I’m just going to write everything backwards because my life is a fucking mess anyway. This all happened prior to my last post, so mid-August, but I think I just learned WordPress uses the time stamp of when the draft was written, not when the post was published, so who the hell knows when it will say this was posted.
My cousins came down from Toronto for a wedding, not a wedding on “my” side, although I’m sure I would have loved to attend because they’re Guyanese and everything I’ve heard indicates the Guyanese party game is on point.
They were nice enough to bring a bunch of my grandfather’s tools, and my grandma’s cooking books, mementos basically as a bunch of my family went to clean out their house and get it ready for sale. My grandpa’s tools was more of a practical thing, he amassed quite the collection and we have some belt sanding to do. As I suspected, I have no idea how the fuck anyone in my immediate family is going to physically handle this belt sander, my grandpa was not a large man, but apparently he did not fuck around. My grandma’s cookbooks are amazing. We got a reproduction copy of one last year when we thought they’d all been lost, with this amazing (in theory) recipe for canning moose. There are some real gems in there. Some because of their super 70s or super Newfoundland content, others for incredibly geographically specific or WTF value like one on indigenous plants.
The best part was they brought the coffee table from Nanny & Poppy’s living room, a true “mid-century” splayed leg, two level, press board lacquered in fake wood kind of thing, that when flipped over reveals a bulls-eye someone had drawn on the underside for use as target practice.
We went downtown to see my Mom’s friend who was staying at this amazing hotel called The Donovan. It had the most futuristic shower that I did not use. We brought her a Welcome 2 Amurica bag that was filled with Old Bay seasoned cheese balls and American flag beer cozies. When the ungodly torrents of rain stopped, we wandered around and went to a bar/restaurant called The Drafting Table that had duck grilled cheeses and “poutine” with sausage gravy that did not taste as bad as it looked but was still not fucking poutine.
We walked around U Street at night, God, U Street is the shit now. I remember going to see The Blood Brothers at The Black Cat in high school, and our friend’s Dad dropped us off and stayed in the area the entire time because we were not allowed to walk around there alone. Now they have a Room & Board. What a 180. When we went to see Chris Hardwick at 9:30 Club, I couldn’t even figure out where I was. All these contemporary faux loft-y condos? That cool Satellite (?) bar on the back? WTF! I’d live there. If I was going to live in D.C. that would be at the top of my list. I’m not naive enough to think with all this “gentrification” there isn’t some seriously racist and classist politics at bay, but superficially, damn does it ever seem fun down there.
We went back to the hotel and on the way back we stopped at a liquor store that had individual glasses of Moet in the window. They said they were “display only.” What kind of cold hearted bastard does this to someone? Shame! Shame! Shame!
I got a Sapporo tall can instead. What? I don’t know. I’m not really okay with drinking in front of my family. It was good though. This is going to sound like the ultimate Dad thing, but it was the real sturdy metal can (redundant?) Very satisfying. I can only fine the little normal cans around here.
Proceded to stay up until 2AM talking to my Mom and sister while her friend slept. We are great guests. My Mom snored so fucking loud I did not sleep the entire night on my air mattress, that was rapidly deflating. It was one of those bed height air mattresses, so when it started sagging, the differential between my head & feet and ass-zone was multiple feet. I slept in a v-shape. By morning my head area had also sagged, so my body was at a maybe 35-degree angle, with my feet in the air and my head on the ground, in the saddest, vinyl clammiest, sleep deprived, nauseaus, dizzy, weird hotel specific damp coldest version of Where Is My Mind! available. Then I drank a room temperature Red Bull. Great decision making!
Walked around some more, went to some weird empty bar that was called… World of Beer? I don’t know how old people constantly get tricked by dive bars that serve food, but this was one of those instances. Like, you know how some bars are BARS and they just happen to have food for LEGAL/EXTRA INCOME REASONS and you don’t go to these bars for food specifically because it’s a BAR and also because you put a Steigl banner in the window it doesn’t make you INTERNATIONAL. YES YOU KNOW THIS BECAUSE EVERYONE KNOWS THIS. Yeah, this was not computing. My Mom’s looking at THE BAR MENU IN THE WINDOW ‘this doesn’t sound very international’ IT’S NOT INTERNATIONAL THEY JUST HAVE A BUNCH OF BEER SIGNS IN THE WINDOW BECAUSE IT’S A BAR. Our campus bar was literally draped in flags. They had irish car bombs and spicy sweet potato fries. That was as “international” as it got.
It actually wasn’t bad, but it was 1. cavernous 2. very dark (already covered by cavernous?) 3. incredibly, incredibly, awkwardly empty.
They had the best root beer float ever though. They used Dominion root beer, but the ice cream is going to plague me until the end of time. I know they weren’t handchurning their ice cream in the kitchen that passed of a chicken nugget as a “chicken fritter,” so it had to be store bought, but where!?
I will say this, as we were leaving, I got struck with horrible diarrhea that I will blame on the duck grilled cheese but was probably just my own ecosystem turning on me violently. The fact this place was empty put me about 40000km from another human as I contemplated how God seriously fucking hates me and Jesus Christ I was just trying to welcome our oldest family friend into the neighborhood and all I got was the worst sleep of my life and no individual cup of Moet and fuck why did I eat a duck grilled cheese at a restaurant I had never been to and FUCK THIS IS WHY I CAN’T TAKE RISKS AND I LIVE A SHELTERED SAD LIFE THAT IS LACKING IN SO MANY RESPECTS BECAUSE I CAN’T EVEN EAT A DUCK GRILLED CHEESE WITHOUT NEARLY SHITTING MY PANTS AND FUCK IT I’M GOING TO SEE IF THERE ARE ANY POKEMON IN HERE.
There were. Not only that, the cave reception was so bad the GPS kept hurling my avatar across D.C. as I racked up spins from a thousand random PokeStops.
I will accept this as divine intervention.
We saw my Mom’s friends new place and it is amaaaazing and her realtor randomly also went to U of T and I continued to not shit myself which I will also accept as divine intervention.