Birthday Bedlam

As I guessed early Friday, the impact of my birthday festivities that night left me rather incapacitated for the duration of the following day. I have heard how it pays off to mix in glasses of water with all the alcohol one drinks in the course of an evening, but that is a lesson that I have yet to learn. I was advised after the fact by a friend that on one's birthday, such precautions are not to be taken in any case. I was glad to be vindicated.

Dinner was good. It followed a fit of anxiety as the burden of logistical planning began to overwhelm me, and I feel that every birthday ought to contain both a freak-out and friends good enough to help you through it. Dinner was pushed back, but things otherwise proceeded apace. The restaurant, which as I think I said yesterday excels at bacon and which I first visited a few years ago for the party of a friend, was good.

The entertainment phase of the evening was regrettably marred by the show I'd intended seeing selling out before I and my friends at dinner could obtain tickets. One friend who was not at dinner took the sensible step of buying tickets in advance, but was consequently left out. Indeed, no one who responsibly tried to to adhere to the plan from the beginning was rewarded. Those who spontaneously jumped aboard on a whim seemed to do better.

The evening saw the critical core of dinner guests on a fruitless march through the desert, so to speak, as we careened around town in search of a substitute plan. We first tried a bikini bar nearby, but passed when the line outside was judged too long. We then corrected the course of the evening in a rather more vulgar direction. One gentlemen's club was deemed substandard. One bathroom break at a tiki bar and stop at a grocery store later, we found a superior one, and the evening took a turn for the better.

It was at that second club that one of my friends gifted me with a typewriter of the kind that I recently described wanting. I felt keenly how funny it was to have that on my person in such surroundings. Perhaps I am meant more than I ever guessed to emulate the life and work of Charles Bukowski. In any case, the evening finished in the safety and comfort of my friends' house at an exceptionally late hour, and I resigned myself to spending the day in quiet solitude, resting and contemplating my actions.