al gore rhythms

It was quite a nice weekend down in the Cities. Had some beautiful experiences reconciling my internal metaphysics and epistemological frameworks. In English? A hard weekend of wine, dine and women.

I went to the pro-war rally/sign distribution out on Piedmont Avenue. Ends up it was just two guys passing out signs, but they had a fairly steady stream of sign-takers. As of Friday they had given away 6,000 signs total, and about 250 during their two hours in Duluth. I took pictures but they’re nothing special. Lots of American flags, lots of signs.

And say. Hot girls seem to be totally down with this pro-war thing. If you don’t make the switch for any other reason, at least spend some time blending in with us so you can sidle up to these ladies. They subscribe to a totally different aesthetic than the anti-war crowd. A lot less hair.

Went out to dinner with my folks at a leading Mexican restaurant. The waitress seemed to be digging on me pretty strong, so I dug back. Asked her out. Got her phone number. She got off work at 11:30 and we went to Perkins, as even down in the Cities there’s very little to do around midnight. I mean, you can try to get yourself kicked out of Wal-Mart, you can go to the laundromat, you can drive around aimlessly, or you can go to Perkins and wait for the drunks to stumble in.

Throughout our entire date it seemed she was convinced I was this high-rollin’ fothermucker in the lady business, a bold lad that plays the field and asks girls out on dates in front of his parents. History suggests otherwise, however, and even I was surprised at myself for my sudden uncharacteristic forwardness.

Saturday I met up with Dave and we hit the town, leaving McCoy’s, Micro Center, the King’s Wok and Cheapo in our wake. Dave got two Moog Cookbook CDs, and I got Save Ferris, Greazy Meal and the new Happy Apple. We eventually wrangled in my friend Dan and shot off to the Cabooze for some hot bluegrass action courtesy of Yonder Mountain String Band. The streets were packed, so we had to circle a few times to find a decent parking spot in a snowbank. We ran down the cold street, glancing in the windows of biker bars that were unsettlingly empty.

“Ya know, Dane,” said Dave, “I think all these people are here to see Yonder Mountain.”

“No, they can’t be,” I assured myself. “Don’t people know that bluegrass music sucks? I mean, seriously, it’s bluegrass. It’s folky. We listen to it. It’s not cool.”

The entrance was surrounded by people looking for extra tickets, as the show was SOLD OUT. Now, understand that we had the opportunity to get our tickets in advance; a mere $18 in advance. Why, with tickets at the door being $20, that would have been a $2 savings, right? Nay. Tacked onto that $18 was a $3 INCONVENIENCE CHARGE, so we actually would have paid more for advance tickets than door tickets. Of course, standing there in the cold, without coats, in front of a biker bar we couldn’t really spend $18 or $20 on anything but a kick to the throat…

But Goonies never say die, so we took our $60 in concert savings and invested in some stocks at the liquor store and went to Dave’s Japan House. We sat around and talked about nerdy things, and eventually the evening degenerated into the drunken-anime-watching of every single Golden Boy episode. Golden Boy is centered around this 25-year-old guy named Kintaro who rides his bicycle everywhere, working odd jobs part-time. The catch is that Kintaro is an artist, a misunderstood genius, a womanizer and a pr3v3rt. The catch is also that Golden Boy ended up with an obscenely large budget that allowed the producers to adequately animate the[ahem] objects central to the story.

What do I mean? Let’s just say that the animators watched a lot of videos on bounce algorithms to make the show accurate, and then twisted physics in a horribly alluring way. It was just about as gratuitous as fan-service can get.

It was great.