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After that to Goodwill, buy badly needed work shoes and a 99 cent old answering machine – thinking it might play my old micro tapes. Doesn’t work, but oddly enough, in desperation I try my old microplayer again, and two years after it last worked, today it miraculously does again! Kick ass! I can now transcribe some of those old tapes before it’s too late.
Record some vocals on computer, too, and mix down one song, burn to disc track by track, then delete the files to free up memory on there.
Then it’s time to assemble the troops for our big outing to Marshall’s, for Shauna’s 21st birthday. Our lives sure have taken some weird twists and turns, and this year is already shaping up as possibly one of the strangest ever. Seemingly at a time where things were kind of winding down (I mean, I’m living in freaking Hilliard these days, to cite just my own example), which makes it doubly odd. For example in the early going, our group at the outset is Shauna, Norman, Jay Taylor, Hostetler, Kyle, Amy, Elissa, me…but also this one peculiar middle aged couple who shop at our store. Somebody invited them, I’m not sure who. The other 8 of us are all Wild Oats employees, these are Wild Oats shoppers. But it’s cool, we pull together some chairs and tables for this huge conglomeration in the middle of the room, game on. That hot new Buckcherry song, Crazy Bitch, is spewing forth from the jukebox. Apart from that one couple, our troop is four dudes in their thirties…Kyle, the “young lad” here in his mid-late twenties…and then three chicks who are all exactly 21. At the age of 19, Shauna was my roommate, then began hooking up with a friend of mine (Norman). These other two girls are much more recent, ahem, additions to the entourage.
Hilariously enough, Tim just happens to be wandering around here for some strange reason. He had no idea any of this was going on, is literally meandering about the bar aimlessly. “Every time I come here I see someone I know,” he mumbles and pulls up a chair next to me. Then as we seem to be the only two actually listening to Shauna’s stories, she gets up, sits in between us now. Doing a good job pacing herself, though, I must say, which is difficult for most folks on their 21st, and definitely a struggle for most chicks on their 21st.
Tiffany shows up, then Jim Marshall, Suzie. We pull up a third section to add to our table. Tim’s telling me he quit Bob The Fish Guy and is now repairing bicycles at this mom & pop shop in Westerville. Fitting because he’s not driving these days and is instead riding a bicycle everywhere himself. Jay buys Shauna some minty shot, not knowing that she’s actually allergic to mint. He is the first person to leave, too.
Elissa is desperate for my attention. Tonight she tells me the same thing Amber G. said when I was dating her, almost verbatim, in that I remind her of a “little boy.” But the funniest aspect about that, or should we say one of the funniest, is that while possibly possessing somewhat of a baby face and definitely youthful with my energy at this age, I feel like I’m actually pretty decent at playing these girls at this point. It just seems like there’s no way some of us guys cannot have the upper hand with a lot of these females, and certainly younger females, at his stage in the game, after the past 10-12-14 years of…man, I’m not even sure what you would call it, but it’s certainly been an epically wild ride, somewhat all over the map, but a definite learning experience. You’re almost on autopilot at this point, if you choose to be.
For example, I fall into this off the wall conundrum. I know by now that ignoring Elissa to some extent, and treating her somewhat dismissively, is the paradoxical best way to keep her around. But then you tell yourself, well, no, I actually like this one, I should treat her better. Except THEN there’s actually another level above that where you almost have to tell yourself, and force yourself to stick to it, of, okay then but if you do actually like this girl quite a bit, and want her to stick around…then the best way to accomplish that, nonetheless, is to…ignore her, and treat her somewhat dismissively. Or you can be nice, watch her scamper away, kick yourself for being an idiot and not doing what you actually knew would work and wanted to do on top of it, anyway, all because you were on some big nobility kick or something. This is the minefield you’re negotiating right now as a guy.
At least until the drinks start a-flowin’, at which point it maybe doesn’t matter as much. But then let’s look at things from her point of view, or maybe what we should say I feel like must be going through these girls’ heads, at least on the oddball occasions where they are actually maybe into me, and are picking up on what I’m throwing down. It must run something like this: okay, he’s distant and kind of a smartass, but he’s not actually a mean person with any of this stuff. He’s got some wacky theories on life, yet at the same time seems to possess some peculiar confidence in them anyway, like he believes he knows what he’s talking about. I mean, Elissa did after all tell me one night here recently, “there’s no reason I would ever say, wow, this Jason guy’s an asshole,” when I was explaining others were often not quite so amused by my antics. Beyond that, she’s already worried she might not have anywhere else to stay after fighting with her roommate last night. Is a chick in this situation going to waste her time with, like, some normal, nervous acting but really nice guy who is jumping through the proper hoops and timelines and so on of trying to be serious and date her? Or would they prefer some dude who, even if a weirdo, does appear to have his life together and tends to muddle forward with a kind of unflappable shrug no matter how chaotic things become? Well, whatever the case, this is my take on everything. Plus one other additional consideration: is this somebody you would want to get serious about, anyway? So that’s why I tend to think being distant is typically not an issue.
Tim and I are discussing Sequoia Lanes, Capri Lanes. Elissa chimes in, then somehow this morphs into a discussion of “crustache rock” as she calls it. She’s brought with her of course her cute little backpack with the red strap and the buttons pinned everywhere.
Come to think of it, this must have been before Jim Marshall even showed up. Elissa tells me, “Amy says you look like Steve Buscemi, but I disagree.”
“That’s good. I mean I know my teeth are fucked up, but come on,” I joke.
Anyway, Chris, Tiffany, Shauna, and Amy are all outside, smoking a joint. Amy is wearing this red dress with heavy material, like denim, with a button up blouse part, short skirt, but vaguely I must admit cottage cheese thighs. Shauna calls Jim, to try and talk him into joining us, and Amy slurs, “if Jim comes here, tell him I’ll fuck him!” into the phone.
“He was there about a minute and a half later,” I will joke, after the fact, “his tires were still smokin when we left the bar.”
So soon enough, they’re all over each other. Jim has shown up in this thinly vertically striped, blue and white, button up shirt, in other words his classic attire. The middle aged couple split, and so does Tim – it turns out he’s actually driving his boss’s van for some reason tonight. Tiffany has the right idea, too: a couple of drinks and then bye-bye. Shauna’s wearing a black sleeveless dress, low cut neckline and cleavage. Suzie a black sleeveless blouse also, looking sharp, but no cleavage.
Funny, the first time I ever saw her, I thought, “now there’s a chick that’s right up my alley,” without any specific explanation why. Tonight’s the first time we’ve actually spoken, but I think I was right, maybe subconsciously picking up on something (then again it ties into these massive rivers of water under the bridge I was alluding to earlier).
Forgot to mention that also much earlier, before Jim showed up, Amy was reading an Other Paper at our table, and I said, “don’t read at the bar – that’s lame,” and threw it across the room. Totally unfazed, she reaches down and pulls a book from her own backpack, holds it aloft with both hands like one of the girls from The Price Is Right.
“The Sun Also Rises?” she says, and I nod approvingly.
-Elissa (to me): You’ve got a great laugh. It reminds me of my uncle (Tim) (not our friend Tim who is here) (this is actually the second time she’s told me this, but she doesn’t remember).
By now we’re progressing to the middle-later stages of our outing. She comes over and plops down in an effort to disrupt my conversation with others. Flips me off, other standard shenanigans, and so on.
-And this is all before Shauna’s whole Xenos crowd shows up – fellow practitioners of her somewhat controversial religion. This seems to me as the moment where matters escalate into exponentially even greater weirdness (but not necessarily wildness), somehow. I remember there’s a black chick (cute!), and Elizabeth (Shauna’s current roommate, with brown hair and preternaturally, possibly fake, blue eyes), some John guy (curly red hair, extremely talkative) from the Xenos crew. Meanwhile Pitt is here now too and trying to work his magic with the black chick. I’m locked into an extensive conversation with Suzie – telling her about my writing, some nonsense estimating I make “sixteen” bucks an hour, just total gibberish. It doesn’t matter provided you stay in character and just keep going.
It’s all meaningless, up to a point. She does throw me for a loop, though, asking why I don’t hook up with Amy, who plainly appears ripe for the plucking. But I say no, “I gotta be good to my girl.”
Then there’s another moment where she, Jim, Chris, and I are having a highly involved discussion about our collective war stories. One extremely peculiar tragedy those two guys share is that they have both been shot at and lived to tell the tale – as in not just shot at, but the bullets actually hit them. For Jim it’s still lodged in the small of his back, and he shows us his wound; Hostetler of course was attacked by some stranger at a park when he was five, and still walks with a limp. “I would’ve died if it went out the other side,” he says, as it’s resting to this day against his spinal column. When it comes to my history I’m estimating, “I know I’ve used up 4 of my 9 lives,” with reference to two serious car wrecks, this time that idiot at Jamie’s apartment was playing with a gun and it went off (everyone says it missed my head by about an inch) and then also at least possibly the strangest occurrence, if not necessarily the closest brush with death, of having survived a plane crash.
“I work for NewsCenter,” Suzie marvels, “I’m surprised I never heard about it.” (I have no idea what this is, am merely guessing at the spelling/styling).
“Check the London paper, early March 2001,” I tell her.
-Jim insists upon buying himself, Chris, and me this “oil slick” shot: it’s 151 and Jager. Never heard of such, but it is about as nasty as it sounds. Hostetler slugs his, while I sip mine, feel like I’m obligated to at least finish it.
-Shauna goes outside and forces herself to stick her finger down her throat and puke up some of the alcohol. I know a lot of the guys consider her annoying, that she tells outrageous tales sometimes, but I don’t care what anyone says or how much they bitch about her – I think she’s a pretty cool person, overall.
-Kyle’s trying to rustle an afterhours coalition. But no. It’s time for most of us to get out of here.
-one guy I know pissed in someone else’s bed tonight, though, at said afterhours. I’ll be a real chum and omit his name. It sounds like some of us made the right call in skipping this puppy, however.
-then again I’m saying that despite, never mind my “early” exit, getting up just a handful of hours later and calling off at Target anyway.
Epilogue: I seem to recall writing about other 21st birthdays and/or similar occasions in the past, and that there used to be much more detail, a more coherent narrative. But I think those were the absurd outliers. It’s borderline insane to have even this much scattershot detail about a night such as this one, and after awhile you recognize that there is no overarching narrative to anything. It’s just a bunch of random, intersecting nonsense. By extension those other nights were freakish to the extreme, in holding together as some sort of actual story, with somewhat of a real semi-point. But endlessly fascinating, in any case, whatever way you wish to slice it.
In summary I would say this was a somewhat arbitrarily chosen, but fun and representative day, for this little sliver of our collective personal lives. It was also sunny, and warmer than expected, with temperatures topping out in the high 60s. But what else was happening around this fair city, on this date? It turns out there weren’t a ton of newsworthy developments, at least not that I’ve unearthed so far. Yet here are a few of the highlights:
Mae are at Newport Music Hall
Columbus Symphony Orchestra backs vocalist Barbara Cook at Palace Theatre. The CSO plays an instrumental first act of old standards, before Cook joins them onstage.
Comedian Kathy Griffin performs a 90 minute set at Southern Theatre, her first of two nights in town.
The OSU Medical Center emergency room treats 84 year old Leo LeVan for minor injuries, before releasing him – he was helicoptered in after a badly driven dump truck plowed into his living room.
Pitcher Aaron Small, making a rehab start for the Yankees, leads the Clippers to a 7-2 win over Louisville, at Cooper Stadium. Kevin Thompson keys the offense, with a 3 run homer in the 6th.
Harper are playing at Blues Station.
Park Street Tavern has an open stage jam with Jimmy McGee.
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