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SURE, I’LL TAKE A BREATHALYZER.

Days 3 and 4, which were Friday the 3rd and Saturday the 4th, connect for this story because they were pretty much the same day, since I never did go to sleep.  Zeno came over to the house and he and I went to the store for supplies.  The plan was that while there was a boat cruise scheduled for that evening, we were going to bail on that since we were pretty much broke and didn’t feel like taking part in that particular activity.  So we went to the store and good food for the day to cook at home and we stocked up on that and Bombay Sapphire gin.  We both felt like we’d already had too much beer in the previous two days so we switched it up.  Gin/tonics on a warm summer day is always nice, and we were going to go see the fireworks that evening in a parking lot downtown, so were in that mood.  FYI: Juneau has their fireworks display at midnight the night of the 3rd because you have to wait forever for it to get dark and if they did it on the 4th, they’d actually be doing it on the 5th.  That’s my theory anyway.

When Aaron picked us up, we were already getting into the gin and by the time we got to our destination (with a pit stop at Zeno’s so he could freshen up) it was almost gone, so we headed to the liquor store for more.  Juneau’s 4th of July scene is pretty crazy and so traffic and BBQs and just the general atmosphere were in full-effect.  So what to do after you’ve stocked up on gin and beer and gotten safely back to the car, with a few hours to go before the fireworks show?  Put it in the trunk and head to the bar!  So we did!

Sidenote:  Interspersed throughout the entire weekend are a number of encounters with classmates with the inevitable exchanges of what you’ve been up to and how drunk you may have gotten at this or that function, and when we got to the bar in question, there was already a large group of our fellow ’89ers there, eating and drinking.

As soon as Zeno and I pulled up to the bar to order our drinks, he turned to his right and immediately became engrossed in a conversation about soccer (FUTBOL!!!) with some English chaps.  Now, Zeno’s not unintelligent, but let’s just say that “details” about “stuff n things” aren’t his strong suit.  Case in point, we had been talking about movies with my mom earlier in the day, and after talking about Burn After Reading for a while, Zeno said “Who directed that, was it the Scorsese brothers?”  There are enough Zeno Quotes like that to fill an entire wiki page, but that will suffice to illustrate my point.  He’s not paying attention to EVERYTHING at all times.  So imagine my surprise when Zeno had these English guys fully engaged in a conversation about futbol and he was right there with them, asking questions and talking stats and all that.  I know Zeno was a hot-shit soccer player when we were growing up, but watching that was kinda cool.  Whatever…Zeno’s got it going on when he wants to.  Little did I know…

We partied and drank and hung out for quite a while, waiting for it to get dark and finally went back to the tailgating party that we were part of and for half an hour, we were all, “OOOOOOO” and “AAAAHHHHH”, and then it was over.  At that point, I was faced with a major decision and I still don’t know if I failed or not.  Aaron said it was time to go home, and I felt the same way, but Zeno was being Zeno and he said, “Fuck it, I wanna go DT!!!”  Zeno always says DT, which is short for ‘downtown’, which means let’s go drink.  Or in this case it means let’s go drink more.  And I thought long and hard about that one.

Oh man, do I go home?  I really should, cuz I’m broke and I’m drunk.  But Zeno is always willing to buy you drinks so you don’t need any money, and we’re already downtown.  Yeah, but we already went through two bottles of gin and a number of pitchers and it’s late and I don’t know….this just doesn’t sound like a good choice.  What are you a pussy?  You’re on vacation and it’s 4th of July weekend.  Besides…there are a bunch of people in town and you’re bound to run into somebody.  Geez, I don’t know Yogi.  The ranger’s gonna get pissed and kick us in the nuts.  Awww fuck it, I’m in, let’s go Zeno.

And little did I know where we were heading off to.  The Future!  See, when you reach a certain point in your alcohol intake, you reach an area of space/time where one’s traditional thoughts of Time as being linear start to break down.  It’s at this point, this singularity, where Time Travel becomes possible.  Sometimes time slows down and it seems as though you party for weeks at a time and somehow manage to pack so much experience into a seemingly short amount of time.  And sometimes you feel as though you’ve hit a wormhole and end up in the Future, with a cop waking you up on the sidewalk, asking you to get into his cop car.  However…that’s The Future…we’re dealing with the Present right now….or rather, you’re reading about the Past at this moment.  The point here is that there is conventionally thought to be a Time Arrow, with events moving from the Past toward the Future and so we will stick to that for the time being.  READ ON!

I don’t think we went back to the Hangar (the previous bar we’d been at), but I’m honestly not sure.  I do know we went to the Alaskan and had a Stella there.  And I know we went to the Imperial because we met D and Mouth there.  It was there that we met up with a crew who were going to have an after-hours party at some band’s practice space, and being of sound mind, I was all for it.  Let’s go!  And that place was a blast!  I was allowed to plug a Fender Telecaster into a Steve Vai Legacy 2×12 combo amp and just fart around for what felt like a week, but it turned out to be only a couple hours before everybody had gone home and Zeno and I were arguing on the street.  I wanted to go home and he didn’t and without any details, I’ll just say that I got pissed enough at him that I stole his cell phone and called a cab home at 6 or 7am.  Once there, I realized that the Tour de France was on TV, so I was able to catch the Prologue before having to take a shower and go with my mom back to downtown for breakfast with my her and my brother.  Downtown???  Wasn’t I just here?  I think so.  But it was a different time then…another age.

After having had breakfast, we walked to a location and sat down for the 4th of July parade.  I remember thinking as I walked about how pissed I had been at Zeno.  I had his phone on me, and in my drunken musings the previous evening (like 3 hours previous) I’d thought of testing its self-proclaimed waterproof ability by throwing it into Gastineau Channel but I didn’t.  At any rate, we found a place to sit down and watch the parade, when along comes Zeno, strolling down the sidewalk with a purposeful stride.  I was so pissed at him, but he is my lifelong buddy, so I hollered his name and he came and sat down with us as we watched the parade.  Needless to say, we’d both had a hard night, so while I tried to catch my 2nd or 3rd wind, he just laid down right there in the grass and passed out for the duration of the parade.

“All I have left is a hangover and my underwear.  Maybe.”

Did I mention that Zeno is a quote machine?  The above quote is one that came from his lips as he was on the phone with one of the people who called him while we were at the parade.  I’d given him his phone back, and it dawned on me that maybe I hadn’t stolen it from him to be a dick or that I hadn’t been being petty, but rather maybe I knew that if left to him, he’d have lost it himself.  And all was good in the Universe again.  I’d helped my friend fare through an evening of Time Travel and I’d done so with a merit badge to boot!  But wait…how did he fare?

Zeno woke up to Officer Friendly prodding him back to The Present.  Said officer was telling Zeno that it wasn’t okay to be sleeping/passed out on the sidewalk because that’s not good for the economy, since Juneau’s revolves around tourism and tourists don’t pay good money to see a 6ft redhead with poor decision-making skills sleeping in the doorway of a shop where they DO want to spend their hard-earned money.  It seems the officer was telling Zeno to get into the car because they were going to give him a ride home.  He declined, saying that he did not want a ride home.  “We will drop you off at your door.  It’s a free ride!”  However, Zeno did have enough CPU power to realize that probably the ride would be straight to the drunk tank, so he kept declining until he won the argument.  The cop, however wasn’t fully done with him and said something like, “Well we wanna give you a breathalyzer just the same.”  So he says, “Okay, I’m kinda curious to see what I would blow right now anyway”.  (Insert joke here…I’d bet he would have blown a goat…ZING!!!)  The breathalyzer showed a .28BAC.  Great Zombie Jesus!!!  You go, girl!  Somehow the cop let him go.  No ticket, no nothing.

However, in typical Zeno fashion, he did go have breakfast at the homeless shelter nearby.  And got back in line for a second helping.  Are you fucking kidding me!?  I don’t know if I should kick him in the nuts or praise him on the internets!  Hmmmm….but that does lead us to the 2nd Zeno quote from that night.

“I refuse to be ashamed.”  Holy crap.  How do you top that?  You don’t.

Needless to say, after the parade, we went back to Mom’s house and recovered.  I slept for about 2 hours, but Zeno was face down on the floor for long enough that I thought I might need to draw a chalk outline around him.  After watching the Tour stage that evening, we both crashed out by midnight and got a good night’s sleep.

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