C-130

Belated Thanksgiving wishes to all, of course, and I hope that your extended weekend is providing the same sort of refreshing pause from work or school as it is for me. I've reached a certain point, though, where the pleasant boredom calms to simple boredom, which will soon multiply into god-awful boredom (but I love being bored, so no harm done).

Wednesday night my roommate and I went to Millie & Al's for the dollar draft special and got totally shit-faced, which I hadn't done (publicly or privately) in a long time. Her friend Christian joined us around drink seven or nine, and even he managed to drink himself over the line of reason. At some point we departed to go to the Common Share, but I left them to their pool-playing selves after one drink to walk home in the weird warm rain.

I made sure to drink a few glasses of water before bed, which helped remarkably well for Thursday morning, which I can't quite say for the roommate (who didn't even remember where we had gone after the first bar). She left to visit family in the early afternoon and my other roommate had left to do the same earlier in the morning, leaving me with the house to myself, gloriously devoid of any bad radio hits. I celebrated by inviting the Italian neighbor up for a drink and some music-talk, and he brought this bizarre, delicious Tarantula tequila (it's turquoise) that had us singing aloud to Morphine in no time at all.

After a nice nap in the sun on the deck, I dressed and hopped on the bike for a ride down to Eastern Market to celebrate a posh Thanksgiving with Robert and Steve, the gentlemen who hosted me upon my arrival in this city, and a few of their friends. Their friends are chatty, loud, dare I say brassy folk of diverse mixté who have many stories to tell. For the majority of the night I aligned myself to avoid political discussions and, once the fire was going, absorb the maximum comfort from the hearth. Invariably, though, the crowd thinned and Steve, as he is wont to do, ever so casually brought up my sex life as the next topic for general discussion. Fair enough, I'd come as the libertine guest who is inoffensible, but it didn't make it any more fun to have a few strangers chiming in as effective therapists or, in a stranger sense, encouraging mothers.

Shortly thereafter, I took to the bike again and rode back to Columbia Heights against a fierce, cold wind. The Italian neighbor was still awake, still drinking Tarantula, and, sniff sniff, what's that smell, Antonio? Needless to say, I stayed with him for a couple of hours until I was sufficiently exhausted, still noodle-legged from the ride, to climb three flights of stairs to my bed.

Yesterday morning I spent painting and dawdling on otherwise meaningless tasks, eventually signalled by the setting sun to get dressed for the next Eastern Market dinner party, at which I'd been requested to attend as something as a go-between. Fatigued from the previous days and not too teribly interested in biking to and from Eastern Market again in the cold to a party where people I don't know talk about real estate, I decided that I'd only attend if someone called to give me directions, and so I continued painting through the night with hot chocolate, a couple of joints, and my roommate's DVD stash.

It's high time I get some chocolate; research suggests that the equivalent of two cups of hot cocoa contains enough active theobromine to supress coughing more effectively than codeine.