I HUNG UP THE SHOWER CURTAIN

There are times when a person gets intentionally inebriated and then there are times when inebriation sneaks up on you like "The King" (Burger King) and delivers you a steamy heap of drunk. It's not pleasing and it's not tasty but then arguably neither is Burger King. SG claims she saw me going downhill and stopped drinking knowing full well that when one starts down that path it's like trying to stop a locomotive with nothing but your hands. I'd just like to think that she didn't have the will to compete in the latest bout of drunk. SG and I have this thing we do when we go out where we try to see which one will drive the other home. Most mature adults will agree before they go out who is driving and who is drinking. We not yet being mature adults and not sure when maturity will hit choose to try to out drink the other.

I like variety and I like to try different things which doesn't work so well when having more than a drink or two. Mix this, mix that have some wine, and have some beer have some hard liquor. By the time I'm done my stomach is so upset and queasy that I vomit for that reason alone. Besides my love of variety I also drink in a very knee jerk fashion. If there is a drink in my hand I tend to drink it in the same way that your body breathes for you without having to think about it. If I had a glass of water that was constantly being filled it would nearly guarantee that 90% of my problems would go away. I guess I could try to bring a Nalgene bottle full of water but I think most bars frown on that since they probably think you are bringing your own hooch in. Oh if they did let me bring my own water I would go out with water bottles clipped to my body like a bandolier. It could be my agualier and I would where a big sombrero and have a lip full of chaw. I have this feeling though that I would either be looked at funny or worse have my water bottles confiscated. Confiscation of my shit makes me grumpy and I really don't need another reason to be grumpy.

The ride home was uneventful except for the occasional drunk breathing huffing noises and the hand resting lightly on the window button like a gunslinger waiting to draw his gun in a showdown. Ahhh yes drunk breathing. Drunk breathing is very similar to the minor tremors and bulges that occur on volcanoes right before they explode. Like these volcanic eruption predictors drunk breathing can be the single most reliable sign that someone is about to go Mount St Helens and that you should best start running to avoid the pyroclastic flows of vomit that will erupt from said person.

By 7:30am all the drama had subsided and the reality had set in. I learned later that I had tried to sleep in our guest (sick persons) bedroom but had trouble sleeping due to being cold and probably because of the dizziness. The attempt to sleep in a bed was followed by the traditional last hu-ah in the bathroom and the collapse on the bathroom floor pants-less and using the pedestal sink as a pillow. Through all of this SG was either showering or reading her book snuggled up in bed. She was nice enough before going to bed to check on me one last time and game me a pair of sweatpants a blanket and a towel wadded up to make a surprisingly nice pillow. A folded up towel might be the single greatest thing that you can do for a drunk person sleeping on the floor. So please if you or someone you love gets hurt by alcohol, have mercy on them and make them a pillow out of a towel it might be the single nicest thing you can do for them.

YOU AREN'T ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE
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That takes pictures of concerts with your cellphone. Until a about a week ago I couldn't have been one of those people but now I have taken one very baby step out of ludditeville and got myself one of those fangled camera phones.

On Saturday (3/3) I went to the "Wolfmother" show at the LC (lifestyle community pavilion) with SG and a couple of friends. The reasons why I went were varied but they boiled down to things like I like the album, the concert wasn't too expensive and the LC isn't too big. The too big part matters because I hate big concerts, something about paying lots of money to barely be able to see the band you paid to see. I've only ever been to a LC concert once before and that was outside and I highly recommend the LC in the summer as it is not too big and yet has a wealth of places to stand or sit (My favorite is the grassy knoll built on an incline). There's just something about seeing a concert outside with a beer in one hand a White Castle slider in the other, friends at your side and live music. Maybe it's the lush in me but there are very few things that can match being able to have a drink or six outside.

The LC inside however is a whole other underwhelming and rage building experience. It's nice, sanitary and wholesome which all added up to feeling commercial. A rock concert in my mind is all about gritty alcoholic decadence and indoors the LC felt more like a Lutheran youth group lock in. My biggest gripe and I apologize to SG and Olaf as they heard every single one of my gripes is the setup of the first floor. The ground level that you enter onto is more or less the first floor that then spreads towards stage at a uniform level until it hits the pit. The problem with this first floor is that it's probably fifty yards deep and has no incline whatsoever. To exacerbate this lack of a incline is that the stage is actually lower than the first floor. So unless you happen to be of Andre the Giant proportions your chance of actually seeing anything is slim and nil unless you are right up front. The evidence that the LC realized this problem was they installed these projector screens on the ceiling. So dumb. Let's go to a concert then stand around drinking Budweiser products in the middle of a crowd while staring up at giant TV screens.

I know I had other gripes but those might have had more to do with the people that were at the show than the venue itself. Before I gripe anymore and start sounding 40 years older than I am let me say that the Wolfmother concert was fantastic. The band had a great stage presence putting out such a full sound that you sort of forgot that it was just three guys. The music was smack on, the improvisations were neither too long or too short and the encore was electric. The experience though was mixed and maybe that was because I was with SG. SG is normally a sane and rational person when not surrounding by groups of people. Put her in a mall and she starts to get one of those wild animal looks, put her in the middle of a crowd in a pit and she turns "Oh my God the Zombies are coming get the fuck out of my way". It was actually really amusing.

Most of the issues had to do with SG being shorter than I am so I was constantly trying to find her a place to stand so that she could see something. Problems started whenever someone would decide that the pit was too rough or that the first floor/second floor was too boring and they would weave their way through the crowd to stand in front of SG. Sometimes they would stop in front of us only to move on and sometimes they would just stop. Oh you poor stoppers. One guy stopped in front of SG and she nudged/pushed him. When he turned around she somehow simultaneously made the WTF, shoo kitty kitty gesture at him all the while yelling over the concert to tell him to move. Then there was the drunk kid that kept groping women as he wove himself back to the front of the pit. That poor bastard nearly got knocked on his ass when SG and a horde of other woman pushed him.

Come to think of it this wasn't all that different from when we were in college and we used to go out. Huh, I completely forgot that she used to yell and push people in the bars at O.U. and now that I really think about it many of those bars weren't all that different from a pit. I remember telling her over and over again that if she were to pick a fight that I would not back her up. I don't mean to sound like an asshole and I know I should throw down for my woman but it just doesn't seem right to throw down for someone who intentionally starts things.

One of the more entertaining things that we did that night was irritate people who would try to take or make calls on their cell. They would eventually plug their one ear in an attempt to hear better at which point SG and I would start screaming WOO directly at their head. This Wooing would gain the attention of other equally irritating people who also started wooing at the cellphone user. There were nice people like this guy with a faux hawk who stood in front of Jess then apologized to her for doing so and inviting her to stand in front of him if she couldn't see. Then there was the woman who flipped my phone closed when I attempted to text message Olaf that I had moved to the pit during the opening band. She was really funny because after she flipped my phone closed she then apologized profusely.