Worst influence ever!

Last night, all I wanted to do was get some warm food in me and get to bed. At the last minute, Chinese class had been cancelled on account of Columbus Day, so there was nothing stopping me--except the fact that I'd promised a friend to go out with him for his birthday.

He'd been dithering about what to do and finally told me just to call him that evening. I put off doing so for two reasons: First, I wasn't really looking forward to it. Second, I'd forgotten to get him anything. So the evening began with a fruitless forty-five minutes prowling the local dollar stores looking for some sort of cheesy gag gift. Suddenly, it occurred to me what I should be getting him, but I only managed to get to the pot store right as it was closing.

When I called, I got voice mail, so I went home and collapsed. After nearly an hour, I figured I was off the hook and tramped over to Big Chicks for dollar burgers. Naturally, two minutes after I'd ordered them, the Scoutmaster called me from Bucks and asked if I'd join him. He began to tell me about the incredibly shitty day he'd had--being called in when he should've had the day off, the boss taking the whole office out for lunch except him--and my hopes of an earlier bedtime began to fade. I try to talk him into meeting me at a nearby restaurant; he says we can talk about that when I get there.

So five minutes after eating my food, I'm failing to hail a cab on the corner near my building. (Worth the wait, actually, for the cute Paki daddy I ended up with.) I found him knocking back the most grotesquely-named cocktail I've ever heard. Really. I knew even one drink would set back my bedtime and hour or more, so I demured as he and his buddies did shot after shot. He was so trashed he thought They Might Be Giants was Barry Manilow. NOT KIDDING! (My attempt to get another drunkard to confirm the name of the band ended up with a "Is that the name of the song or the band?" routine that the two Johns themselves would've smirked over.)

Thank goodness I ate before I came! My attempts to get him to pick a place to eat--any place--were getting nowhere. He wants to go over to Roscoes for a cabaret singer. (BTW, this is the point at which I ended up missing your call, grunter. Sorry about that.) What can I do? I resign myself to my evening--a little too noticeably, I'm afraid, because halfway into my third or fourth soda of the night, he begins bitching that I'm not drinking, not having fun, that I'm only there to babysit him.

That's how I agreed to the kamikaze.

The singer was excellent by the way. A big funny woman with fantastic presence and a great set of pipes. The culmination of her act was the Fish Trilogy, three songs from The Little Mermaid (with some altered lyrics--the "I Want" song becomes uncannily like Satan's). As much as I wanted to go, I had to stay to hear her sing Ursula's show-stopper. I thanked her warmly for doing so much to cheer my buddy up after such a crappy day. She sang a song in my honour and said that he'd told her he was really happy I'd come, making my grudgingness seem petty in retrospect.

At least I got to bed before midnight. And the Scoutmaster confessed to me on the way back that he'd been spending too much time in bars and not enough in the great outdoors, which allayed some of my concerns for him. I'll definitely seek out the cabaretiste some Wednesday night when she performs up at @tmosphere. Right now, I'm looking forward to nothing more wild than a bowl of warm soup and--for the first time in five days--hitting the sack at a reasonable hour. If I couldn't handle this in my 20s, I'm not about to start in my 30s.