Get on plane. Watch bad movie. Use ipod to drown out annoying fellow passengers. Get off plane. Immediately seek out nearest exit to smoke much needed cigarette. Oh nicotine. If life were prison, I’d so be your bitch. Sigh. Use cell phone to locate Alex, who’s running around with a handmade “Corti Qui! (Courtney here!) poster. Meet the boy. Buy wine, bring to Indian food restaurant. Proceed to get incredibly drunk and spend the night entertaining Al’s boy (and each other) recounting past adventures and catching each other up on gossip about our mutual friends. Talk about sex, life, relationships, repeat. Sleep in the cocoon on the couch.
Wake up. Shower. Get coffee with Shaun (the boy) and walk to park. Swings. Get to know Shaun, Shaun gets to know me. Get more coffee. Sit outside coffee place for an hour chatting about movies and life and of course Alex. Meet Al at work. Go to MOMA. See awesome afterlife exhibit and permanent collection, and random golden Michael Jackson and his chimp statue. Al and Shaun highlight all the great things about SF, in a not even remotely veiled attempt to get me to move there for a few months. Go to Berkley. Get dinner with Karlyn (Al’s sister). Proceed to get drunk, again, in a tiki bar. Then in an Irish bar down the street from their house, with a dirty old man bartender and some very random patrons. Get talked (read: coerced, by Ryan of all people, Karlyns normally very quiet husband) into playing karaoke play station game. Laugh my ass off at Al and Karlyn trying to sing “I’m a survivor”. Ryan kicks everyone’s ass, especially with the moody boy rock songs. He clearly practices when no one else is home. Sleep in the cocoon on their couch. I love how much visiting her family feels like visiting my own family sometimes.
Al brings the boy to the airport sometime early early in the morning. Wake up to her wandering downstairs and landing on the second couch around 9. Walk to the coffee place with her up the block. Drink coffee and juice and talk about EVERYTHING with her for the next 4 and a half hours. This is what I miss. Realize we’re hungry and it’s not morning anymore. Back to SF, burritos and Margaret Cho and naps. Shower. Blow a fuse in the whole front half of their house. Unsuccessfully attempt to fix it. Attempt to kick each other. “Protect your internal organs”. Make the most random pre-game drink ever invented, and which should never be invented again. Eat remainder of burritos. Leave to get real drinks. Stroll to bar singing our own remixes. Proceed to get drunk. Talk about sex, life, relationships, repeat. Once drunk, go dancing. Stumble home with more singing and random pictures. Sleep in Al’s bed (which Shaun washed the sheets for before he left so I “wouldn’t feel weird”) and threaten to pee in the middle of the night to annoy her. (I would however never actually do this, that’d be gross, but annoying her is fun, also something I miss, I think bc I grew up w/o siblings).
Wake up. Get coffee. I’m now a huge fan of the coffee place down the street from her apartment. Talk about sex, life, relationships, repeat. See the cutest little boy, who’s barely learned to walk but is dressed cooler than most adults I know, complete with awesome shades and as much of a badass attitude as a 2yr old can have. His father must be gay. I love it. Eat al’s homemade biscuit experiment. Go to beach. Take random, hysterical “series pictures”. Walk up giant motherfucking hill, to bath house ruins and cool cave, and awesome view of the ocean. Random kid climbing around on the little rock cliffs, with his guitar, in a black trench coat. He looks like he should be shooting a music video. Talk about sex, life, relationships, repeat. Get cold and hungry. Walk through Golden Gate park at night. Go get wine and go back to Indian place. Proceed to get drunk. Talk about sex, life, relationships, repeat. Al continues her weekend long “this is why this city is so great and you’d love it here” pitch. Make up songs on drunk walk home. More random drunk series pictures. Talk about sex, life, relationships, repeat. Get map with directions from Al. Sleep. She goes to work. I sleep more. Shower. Wander around Castro and Mission (with the occasional “where’d you say this store was again? Is it on 16th street or on this other one over here?” calls to Al). Talk to big scary but very nice gay S&M man in gay S&M shop that happens to also randomly sell really cool messenger bags hanging in the window (next to the display of cock rings). But the bag I like is two inches to small to fit my Mac so I don’t buy it, but am very (immaturely) amused at the fact that the nice big scary S&M man continently has a tape measurer behind the counter.
Dinner with Al, drunk once again. Talk about sex, life, relationships, repeat. Sad I’m leaving tomorrow. Try to talk each other into moving to our respective cities. Sleep.
Breakfast with Al. Coffee by myself in Union Square. Back to Al’s office to get my stuff, say goodbye, go back to airport.
Once home, feel incredibly pensive, and overwhelmed with “real life”, and work and feeling burnt out and responsibility and the gap between my dreams and reality and how to make it smaller.
Still trying to figure out how to shake the feeling.
