Things that make you go "What the hell?"

My life is incredibly strange. The thing is I don’t do anything to seek out these completely bizarre events. They just seem to happen around me. Here is the latest one.

So I went out to the bar on Friday night. I had a couple of reasons behind it. I have a few new business ideas that are floating around my head that I wanted to ponder over. Also, the smoking ban is now in effect so I wanted to see how a smoke free bar environment actually worked. (Plus, right before I went there was this massive downpour so I quite expected to discover a half dozen smokers drenched to the bone trying desperately to relight their cigarettes.) But mainly I just needed to get out and think and say hi to my bartending friends.

I get in and take my usual seat at the end of the bar after moving over to let some friends of the staff have some room. As I said, any friend of a bartender is a friend of mine. I was just hanging out and doing my thing, which is sitting, drinking and thinking. Joked with a guy who asked for an ashtray. Typical night, right? Then suddenly someone came over to me and put their arm around me.

“I’m from New York” she slurred, “Where can someone find some fun and dance around here?”
“You’re in the wrong town.” I replied.

She found that funny and would not leave my side for the next ten minutes talking in a manner that I assume was meant to be seductive but was in reality quite funny. First off, she was very upset that I wasn’t big on dancing. Now let’s look at the picture here. I am a guy who is sitting at the corner of a bar by himself on a Friday night. Odds are, if I wanted to dance I wouldn’t be there. Then she started talking about all the subjects she knows in which philosophy and scientology were given roughly equal treatment. Finally she asked “Are you familiar with Einstein?”

Again, we are talking about me here. I’m pretty sure that just by looking at me you would know that not only am I familiar with Einstein but that I can recite entire passages of his work by heart. This might be the most unusual question anyone has ever asked me.

So while she is hovering over me it begins to dawn on me that this picture is entirely wrong. First off, she was previously sitting at the same table as the guy who asked for an ashtray. Second, I don’t typically have people that I have never met and wasn’t even looking at come up to me, ask for me to go party with them, and tell me how amazing I am. But there was something else that was really off. It dawned on me that I was talking to either a) a prostitute, b) a transvestite or c) possibly both. Which wasn’t quite how I expected the night to go.

I finally gave her (I hope) enough of a cold shoulder that she left me alone and she immediately, I mean within a minute, had two other guys in the bar wrapped around her finger. This all turned into great drama when she took off without them. I of course stayed rooted to my end of the bar and realized that sometimes the stories you get from just sitting around are better than anything you could ever come up with.

Best of 120 Minutes: I spent last night at a Jeff Buckley tribute show. For those who know what has been going on in my life as of late you’ll understand that if there is one thing I needed more than anything it is to sit in a bar with a beer in my hand listening to Jeff’s songs. There are points in your life when only Last Goodbye can express what is in your mind. So I was really planning on posting a video of Jeff’s here tonight. However, thanks to the geniuses at Sony Music, I am not allowed to embed his videos from YouTube. Why a label wouldn’t want me to freely promote one of their artists is beyond me. So instead, I’ve decided to post Leonard Cohen’s original version of Halleluiah. Yes, the video is tres bizarre.

Don't mind me, I'm just the guy at the end of the bar

Here might be the best example of what type of employee (and person) I am. I spent two hours tonight designing spreadsheets for a job (and a company) that I will be leaving in two weeks. It shows my dedication to my craft, how I always finish the job and that I care too much about what happens in the office. It also shows that I have nothing else to do and prefer crafting incredibly intricate spreadsheets to watching bad television. Oh well, the future will come soon enough where life will no longer consist entirely of Excel documents.

It’s been an odd little weekend. Some of that is my fault and other parts just seemed to happen. Things started off great on Saturday as I had a great treadmill workout. It was one of those times when you felt that you could keep the same pace up for another hour and not even blink. Got the oil changed on my car, picked up some CDs (Kathleen Edwards awesome new disc being one of them), and simply stayed productive all afternoon. I even watched another hour of A History of Britain, which has somehow become a Saturday evening ritual for me.

Somehow this all led to my spending hours cleaning my apartment on Saturday night. That’s not entirely the way that I wanted to spend the night. I’m supposed to have this entire carefree lifestyle but occasionally I have to deal with the fact that dishes are supposed to get washed as opposed to pile up until they spill out onto all available countertops. I also made a half hearted attempt at reorganizing my bookshelves, which is now at the point where I should just give up and wait until I move to figure out what I’m going to do with my library. At least the CD collection is by artist. My books are more by wherever I had space at the time.

I did go out late Saturday night and I had…well, it was my typical interesting experience. It took me a little while but I got my usual stool at Harry’s where I can joke with the staff and watch the world go by while I think through some things. One great story from the night. So I was sitting around drinking and thinking and these two girls come in who a) know the staff, b) look vaguely familiar and c) are extremely drunk in the “I’m just going to lean on the nearest stable object for balance” sense of the term. Well, for one girl, that stable object was me.

Now some people would think that I would have a problem with this. Random person in my personal space when all I’m doing is minding my own business. The thing is this is precisely why I go out. Fun story started by people who are clearly enjoying themselves. I ended up talking to her for a while or at least as much as one can talk to someone who will clearly not remember the conversation in the morning. At one point she ended up just lying her head on my shoulder and I’ll have to say it was pretty cool. It was bizarre and unusual and that’s what I want in my life. I’ll leave normalcy for the masses; I’ll take the unique.

Of course I imbibed a little too much and suffered for it today. Workout sucked, grocery shopping was even less enjoyable than usual and I still haven’t finished doing all of my laundry. Oh, and the Illini lost. At least tomorrow is St. Patrick’s Day. Who knows what will happen to me tomorrow.

No Depression Week: We’ll start the week with the band that named the genre: Uncle Tupelo. “Chickamauga” is my favorite Uncle Tupelo song and probably my favorite song of all time. It certainly has my favorite lyric (and what has become a motto of sorts for me) “Catch yourself in midair thinking your dreams can never be bought.” I could listen to this every day and never grow tired of it.



The five random CDs for the week:
1) Whiskeytown “Pneumonia”
2) Jay Farrar “Sebastopol”
3) Vedera “The Weight of an Empty Room”
4) U2 “War”
5) The Subdudes “Miracle Mule”