Friday night, Hessica and I head out to Gravity for a brief hello at Vic's bday party. I've got Illinois with me and we stop in to pre-party with ChengJ and Foster. When we walk in, ChengJ, who thought I was coming up by myself, is surprised to be caught by us shirtless playing Guitar Hero. We party there for a bit and then leave. Maurod picks us up, with his side view mirror suspiciously held on with masking tape, and gets us there in a spliffy (my new term describing a quick j...spliff, jiffy, spliffy!)
Upon getting to Gravity, we're told there's a 5 dollar cover per person. I try to explain to the nice man at the door that our friend has reserved the upstairs bar and the idea of a cover is bullshit. Bouncer starts to get in our face, and I'm stubbornly deciding that I'd rather get out of line and go home than pay this scum bag 5 bucks to get in when we've rented the upstairs room. He starts to push back and about 5 sentences into our conversation, I think he realizes he's not going to win with me, and I'm not just going to fork money over to him for the hell of it. He tells us we can all get in for 5 bucks. We take the deal, fork over 5 bucks and head upstairs.
It's standard drinking and partying here, so nothing much to write about. Unless, of course, you include "the punch." Midway through the evening I decide that I'm going to tickle Hessica in the middle of the bar. She, faded, starts flailing around. As she flails around, she swings on me, and in her hand is her wallet with a metal clasp on it, and "whack!" it nails me right on the upper lip. I spend the next 15 minutes holding a napkin to my lip as I bleed all over the place. This cut on my lip becomes the jumping off point for numerous jokes about Hessica and I boxing and/or cage fighting. We get home around 1 am after spending some time at City, and I get to wake up at 5:30 to take Illinois back to the airport.
Whether or not it's actually healthy, Hessica and I have developed an ability and a system that allows us to start a day drinking at 11am and finish at the bars at 2am. This has been noted in some of the more prolific writings here concerning the Golf outings and a few other examples of all day drinking. Well, staring at the Union Street fair this weekend, we knew it was once again that magical time we like to call "go time." Or, as we say in our apartment, it's "time to go hard." We get up around 10 on Saturday morning and get to Nini's at 11 where we start our day with breakfast and mimosas. It only takes Hessica three sips of her mimosa to declare herself drunk again, and I'm feeling pretty healthy when I finish mine and we kill a j on the way to the city. Once there, I stop at the Love Shack before we make the cross city trek to the Marina. I've got cans of rockstar and a water bottle of vodka in tow, which will help alleviate any need to pay for drinks throughout the day. That, and a can of rockstar doesn't scream "this is an alcoholic beverage" to police quite like the red cup does.
Unfortunately, the only place I can find to park is on Vallejo and it's in a metered parking spot (1 hour, up to 6pm). We trek over to Union Street and meet there with old middle/high school friends BShap and MZip, with B hosting the pre-party. It's a chill group of people (although, you can't help but laugh at one girl who is so antsy to leave she wants to leave before everyone else has finished their booze, and a married couple wearing matching yet different colored polo shirts with their collars up. I wonder if this is the yuppie wonderland I've wandered into.) We catch up for a while and when it's time to leave, we've been there for about an hour and I decide I'm going to check on the meter. Another hour and we're off again.
We go from here over to meet ChengJ and Foster at ChengJ's place, and they're both just barely up and still recovering from the evening before. Hessica and I are on our fourth drink. They finish lunch, Hessica and I mix another "to go," and we head to a party where we're told that we need to have Hessica with us (a female) as the price of admission. We get there and it's a super sweet place with a ravine in the backyard. About 25 people, none of whom I know, are out on the back deck playing Beirut and listening to music. It's a good scene and I get a few peoples' heads in the clouds before Hessica and I decide to take off and meet up with some of her friends.
But not before going back to the car to check the meter. The meter is expired and the sidewalk has been marked with chalk right in front of the front bumper of the car, a reminder to the meter maid that this is where the car is. I proceed to feed the meter, move the car back two feet and douse the chalk with water (which doesn't really work) before leaving again. I've resigned myself to getting a ticket at this point, but figure I'll try to prolong the magic as long as possible. We start off towards Union Street, but a peaceful oasis in the middle of the Marina greets us on our journey and we stop in to have a quick moment of peace at the Sherman/School. I find the gates are open so Hessica and I creep inside to find a delightful sitting area next to a waterfall. The yard is also built deep enough into the ground that no one on the street level passing by can see us.
After this magical moment, we head on to the street fair where we meet up with Hessica's friend J, as well as Glass and her new friend Trapeze. Hessica points out to me while waiting in line for the bathroom that if I cut, a queue of women will physically assault me in the bad way, so we wait a bit longer. While waiting, I run into KP, my former roommate of sorts, who has decided to move to Kansas for a guy she's in love with. All I'm saying is that if you're going to get me to move to one of the fly-over states, it's going to take a lot more than a few months in a relationship!
Following this, even though we've been on Union street for probably less than an hour, we (by which I mean myself, Hessica, Glass and Trapeze) head over to Marc and JK's place where a regular high school/middle school reunion is in progress over a backyard BBQ. Hessica and I are still working our way slowly to the bottom of the water bottle and flask we've brought, but she's almost comatose in a chair, drinking a Corona. I call this her "recharge" period. We've got Rae, Al, ChengJ, Page, Sutton and more there with Marc on the grill making bomb burgers and JK preparing some unbelievably good crab cakes. The weather, in addition to a sweet fire pit, lets us stay outside well into the evening until Gavroche shows up.
We roll some more over a few games of Wii bowling before we decide to meet up with E over at the I. Hessica takes a ride home (we had been drinking 12 hours at that point), and Gavroche, myself, ChengJ and Foster head over to North Beach. From here, I remember basically a few points of the rest of the evening....taking out my camera to take a picture of E, almost getting myself thrown out in the process (cameras not allowed in this bar!), drinking at least two more drinks, where the tendress, Dagmar, is actively trying to finish me off, and deciding at 2 am that I was going to leave and head back over to the Marina. But would I take a cab for such a thing? My logic at the time is that the city is no more than 7 miles square, so that walk can't be that long, it's free, and I have my iPod, so let's walk. The rest of the evening is spent walking from Broadway in North Beach to Union Street in the Marina, a walk spent mostly dancing, skipping and singing. At one point a group of people in a car ask me for directions before telling me that I should, "get out of the street." They mean this for my safety, not because I'm actually in the street.
On the way back, I swing by my car. No ticket.
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