Tuesday Night at the HOB I woke up this morning at 5:20, and couldn't fall back asleep before my alarm went off at 6:15. It was, without a doubt, the most alert I've felt in the morning in at least the last six months. I felt fantastic. I didn't even really want to stay in bed, I wanted to get up and go into work early, but I didn't. There is a difference between waking up feeling good and waking up retarded, and I did not wake up retarded. Sadly, this was to be the best I felt all day.
Things started turning against me about a half mile in on my walk to work. The morning was crisp and clear, and I stopped long enough to take this underexposed picture from the bridge crossing the magnificent Cuyahoga River (Trivia Question: Why is the Cuyahoga River famous? Answer: It once caught on fire.)
As I started walking again, I started to feel what would soon become a vicious hangover. It started in my stomach, with the feeling that I'm starving yet nauseous, and I finally realized that I felt good in the morning because I was still drunk, and regaining sobriety was going to be a bitch. By the time I got to work, I had been staring at the apple I had in my pocket for a full five minutes, weighing the consequences between eating the apple and either feeling better or throwing up, and not eating the apple, where I would feel miserable and probably throw up. I ate the apple. It helped.
Ten minutes later the apple was probably fully digested, as the potent brew of stomach acid, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Vodka Cranberry, and at least a couple of Jagerbombs finished breaking down the apple into its respective nutrients and now started working on eating its way through my sphincter and out onto my office chair. While I managed to retain the solid waste, I couldn't help but drop a couple bombs and I opted out of the morning meeting. The rest of the day was spent building mindless spreadsheets, taking frequent bathroom trips, fighting major heartburn from pounding a couple of Gatorades and a BBQ beef sandwich, and feeling really, really awkward and uncomfortable around a specific female co-worker.
Tuesday had been a fairly normal day, but I skipped my evening workout in order to go get drinks with a friend of mine, who is in the process of dealing with some of the issues that I recently dealt with at work, and is probably on his way to finding something else to do as well. We stayed at the bar until 7:30, drinking Miller Lites and reaching the conclusion that nothing proves The Fall quite to the extent of a typical white-collar job, before I had to run back to my apartment to meet another friend of mine for some pre-game action before the Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers concert at The House of Blues downtown.
He stopped on the way up to grab a fifth of vodka, and we put a good portion of it away along with a freezer pizza before heading out to the HOB around 9:00. My move downtown was a strategic masterpiece, and I'm now becoming to free parking in the city what George Costanza is to public restrooms in New York (the emerging similarities between me and George Costanza are deserving of a post on their own, probably while I'm on vacation enjoying my severance package during the upcoming "Summer of Jackscolon"), and I found a place within a half mile from my place across the bridge where I had a straight shot home and a short walk down to the HOB on E. 4th. I fully intended to take copious amounts of pictures at the concert for this intended post, but I left my camera in my coat in the car on the corner in downtown Cleveland.
As we walked down to the HOB to get tickets and get into the show, we carefully picked our way through the gathering homeless who flock downtown on event nights, stopping only to give money to a one-eyed man talking in the third person and waving some papers releasing him from prison. As we neared the entrance, I received a text message from the physically stunning and remarkably personable girl (who will be referred to in the rest of this post as "Jane") who sits in a cube across from mine at work informing me that she had decided to come as well, and she was bringing her roommate to hang out with my friend. In all honesty, my phone didn't really ring as much as scream "Yahtzee!" and I immediately nicknamed my friend "Wedge" for the remainder of the night and started saying things like "I can't see the exhaust port!" and "That's impossible! even for a computer!" He, not being a giant nerd like all of us, didn't get it.
She arrived soon after with her roommate, and we pushed our way back to the bar in the concert room while everyone else pushed closer to the stage. While Jason Spooner warmed up the crowd for Stephen Kellogg, Wedge and Jane's roommate warmed up to each other, and I discovered that Jane had also been pushed out the door at work, and was leaving the same time I was. Apparently, if there is anything that can push an incredibly attractive girl down a few rungs on the ladder to my level, it's lots of alcohol and shared misery.
As they dimmed the lights to change the stage for Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers, I took the opportunity to jump on the make out train, and the conductor went ahead and waved me up to first class. What can I say? I'm a sucker for a girl who presses up against me to keep her balance while looking at me with some glassy, half-drunk eyes. Unfortunately, I had only consumed just enough alcohol to overcome to hesitancy to make out at a bar in front of a hundred people, but not so much that I didn't feel stupid making a spectacle of myself.
As Stephen Kellogg started playing, Jason Spooner and his band worked their way back to the bar. We struck up a conversation (him being from Maine, me being born there) bought some Jagerbombs, and I just may have mentioned how envious I was that they traveled around playing gigs in bars, made a toast to doing what you love, and then listened to how miserable it is to travel for ten years and be stuck opening for a guy who didn't even sell out the small room at the Cleveland HOB, and heard some hilarious stories about how Ray LaMontagne is a dirty, weird, musical genius. We then tagged along as Jason Spooner used his all-access pass to get us into the big theater to see G-Love and Special Sauce, but I didn't actually see any of it. I only made it to the bar, and then got pulled into a back hallway for some more making out while the security guards walked by and yelled at us to get a room.
I'm not sure what else happened, but somebody ended up driving my car home (me) and then I woke up four hours later feeling fantastic.
Things started turning against me about a half mile in on my walk to work. The morning was crisp and clear, and I stopped long enough to take this underexposed picture from the bridge crossing the magnificent Cuyahoga River (Trivia Question: Why is the Cuyahoga River famous? Answer: It once caught on fire.)
As I started walking again, I started to feel what would soon become a vicious hangover. It started in my stomach, with the feeling that I'm starving yet nauseous, and I finally realized that I felt good in the morning because I was still drunk, and regaining sobriety was going to be a bitch. By the time I got to work, I had been staring at the apple I had in my pocket for a full five minutes, weighing the consequences between eating the apple and either feeling better or throwing up, and not eating the apple, where I would feel miserable and probably throw up. I ate the apple. It helped.Ten minutes later the apple was probably fully digested, as the potent brew of stomach acid, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Vodka Cranberry, and at least a couple of Jagerbombs finished breaking down the apple into its respective nutrients and now started working on eating its way through my sphincter and out onto my office chair. While I managed to retain the solid waste, I couldn't help but drop a couple bombs and I opted out of the morning meeting. The rest of the day was spent building mindless spreadsheets, taking frequent bathroom trips, fighting major heartburn from pounding a couple of Gatorades and a BBQ beef sandwich, and feeling really, really awkward and uncomfortable around a specific female co-worker.
Tuesday had been a fairly normal day, but I skipped my evening workout in order to go get drinks with a friend of mine, who is in the process of dealing with some of the issues that I recently dealt with at work, and is probably on his way to finding something else to do as well. We stayed at the bar until 7:30, drinking Miller Lites and reaching the conclusion that nothing proves The Fall quite to the extent of a typical white-collar job, before I had to run back to my apartment to meet another friend of mine for some pre-game action before the Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers concert at The House of Blues downtown.
He stopped on the way up to grab a fifth of vodka, and we put a good portion of it away along with a freezer pizza before heading out to the HOB around 9:00. My move downtown was a strategic masterpiece, and I'm now becoming to free parking in the city what George Costanza is to public restrooms in New York (the emerging similarities between me and George Costanza are deserving of a post on their own, probably while I'm on vacation enjoying my severance package during the upcoming "Summer of Jackscolon"), and I found a place within a half mile from my place across the bridge where I had a straight shot home and a short walk down to the HOB on E. 4th. I fully intended to take copious amounts of pictures at the concert for this intended post, but I left my camera in my coat in the car on the corner in downtown Cleveland.
As we walked down to the HOB to get tickets and get into the show, we carefully picked our way through the gathering homeless who flock downtown on event nights, stopping only to give money to a one-eyed man talking in the third person and waving some papers releasing him from prison. As we neared the entrance, I received a text message from the physically stunning and remarkably personable girl (who will be referred to in the rest of this post as "Jane") who sits in a cube across from mine at work informing me that she had decided to come as well, and she was bringing her roommate to hang out with my friend. In all honesty, my phone didn't really ring as much as scream "Yahtzee!" and I immediately nicknamed my friend "Wedge" for the remainder of the night and started saying things like "I can't see the exhaust port!" and "That's impossible! even for a computer!" He, not being a giant nerd like all of us, didn't get it.
She arrived soon after with her roommate, and we pushed our way back to the bar in the concert room while everyone else pushed closer to the stage. While Jason Spooner warmed up the crowd for Stephen Kellogg, Wedge and Jane's roommate warmed up to each other, and I discovered that Jane had also been pushed out the door at work, and was leaving the same time I was. Apparently, if there is anything that can push an incredibly attractive girl down a few rungs on the ladder to my level, it's lots of alcohol and shared misery.
As they dimmed the lights to change the stage for Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers, I took the opportunity to jump on the make out train, and the conductor went ahead and waved me up to first class. What can I say? I'm a sucker for a girl who presses up against me to keep her balance while looking at me with some glassy, half-drunk eyes. Unfortunately, I had only consumed just enough alcohol to overcome to hesitancy to make out at a bar in front of a hundred people, but not so much that I didn't feel stupid making a spectacle of myself.
As Stephen Kellogg started playing, Jason Spooner and his band worked their way back to the bar. We struck up a conversation (him being from Maine, me being born there) bought some Jagerbombs, and I just may have mentioned how envious I was that they traveled around playing gigs in bars, made a toast to doing what you love, and then listened to how miserable it is to travel for ten years and be stuck opening for a guy who didn't even sell out the small room at the Cleveland HOB, and heard some hilarious stories about how Ray LaMontagne is a dirty, weird, musical genius. We then tagged along as Jason Spooner used his all-access pass to get us into the big theater to see G-Love and Special Sauce, but I didn't actually see any of it. I only made it to the bar, and then got pulled into a back hallway for some more making out while the security guards walked by and yelled at us to get a room.
I'm not sure what else happened, but somebody ended up driving my car home (me) and then I woke up four hours later feeling fantastic.
posted by Justin at 7:00 PM 
2 Comments:
you couldn't at least say, "hey, sorry I disappeared last night instead of showing up in your shower this morning"?
'Fires plagued the Cuyahoga beginning in 1936 when a spark from a blow torch ignited floating debris and oils. Fires erupted on the river several more times before June 22, 1969, when a river fire captured the attention of Time magazine, which described the Cuyahoga as the river that "oozes rather than flows" and in which a person "does not drown but decays".'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuyahoga_River
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