10:00 AM: Unaccounted for

Once you get it, man, make sure you keep gettin' it.

These are words, paraphrased by Chrisbrown. How we arrived at them I will vaguely allude to in a minute. I'm decently buzzd and trying to hold myself together in order to hit the proper keys. I'm kind of famous as a lightweight, this I cannot deny, (hell, catch me on the right night and I'll downright brag,) but right now I'm plugged into my tunes and ready to focus.

The upshot is, I'm at that point where I become verbose and ready to pull out the ten-dollar vocab words. Like grandiloquent. I'm ready to be grandiloquent.

At the foot of a very interesting week has come a most interesting day indeed. It started out the way any day might. I got up, I went for coffee, I returned some DVDs to Blockbuster for Eric, I played video games. It was a ridiculous, ordinary day.

Then after Eric got home we went grocery shopping. And when I say we went grocery shopping I mean it differently from ever before. Now that Eric's moving out, it's shopping for just me and Brandon and I have to come up ideas I can do quickly and easily without exerting the same kind of effort Eric would have to spare. Life is going to be different. It reminds me of that summer of 2004, when we first moved into this place and became responsible for our own meals for the first time. I'm already exhausted thinking about it, thinking back to that first night when we first started up the oven... that night doesn't even hold any significance, nothing interesting happened but damn if it doesn't seem relevant now.

So B. and I were navigating the currently re-organizing SuperStore while Eric was off on his own getting his own groceries. It was doubly weird in the half-reconfigured supermarket. Everything changing. Not in a "oh my God life is changing" 2004-2005 way, just in a "Fucking constant of life" 2008 way. If I were writing a screenplay and included that scene, it would be criticized for the overt and obvious parallels between me finding my way in life and the supermarket.

I'm all lost in the supermarket / I can no longer shop happily... a little Clash taking us up to 12:30...

The big story, though, happened afterward. I was due to hang out with Lauren Wing and Chrisbrown. Somehow, it got to be July and I hadn't seen Lauren since February, and she went to Europe so it got to be August and I hadn't seen her in six months. And CB is just a good guy to drink with. So the three of us ended up at CB's home pub, the Stout Monk, in the same complex as Dominion.

I left the house at 8:15 and walked for about 45 minutes. I think I had originally planned on taking my bike because apparently I figured getting soused well after dusk wasn't sufficient negation of motor skills. At any rate I ended up walking. CB met me at the foot of the parking lot on Neyagawa and we went over to the bar and got our drinks. The Jays game was on, they were up 13-0 (13-3 by game's end,) and we jawed a bit on baseball although frankly I haven't been following as closely as I'd like to.

Eventually Lauren showed up, looking like a more sophisticated, worldly young lady than I remember her being. Maybe it was the way she was doing her hair, who the fuck knows. We all had our pints and started talking.

We started by catching up a bit, of course, asking rudimentary Europe and getting a few decent anecdotes out of her. Fromt here we went into a conversation about school life until resting comfortably in full-blown nostalgia. CB and I reminisced about turning 20 (and I contrasted with what it felt like to turn 21) and we talked about how so many of the good times were in the past. A few of the dates that came up in specifics were the summer of 2005, New Year's 2006, and a few of the not-so-stellar times in between and thereafter. It's alwats awesome to hear how people remember things in comparison to my own (admittedly not-so-great) memory. Lauren remembered Thanksgiving 2006, for instance, as that night I spent a lot of time on Conorton's steps consoling her. CB remembered it as the night Conorton and Vanessa had a massive fight. I remembered it through my own lens. There were other reminiscences. Cary's 20th birthday came up, which is always a fun one to relive.

I'll say this, in recalling that night, and many others not unlike it: I never seduced anyone who wasn't looking to be seduced.

I'm still drunk enough to think that sentence made sense.

Well I don't know, it was a fun evening. We talked about all sorts of nonsense without ever getting too serious, over the course of two pints apiece. I had Keith's Red for once. We talked about how much better beer from a tap is compared to a bottle (CB says he's been spoiled; I could never see that happening to me, especially not with the price point.) Lauren took a cab home and CB and I walked to his house whereupon he sobered up and gave me a lift home. Along the way we talked about the difficulty of graffiti-style defecating (er, yep) and Half-Past Eight PM (not sure how smooth of a segue between the two.) The good old days indeed.

We shall have to recreate the evening in the near future before all parties concerned return to their places of schooling.

It's important to have friends you can talk with. Not just catch up, but have real conversations about things you really care about. I strive to do this with everyone I care about.

I'm sufficiently sobered up by the end of this entry, but I need a good lie-down so I'll end it here. Maybe there's more to say, but maybe it'll disappear.

Oh Scotto. What a poet you are.

Keep on rockin'
-SAW