home is where you feed your cat

last night began relatively normal, it was yet another oyster tuesday in an endless string of evenings that I spend surrounded by raw fish and yuppies who are across the dining room writing real-time complaints about me on yelp from their iphones. I ended up sitting down at the sushi bar and having dinner for the last half hour of my shift because we had only three customers in the building and I chewed my soba noodles lackadaisically, envisioning a smattering of tumbleweeds rolling across the floor. when I got back to the treehouse at 11 sharp, rob was moving his belongings from the front room to the vacant one upstairs that val abandoned for warmer pastures in the south, and derek was executing his surly drunk bit with particular gusto. I fed rufus, clumsily spilling half of the remaining contents of the bag onto the floor and he barreled into the room from where he'd been lounging upon hearing the familiar clinking of kibble in his dish. he went straight for the pile of food directly adjacent to begin winnowing away at the overpour and I scratched him behind the ears. "good boy. good kitty."

an hour or so later of wasting time on instant messenger, I grabbed my reserve bottle of cook's from the fridge and started walking to lindsay's. maren was over and we left together after tucking her in, under the guise of "going to sparky's" for cheeseburgers when both of us knew full well we weren't going to make it past safeway's booze aisle. we acquired two more bottles of champagne (upgraded this time to korbel, the champagne of champagnes) and ran into this hipster bird whose name escaped me but I remembered her handle on myspace. (sick sad world.) "bipp" invited us to a house party on divisadero and haight street and we obliged to tag along, and as we exited the supermarket both watched as 9 people piled into her camry and we yelled, "it's cool, we'll walk!".

it was still warm out and the clouds were hovering motionless and eerie in a slate colored sky, illuminated by a perfect halloween moon. maren and I clutched our bottles for dear life and I lamented to myself of the memories I had for every corner of the cutty streets in lower haight. being followed home from by a crackhead from the transfer on duboce, kicking a mailbox so hard that I nearly snapped my leg off the day after jorge died, fillmore, daily brunch gossip with linds and maren at katz, walking up steiner in my red coat, hand in hand with jon. my nostalgia-o-meter's needle was twitching and straining so far past ten that I half expected it to start spinning. san francisco is the simple answer to the home conundrum I've struggled with for years.

suddenly, I lost interest in the house party. at said house party, I would not be able to talk loudly about penis, drug use, social networking sites, scabies, psychotic families, or the fact that I once held a candlelight vigil in my room at a shrine of pictures I printed out when aaliyah's plane crashed. at least not without a bottle of whiskey, and now it was after three am and tragically past corner store operation hours. maren and I needed to find a grassy knoll and just have a girls night. we found one that suited our bubbly whimsy and proceed to go hog wild with slumber party talk, and it felt like we'd snuck out and might get grounded for life if we were caught. but, fuck it, we were rebels, we were invincible, this was our city! I felt 16 and undeafeatable. a cop car rolled by going excruciatingly slowly and I panicked, just the way I used to in high school. I knew full well that I'd be the only one of my friends who wouldn't be able to run and thus be hog tied, thrown in the clink, and then tortured in an interrogation room while corpulent law enforcement officers shoved bamboo chutes up my nailbeds to get me to crack and tell them what other plaza rats had been smoking marijuana in the rose garden on the night of the 22nd. fortunately, the cop kept driving, despite the fact that we were clearly hobo-ing it up in the park with two open containers in the middle of the night.

at four am we started the trek to orphan andy's 24 hour diner, sufficiently buzzed and hollering as we danced down the sidewalk, no doubt much to the castro's sleepy houses' chagrin. when we arrived, maren serendipitously ran into the guy he has a crush on, who happened to be at the diner with another young man. at first glance, I thought that his distress was due to the fact that the young man was out with another, and maren hastily excused himself after ordering his cheeseburger and I watched him disappear into the darkness through the thick paned windows. I wasn't entirely sure he would return, but I was salivating over my impending beef and cheese and carb bonanza, and would have been happy with all outcomes that included me stuffing my face.

20 minutes later, and still before the food arrived, maren materialized in a puff of rainbow glitter and sat himself down in the booth again as if he'd never left. I realized from his flushed cheeks and dewy forehead that he'd just run at least a mile roundtrip to go home and change his shoes. the first pair were perfectly fine, but he found it desperately important to switch up the footwear, as if his potential paramour would have noticed such a thing as perfectly fine black boots in the first place. apparently, the shoes worked, because maren abandoned me again to confer with crush-boy out front and they proceeded to make out against a lamp post for another 15 minutes, both of them having left me next to the table that sat the weakest link that crush-boy been planning to take home before hurricane maren blew into town. needless to say, I felt a small kinship with this young gay dude with questionably waxed eyebrows, as we were obviously the bridesmaids, and never the brides. I shot him a sympathetic look as my cheesesteak was set down in front of me and I picked it up and moved over to his booth. "mind if I join you?" I asked, and he shook his head no. I stuck my hand in a pile of curly fries as I shook my head and sighed, "foiled again, my friend. foiled again."