Weekends End

I hate it when the weekend is over. M has gone off back to Charleston and I'm sitting here kind of sadly with nothing fun to do. I miss him when he leaves and become lonely and start thinking about all the stupid shit I have to do. I have to go to the laundromat and all I really want to do is something unhealthy, like drink the afternoon away. Fortunately or unfortunately, my drinking buddies are all either busy or sick or out of town and I've never gotten the hang of drinking alone.

Speaking of afternoon drinking, yesterday M and I went downtown to wander around and stopped at the Flying Frog to have a bloody mary and watch Asheville walk by. It's always interesting at the Frog: it's the bar where I won a bet with my younger brother some years ago as to whether Asheville or New York has more freaks per capita. I won (I think it was the lesbian couple in matching zoot suits and moustaches that finally got him.) It was a little chilly for the true freak factor yesterday but there was still a lot to look at, including the guy at the bar when we got there. He had obviously been there for a while, being as how he was having a little trouble standing up and walking out, but he made it and we're all praying that he didn't go get into a car. M sneaked a glance at his paid bill after he left: that man racked up a $160 tab at the bar. By himself. Before 4:30 in the afternoon. Gods know the Flying Frog is not the cheapest place in town, but still, that's downright inspiring.

Friday night we did go and play trivia with our old friends E & M & D, although not, alas, very well. Turns out that M was right about there being a Yellow Sea near China, which none of the rest of us believed (I think we're too inoculated PC or something and it sounded vaguely racist, besides, coming up with a complex etymology for Aegean involving color was so much more, um, challenging) and E was right about Rice Krispies predating Cheerios (Rice Krispies have been around since the 20s. She knew that. The rest of us, associating them only with the little 60s/70s era guys floating around in the bowl, couldn't quite grasp it.) Still, it was really fun and we should do it more often; also, it's pretty cool, when you get down to it, that 20 or so years later, not only are we all still friends after multiple years of losing touch, we're all still having fun doing weird shit in bars. Generation X (the original one which I was theoretically a part of, not the one after they changed the rules and got younger while I continued to age and apparently became a member of some nonexistent gap generation) rules. We do not give up our fun easily.

Then last night we went and had dinner at the Admiral, for which, I am pleased to note, by the way, that this blog is the third Google result of. (And I've just won the awkward sentence construction sweepstakes! Hurrah!) The food was fantastic yet again and we ran into our friends Z & H and their friend S, so we all sat together. I love that place. My only issue with it is that they didn't open during the six or seven years that I lived half a damn block away, the years where that was the B&D Bar, which had an air of eternal scary mystery, being as how it was only open on some secret bizarre schedule that only the regulars could understand and you could tell from the windows that you would probably just not be welcome. My old neighborhood keeps on getting cooler and it makes me nostalgic and sad but on the other hand, if the Admiral and the Rocket Club had been there when I was, no doubt I'd be even poorer than I am and my liver would be in worse shape. Sometimes you have to rely on the silver linings. And I'll be in Charleston on Friday night with M again.