paintedlines

Dripping with redundancy

My best friend - Tim - turns 23 on Sunday so we went out Friday to have some drinks and just hang. (Ironically I typically don't drink ... and we almost ended up at bingo. But me-thinks I'll be saving "the experience that is bingo" for another post.) So he picked me up and we rode back to his place, accompanied by the lovely shrieks of his soon-to-be useless breaks. While on the road, Ross calls and floats the possibility of detour into Oakland. Mulling the options, we err on the side of caution, and ride back out to my place to swap cars - to my car. Although its odd to call it that, since I'm still not exactly driving it yet. So for reasons that ill probably cover in the not too distant future, said vehicle - dubbed the "Mario Kart" by friends - will hence forth simply be: "the Kart" So once again on the road, yet another call: the Oakland breeze-through gets canceled and a 4th is added for drinks. A lot of time was spent on the road last night... car ... driving... pick up Ross... driving... arrival at Fridays! (Now, wasn't that a whole lot faster?) We get there with a 25 min wait, so we crowd into the bar area to be pended like cattle hoping that the coaster-pager-hockey puck thing they gave us will go off sooner than later. And yet somehow this is fun? When it finally buzzes and flashes like a little time bomb we come to find that we where marked for non-smoking. With two people who would rather died than not be able to burn some plant between their lips this simply wont do. Back we march to the pen. In the end we ended up one tier up from where we had been cloistered for an hour ... woo! Bring on the drinks ... and a small amount of food so the table doesn't look like a bunch-o-lushes 'n alkies. Tim's drink of choice is a location dependent variable. Long Island Iced Teas hit his tab. You have to love any place that serves an all alcohol mixed-drink in something that looks big enough to house a small family of tropical fish. As for Ross... well I know it was beer. It was in a pilsner glass after all. But the liquid contents looked like it was filtered through topsoil before pumped and capped in the keg. But to each his own and since I don't touch beer, eh, what the hell do I know. So I sat there with my usual - Sprite. Shane - the 4th - finally shows after we bugged the be-jesus outta him with text messages. Between the "Are you coming" txts - spelled in interesting ways, random animal sounds, and obscurely enough, one sent in the vernacular of Ms. Henrietta Pussycat, it was a wonder he actually showed up at all. And no one was even drunk at this point! It was actually good to see Shane again - I hadn't seen him in few years. Truth be told, I can't say I was ever really friends with him, more acquaintances. I had known him through Tim, and as it turns out, he and Ross had been friends in high-school years - same class. But its not like that really matters - time changes and so do people, or at least one hopes. Hell, less than a year ago I had only known Ross as someone I passed in the halls at TJ. Friendship is indeed a strange animal. I sorta have to wonder: is my small group of friends by choice or do I have the ones I do simply because they could survive no matter how bad a of metaphorical zoo-keeper I may be? Gee what a comforting thought.