Happy New Year, Asshole

I wasn't planning on going out New Year's Eve. Years of working in clubs (and years of sobriety) have made me dread International Amateur Night like the proverbial plague of puking nincompoop lightweights in stupid hats. Your life is no different that it was ten seconds ago, asshole--you've just picked an arbitrary date for self-renewal, which you will commemorate by becoming even more intoxicated and tool-like than you've been in 12 months! Party on, Garth.

My plan was to go to meditation at Urban Dharma, hang with Heather, go to sleep, wake up and go to the races in Livermore. Well, I have a hellacious cough, so I slept through meditation in order to get better. Least, that's how I explained my laziness to myself. Not so good in terms of "setting one's intention," but them's the breaks. Heather and I decided to go out, since it's been raining for a week and the possibility of racing looked slim. (Indeed, they were cancelled.) We were supposed to go to see Old Grandad at Sadie's Flying Elephant, which would have been rocking, but as we pulled up, her ex was standing in front, so she wasn't down.

Funny side note: Her ex is named Chris but everyone calls him Pink. My Master's thesis, written years before I met her, was a series of interconnected short stories called "Pink Stories," about a guy named Chris whom everyone called Pink. Weird.

So we went to her friend's party, more like a fancy dress soiree, in an awesome loft above the Slo Club. I was going to wear one of my superpimp Bangkok suits, but it was raining, so my daily get-up of Dickies and a hoodie was woefully underdressed. Heather looked fantabulous in a sequined butterfly fandango and pinstriped pants, with something saucy underneath. (Wouldn't you like to know...) We joined her friends in a little upstairs nook and drank soda whilst they passed around the cocaine. Like, woo! Par-tay! Whatever. As Aleister Crowley said: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law." Sassy and Sedusa, or "The Mashed Pototoes" as Heather calls them, wanted me to escort them to The Teenage Harlets and Thee Merry Widows at Butter, but a guy can only do so many things... Also, Wifey was supposed to play at my friend Lars Lava's warehouse, but they cancelled. So, instead, I was doing glamorous things, like watching grown adults ring in the New Year by pretending cocaine was still glamorous.

Oh, and the disco music. Yikes. What is it about New Year's that makes rational human beings tell themselves that disco is not only acceptable in the barest sort of "I won't pull it off the turntable and smash it" kind of way, but "fun." I suppose it goes with coke like your chocolate goes with my peanut buttter. A Spoon song came on, inexplicably, and I nearly came in my boxers.

So we left at 12:40, on the way to Lars's house. Despite my cantankerous blogging, it really wasn't so bad. Heather's friends were cool and pretty and I had a swell conversation with her friend's husband, Adam, about The Flaming Lips, aging, the Swans, his bitterness toward his chess master father, and Scrabble.

I was peeing out my festive holiday ginger ale (you think I don't know how to rage, fucker?) upside a telephone pole when I heard Heather say "Fuck!" She was standing next to my truck, so I knew what was up...no passenger window. I used a map to scoop the glass fragments off the seat, forming a glistening pile of what my buddy Ben and I used to call "ghetto snow" on the asphalt. I'm not into that whole "blame the victim" thing, but I've lived in this city for 14 years, and I should've known not to leave CDs visible. Too used to living in the Richmond, where crackheads don't windowshop all night. And I wasn't feeling too victimized. Heather was really impressed that I was so mellow about it. So even though I missed meditation, I still heard Vinny's voice talking about how "everything's a lesson." Not too profound until you put it into practice. Practice isn't a cushion in a room full of people with their eyes closed, it's when someone's smashed your window and stolen 15 CDs, including your 2 CD Lefty Frizzell retrospective. Actually, they only got the case and one CD. The other was still in the deck, so I still had some Lefty to drive home to.

What can you do, you know? Say, "hey, better go tape this window up, it's raining" or go home, load up the Mossberg and go basehead hunting up and down Portrero. I went to Heather's, did a pretty impressive cardboard/trashbag/tape job, took my shoes off, and had a cup of coffee. And...wouldn't you like to know?