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The Thirtieth Prowl
My sister looks cute in her braces and boots, a handful of grease in her hair....
10-18
- My birthday fell on a Wednesday this year, during one of those weeks where stopping the world for a throwdown wasn't necessarily considered the top of the priority list. Friendly phone calls; thoughtful gifts when I got home from work; all very nice. All truly appreciated.
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- But this was thirty. Or more to the point - the end of my 20's.
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- Somewhere in the middle of my second century, as my third started to become an unavoidable inevitability, I made a promise to myself. I decided that if I couldn't get out of its way, then I had to find a way to somehow defy it. Or at the very least, face it down with an epic assault of partying. You know, the kind of deviance that you would have to apologize to strangers for years later; the sort of good time that would come with at least one "friendly warning" from a law enforcement official.
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- What I wanted was chaos. What I wanted was debauchery. What I wanted was the throwdown.
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- What I really wanted was not to be 30.
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- Silly, maybe... but the stone was cast.
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- Unfortunately, like a lot of other promises I made during my 20's - things got turned around here and there, and not everything ended up the way I was thinking it was going to. A lot of things turned out better. Way better...
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- But that didn't mean I was any more excited about turning.
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- What I had originally envisioned as a full on baccanal became my parents watching the kid while Kim and I had a night out. Maybe not the kind of thing National Lampoon makes movies about, but certainly good enough for me.
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- Then, during dinner - Kim started feeling sick.
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- I took her home, put her to bed, and decided that I should at the very least try to get something out of the evening. Go shoot some pool, maybe have a couple of beers.
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- I tried three different places, hoping to find an empty table - but each was more crammed with people than the last. Quarters stacked on table ledges like poker chips in an old western movie. People wearing gloves with the fingers cut out.
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- They've got a saying in this part of the country:
Something about fishing or cutting bait
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- I personally happen to think fishing is a colossal waste of time, so I decided to go to a bar instead.
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- After driving around a bit, I ventured out to a place in Riverside called The Metro. It's a longstanding gay/lesbian dance club, but not to the point where you ever feel uncomfortable about anything. The drinks are cheap, the drag shows are funny, and they usually have a good DJ playing a decent mix of gothic/alternative music and dance tracks. I hadn't been in a while, but when we used to go places, this was a favorite.
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- Now, just so you know: There are things that are funny; there are things that are amusing; there are things that make you laugh;
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- And then there are Deep South Homosexuals.
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- The club was wall to wall people, with almost everyone wearing bodybuilder tank tops or those blouses that tie together in the back like a lace-up shoe. Every glass had a tiny red stirring rod in it that seemingly everyone in attendance mistook for a drinking straw. Every song being played was a top 40 hit from six months ago, sped up to chipmunk velocity so that it could be synched up with a techno beat.
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- In a word, it was astoundingly gay.
Apparently the Goth thing was 'so last year,' and this was the answer. I'm probably not the best qualified person to make a judgement, but it seemed like there were a lot of people standing around to watch just a few people dancing -- and in my experience that's never a good sign.
I ordered something with rum, and tossed away the swizzle stick.
Then a guy next to me turned to his companions -- and in a country drawl that sounded like it would have been better placed on Hee-Haw than a techno dance floor, uttered the line of the night:
"Y'all bitches need to quit, ya hear?!"
My drink was good, and there was room to stand - but making fun of the way people look and act is only entertaining if you have someone to share with. I didn't, and something about the vibe in the place made me more aware of my solitude than I wanted to be.
So I headed out to the beach.
There's a club out there that can only really only be described as "a hole" called Bukkets, which (despite itself) usually ends up being my destination whenever I go out alone. Live bands, cheap drinks, and an upstairs dance room that's always crammed with people having a good time. It's beyond low rent, but there's a simplicity to it that makes it endearing.. in a plastic cup sort of way.
This night found the same band on the stage as the last time I was there, sounding even worse than before. Just a word of advice to anyone who may play there in the future - opening with Freebird is probably not your best move. So I climbed the stairs hoping for something different and found myself in the middle of what seemed like every bank teller and landscape guy in the city going crazy to the sounds of Busta Rhymes.
The floor was packed to the gills, but the vibe was friendly. I made my way to a spot near one of the speakers, and hung out with a beer. The beer tub girl (do you have those, or is that just a southern thing - washtub full of ice and beer, girl sitting near it [actually sometimes in it] selling them for cheap?) was really pretty. She spent most of her night flirting back and forth with some chick on the dance floor.
There were plenty of things to see (play 2 live crew in an enclosed space and anything's possible) - but probably since I was sitting so close by (added to the fact that they kept flashing each other), I found myself watching their little show more than anything else in the vicinity.
- Maybe I stared, maybe they noticed. Maybe some of my drinks were free;
Maybe some of my tips were better than they needed to be...
A few beers later, I'm feeling very relaxed. But -- I'm my own designated driver, so I have make sure and cut myself off before I start feeling a whole lot better. It's late - and despite good music and interesting scenery (strange how I had to leave a gay bar and go to a redneck dive to see two women making out), I know that I need to call it a night.
- I take the long way back to the car, so I can walk on the shore a little.
A deep orange half-crescent moon hangs over the ocean like a light bulb in a closet. Right in the middle of the sky. It leaves this amazing sepia glow on the breaking waves. There's a line of shrimp boats on the horizon, but all you can see of them is a string of green and white lights, looking like little cities spaced apart.
It was gorgeous, but would have been so much better if there had been someone to share it with.
Drove home with the music up loud. Watched some reruns, went to sleep.
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Woke up with pink bracelets on my wrist.
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