The bartender had not expected the words to come out of my mouth, and he struggled to refrain from looking over at me as I sat there on my bar stool, friends on either side.   The gang laughed.  Not necessarily at me, but rather, at the unexpectedness of the statement.

“Sometimes when I’m hungover, I like to go antiquing,”  I had confessed.

It was a true statement.  I’m not ashamed.  I do, indeed, enjoy wandering through the quiet halls of an antique shop, browsing the dusty bric-a-brac as the prior night’s leftover alcohol crawls out through my pores.  It’s a wonderful bittersweet feeling to stumble upon a certain useless artifact that brings sudden pangs of nostalgia to the forefront of my currently over-sensitive consciousness.  Or to spot a piece of old unwanted retro furniture that induces that momentary brilliant epiphany of “Hey, maybe I could turn my empty guest room into an old 50s diner” or a tiki hut, or an old-time cinema, or a run-down side-of-the-highway motel room complete with creepy faded brown floral paintings and suspicious stains on the comforter.  There’s something about seeing all that old shit scattered about a room when your hangover has put your nerves on high alert and set your emotions to hyper-sensitive.  When the site of a battered alarm clock can make you pine for those innocent middle school days, or a box of cassette tapes invites you to revisit the simple memories of family car trips.  Or that creepy mannequin lurking in your peripheral stirs up another one those “Wouldn’t it be terrifying if…” inspirations.

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Hey gang, what’s the haps?  How’s 2010 treating you so far?  Are you as excited as I am that we’re now only 102 years away from year 2112?   That’s right, only 102 short years until we can finally toss out all those tired old New Years Party songs and ring in the new year with “The Priests of Syrinx.”   I can barely contain my excitement.   Other than that, I haven’t had time to write any posts as I’ve been furiously scribbling my memoirs for my new book, “Bones: Going Rogue: An American Life by Sarah Palin.”   I think the title has a certain ring to it.   Then again, having two colons in the title might be a bit awkward.   Maybe I’ll switch it around a bit.    Maybe “Going Rogue:  An American Life by Sarah Palin by Bones”.   Hmm, they’re both pretty strong titles.   But I’m still open for ideas – please let me know if you have any suggestions.

What else?  Oh yeah, I just cracked open my latest homebrew.   And I’m very pleased to say that it rules!  It was my seventh and last batch of 2009, and the best one so far.  Awesome.  Ladies and Gents, please welcome  The Kasinka Russian Imperial Stout.

Kasinka Russian Imperial Stout

Yesterday I started a new batch – a Nut Brown Ale made from ingredients that my friends Jaguar and Jamie gave me for Christmas.   Next weekend I’ll be transferring it to the secondary fermenter and tossing in a bunch of Georgia Pecans.   Delicious.

Oh, good news – my brother just started a new blog.  It’s awesome.  We used to write on the same blog a couple years ago, and I’m really excited that he’s picked up the pen again, cause the dude can write a hilarious damn story!  Check out Stuck Behind A Mini Van - you’ll be stoked!

Well, that’s it for me tonight.   Remember the tough girl from Facts of Life?  What was her name?  Joe, I think?  She was pretty cool.

Snakes,

Bones

It was a beautiful thing, this beer store.

Rows upon rows of bottles.  Trappists, Lambics, Stouts, Pales, and any assortment of high gravity craft brews.  In my hand I clenched  a bottle.  The label read Spaten.  I lifted it to my face to get a closer look and noticed an odd logo perched towards the top.  Schlitz, it read.

Eh?  That’s confusing.

No matter.  I wasn’t in the mood for a Spaten anyway, not with this palace of pleasures that awaited me.  I placed the bottle on the rack and headed down the aisle, following the sparkles of light that bounced and glistened off the glass and led me further and further in.

Suddenly the bottles began to rattle and bounce off each other, as a horrid screaming noise pierced the paradise.  And I watched in horror as the beer store began to engulf itself, pulling its reality inward, imploding, until it was gone.  And I was left floating within a deep black void.

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

And then I was awake.
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Well, I’ve finally reached the tail-end of a nasty-ass work bender, and similar to the software project I found myself engulfed in at the close of 2008, this one was a doooozie, my friends.  An intense month of unrelenting stress and long days and nights in the office,  weekends in front of the computer,  mornings of waking up with that familiar sense of dread and rolling out of bed to immediately check the Blackberry and learn what new frustrations awaited, sitting in my car in the office parking garage thinking, “Man, I’m not in the mood for another day of this,” saying “fuck” way too often and way too loudly in front of coworkers…

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We sat in the waiting room, basking in our joyous mood after having just received the “It’s a Boy!!” text from my little brother in the delivery room down the hall, announcing the entrance of his and Jenn’s new son into the world.  We were now waiting for the “all clear” sign that we could get up from our seats, throw away our soggy McDonald’s cups, and go meet the little feller.  To make the time go by faster, Jamie offered up a topic of conversation.

“What do you think little Cameron is going to be when he grows up?”

The gang threw out a few suggestions.

He’ll do something with computers…

He’ll be a podiatrist…

We paused.  A podiatrist?  An oddly exacting profession to toss out there.   Maybe not the first thing one might come up with when thinking about a 10 minute-old boy, but yet, who knows, right?

Half-sitting, half-lying in my seat, I offered up my opinion.

“He’ll drive a Ronthanton.”

The gang turned to look at the guy who suggested something even more random than “Podiatrist.”  So random, in fact, that the term didn’t actually exist.

“A Ronthanton,”  I repeated.   “A flying machine.”

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I’m sitting at a bar with a buddy and his girlfriend, a Bic lighter in my hand.   My buddy motions to the patrons sitting to my left and says, “Dude, show them a magic trick.”

I turn to the girl on the stool next to me and tap her on the shoulder.

“Excuse me.  I’d like to show you an illusion,”  I say, as I position the lighter in one hand and prepare to deftly make it disappear with a slight pass of the other hand.

She looks over at me, then at the lighter, and responds.

“Bones?”

It seems that the legend is growing.

. . .
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This week I made an important discovery.  A discovery of a wonderful something which should not have remained hidden from me for as long as it did.   But nevertheless, I have discovered it.  And it’s a life-changer for your old friend, Bones.

Going forward, should you need to find me, you need not look much further than right outside my neighborhood.  At Cafe Instanbul, where I’ll be.  My new hangout.

Every month or so, my old pal Dirty D. and I will meet up at Java Monkey, a wonderful coffee shop in Decatur, to discuss our respective software careers, our takes on the current state of politics, and mystic physics.  This week we decided to shake things up a bit and try something different.  We decided to meet at Cafe Istanbul, a Mediterranean restaurant located in a small, unassuming strip mall a couple miles up from downtown Decatur, and a short walk from my neighborhood.  Cafe Instanbul has become quite the popular destination for folks looking to enjoy a night of dining on fine turkish cuisine, watching belly dancers do their sexy thang, and smoking flavored tobacco from hookahs.   Dirty D. wanted to check the place out because he’s an aficionado of international menus and because he’d never smoked a hookah.  Me, I had my own reasons for wanting to give the place a visit – specifically,  that big yellow sign that the owners had recently hung from the roof that proudly proclaimed, “NOW SERVING FULL BAR.”
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Hi gang, how are you?  I’m a bit tired.  Early day at the office.  We had a code deployment scheduled for 7am this morning, and for me, like a lot of folks in software development, this was about two and a half hours earlier than my usual work day begins.  When we have these early conference calls, most of the team members roll out of bed, turn on their laptops, and call into the bridge.  You can hear people yawning, sipping coffee, babies crying in the background.   But for me, a creature of the most neurotic of habits, this meant that I had to wake up at 4:45am so I could engage in my normal daily ritual of make coffee, shower, fill up cup of coffee,  peruse my daily news sites, fill up cup of coffee, finish getting ready,  fill up to-go cup of coffee, head to the office.  I explained to my co-workers that these abnormally early work days don’t mean that my schedule is allowed to change in any way . Everything just shifts forward two and half hours.   So now I’m kind of tired.
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I was chatting with some friends at work about business ideas and past  jobs and whatnot, when I sighed, “Ahh, but nothing will compare to my former job of selling snow cones.”

The group turned to look at me.

“Snow cones?”

Maybe it was the particularly frustrating past couple of weeks in the office, or maybe I’m just a moron, but the nostalgia in my voice was unmistakable.  I wasn’t goofing around.  I really missed that job.

“Yeah man, snow cones.  I sat in this tiny dumb wooden shed – a box, really – at the end of a shopping mall parking lot.  Alone, reading books, all day long.  Every now and then a car would pull up to the window, I’d stand up, hand them a snow cone, take their cash, and then sit back down to my book.   It was the best job I’ve ever had.”
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Golden John reached over and grabbed the three sheets of printer paper off of my coffee table, briefly scanned through the lines and lines of printed text, and then began to read aloud.

“A guy walks into a bar with a set of jumper cables.  The bartender says, ‘You can come in, but don’t start anything!’”

Panther and Jamie snickered.  And then Panther asked, “Is that really a bunch of pages of ‘Guy walks into a bar’ jokes?”

Golden John replied calmly in a tone of mock nonchalance, as if it was the most normal thing in the world.  “Yep, it was right here on Bones’s coffee table, next to the whoopie cushion and the ‘Meditating with Mandalas’ book.”

Panther and Jamie shrugged and then went back to their previous conversation.   No one gave it much of a thought, presumably because they weren’t terribly surprised to discover that their weird buddy had a stack of “Guy Walks Into a Bar” jokes, a whoopie cushion, and a “Meditating with Mendalas” book on his coffee table, much in the same way a normal person might keep a book of landscape photography or a basket of remote controls.  Perhaps a bowl of decorative shells.  No one showed any particular surprise at my chosen selection of coffee table decor.  But I felt a bit of happiness about the whole thing – the way Golden John noticed the absurd trio of items and called me out on it.
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