Big Tall Super Maximum Fun Bomb Weekend Yes Go!
(a liar's account in two honest parts)
Faster, SUV! Pollute! Pollute!
(how we got there)
prole was lying on the grass because she was dead, i think, and respectfully airing out the smell of her formaldehyde bath so as that it wouldn't be overpowering once we were inside the vehicle and speeding happily from San Francisco to La Jolla (quick pronunciation guide: "la jolla" is pronounced "la jolla", you know, with all them fancy ferner accents and rolled r's and whatnot).
The vehicle itself was a mammoth, a Ford Super Deluxe Bang Bang Funtime with all the fixin's: leather exterior, gas powered CD player, tail fins, afterburners. I had stolen it from my mother who is, at this moment, still passed out on her kitchen floor from the cornucopia of tranquilizers I fed her. The SUV gets 20 gallons to the mile and kept threatening to tip over, roll, and explode with every curve and lane change.
Not to say that the journey was monotonous, but we took to playing drinking games after the sun had set. This obviously made driving the behemoth more interesting, as I usually play drinking games to lose. We were drunk on the sweet scotch of interstellar interstate travel. This was another ordinary day of an ordinary weekend on an ordinary planet. We stopped at Pismo Beach and took turns pushing each other on a mysterious swing set on the coast. After swing-jumping into the ocean, we felt it was time to move on.
By the time we hit Santa Barbara, we had moved from drinking games to strip poker and felt that it was best to find a place to stop for the night. The UCSB area was strangely abandoned, a mass alien abduction having apparently occured the night before. I asked a gangrenous local what the hell had happened, but his only words were, "Spriiiiiing breeeeeaaaaak..." He then tried to suck prole's brains with a silly straw, so I socked him in the sternum and we fled to a no-tell motel by the Santa Barbara airport.
Being bare-ass naked, we felt the best thing to do once at the motel was drink and watch TV. An artsy film about infidelity and insanity was on the tube and somehow enhanced the experience of the alcohol. A note about the motel: there were vaulted ceilings and cigarette burns on the nightstand. The shower was a hermetically sealed cleaning apparatus. It was a strange little place.
Here's the sum total of our combined rememberences of the rest of the evening:
(your prurient thoughts here)
No doubt something ribald must've happened. No doubt except for the fact that we awoke atop a pile of Games Magazines and Eskimo Pie wrappers. Eventually, it was all too obvious what had happened. We had succumbed to our desires and gone on an all night logic puzzle spree. I'm so ashamed. I used to be such a quiet boy.
The journey to La Jolla the next day was uneventful, save for the five thousand eunichs shaking our car and screaming, "Free Mumia!" We made it to Porkyland, purveyors of exotic Mexican foodstuffs impossibly wrapped in non-digestible cornhusks, and immediately spotted the large group of noders that had assembled there. They were wearing wooden masks and making sacrifices to the God of Olfactory.
The evening was obviously just getting started.
Upscale Suburban Drinking Establishment 1, Karaoke 0
(what we did when we got there)
Meeting noders was exactly how I expected it would be: conversations were started by one of us asking a question, and then the rest of us would add our replies in sequence. Most lines of dialogue were glib comments followed by an anxious expectation for C!'s and upvotes. Eventually everybody settled down, remembered how not to be complete social muppets, and talked about smelly things and rural mishaps.
It soon became apparent that Porkyland would no longer contain our need for the two necessities of life: karaoke and booze. m_turner took the picture of the assembled Porkyland group luckily just minutes before the locals came along and cannibalized the less fortunate members of the group, people whose names I had forgotten even minutes before I learned what they were. Our numbers were reduced to eight strong, so we ventured forth to bars unknown.
The common bond of the remaining group (if I remember correctly, it was Quizro and his wife, Yurei, igloowhite, lost and found, m_turner, prole, and myself, not to mention a small green space alien named "Kajamagoogoo" that only Yurei could see) was a love of ludicrousy. I was able to talk to Quizro and spouse (whose professions are belly dancer and international superspy, respectively) very briefly about El Fisico Nuclear before the group managed to pass a veritable warehouse of useless items that would only serve to overpower one's living room. Just in the storefront window was a pair of five-foot tall goblets (for the subtle alcoholic: "but i only have a glass of wine a night!"), an ornate wooden butler whose hand is forever held out to either receive a tip or some skin, and a herd of cast iron giraffes. We must've passed this place three times in our various travels that evening and each time we found new ways to extract rich, fruity merriment and nutritious vitamin funni from this establishment.
The blind led the blind towards the lost dutchman's hidden karaoke bar, and nobody could've been happier. When we arrived at what appeared to be Quizro's alleged karaoke happy funtime making plant, but apparently the place had ceased its off-key singing operations. We were ready to assume attack formation when Yurei (ironically, because he was the evening's head of military operations) suggested we go back to the bar where all the underage girls were.
We unanimously consented to this idea and withdrew our forces stealthfully into the night.
Finding a down-to-earth pub with an atmosphere conducive to conversation in La Jolla is somewhat akin to finding the hay in the needlestack: painful and fruitless. We arrived at the upscale brewery and they seated us a) in a two-foot-by-two-foot square room that was slowly being filled with deadly asps and b) nowhere near the underage girls' volleyball team. m_turner barely got to make a comment along the lines of "if there's grass on the field..." when he succumbed to the poison just as the combined strength of igloowhite's latent southern roots and Kajamagoogoo's magic space powers freed us from our brewery prison.
Quizro then asked the hostess for the yellow pages and some antidote.
After we licked our wounds and found a practical way to carry m_turner's corpse around without arousing suspicion, ala Weekend at Bernies, we decided on a proper pub in San Diego named, frighteningly enough, "The Princess". I struggled to remember my days as a tarot reader in a futile attempt to glean some sort of psychic guidance for the rest of the evening, but it was a moot point: I was never a tarot reader. We packed into three cars and headed down the freeway. lost and found handed me a double CD set with various audio encodings of the videodrome signal, thus completing his last requirement for his merit badge in E-V-I-L.
The Irish pub was in Little Italy, which didn't seem to phase that many of us. I fought the battle of the jukebox with someone who kept trying to pollute the noise around us with the latest Santana hit. A five dollar bill and a vague promise to include Margaritaville in the playlist (which I ended up fudging on because I'm that kind of asshole) won the day. There was much debate on the recent E2 accounts for sale / Malcolm Frink debacle, talk of secret messages over the urinal, seat swapping, flame juggling, radar describing, and belly dancing at the table. The sexual tension was thick and non-existent. Men wept openly. Women grew moustaches and rode Harleys. Somewhere, the world stood still.
And then the night was over, now, the night was over now. The waitress kept leaving subtle hints, like the bill, so we stiffed her and ran for the border. I won't talk about the next ten years that we spent in a Mexican prison, but I will let you know that the donkey show thing isn't just for entertainment. Eventually the group dissipated on good terms and we made plans to record a reunion record sometime in the spring. prole and I swiftly debated the merits of impersonating m_turner in order to get a hotel room, but lost and found beat us to the punch, so we undertook the two hour process of finding the only place to stay in the San Diego area, all the while believing it was all just some exceptionally cruel April Fool's joke.
At long last we gave up and instantly willed ourselves back to our respectful homes. And that's how I spent my summer vacation.