I Feel Big

It sure has been a while; look at the date on that last post, holy mackerel that was a long time ago, I’ve lost so much money since then. Financial crisis aside, everything’s been pretty awesome since last I graced this URL. I had been leaning in and looking forward to the entire month of October since, let’s say, Labor Day, and it didn’t disappoint.

I started out the month working, staying at one of the nicer hotels in Texas but was working to hard to really enjoy it, I didn’t even know they had a pool until one of the last days I was there. The work I was ding was really cool and bigger than most people work on in their entire career. I was almost completely in charge of the whole operation which was insured for around $150M. It was bases loaded, bottom of the ninth stuff and if I hadn’t performed it would’ve been a catastrophe. At one point after being up for almost 20 hours my boss told me to go back to hotel to sleep. Not two hours later I got a panicked phone call asking me what to do. It’s nice to feel wanted, but at that point I just wanted to sleep.

After three weeks of 12-20 hour days with only two days off I was badly in need of a vacation. Fortunately I had already planned one. I flew up to North Carolina to visit my brother on a Saturday evening and was picked up by my brother and his bride-to-be and driven directly to the bar. This same sports bar my brother has been frequenting since it opened ten years ago is the same bar I worked at the summer after my sophomore year of college. There’s a lot of turnover, so not all the staff knows him by name, but I’m pretty sure all of the regulars do. Anyways, we watched some college football and if I’m not mistaking it was game 1 (maybe 2 I forget) of the Sox vs. Rays series. My brother’s friends trickled in as the beer and other assorted booze trickled into our bloodstreams. We went downtown to a club that was mostly lame and then went to a nearby Mexican restaurant which is awesome and even more so at two in the morning. After everyone had retrieved their cars from various places around town, and those that weren’t allowed to spend Sunday further poisoning themselves had been corralled, we went back to the bar (same one, you can walk there from my brother’s place.) Sunday Funday as it’s called started with a few rounds of beers, entertained by NFL’s finest galoots, and was rolling along rather smoothly until my brother ordered what was to be first of numerous rounds of Jaegerbombs. Though I doubt Jaegerbombs were what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they penned the Declaration of Independence, I’m sure that’s only because Redbull hadn’t been invented yet. Needless to say it’s a slippery slope when you’ve been drinking beer all day. Around the time the afternoon games ended, everything gets really fuzzy around the edges, but the other day when I was doing laundry I found a couple ATM slips for withdrawals that night at a place called “Raleigh Restaurant Concepts,” which I can assure you is not a restaurant, one at 10:30pm and one at 1:30am.

Monday we packed the cars and drove to the beach. We spent the next few days lounging in a huge mansion on one of North Carolina’s lesser known barrier islands, drinking beer, fishing, and jumping back and forth between the hot tub and the swimming pool. The hot tub was a steamy 104 F and the swimming pool was whatever temperature makes the mountains turn blue on the Coors Light bottle. Thursday we drove back to Raleigh to pick up the Tuxedos and for tailgating and to watch the first half of the NC State vs. Florida State slugfest, after which we went back to tailgating. I convinced two different people to hit my brother in the face with a pie. His retaliation was to peg me snowball style with a handful of mashed potatoes.

My one job for Friday was to get my brother, the groom, back to the beach in time for lunch with the grandparents and the wedding rehearsal. Lunch was fun, I sat with the bridesmaids, the brides aunt and uncle, and the other best man. I don’t think there were too many jokes made at our expense, as we had been up late the previous night celebrating a game no one knew who won. The rehersal itself was a breeze, the main topic of conversation being how much or how little everybody wanted to get to the party that would soon be taking place at the aforementioned mansion.

At the party, I was tapped to play bartender, which in retrospect was probably a bad choice. It was only after going through two handles of vodka that I noticed that it was 100 proof. In attendance was a good portion of my father’s side of the family, and two of my mother’s brothers. Additionally, there was a large assortment of my brother’s knucklehead friends, one I’ve known my whole life, and some of whom I met for the first time when I was like fourteen. For the actual wedding a few of his highschool buddies showed up, including one whom we went to my first Phish concert with Thanksgiving 1995, I was 12.

The wedding itself was perfect in every way, with the notable exception of the minister butchering our last name, but he’s not the first and once out of the like ten times he had to say it isn’t bad. My virtuosic cousins provided the ceremonies music and my mom sang a hymn that had so many amens at the end I wondered if it had ended and my mom was trying to delay the nuptials as long as she could. Both the ceremony and the reception were at the Aquarium, so after the kissing of the bride and recessionaling we made our way to the shark tank for pictures. Lighting the pictures in fornt of the shark tank turned out to be more difficult then the photogs had thought and it was quite a process to get everything taken care of, but we had people bringing us little delights like salami wrapped cream cheese, and mini Cuban sandwiches and cold Miller Lites and stuff like that. Dinner was equally delightful, with seared Ahi and the top your own mashed potato sundae bar being the star attractions.

After dinner it was time for the couples first dances, my brother and sister-in-law danced to the Aleisha Keys song about how it will only get better, the bride danced with her father to a slow country song about fathers and daughters, and my brother danced with my mom to Paul Simon’s American Tune and my eyes welled for maybe the third time of the evening.

Then came the much hyped toasts. I should’ve worked a little harder on mine. Had I put a little more effort into it, I would’ve noticed my plan involved an f-bomb, which f-bomb I will regret until I die. I also boneheadedly missed a perfect opportunity to score points with in-laws. The bride’s father and consequently a portion of the bride-side guests were Marines, and one of my standard toasts is to “our Brothers and Sisters overseas.” I’m an idiot, oh well, live and learn.

After the wedding it was back to reality for yours truly, but October was only part of the way done. I came back to New Orleans and one of my best friends was visiting, that weekend was Voodoo fest, where we saw Lil Wayne(!!!) and Mars Volta who if you’re not familiar is basically a Mexican Led Zepplin, and some others. The weekend after that was Halloween, which is going to require its own post. The next week, I voted for the first time and we elected the first non-white-male president in the 232 years of our United States. It’s been quite a ride.