Girth, wind and fire On the buzzes
Saturday morning hurt. I woke up before 8am and really in quite significant amounts of pain. I'm pretty sure that barely eating makes hangovers unnecessarily bad, but my pain is eased somewhat by getting loads of lovely attention from Jesus. Until she punches me, that is. I have a chat with Helen but then go back to sleep because ouch.
When I wake again, the hangover has only slightly dissipated. Russell emerges too and feels similarly shit. I write Friday up while he performs a whole series of chores all to do with brewing, which doesn't seem like the most attractive activity in this state. There's basically no food in the house, only ingredients for his beers and wines so breakfast is a small plate of cocoa nibs doused in whisky, and a teaspoon of the water he's been boiling chillis in. These are not the heuvos rancheros I was hoping for.
At 1125 it's 24hrs until my next flight, so I fire up the American Airlines app and check-in. Except I can't check-in because it throws a dialog box at me which says Agent Takeover required and oo-eck, I have to go speak to someone at the airport. That seems weird. I wonder what's going on? A flyertalk search yields pretty much fuck all results and some threads about being unable to check-in online make it sound like I've just been selected for a random manual check. I guess I'll see in the morning.
By the time I'm done blogging, and he's got some real work done too, I complain about food and we finally go outside. It's like 2pm or something stupid. There's no day being seized here. Immediately outside the flat we run into his neighbour Mary, who might join us for beer later and totally approves of Russell's plan to take me to Cancun for burritos.
10 minutes or so later we've been seated and handed menus at a place called Tacolicious, beause Russell's an idiot. Somehow he's managed to take me to the only Mexican food outlet in the Mission which doesn't fucking serve burritos! This totally sucks, though I don't complain much because all Mexican food is nice and anyway we're here now, grumble grumble. He gets a salad, I get a plate of 4 tacos: cod, carnitas, Oaxaca cheese, and chorizo. They are all bloody lovely., especially with the really hot sauce. He tries to eat his salad with the tossing cutlery it came with and the giant fork is hilarious, but regrettably I bring his attention to the real cutlery and the fun ends. Oh, we also have a beer.
Given how much we overdid it on Friday, and the fact I have to be up early for that there agent takeover on Sunday morning, we both agree that today should not be a big session and we should probably finish drinking by about 8pm regardless. So, we jump in an uber to Haight and meet some friends of his in a dive bar called the Gold Cane cocktail lounge. Jess and ... the bloke whose name I've forgotten already, d'oh ... are seated at the bar, along with their tiny cute dog Ramona. I get a California lager and explain, yet again, my gamification of drinking and how unnecessary it is.
Instantly some more friends arrive and we're going outside to find a table for 8. Julian introduces himself to me with a compliment about my Brutal Truth t-shirt. At this point I realise all my foreign travels so far this year have been punctuated by my wearing of a grindcore band t-shirt from the country in question, which seems like the kind of bizarrely specific match of destination and musical attire I should attempt to continue throughout the year.
So now there's loads of us. Me, Russell, Jess and her fella (this is really quite embarrassing), Julian and Katy and then Greg and Mary, the neighbour we briefly met when leaving the flat. Conversation flows and being the new foreigner in town I'm asked all the usual questions, and accused of being a Kiwi because apparently that's what my accent is. What? Katy expresses her dismay at the Scottish accents on the Great British Bake Off and insists I admit once and for all that Mary Berry isn't a real person. I'm not used to having to justify the real life existence of TV cooks so much.
There's also marijuana lip balm, two strengths. Can also be used topically wherever there's pain. Katy has made it and is doing market research, and everyone except me takes some. Jess's shoulder feels better, Russell puts some on his temples and his hangover instantly goes. Mary actually uses it as lip balm and it has a similar effect on her. These guys are telling me they are sceptical because they're terrible pot smokers but the overwhelming consensus is that this stuff is completely wonderful. The buzz comes very quickly, is gently, and dissipates slowly. Throughout our whole time there everyone keeps rubbing into various parts of their body. Seems like Katy is onto a winner here.
Some random guy keeps wandering around the whole outside area talking to everyone whether they want him to or not. His interaction with me is to bump my elbow and say "well let's say they're $5 a piece" and points to some stuff he's drawn on small bits of paper. Yes, let's say that. Also I'm told that Metallica are playing tonight. What!? Metallica in San Francisco? How the fuck did I miss that?
The sun goes down and people start asking me if I'm cold, because of the shorts and t-shirt thing. And then, it's time to leave. Julian and Katy are heading elsewhere but the other 6 of us all actually live on the same street and so we share an UberXL ride at 3x surge pricing. Traffic is mental and the driver is a miserable bastard who doesn't seem to like compliments about his music or being asked if he's a Russian.
The plan now is that Greg and Mary will come up to Russell's flat where the four of us are going to drink and play a video game projected onto the wall at ludicrous size. I'm promised this game will give me epilepsy. First we head to the local off licence and I purchase 3 giant beer bottles. The cats are pleased to see us all and whoa, fucking hell, that really is a ludicrous projection. Greg points out how impressed he is that Russell's toilet is square.
Another mutual friend of everyone else, Anna, turns up and that means there's 5 of us to play a 4-player game. Russell sits out of the first round and battle commences. Buzz is a PS3 TV quiz show game hosted by a cartoon version of Guy Smiley, voiced by Jason Donovan, and it's all so fucked up. I pick my character as Pelvis, a fat Elvis lookalike. I do pretty well in the first game, I think I come second.
In the second game things really kick off. Perhaps it's the 10% imperial stout I was drinking along with it - oh wait, there's a side track to go down here. When I checked in this beer on Untappd, it correctly told me it was my 50th beer of the year and so awarded me a badge. That would be fine except the accompanying text told me I'd drunk more than 50 beers. No, I haven't! I've drunk exactly 50! Grr!
Anyway. Round 2 of Buzz and my horrible competitive reaction kicks in. I'd explained at length on Friday night that I don't like playing competitive games because I'm a terrible loser and a terrible winner. I don't like my happiness being predicated on someone else losing, and I don't like feeling crap because others are measurably better than me. So generally I just like to play games or do things which are solo, and I only compare my score against my own (table tennis is an outlier here).
So, thanks for dropping me into a competitive game amongst 3 strangers, Russell. I'm in the lead and being obnoxious about it until the round where the first correct answer grants the player the capability to steal points from another player of their choice, and everyone steals them from me and I end up not last but almost. Grr. Game 3 starts with both Mary and Greg playing as characters called Mary, which is really fucking confusing, and I begin terribly, remaining in last place for the first 3 rounds. But the loser is allowed to choose the subject matter and the game has a British slant, so when I choose sports I clean up and the same happens for 90s music. Suddenly I'm in the lead, and I don't let it go. FUCK YEAH.
Anna leaves; Mary and Greg want to eat, and so do I. As the guest I'm allowed to choose cuisine, and to the surprise of no-one and delight of everyone I say I want a burrito. The others are all, like, yo tambien, so attempt number two at visiting Cancun kicks off. At the first junction Russell wants to go a different way to Mary and Greg and I refuse to let him fail to take me to the right place for a second time, so Mary takes charge. Cancun is fucking rammed, which is a great sign. Russell is massively tempted to break his diet because surely just one massive burrito can't hurt, can it? But I talk him down from the brink.
Greg and I stay in the queue while Mary and Russ fetch us una mesa por cuatro. There are burritos, there are super burritos, and there's THE BIG ONE. I of course go for the latter and holy frijoles they're not lying. This burrito is so big they don't even wrap it, you get it on a plate and need a knife and fork. It's oh my fucking God, increíble y maravillosa y agradable y grande. Turns out using Memrise to learn Spanish is very useful for helping me describe burritos.
Mary carries around a bottle of hot habanero sauce in her handbag, because of course she does, and that makes the awesome burrito even more awesome. Conversation somehow gets round to the subject of farting in bed. I'm sure it was me that instigated it but I don't actually remember why or how. But anyway, now some strangers know (my claim) that my farts are really loud, but don't smell. The plan now is to head back to the flat either for more Buzz, or to watch a movie, but once we get back Greg's actually feeling pretty ill, so he and Mary disappear, after I donate her my BART $20 card because y'know what, on Super Bowl day the BART is gonna be horrible and why don't I just get a cab?
I get back on the beer I'd half drunk before we went out and me and Rusty play a two player game of Buzz. By now it's, I dunno, 11pm? That whole plan to stop drinking at 8pm didn't seem to work too well. Apparently I'm tired though, because I keep falling asleep during the game for 5 or 6 seconds at a time, ensuring that it's completely impossible for me to win. This is stupid. I try again, and the same thing happens. I think perhaps my body was telling me somethng, so the night comes to an end. I make the rare sensible move of loading up on water before bed and leave a full glass next to me for the night too. Tomorrow's gonna be a long day and I could really do without a hangover.
Addendum: the last thing I wrote in my pad about yesterday is "piss talk". Why did I write "piss talk"?