Seattle

On the way back the sun was starting to set and the water was getting darker as the veil of night began to fold itself gently down over our day. We went below decks to grab a beer and stare out across that water that rippled glass. My friend and I sat around and talked about our lives for a while. The things we have, the things we want, that lonely space between them that too is like an island. We talked of children and love and waited for our ship to dock. The best conversations take place in these liminal zones, where all the bodies are buried.

Stepping back onto land we kissed the ground and made our way back into the heart of the city. The ground was dirty, so we didn’t kiss it. And we weren’t technically in the heart of the city. I could have said something about saving money, but instead we took a cab. It turns out that cars get you places faster, a fact for which we were all thankful.

At home, we drank beer and wine and marveled over the jingoistic nature of Mike Tyson’s Punch Out. Every character was a caricature of someone from a foreign country. We were nominally offended by the past. After some drinks we headed back out into the city. The night was brisk and cool. We fended off the cold with smoke and the warmth of wine.

We were five strong the second evening and largely repeated the events of the first. We skipped The Pony and Sam’s and headed straight for the bar with pool tables and games. We tried to play a game of skee ball but were blocked by a fairly drunk couple who insisted that they had placed their quarters on the machine before we did. I stood in the middle of the room and drank. It was like I was a character in  a Hemingway novel.

Later, we played a game of Jenga. I don’t know if you’ve ever played a game of Jenga for fun, but I would suggest that it’s not the sort of thing you should try. It’s a strange game, probably best played under the influence of much stiffer stuff than I was having. I might just be saying this because I lost. I like winning. In fact, I suspect that I like winning much more than other people who only seem to be mildly attached to the idea of winning. I like to win ­­­­­­­like the Gods like to turn mortals into cows or objects of ridicule. It’s not just a thing like, but something that is central to who I am. We play a game of shuffle board on the world’s smallest shuffle board table and lose. We do not lose, if I’m being honest, because of my poor play. My teammate cannot hold up his end of the bargain, and I wouldn’t blame him because he’s as annoyed as anyone at his piss poor ability to throw a small disk across a table full of sawdust to rest in a particular spot where someone has painted lines. Actually, when I start to describe it, maybe I shouldn’t care about winning a game of shuffleboard. Lost in the festivities of the night before is the fact that we eventually wandered down to a bowling alley and bowled for a couple of games. Again, I did fine, but my partner was held below 100 and spent the rest of the evening visibly upset and telling us that he hadn’t bowled under 100 since he was in grade school. What I’m saying of course is that even though I lost, I didn’t really lose. I was handicapped.

Somehow or other we left the table and when we returned two of my friends ended playing a match with a couple of girls to see who got to keep possession of the table. I’d like to tell you a tale that was like a Homeric epic, but if I’m honest these two girls just handed their asses to them. The score was something like 21-5, may God have mercy on their souls. Maybe we played our game after we lost the table. Maybe the Jenga happened in between those things. Maybe we all got up and danced on a table for an hour. I don’t remember. I don’t remember anything.

The evening played out much like the last. We searched out places for food, large German hot dogs, Mexican restaurants for fish tacos, small hole in the wall restaurants with Cuban sandwiches that had clear walls on the walk to the bathroom through which you could see the handsome boys with swept back hair and girls in little black dresses waiting in line to get into a club, who’s music is reverberating out on the street, and there you are, peering back at them, on your way to take a piss at a hole in the wall restaurant. I believe the term is juxtaposition.

I believe that someone once said that variety is the spice of life. I have a firm belief that our regular work a day lives are too rote and mundane. I realize that this makes me like 99.9 percent of other human beings, but I’d like to be granted the possibility that I am a beautiful and unique snowflake. Of course, in this respect I do appear to be a beautiful and unique snow flake because my friends keep saying how happy they are to just be together doing the same thing while I feel that though it is good to be together it would be even better to be together if we were in a club playing some music and listening to it bounce off the walls. I am selfish in this and many other ways, a fact of which I'm not particularly proud nor particularly repentant. I am a go with the flow kind of person some of the time. Other times I would like to direct the flow like a human Hoover Dam.

We wandered over to a club called the Starlight Room where we were told there would be dancing. Once inside this multi-level monstrosity it became clear that while many things were happening in the Star Light Room, none of them were dancing. We retreated back to another bar and wandered the streets until we came across a Mexican place where people ordered food and one of my friends who was a touch inebriated slammed his fist down on the table right when the waitress was taking our order. When asked the next day about the event in question he said, very innocently and believably, "I did that?"

After a night spent cajoling we finally made our way down the street to a club with actual dancing. Within seconds I was out on the dance floor looking for my friends and finding them off at the bar. The bar was packed, but I could feel someone dancing close enough to me that I feared we had lost room for the Holy Spirit and when I turned around to find a fine looking male specimen I realized that I was probably dancing, not for the first time, in a gay bar. This would have been fine except that the bar was packed in the kind of way that makes you feel like you're in a mosh pit, only you don't have any volition. Someone needs to get a drink. Shoulder to the face. Someone is leaving the dance floor, hello elbows. Someone is entering the dance floor, pushed in the back. After a while this feeling of being a pinball is less charming than it could be, so I wandered around with J looking for my other three friends who had taken the opportunity of me dancing to slip back out onto the streets in search of more street food.

The second night we took a cab home, up from the bright lights of the bars into the quiet and leafy streets of Capitol Hill. I was in bed by 2. A sure sign that we are all getting too old for this. Next year I think we should go to Athens, Georgia or New Orleans, but maybe in five years we'll go to Montana and look outside the window at a bear digging through a trash can and be happy we are inside. Maybe someday we'll all get old. But my God, I will chase the nights to fend it off.