Note: In this post I will attempt to describe my weekend by using each and every one of the 86 words that were submitted by my certifiably insane readers on this post. Such words will be italicized. PS: I took some liberties. It’s called “art”. Get over it.
In college, weekends were when I would get drunk, go to Circle K conferences, or let Manny get me into trouble with things like Unofficial CKI. In Law School, weekends were when I put off doing work by watching TV or drinking. Once I was out in the real world, weekends were the times when I had to make up for a week’s worth of neglecting my dog.
When you’re unemployed, though, your weekends are defined by two things and two things only: when businesses are closed and when your friends are available to do things in the middle of the day. That’s really the only way to define the start or end of a weekend when you don’t have a job. That being what it is, I can basically decide when my weekends start. Wednesday was fun, but I think that claiming to start my weekend in the middle of everyone else’s work-week would sound way too much like law school. Since I didn’t do anything terribly interesting on Thursday that I remember, we start our Journey on Friday, Valentine’s Day Eve.
Friday
The day started with an undeniable urge to write about the upcoming holiday. While years past have seen this blog extolling the virtues of being Single and Proud, this year I had a different goal: to keep men from experiencing defenestration or head injuries and help them on their progress toward their eventual nuptials. The result? 1,600 words on Valentine’s Day and not a single reference to dry-humping.
A long, long time ago in a land far, far away, a pick-up truck rolled off an assembly line with a glossy new windshield. 10 years and 150,000 miles later, it looked like it had been a casualty in a Tarpon rodeo — all cracked and chipped. This being a fairly unsafe way to travel the highways, and against the law no less, I decided I really ought to get it fixed.
After some calling around, I found someone who would replace the thing at a reasonable price that afternoon. The traffic was silly. Apparently Atlantans get off work at 3:30 on Fridays? Who knew. You’d think that someone had just announced that Lane Kiffin’s wife was performing some sort of sexual congress with unicorns and Jonathan Taylor Thomas at the local Motel 6 and the first hundred people in the door got a free pint of potato salad.
The unicorn bestiality traffic caused me to get there a little later than I wanted and the replacement took a little longer than I expected, but eventually I was on my way back home. The return traffic was just as bad, if not worse, and a few isolated incidents of extreme stupidity (caused, no doubt, by one of the nine million octogenarians out on the road) caused me to miss an exit. As a result, I had to drive around in circles a bit and the trip home took a little longer than expected.
In fact, up to that point, pretty much everything had taken longer than expected, which caused me to have to bump my dinner-date back a little — totally declasse, but luckily for me she didn’t cancel otherwise I’d have had to spend my evening curled up in my snuggie dining on Little Debbie’s, pickled pigs feet, and juice boxes while sexting Gene Chizik about Dutch Rudders.
Yes, you read that correctly. I had a date. As a general rule, I don’t talk about girls on the blog1 because I’m always afraid that I’m going to write something which would get me exiled from the dating circles and force me to move to Canadia and learn Swahili just to have someone to go out with.
Point is: there is at least one person in the city of Atlanta will both be seen with me in public and consent have said encounter mentioned on this blog. Some of you may find this more surprising than a spandex-clad 2 Live Crew waxing eloquent on the kombucha drink craze at the Irish Dance World Championships, but I assure you that it is fact!
We had dinner at a Thai/sushi place in the Highlands which I heard about through a fellow ‘Bama Alumnus. At first I was skeptical — the Thai/sushi combo is a common one in Atlanta, but it still seems more out of place to me than a talking giraffe cruising around a superspeedway on a double-decker bus.
But it was actually really good – CitySearch ratings did not steer us wrong. I tried Sake for the first time, at least as far as I know, and liked it. That, not to mention the fact that the sushi itself certainly elicited a feeling of chewphoria. I definitely recommend it.
Ended up watching 21 which, as best I can tell, is a movie about a bunch of tax cheats trying to avoid pit-boss-aggro while using advanced counting skills to turn a literal crap shoot into millions of dollars.
Saturday
As is typical for a Friday, I was up late. Atypically for a Saturday, though, I woke up way too early. I figured I’d feel like a zombie, but I couldn’t go back to sleep due, in part, to Scout valorously leaping onto the bed some time before 9:00am. Jerk.
The winter Goaltimate league has games on Saturday afternoons, so that was a part of the plan. Goaltimate is a weird game, folks. It’s a bunch of folks crammed so close together that you almost need KY Jelly to move, throwing their inverted, reverse hammers through a xanthous, semi-circular ring hoping that some funambulist can catch it on the back line for a point. Rinse and repeat for two or three hours. After all you really just want to sit down somewhere and drink a case of Leinies.
When I wasn’t grundle-to-grundle with a half-dozen other people standing in a small circle of healthy grass trying to catch a small plastic disc, I had the turpitude to try to capture folks on camera.
The photography turned out reasonably well, although I had a little too much angle to my dangle, so to speak, so I had to spend a lot of time rotating the pictures to get them straight. The games, on the other hand, did not go particularly well. Suffice it to say that at the end of season tournament, we’re not going to be favored in the bracketology and if this were a video game, even Tigole would agree that we needed a huge “buff).”
As we were leaving the fields, a few people decided they were going to go to The Vortex for something they called “Nacho Tots”. I was intrigued. The Vortex has awesome burgers . . . could it be that Atlanta squared the goodness and made nachos out of tater tots to go along with their burgers?
Indeed, that was the case.
In fact, the nacho tots were so good, I can’t even tell you what the ingredients were. It could’ve been made out of rainbows, kumquat, and Limburger Cheese. All I know is that masticating it there in the restaurant was a very special experience, and it really satiated the borborygmi that had cropped up during the game.
I made it home in time for a shower before a Valentine’s Day bar crawl that I had been invited to the weekend before. My prediction as to the evening’s activities was memorialized in this Tweet:
Time for the Valentine’s Day Bar Crawl. Also known as the bitter, single-woman watching safari.
The plan was to head to the Highlands and wander from bar to bar, hoping not to get accosted by some yegg or end up so drunk that the DD had to set her down in the river. Seriously, though, any story that starts with drinking and ends with subrogation is big trouble, so we were hoping to avoid that.
Things hit a snag earlier in the day when our hostess got some bad news, but she was determined not to be lugubrious about it and soldiered on. We did a little pre-gaming at the apartments and then headed out for a night of debuachery.
To be honest, I had never gone out to the bars on Valentine’s Day before. I didn’t know what to expect. What I found were herds of apparently single women (birds of a feather and all that), all of them looking desperate enough to carry octuplets to term if it would get them a tumescent bananagram at the end of the night.
There were also a bunch of men, most of them middle-aged, with all of the negative side-effects of steroids but none of the benefits. I got the impression that they just wanted to avoid waking up the next morning dry humping their Dachshunds again.
Many potentially tweetalicious things happened that night, but two stories stand out.
One in the party started trying to dare people to do ridiculous things. Any guy trying to take her bet would have been lucky to escape with just a smack, he’d probably have ended up arrested or beaten to death. Clearly she was just hoping to get dared herself and eventually she became tired of waiting and issued herself a challenge.
“Do you think I can walk up to that man over there,” she asked, indicating a pudgy, balding, middle-aged man standing in a sea callipygian twenty-somethings, “and get him to let me rub his cock right here in the bar??”
Thinking the way only drunk people do, an immediate follow-up was asked: “Inside the pants, or just outside?”
“Outside!” She shouted, aghast, “What kind of a slut do you think I am?” (lolwut?)
You will be unsurprised to learn that the man didn’t seem to have taken the overture as an affront to hizzoner and he ended up following us around for the rest of the night, hoping to prove that his nickname, Grandmaster Flash, was a misnomer.
To the best of my knowledge, neither of those things happened, but that wasn’t the end of the excitement.
From the very first minute of pre-gaming festivities, another one in the group — who had not-so-recently returned from serving in Iraq with the Airborne — had his eye on our daredevil friend.
We were at the second bar of the night when I made my way to the men’s room. I turned into the hallway which is when I discovered our two snookered friends partially blocking the hallway leading there. He was well on his way to getting her to cop a feel of his manchego (apparently her reputation preceded her), but the other patrons kept jostling him as they squeezed by, which didn’t give our airborne ranger time to work.
The night ended a bit early on account of our two too-drunk friends, but I’m confident that they’d have managed to transubstantiate liquor into sex before they dry humped a third time, if only we had stayed out a little longer.
Sunday
On Sunday I actually slept in a little, lounged around in a grey Indiana Law shirt, fixed up the photos from Goaltimate, and then had a wonderful lunch delivery.
After lunch it was time for Scout to chase the frisbee a bit, so we took him outside. After we had been at it for a while, Scout caught the frisbee, dropped it on the ground and stood there, all the way across the courtyard, staring at me, just daring me to come and take it from him. I did the opposite — I took off running for the apartment, when I turned around he was running toward me at full speed, but he cut a corner a little short and slammed his hip into a park bench, letting out an onomatopoeic yelp and then whining all the way to me.
Somehow, he didn’t seem to mind so long as he actually caught me and I didn’t leave him abandoned in the courtyard. I’m such an ass sometimes.
After that I basically sat around the rest of the afternoon doing nothing. It was great.
After dinner I found out that a “journalist”, Ron Higgns, for the Memphis Commercial Appeal wrote a hit piece which basically amounts to “Nick Saban sucks,” so I spent a while reading up on that . . . the bottom line is that Higgins’ piece was less accurate than a phlebotomist on a trampoline.
The weekend ended with the death of my television. I’m pretty sure the lamp just went out, but that’s a few hundred bucks I’m not going to spend until I get a job back. I guess that means I’ll be doing more screwing around on the internet.
That’s either good or bad, depending on how you feel about epic posts.
Rule not applicable to significant others.
Tags: Alabama, bar crawl, date, goaltimate, MWiYW, Nacho Tots, Photography, Scout, sexting, Sushi, Tater Tots, television, The Vortex, traffic, ultimate, unicorns, Valentine's Day, windshield
That’s right. All 86 words and phrases. It only took me all afternoon to write it.
In any event, those of you who submitted words were worth opponents but, in the end, I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
This is the place where you whine about how I didn’t use your word well or correctly, it is also the place where I ignore said complaints.
Not terrible. I’d ask for a ruling on greyshirt but that’s like asking the Pope to reconsider.
Oh, and one of the greatest movie quotes of all time.
I had considered writing that as “my greyshirt from IU” but it sounded awkward and seemed to imply something I didn’t intend.
Damn son. That was longer than my college essay and senior year thesis paper…combined!
ok… so it’s not the first time you impressed me.
I was hoping for some points in as my life is seriously lacking in points. In fact, I have been referred to as pointless, but with heavy sigh… I again bow to you.
Is it okay that I’m completely disturbed by the fact that I’ve only ever thought about the word transubstantiate in terms of a Catholic mass before this?