2004-05-18 - 1:27 a.m.

I feel like a bad son gone weird--the only time you ever hear from me is after weekends.

This one was a really great one, though.

Friday night was the Dents with the Roommate and Julianne, and that was wicked fun �cause it�s always fun to see the Dents and the folks who love them outside of the Abbey. I wonder what it would be like to go to the Abbey on a night like that. (I think I might have been once or twice.)

Saturday was work from two to six and a huge hangover. Huge. I really did myself in on Friday, but it all worked out in the end.

The Roommate and I--wait--hold on. This is worth pausing for. The mark of a great weekend is when you have to think really hard to remember stuff that happened. When there�s so much awesome crammed into every nook of a minute and every cranny of an hour.

So I�m struggling to remember Saturday, just like Friday, which means nothing but awesome.

So Saturday I got out of work and the Roommate and I, weekend still ahead of us, basically went home �cause all was shot.

Our plan was to go to Rhode Island, where she�s from and where her family still resides, to see the Strokes at the Strand in Providence, and then to take Monday off to do some Providence-y things (like Federal Hill and Thayer Street), staying overnight at her brother�s place in Warwick.

But that got fugged up--her brother was forced to work on the day off he had reserved a month ago (the Roommate is a careful planner), and everything went haywire.

Which is weird considering what ended up happening--we basically did everything we were already going to do, with a minimum of ad lib.

This is editing--I remembered that we went to a pancake breakfast for some arts organization that the Roommate is involved in and that I�m nebulously involved in.

Also, and this is to one person in the world and will make no sense to almost anyone else, but I want to say this and I mean it, but you weren�t an animal, obviously, because of the iron fence--you had to have been a person to reach over and uproot the bush--so I know you�re a person. A human being. And of anything else I�ve seen in my life, and it seems to be my unrequested quest to seek these things out--this evidence that we�re horrible as a species and unfit to rule the world as we do--I have never had an experience in my life, so far, that has done more to prove that humans are basically evil.

That baby bird had a chance, and while I�m not asking for a medal for trying to help it, you certainly did the world no good by killing it. I don�t care if I�m seventy with my life behind me--I want you. If I hear some braggart in a bar when we�re all driving our flying cars (and I�m taking my flying T) and I hear you go on about that bird in Somerville, that little baby bird that looked to me for help, that was asking me for help, with its huge, scary mouth, showing me it was actually hurt by hobbling around about the tiny patch of mulch outside of my apartment, I�m going to engage that braggart in a fight, and I�m going to win also.

Anyway, Saturday was horrible for awhile--I told my folks at work that I�d buy them a beer at the closest possible bar in honor of an employee that had been there for two years (which is rare), and I knew the whole thing was going to be a disaster, but I did it anyway to make the kid of honor feel good, �cause he deserved it, and then it eventually went from frustration to awesome--we spent a couple of hours following around Rita (my dear friend R.), getting to and eventually starting to participate in a planned out pub crawl she was involved in, while poor Julianne was stuck in transit for maybe two hours, playing catch up, but it turned out to be a fru-fru pub crawl while we were waiting for her, culminating in $5.00 coronas at a very pretty place that still wasn�t worth $5.00 for a Corona.

Rita is one of my best friends in the known universe, but we were done after that. I think she must have been a little sad to see us go--I honestly felt like I was crashing a baby shower, and come to think of it, I think I was crashing a sort of practice shower, so my awesome joke was more just kind of insightful after all, as opposed to funny, which was what I was going for.

Go me.

So after that, Julianne got her seventy-fifth status update and met us at the Pour House--one of my college days haunts.

And cheeseburgers--I don�t know what happened--I had given up cow--but that started it.

And all of them were good and all of them were different and lovable like kids and I�m not having any more.

The Roommate and I got home--I'll pick up the story later.

So in case you never go, here are a few facts I observed about Rhode Island.

1) It�s not an island. But it is in fact one gigantic road. Everyone drives. Sidewalks are scarce.

2) For whatever reason, gazebos are plentiful.

3) Their license plate has a wave on it. I know this only because someone from that state pointed it out to me. The wave on the plate is grey so

4) All Rhode Islanders are color blind.

5) Your business can be successful only if its name is a pun.

6) Nobody knows, probably because there�s no sidewalks, that you have to stay to the right on escalators so people in a hurry can pass you. Probably because nobody is in a hurry, too. Rhode Island is the Mexico of Massachusetts except that it�s only slightly cheaper.

7) You can smoke in the bars.

8) Which is awesome.

9) But it�s also the only state (that I�ll go to) where a waitress in a bar will tell you that the song We Are The World is the song of choice for her generation, and be genuinely sorry when you leave her bar.

10) And it�s also a state where people seem to enjoy being made fun of, which is where I got my balls for that one.

Bonus--I�ve learned over the years, from credible sources, that nobody ever leaves, and maybe that�s because there�s a Dell�s lemonade stand on every corner, because you can get hot wieners whenever you want them (you don�t want the pit dog), or a grinder, and that the people there have a ton of pride.

I�ll try to finish this later.