Reliving the Dream

I am serving up some tenderized, fully-aged horseflesh marinated in last month's alcohol and peppered with the bitterroot of lost youth. It goes well with a glass of whine vintaged from sour grapes.

So, last night me and the missus go out for drinks together for the first time since Clinton was staining dresses in the Oval Office. We've got two young children and all of our partying now involves cake and ice cream. But I turned 40 this week and to "celebrate" I'm going out to get hammered and wish I was dead. Tonight we gonna party like it's 1999.

This is a college town and there are enough bars here for every man, woman and child to get a drink simultaneously without waiting in line. It also means that bars open and sometimes close in a matter of weeks, depending on the whim of the student herd. Most of the places I used to know and drink in have since changed hands and I now have no clue what goes on where. After going to one of my old haunts and seeing a dear, even-older friend, my wife talks me into going to the 8E's bar around the corner. Now I fuckin' hated the 80's, pop culturally speaking, and I despise nearly all of the music that ever played on the mainstream airwaves from that era. But I guess the twenty-somethings of this generation like to romanticize the decade of their birth, just as mine did with the Sixties. Anyway, even though it is MY night out, I am a big hairy pussy and so I sit at the bar with my MILF and listen to shitty music and we comment on all the lame 80's movie posters that pass for ambience in this dump. After a few more drinks though I'm starting to loosen up a bit and me and milady are having a good time.

The place was practically empty when we got there, but it starts to fill up after about an hour. When the crowd starts rolling in, I begin to notice that 8E's is, apparently, code for G8E's. Nearly everyone but us breeders seems to be part of the G/L/T scene. Might have something to do with the F2M bartender that looks a lot like the comedian Jim Norton. Anyway, I'm cool with it 'cause I got no one to impress and the music has gotten alternative along with the crowd. And, inexplicably, they've got UFC on the big screen and Joe Rogan is congratulating the winners of the undercard bouts. "Strange," I think as I knock back more rum-and-cokes with the intermittent Sam Adams and I begin to feel it in my toes. A little later the deejay, looking like Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons, comes out and so do the dance fags like moths to a flame. Now the music really hits the skids and I don't know if it is all the booze or just the tunes that are making me want to puke. The lights are spinning and the moths are flaming. My wife is trying to get my drunk and way-too-white old ass to dance and that doesn't happen on a good day. I'm seriously stupored by this point and dancing is completely out of the question. But my most memorable mental snapshot of the place is of two hot lesbians under a life-sized cardboard cutout of Boba Fett engaging in some serious frottage to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" while Randy Couture is getting his face pounded into the mat by some huge fucking man-beast. What a surreal scene!