Waking up drunk means no hangover

I woke up at noon today. And I was hammered.

Alright, that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but I couldn't find my pants, my hair smelled like a deep fried cigarette, and I definitely wasn't in any shape to drive.

Ever have one of those days?

Last night started innocently enough - the AJitator and I went to Bully's (JJ's was packed) for an adult beverage and, on the way home, I decided I wanted a bottle of champagne.

After springing an extra $4 for a bottle of Korbel (as opposed to Andre's) my plan was to sit in front of the television and drink or have people over to play drinking games. Things quickly escalated into drunken quasi-madness.

The AJitator, who had been drinking since 11 a.m., passed out shortly thereafter, so I decided to meet a few lady-friends at Chewy and Jugs with the Hetero Lifemate.

Chewy and Jugs is a sports bar type place minus the big TV's, atmosphere and young crowd. We only go to Chewy's because it's walking distance from our house and the bar tenders who own the place are fucking hilarious (and we're not really into the heavy metal and occasional stabbings that go on at the bar next door).

Last night there happened to be a cover band trying to entertain a rather large group of middle-aged couples dancing in rhythmless spasms.

I hate cover bands. First off, if they were any good they'd have their own music. And nobody does a song as good the original artist, ever, so I don't get why people have the desire to listen to their favorite songs as rendered by a band of questionable talent when they could just listen to, you know, the actual song.

Cover bands are like shitty, more expensive, juke boxes.

So, after spending several minutes of debating if I wanted to test the strength of some marriages by grinding up on old women (I ultimately decided I wasn't drunk enough) we left for a house party.

It ended up being a Tonapah party, which amused me to no end. I, a Wells boy, went with a group of Elko girls, at the behest of a Eureka kid, to a party organized and mostly attended by the kind college students of Tonapah. It was like Eight Degrees of Podunk Nevada.

I did have a good time, though.

Boise Amanda's boyfriend, Kyle (my cousin Amanda, who is Boise Amanda's good friend, is also dating a Kyle), is from Tonapah, and I ran into him. He was there with Chance Kretchsmer, who aside being one of the best running backs in Nevada history a few years ago is also the cousin of my freshman roommate.

I ended up bullshitting with Kyle for awhile before hitting the beer pong table, where I ended up chugging room temperature Keystone Light.

The end result of this was me being drunk.

This was somewhat concerning to me, mostly because I didn't have all that much to drink. I've been getting drunk a little bit quicker of late.

I don't know whether it's because I'm getting old or because I haven't been drinking much lately or because I'm much smaller than I was a year ago, but it's getting sort of depressing.

My tank liver is now much more like one of those armored trucks. It's still epic, but not the legend of old.

Oh well, it's a lot cheaper that way.

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Loving the beginning of spring

Days like today are why I love Reno.

The sun is beating down on the pine trees in beautiful 61-degree weather, I'm sitting outside of Fritz Bar and Grill drinking Corona and hanging out with my friend Dave, and all the stress, specifically as it relates to the Big Freaking Paper, is gone for the moment.

Oh, and there's a cute girl in a tube top sitting just behind Dave, so I can check out her infant nurturing region and look like I'm making eye contact with Dave.

This euphoria will go away soon enough – at any moment I'll realize that I have about two weeks to learn Flash, a month to finish my thesis and two months to figure out what I'm doing with my life – but right now I can go back to the way I was when I was sophomore and life was only as complicated as deciding between hard alcohol and beer.

I think that when I look back at college when I'm old (in about a year), those are the days I'll remember. My entire life, I've felt a ridiculous amount of pressure to try to be successful – whatever that means – at what I was doing.

Except for my middle years of college when, quite frankly, I stopped giving a shit and started loving everything about life, especially the part where I could make fun of the drunk, slutty sorority girls to their faces and they didn't get it.

I used to spend almost everyday like I'm spending today, plus or minus the alcohol and cleavage (who am I kidding, it was usually plus alcohol and minus cleavage). During my first two years of college, I spent my spring days imbibing with the homies on the back porch of their house before heading inside for a night of beer pong or going out for a night of general and debauchery that would almost certainly end in our expulsion from one of downtown's fine establishments or one of us winning $200 and buying breakfast.

If we weren't shooting the shit or hitting a casino, we were usually doing normal things (like sneaking alcohol into the movies) or watching our buddy Stefan drive a 10-speed off a homemade ramp in the middle of the street (oddly enough, we always did the dumbest stuff when we were sober).

Somewhere over the years, all that ended. No doubt part of it has to do with the fact that most of the people in our crowd have graduated, and then there's that moment of self-awareness when I realized the real word was coming whether I took it seriously or not.

Whatever the reason, I don't think I've ever laughed like I did during those days, so I'm going to enjoy what's going on in the moment while it's all fresh in my head. All the work and decisions and responsibility will weigh down on me soon enough, but right now I'm just going to tip back another beer and accept that I can worry about everything else tomorrow.

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