last night was something else. i've been talking for months about trying to recapture that "in the moment" mindset, but yesterday evening was the first night i was able to catch a tail feather of it in all that time i have been trying. there was wonderful food in abundance - corned beef, chicken casserole, bangers and mash, potatoes, cabbage. i had my dinner with a guiness, but after that (as my post yesterday suggests) it was all whiskey. i danced for almost 30 minutes with a gorgeous black woman named simone, and then danced a jig with her friend camile (who was a puerto rican irish)!
there was good cheer and whiskey and bagpipes. i made some joke to camile about rice and beans and potatoes which she thought was very funny, but i'll be damned if i can remember it today.the bagpipes trilled and my blood answered. leave it to the irish to unmoor my soul a little - we drank them out of jamesons, then makers, then black. i lost count after 20, but i did down about a gallon of water before we made the trek back to manhattan. other people were still going when i departed.
there was also some serious gambling at this place last night. there was a 60-odd man poker tourney with a 300$ buyin. it came down to two people, and it stayed there for over an hour. the chips and cards were hard and fast, but at the end of the day a 5-9 diamond straight flush beat pocket aces. kinda crazy to see all those chips calculate out to greenbacks though - there were far more benjamans than yuppie food stamps. winner took home 4000, second place was 2000, and there was a 500$ for "best hand".
at some point last night, i decided it would be a pleasant shenannigan to remove the plastic plate and map from the backseat of a taxi. i don't know why this seemed a good idea at the time, but it did. i now have one authentic NYCT&L map of manhattan.
i'm heading up to my folks today so they can drag me through birthday crap. i am surprisingly up. i've been awake almost two hours already, and crashed out at around 4.
i wrote all this out on the train this morning, but in my arrogance, decided that typing into a web form was ok. notepad and copy paste from now on. technology can be so stupid sometimes.