First off, I have to link and give a shout out to my fellow slam team member Andy Hall who left a very nice message on the guestbook. Our team really kicks ass this year.
So. To say that this weekend was at least interesting is overstating it a bit. I’m a little twacked out right now from getting to bed at 4 this morning, so I’ll try and be somewhat coherent and maybe even witty. Probably not.
Natalie came in Wednesday night. She helped me hose down the back patio on Thursday before doing some shopping and random errand-running. Fonzie was running around spaztic, as usual. Said Bon Voyage to Jon’s girlfriend Suzette, who was trekking to Portland for a new job. Hung out with Kim from the Old Old Green Valley Crew and got some coffee.
Friday was our annual cookout/kickback over here. All the doors were thrown open and burgers and franks were in mass production.
Then Fonzie disappeared. He wasn’t in the backyard, wasn’t running around out front, wasn’t hiding in his usual places, wasn’t sniffing around my neighbor’s houses. I started to panic. My first thought was that he’d sniffed his way up to the street and someone in a car picked him up and kept him because he doesn’t have his tags on yet. I start to lose my mind and everyone tries to calm me down and help look at the same time.
Meanwhile, there’s a profuse amount of smoke coming from the backyard, to which I completely freak out about because who would forget they left food on the grill; in all actuality, unbeknownst to me earlier in the evening Nick decided that he’d lower the fire on the gas grill by pouring fucking water on the dammed thing, which meant that all the grease (some of it from my own swarays and most recently my brother) in the grease catch below the actual grill eventually caught fire, which made it look like the dammed thing was going to blow at any second and basically turned my house into a smoke-filled club with the music blaring and people coughing from too much smoke. Greg and Mike put the thing out with a handy fire extinguisher. Yay.
Nick had already left when this happened, of course.
After a traumatic day, Greg’s friend Dana calls, in from California, and the gang convinces me to get a drink while Natalie volunteers to get up early the next day to put up fliers to try and find Fonzie. We start getting in the car, and Natalie starts screaming from inside the house.
Fonzie had been hiding underneath the bed in the guest bedroom the entire time. After we’d called out his name and made noise with his little sqeaky toy all evening.
Needless to say I had two Appletinis at Hurricane Harry’s that night.
Saturday’s day was spent recovering and trying not to kill Fonzie. We’d made plans to go to Fadó and get our Irish drinking on, and I was determined to just have a couple of pints and go home slightly buzzy. Er, no. I was doing fine until my fourth pint, after having started drinking at about 7:30, when Dana decides to buy another round. It’s about midnight at this point, and I’m not even halfway through this lovely fourth pint. He and his girlfriend Ellie were nice enough to buy a chapbook from me, which was more appreciated than I think they realized.
Ran into Nick. Scolded him for almost burning my house down.
I get a pint and half in in about an hour and a half. I pee. I come back to find that Dana had paid for just about everything. I owe him my soul at this point. I thank him profusely. I’m piss-assed drunk at this point, so Natalie drives home while I babble on in the front seat about how Rozzie and I used to do it every weekend when she was here, amongst other random musings on being inebriated.
I sleep the sleep of the dead, which is about the same as the heavily buzzed. At about seven in the morning, still a little drunk, I get up, drink a glass of water, take two Advil, post here, and go back to bed only to wake up about two hours later ready to take on the day.
Natalie doesn’t leave until about one in the afternoon, totally against her plans to leave early muahahaha. I drive across town to the Smoothie King at Lake Mead and Rampart to perform at Artists’ Emporium, a well-stocked, poorly organized and poorly attended hip-hop flavored outdoor event. In 100 degree weather.
I try to do my pieces. I find that I can’t curse so I’m standing on stage looking like a complete asshole because I don’t find out until afterward that I could have cursed because it was all in context. Mike and I are not happy at all.
After about three hours and some text messages from a desperate Matt about getting work done on the film, I drive back across town, getting a phone call from Heather who’s in town from San Diego about what I was up to that night– we decide to meet up at Richard Cheese at Sunset Station, since I was going there with Kim, Greg, Ellie, and Dana.
Richard Cheese was really good. A nice end to the weekend. Heather and her boyfriend Graham and their friend Jared come down and catch the last set. Kim had to go home to bed for work the next morning, and Dana wanted to go gamble with Greg, so I met up with Heather and her gang at the Double Down where Ubershall was playing so the place was a little stuffed with people.
Ran into Nick. Again. He told me about almost getting arrested at Fadó the evening previous.
Heather runs into a couple of people and hangs for a little bit and we eventually decide to just go down to Cheers since it’d be quieter, plus I could get some food from Roberto’s next door.
Much pool was had. Nice, chill hang time. Looks like I’ll be heading to San Diego in July for Comic Con. Hopefully I’ll be able to say hi to Neil while I’m there.
Get home at 4 this morning and get my 8 hours of sleep. Hopefully, tomorrow, I can get back to somewhat normal.
