Memorial Day Weekend

It was a good weekend full of drinking and barbecues. There's nothing better than drinking outside when it's beautiful out and it's some kind of holiday that revolves around drinking and eating.

I spent tonight, the actual holiday, over by a friend's house in Haledon. I walked up towards his two-family house, of which he lives on the second floor, and I hear him yell, "Hey, this is for you"; I looked up only to see his bare ass in the window.

He had to come downstairs to let me in to the house, and he apparently decided to put some pants on finally (thank fucking God). As we walked up the stairs, I could feel the temperature rising faster than I've ever felt, and when he opened the door, I was hit with a wall of heat that almost knocked me on my ass. I work all day outside, so I'm no stranger to the heat rising from a big open parking lot; when you walk into someone's house, of course, you don't expect to feel that same heat.

As it turns out, the air conditioner had broke, and it was probably about a hundred degrees in the apartment. Normally I might not have lasted as long, but being as it was Memorial Day, I had that feeling that I should just be out somewhere doing something, and I shouldn't just be sitting at home. My buddy and his roommate were there, along with a couple others from assorted places. The sauna like humidity of the day combined with this overwhelming heat in his apartment had left two of them shirtless, just sitting on the couch, and another panting like a mutt whose been running from Animal Control. It was initially funny when I walked in, but it lost its charm really quickly, and soon I was sweating my balls off, not too mention sitting on the couch shirtless.

We planned to go to a nearby bar, being as we figured that it would not only have food but be air conditioned, and we'd be able to fucking breath in there. After a short walk down the road, the bar came into view. Of course...there was a big piece of plywood in the damn doorway, and some fat guy yelled from the inside that it was "Close for renovations". Fucker. Time to walk all the way back.

After biting the bullet and stopping at a nearby Italian restaurant, we headed back to the apartment. An argument commenced between me and one of my buddies about who would be able to kick whose ass, a weightlifter or a swimmer. For some reason he kept ranting about how swimming is the "best workout ever", and kept talking about "stabilizer muscles"; I told'em that Ronnie Coleman would rip the shit out of some pussy swimmer. Even though I think he was just delirious from being in that superheated apartment all day, ironically enough, it was me who was winded from walking back up that hill to his house...I can't seem to walk and talk at the same time anymore, especially up hill. Fucking cigarettes.

The rest of the night was a strange blur. It was so hot in the apartment that I took my own shirt off, and so there we four sat. It was one of the nights that you'd think happens only in old movies about drifters, where the ceiling fan cuts the light every couple of seconds to give a creepy feel, and the lean, haggard main character sits on the bed smoking cigarettes. Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight" would play in the background.

One of my buddies breaks out a pipe and starts smoking a strange mixture of weed and opium, something that looks gross and smells even worse. As they smoke it, my girlfriend covers her face with my discarded shirt, and I go outside to have a smoke. That stuff smells like shit. It was kind of surreal in a way, between the heat, the beer I was drinking, and knowing that drugs like that were in the room with me. I don't smoke the shit, so I didn't care, but there's just something about being around opium that intrigues me and disgusts me at the same time...I think it's because the first thing I think of are the Opium Wars in China, and how addictive that shit is. I would never again go near anything that's so addictive, as I seem to like such things just a little too much.

Eventually, I took off, and drove back into the air conditioned world. What an odd night. I'm not even drunk now, although I feel that I should be.

Define irony. Somewhere, soldiers are digging trenches to fight for America, and I'm sitting here drinking. Isn't Memorial Day for them?