PrettyFakes

ow. my liver officially hurts. after busting big gray’s chops so much about his v+-style vacation, i felt a little guilty. so onward towards glamour weexend 2003!! OR, another empty fifty hours.

friday i bought a six of natty light, walked home from work, put on “pints of guinness make you strong” by against me!, and got to drinking.

by about the fifth beer—around eight o’clock—i was beginning to choke up. the sung-shout of the band started to scrape deep in my guts—the story of broken-down love gone for forty years:

evelyn sits by the elevator doors

it’s been 37 years since

james died on st. patrick’s day in 1964

but she could not hold it against him

there were times when there was nothing she could do

but lie in bed all day

beside a picture of them together

a picture of better days

yeah, so i got good’n’maudlin. and you know what happens at that point: yep, crowded house. i can’t help it at that point, and i’m sloshing beer on my bed, singing the wrong verses to “fall at your feet” (i can never seem to get the order right), dipping into disintegration and “4th of july, asbury park (sandy)” by the boss, and “fourth of july” by x, and then i get into the replacements cassettes and all hell breaks loose.

but i keep coming back to against me! and “pints.” when the narrarator—the real-life, real-gone james, sings to his wife “evelyn, i’m not coming home tonight,” i’m shot to hell and back. the inside of the cd is decorated with photos of the happy couple—before the death of james, and the ensuing dedication of his wife. what, i wonder to myself, does one do to deserve that? devotion for half a century?

weddings always make me reflective, and fred & jp!’s was no different. the big joke was that i was supposed to meet my future wife at the wedding—as the style is these days, between smith & kelly and jason and fred. well, i didn’t. so when in the hell is this majick moment supposed to happen?

she said, “if I would have known just how things would have ended up I just would have let myself die.”

thee faux glamour of gorjus: drunk on natural light, alone on a friday night, and listening to the smiths.

saturday was more social and more fun. we were having a law review* retreat out at lake cavalier (does that map draw as time-delay cool as it did for me?), and me & my pal john were doing the shopping.

i really like grocery shopping, especially for a lot of people. we gots STACKS of hamburgers and hot dogs (and morningstar farms stuff for me, of course—which jp! likes to call “the food of satan,” from the odd name) (which i want to turn into an internet rumor, post-haste!), picked up a keg of coors lite, and headed out to the lake.

it was beautiful. it seems like i never leave jackson anymore, and the spanish moss that covered every available surface out there was wondrous. “it’s a plague,” my friend danny’s mother-in-law tells me, when i ask her about it. “it gets all wrapped up in your lawn mower, and you have to stop and undo it. so it’s better just to rake first before you mow, but who wants to do that?”

it’s danny’s in-laws who are loaning us the house. we unload the keg, fire up the grill, turn on a bit of tennis (ole miss was getting their brains beat in, and ‘bama & lsu weren’t on until later) and . . . start getting drunk.

i didn’t jump in the water, although i should have. my hands stopped doing so well after a while—i dumped a whole thing of sliced tomatoes into the azaleas, and smased an unopened jar of salsa (damn!). john reciprocated by dropping and destroying a corningware dish that held all three big cans of our (vegetarian) baked beans. ah, beer: friend to all!

poor ‘bama. i really wanted something special out of that game—something glorious. they have it—or oklahoma doens’t—but it just didn’t work. what’s missing? what makes for legends, and what makes for losers?

yeah, i was drunk and reflective again. riding back in the back seat of a friend’s car, while he held hands with his girlfriend and blared a rush of blood to the head just didn’t help. ‘cuz after dropping me off at home—whilst he duly urinated in my neighbor’s yard!—i was drunk and alone on a saturday night. which, as sam cooke can tell you, is even worse then being drunk and alone on a friday night.

my pal nat-x called, and i figured going out at midnight, even if i was exhausted and drunk, was better than s.n.a. (saturday night alone). it turned out pretty cool, actually—went down the street to the house of a couple of fellow dean supporters, who were really cool. we listened to ziggy stardust and i drank budweiser out of the can that people kept giving me and we kept dogging this one feisty, hot, yet loathesomely republican girl.

we told peeing stories, and i related how for years i’ve been unjustly accused of peeing in bill & susan’s house, and how a bunch of my friends peed in my mom’s front yard once. nat’s boyfriend, who’s in a band called living better electrically, talked about how he pissed in an air-conditioning unit, unfortunately of the house he was staying in. he also told a great joke about how once when the lights went out after a show at dave’s a wasted jason jones asked him what he could do about fixing the problem—since, after all, his band was electrical.

sunday was just reading comics with adam and eating hot dogs with jp! & fred, drinking a couple pbr’s. it was really nice, actually. maybe i spent a lot of time drunk and mushy, but i know that i still believe in that kind of fifty-year love—the kind they write songs about. maybe i don’t have it, but i still believe in it.

now to go get me a malt at bop’s.

*citation list authored & compiled by yours truly.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2003 at 2:08 pm and is filed under Gorjus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.