whomever I am competing against will stop competing if they feel they have no chance at beating me. So often times I won’t go all out, which leads many people to believe that I am mediocre at best in many areas.

I lavish in the thought of people calling me mediocre, it makes it just that much easier to for me to impress people; making other people have low standards of you is very important to impressing them. That’s horrible life advice, but when it’s just you and a ten year old competing for the coveted title of “Best Diver at Jake’s Parent’s Marina’s Pool Party,” I pull out all of the stops. Allow me to explain.

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Maybe I’m just getting old, but concerts don’t quite seem the same as the used to. For instance, I remember saying that I would never drink at a punk show. Of course, I said that before I started drinking, so drinking at all seemed somewhat preposterous. But there are some other things that I’ve noticed that irk me that didn’t use to.

This past Friday I drove from DC to Virginia Beach for a Reel Big Fish concert. The lineup was awesome, it was Reel Big Fish with Less Than Jake, Streetlight Manifesto, and Against All Authority. It’s normally about a 3 hour drive with no traffic, but since I was leaving during rush hour, I knew I was going to hit some. As it turns out, 3 hours turned into a little over five hours. The show started at 8 and I didn’t get there until 9. Luckily, I managed to get there just as Streetlight Manifesto, the band I wanted to see almost as much as Reel Big Fish, was getting off the stage, so I didn’t even get to see them play. But I did see them setting up for Less Than Jake for the entire 30 minutes it takes to do that.

When I got there I felt almost obligated to buy a beer. I mean, I didn’t get that wristband for nothing. Speaking of wristbands, what a great idea. I wish they had them for 18 year olds as well because it’s kind of hard to tell how old some girls are at these shows. The easiest way, I’ve found, is to look at the guys they are with because most guys actually look their age. And speaking of girls at a show with their boyfriend, why?

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Going out to DC is a big deal. It’s too far away to effectively drive, parking is inconvenient, cabs are too pricey, and the metro closes at 2am. And yet, for some reason, I love going out to DC. It’s not something I do every weekend, and I have to be in the right mood for it, but DC is usually a good time.

My last visit to DC was an exception, however. Maybe it’s because I had imbibed heavily the two previous nights in a row and I was just plane pooped out. Maybe it’s because being in the presence of attractive girls makes me act sober. Maybe it’s because I picked up an unlucky penny. Mayhap it’s because after having had so much alcohol in such a period of time, the alcohol had taken the place of the inhibitory neurotransmitter gamma-aminobutyric acid and as a result of which my brain compensated by reducing the natural creation of GABA meaning that I would have to drink copious amounts of alcohol just to feel “normal.”

Obviously I don’t drink that much if I am able to remember that lesson from biology class.

It was most likely that I was predisposed to have a bad time. I wasn’t in the mood for going out, really. I mean, I would have been fine with a chill evening of drinking, but I never would have suggested going out to DC in my condition. However, I was coaxed out by Mary. To her defense, she didn’t have to coax that hard, pretty much the mention of Nancy and Ricky coming out was enough to get me to go out.

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I was having a conversation with a good friend of mine the other day via IM. He recently became involved with a girl he met via myspace, a very attractive girl. Now, I’ve never even considered using myspace to meet girls. I’m too jaded from all of those fake friend requests I get from girls that try to get me to go to their nude pay-websites.

It’s easy for me to sort out the riff-raff because I’m a guy, and hot girls typically don’t have to go out looking for guys, the guys find them, so if a hot girl does try to friend me, chances are they just want me to pay to go to their website. Attractive girls, on the other hand, have their hands full with filtering out the shady guys.

Trying to set yourself apart from the crowd is not an easy thing to do. How do you make that cute girl respond to your message as she is deleting everybody else’s

What do you say to a girl you want to meet?

This is what my conversation was about with my friend. His response was simply to say, “Hey, what’s up?” that, however, seems to be way too easy, so I took it upon myself to figure out the ultimate pickup line for girls on social networking sites.

After much time, thought, deliberation, and research, the line I discovered is:
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This is going to sound wrong, but bear with me. I often wonder what it would be like to be the most attractive girl in a room. What I mean by that is to be actively pursued by all of the eligible people in the room, and I specified attractive girl because if I was the most attractive guy in the room, well, girls typically don’t approach guys in the same way that a guy will approach an attractive girl. Also, you could go up to ten different girls and they would all give you a different definition of what a hot guy looks like (among the layman, anyway), unless it is someone universally hot like Brad Pitt. But, if you go up to 10 guys and ask what a hot girl looks like, they will all give you almost the same exact description, and the best part is, that description is not of some supermodel or Hollywood actress, it could be the porn star that’s in the room with you right now.

And while I will never know what if feels like to have everybody in the room pine over me, I did get a small taste of it the other night, and I have to say, it was odd. Being actively pursued, being the one that gets to say yes or no, that is an odd feeling.

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Not surprisingly, I was tired all day Friday from going out on Thursday. Fortunately, I didn’t have to work so I was able to relax. I did, however, have some errands to run so I completed them, saw Ratatouille with Mary, who was also enjoying a vacation before she started her new job on Monday as well.

After the movie I took a quasi-nap to get ready for that night’s festivities. I was informed that we would be doing a Reston bar crawl. I wasn’t too excited about this because, to be honest, I’m not a hug fan of the Reston bar scene. The crowd is not what I’m used to; it’s an older more sophisticated crowd. I enjoy the uncomplicated debaucheries of college-aged kids. Additionally, the bars are priced like DC junior, that is to say the drinks ain’t cheap. They aren’t horribly expensive, either, but they require you to pregame heavily before you begin your drinking adventure.

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Bamboozled is a fun word. It’s not so fun when you are on the receiving end of the bamboozlement, though. That’s what happened to me last week, rounding out a three day drinking fest starting on Thursday and culminating in me passing out at 6pm on Sunday.

The drinking fest started on Thursday. Thursday was the last day of my old job; I decided to give myself a whole three day weekend before starting my new job on Monday. Obviously I had to celebrate my last day. I left from work early, because what were they going to do, fire me? I left at about 4 (I know, it’s not even that early) and sat in traffic for about an hour until I got to Fairfax. I met up with my ex-girlfriend Kate, we actually both arrived at the same exact time, it was a little scary, if I’m going to be truthful here.

Just as a side note, taking Doug’s advice, I will be using actual pseudonyms for my acquaintances, as opposed to acronyms or made up words that are hard to follow, so no more New Friend Number 37. Also, these names will remain consistent between stories starting with this one; I’m even making a list of pseudonyms to which I can refer back.

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