but, there WAS a point.

Last Friday morning I drove down to Washington, D.C. It took seven hours. An extra hour and a half or so came from going by way of Philly to pick up Bedoll, who gave me a bottle of Jagermeister for the door-to-door service. I also got to park in the University of Maryland visitor parking lot for the entire weekend and not get my car broken into — a privilege, many might say. Daryn graciously endured a wrong turn that sent us 40 minutes off course, and hours of nearly intelligent yet meaningless banter, not to mention a full hour of The Faint blasting from the stereo with the windows rolled down. This was followed by an encore, played even more loudly, consisting of Günther Pleasureman’s “Ding Dong Song.” Needless to say, Bedoll was controlling the iPod at that point.

Friday night saw me in a bar in DuPont Circle called Buffalo Billiards, eating copious amounts of chicken fingers, drinking copious amounts of beer and bringing copious amounts of suckage to the pool tables and dart boards. You see, our party had this deal whereby if we stood in a certain section of the bar, we could order unlimited amounts of food and/or booze for a flat rate, determined beforehand. This resulted in vast overindulgence on everyone’s part. The real point of all this, of course, was to see Josh Arthur, who was in D.C. for one night as part of his vacation while on leave from Baghdad. Yes, Josh is a Lieutenant in the Army, and I sincerely hope he continues avoiding bullets and IEDs so that we can all do the same thing in November. Although, by the way he tells it, his platoon spends most of its time betting on whether the soldiers can withstand tasering their own balls to pass the time. If I were in the Army and about to be shipped off to Iraq, this might be the danger I would fear most.

I also got to spend a lot of time with Aulicino, much of it prowling the dark streets of College Park, MD while drunk and trying not to get mugged. Let me just say the bars are quite the happening places out there. Not much intelligent conversation can occur when you are surrounded by drunk people with popped-collar polo shirts and 6-inch miniskirts trying to grind in multiples of two to Mims’s “This Is Why I’m Hot” while spilling from their Bud Light longnecks all over your table. The bathrooms are also slathered in a perpetual layer of vomit. Call me a pub snob, but…not my scene. It was good to visit David at his new school environment, though. It was funny when he pointed out people and told me their final grades in the class he TA’d.

I just finished playing Mario Kart: Double Dash for the past hour and a half with my roommate. Let me put it right out there: the computer is a goddamn dirty cheater. Yeah, I still won the gold trophy in the 150cc combined twelve-track megarace, but not without the expulsion of much sweat and tears. Here’s the typical sequence of events:

1. I’m in first place. I’m going in a straight line.
2. Red shell homes in on my ass and sends it rolling into the bottomless abyss.
3. Lakitu (that dude on the cloud) fishes me out.
4. Someone rams my ass from behind and sends me flying off into the abyss again.
5. Lakitu fishes me out and drops me right in front of a banana.
6. I hit the gas and slip on the banana, flying off into the abyss again.
7. I’m in eighth place.
8. (DEUS EX MACHINA)
9. I miraculously obtain a double trifecta of speed mushrooms and zoom across the finish line for a first place finish, because I rule.

The last two items aren’t really true. At least we finally got the coveted mirror mode, which will bring us many more hours of beer-fed fun and screaming curses at the neighbors’ walls.

-D