At one point (after ditching Morley, T.Nels and the girls-- but before I caught up with Fundy and Easy, who had in turn ditched all of us an hour earlier) I ended up solo for about 45 minutes, walking around downtown Minneapolis, eventually going into an unknown bar by myself for a beer, since I was just straight-up lost and clearly needed more alcohol in my bloodstream. Initially I blamed myself, because I was browned out at that point (not quite blacked out, but pretty close) and assumed I was struggling with their directions. However, last night I was going through my drunk texts (Easy and I call them 'Drexlers' or just 'Clydes'), assessing the damage, when I saw this string of texties from Fundy starting just after midnight.
So, maybe it wasn't all my fault. Or maybe cowbOy hoxftM just wasn't a good scene that night. Either way, I hope Fundy's meeting that night was productive.
(Also, the top line is cut off, but it reads that Wiggins tore his ACL in practice, obviously not true. Fundy sends me some variation of this texty pretty much bi-weekly. Clearly I wasn't in the mood for it on Saturday morning.)
Annnnnyway, long story short-ish, I eventually found Easy and Fundy-- although we never did meet back up with Morley and T.Nels, thus never gave them their keys, thus they had to crash downtown, and Fundy had to come back with us to the 'burbs and stay there. By the time 2am rolled around, I was so crushed that when we walked out of the bar and saw the police on horseback keeping the peace, I told the two random dudes that I had just met 15 minutes earlier "Get a look at Secretariat over there, just mad-dogging me right now. He really looks like the kind of horse that can take a punch, doesn't he? For 20 bucks, I'll punch him right in the face." Luckily they didn't accept my offer. Seriously, it was a weird night. Five dudes in their thirties, making decisions and carrying on like a bunch of 16-year-olds with fake IDs, out on the town for the first time ever.
On the plus side, it will fit in nicely with my other favorite ridiculous Minneapolis nights, in no particular order:
- September 2005. T.Nels and I are about to embark on our first Boston trip to see Fenway Park. We're flying out of Minneapolis early the next morning, so the plan is to stay at our buddy Brett's place, "just have a couple of beers", and he'll take us to the airport in the morning so we don't have to pay for parking. We end up having a bunch of beers at his apartment, going to a nearby bar for "just a couple more", then eventually going Uptown, meeting up with a ton of friends from high school, and closing down the bar. We didn't trust ourselves to wake up on time from Brett's apartment, so we just got dropped off at the airport at like 3am and slept in the lobby with the homeless people.
- December 2004. Paul and I went to visit Chelsey back when she lived in the Cities. We met up with some friends of hers and Paul's from the camp they worked at, and they brought a friend along who was both smoking hot and smoking cigarettes at a pretty consistent rate. At some point during dinner, as SportsCenter was playing on an overhead TV, the friend made a comment along the lines of "Yeah, Ben Roethlisberger has a better record right now, but he's just in a better situation than Eli Manning, he has a much better supporting cast. So we can't say who the best rookie QB is yet."
I overlooked her frankly alarming smoking habit, fell in love on the spot, and the evening ended with us making out in the bar, on the ride home, and in Chelsey's building's hallway for like an hour, until her ride was leaving and we had to be physically separated. I came back into the apartment with a sheepish smile, got a high-five from Paul, and a "That was absolutely disgusting" from Chelsey. To this day, any time I see a good-looking gal smoking cigs and talking knowledgeably about sports, I get wistful and think to myself "Damn, what a woman. Wait, what was her name again? Marne? Marty? It definitely started with an M."
- July 2005. Another trip to visit Chels, although this time we added Fundy and Buckley to the mix. We went to a bar that was in a halfway-sketchy location-- sketchy enough that they didn't allow hats to be worn backwards due to possible gang affiliations. This....turned into a problem for me. This was a period in my life where you would rarely find me without a backwards Red Sox hat on. For awhile, life was good at this bar. Billie Jean was played, and I successfully led the entire dancefloor in jumping around to different tiles, pretending to light them up like the music video. It was glorious. Good-looking girls, hipsters, thugs wearing head-to-toe FuBu, douchebags in polo shirts and backwards Red Sox hats thinking they're cooler than they really are....all united in lighting up imaginary tiles. I was the Belle of the Ball.
However, I could NOT keep my hat turned forwards. I wasn't being drunk and belligerent at all, I was just being suuuuper drunk and suuuuper forgetful. The bouncer would come tell me to turn it forwards, I would comply and say "Oh yeah, my bad!", keep dancing, then 30 seconds later my inner monologue would be like "Why is your hat forwards right now? That's weird, we never wear it forwards. Also, let's get some White Castle on the way home, sliders sound fucking amazing right now" and I'd turn it backwards again. Repeat this about six times and I was finally thrown out (at which point I DID become drunk and belligerent.) I went and sat in the parking lot by myself until Buckley finally came looking for me. Right as she found me and started walking over, I projectile vomited across three or four parking spaces. I looked her, smiled, and said "I think I puked a lil' bit."
It's nice to have one more night to add to that list; it'd be a shame if it ended in 2005. We said going into this that we wanted a good old-fashioned shitshow, and we got one. Now I'm never going back to Minneapolis again.
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A couple more notes from the weekend of having too much fun:
- Referencing Friday's post and the lies I was going to tell strangers: All of them were fun, but most of them were failures. However, one of them worked, and worked spectacularly. Morley and I gambled at Canterbury for a couple hours while everyone else went to a bar down the road. Morley went down a couple hundred bucks real quick, borrowed a hundy from me (I was having some success) and lost that too. He shuffled off to the ATM, and some of our fellow blackjack players expressed their sympathy, telling me it's too bad my buddy lost that much money so fast. I had my reply unsheathed before they could even finish their sentence- "Oh, him? Don't worry about that guy. He used to intern at Facebook, got in on the ground floor. He actually helped come up with the 'Like' button. So he's doing juuuuust fine, he can handle a losing streak."
All the players bought it immediately, hook, line, and sinker, and were super excited about it. The dealer, however, has probably seen countless d-bags like myself come through his table, and held his suspicions. He raised an unfriendly eyebrow at me, "That a true story?" And once again, I was prepared, "Yup. He's a lawyer now- he kinda had to become one, what with all the litigation that stupid 'Like' button caused. Lawsuits for years, people trying to claim the idea as their own. He's still in court over it."
Morley, who by this time was playing a different game and making a huge comeback at a table about 30 yards away, was playing his part to perfection without even knowing it. Wearing a garish blaze orange golf jacket and backwards hat, stacks and stacks and stacks of chips in front of him, throwing around money on booze, walking away from his table every once in a while to walk into my line of vision and throw up a gang sign, occasionally coming over with a beer for me and saying things like "As your attorney, I advise you to drink this." The dealer had no choice but to believe me, and pretty soon he was referencing Morley as 'Social Network', and the other players at the table and I were cheers'ing to Facebook after every dealer bust. That blackjack table was a blast-- probably the most fun I've ever had without a single friend at the table with me (after Morley left, of course.) Who says it's wrong to tell little white lies?
- I'm well aware of the fact that my hair is long and shitty right now. I'm in Jared and Steph's wedding in a couple weeks, so I'm trying to wait to cut it so that's it at optimal length for pictures and whatnot. If I had cut it last week, it just would've been long and crappy again by the time the wedding rolled around. Make sense? OK cool.
So I'm fresh off the interstate after a long drive, excited to see my friends, happy to be alive. As I'm walking my bags up to Easy and LZE's apartment, I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the window and have the thought "I bet these guys are gonna rip on my hair HARD this weekend. Ehh, maybe it's not that bad." 30 seconds later I walk in the door to this greeting:
LZE: James is here!
Morley: Whaaaaat is your hair doing right now?!?!
Easy E: Who do you think you are, fucking Jason Sudeikis???
I hate my friends.
- Easy E and I came back from the bar on Friday night and watched the James Franco Roast, each for the second time. Then we watched most of it again the next morning, and if Easy had his way, we would've watched it AGAIN at 3am on Saturday night. As a result, we spent most the weekend yelling out the line from the clip below whenever we had the chance. If I had a buck for every time I yelled this completely out of context last weekend.....well, then, I guess I'd have a lot more money, and I wouldn't have to try and sell my police horse face-punching services on the streets like a friggin' vagrant. SUCH PHENOMENAL RAAAANGE!
