I love this movie. I saw it in the theater with my father. Two weeks later I dragged him to
Mean Girls. 2004 was a magical spring. That poor man.
Yes, 30 was looming, but first I had some shenanigans as a 29-year-old to endure!
My timeline is going to get messed up because I am now 30 and my memory is fading, but I believe this episode starts at
UpDown, the new video arcade in Minneapolis. We had heard about it and thought it sounded fun. I had decided that because I wanted to look and feel best during the biggest show of my career, that I was going to be sober between Pride and the show. It would just be two and a half weeks and I could do it.
I met Steve at UpDown, and Joey and Charlie soon followed. It is really fun! My only recommendation or complaint would be that you should definitely pay cash or close your tab right away, because when they take your card you have to literally be like a private investigator to track down your bartender. We kept confusing this poor girl with another girl who worked there and it was kind of annoying. Other than that, it was a hell of a time. Joey is obsessed with MarioKart but I can't play it to save my life, so I suggested games from my youth like Tetris and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
"You guys can name all the ninja turtles, right?" I asked my posse.
They looked at me blankly. Good God. Was this an age thing? I had flashbacks to daycare when we would role play Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but there were too many boys to claim the roles of the turtles, Shredder, and Splinter, and we only had one girl who always got to be April O'Neill, so I always had to be April's loser friend Irma.
 |
| Me on a Saturday night. |
"Oh my God," I sputtered. "I'll give you a hint. They were all named after artists."
"Leonardo DiCaprio," Joey guessed.
"Oh, wait, I know!" Steve cried. "Georgia O'Keefe!"
Then we played a zombie game where you had to go through this big mansion and there were so many zombies. Steve was almost bored playing it but I still gave him all my coins because I wanted to see him beat the big giant scary butterfly monster thing.
After our excursion at the arcade, we decided to have happy hour at moto-I, where I have never been! This was close to Joey's new apartment.
Oh my god, I forgot to tell you. Joey is MOVING. Why is this show even called
Loring Park (Adjacent) anymore? Originally he was going to move to St. Louis Park, and I handed him a butcher knife from the kitchen drawer and told him to just finish me already. Uptown isn't necessarily far from Stevens Square, but the era of me walking to his place or crashing at his place after The Saloon would now be over, and I had to mourn it as yet another example that this, the year of 30, was going to bring changes.
"It's not like he's moving back to Wisconsin!" my mother told me when I was freaking out about it.
My friend Jack was also pragmatic. "It is the natural evolution of a gay man in Minneapolis," he said. "First a gay man moves downtown and gets all the clubbing out of his system. Then they move to uptown. Then they move to St. Louis Park. Then they move far away to the suburbs and are never seen again."
I had images of Joey inviting me via snail mail to his birthday barbecue in Plymouth and shuddered at the thought. My poor baby!
Anyway, we were up at moto-I at the rooftop, and I declared that I was not drinking for a week so I would have a tonic water please, while the boys enjoyed adult beverages. The food was delicious. Charlie had to go back to his home in St. Paul (he's close St. Paul, though, like by UST), and the three of us went back to the house to watch the Beyonce visual album
Lemonade. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the remote after moving back to the house, so we couldn't fast-forward anything and and to watch it straight through.
"I just don't get this," Joey said about every video.
"I want to get laid," said Steve after every video.
"You boys are stressing me out!" I cried. "I need a drink!" Steve and Joey looked at each other like children when Mommy is off her medicine. And thus ended my flirtation with sobriety. I felt bad about myself for drinking again and then drank more to feel less bad about myself. I had only been holding myself accountable -- I didn't pledge to anybody else that I would do this sober kick, and the only person I was letting down was myself (and maybe my mother) -- but it still felt like an internal failure on my part.
