Massive Nights

I've been listening to music a lot more recently. Part of it is just my natural rotation of things I do while chilling out at home. Sometimes I'll watch everything I can on TV, sometimes I'll be reading a book a week and sometimes I'll be listening to albums straight through as much as I can; and right now we're on the music train. Part of this is because of my friend's new blog, which you can find here. If you're the type of person that actually listens to music as opposed to having it on in the background, I think you should definitely check it out.

The title to this blog is a Hold Steady song, a quick little sub 3 minute ditty (spelling?) that probably would have made the band well known back in the mid to late 90s when pop music stations actually played semi decent rock music. Instead, it was on an album released in 2006 and they're only played in NYC on the only radio station even conceivably worth listening to; and I only heard of them because a friend of a friend of mine told her (and she told me) a lot of the songs seem like they were written about her and I decided to check out their myspace page.

This song gave me the inspiration to write because I've been missing NYC a little recently. I'll be there on Friday, but it's been just short of a month since my last trek on NJ transit. Even though I'm only a quick 50 minute train ride from the city I need to move back to (or at least much closer to) as soon as I can, there are just some things you can't experience unless you're a cab ride away. One of these things I might miss the most is my version of the Massive Night, the random weeknight that was supposed to be quiet and before you know it goes completely the other direction. Here's a quick recap of a recent favorite.

It was the Wednesday before 4th of July weekend last year. My friends were going to Whistling Dixie's Texas Tavern, a wannabe country dive bar type place that tries to get male clientele to trek to 11th Avenue on Sundays by offering free drinks to strippers. Eh, I wasn't sure I would make the trip until I heard two wonderful words: free beer. The bar was giving away free beer for a couple hours to celebrate their first anniversary. As I was unemployed at the time, free = good. And my plan was to hang out there for a couple hours and then head home for the night. But the night had other plans for me.

We ended up going to another bar nearby $1 mini burgers and $3 beers at all times (it didn't take much to convince me to stop here). From there next thing I know a good friend of mine from college is in town with his wife and will be at a bar down in the Meatpacking District where the wife's sister is bartending.

Now I don't think anything says friendship more than me leaving a bar with $1 burgers and $3 beers to go to a place with $7 Heineken Lights in my least favorite part of the city (and possibly my least favorite place on Earth) to see a friend. But we went there and bounced around a couple of bars and out of nowhere it's 2am on a Wednesday. So of course, when we all piled into cabs, we were headed home so (most of us, myself not included) could get up for another day's work.

Or maybe we went to a Japanese karaoke place in midtown and rented a room for an hour. Because sure, that makes sense. And the night, which I thought would be relatively tame and over by 8pm, turned massive with a room full of (at minimum) slightly intoxicated people singing/yelling Thriller at 3am on a school night. That's the kind of night that I miss, and that's the kind of night I have to know will come around again soon.

Sidebar - Am I turning into what I dislike?

Everyone knows those annoying, inane conversations you have with co-workers where you just repeat tired old cliches because you can't/don't care enough to think of something original to say. The usual Monday again, hey it's Friday blah blah blah nonsense that goes on in offices everywhere across these fruited plains. I actively try to avoid this stuff to maintain my sanity, but I seem to be falling into one of them with my boss.

My boss is a very good guy, and of the four people on his level I could have conceivable ended up working for when I got this job, I definitely got lucky. As long as we do our work, he stays off our back and has fun. If we don't he tears us the new assholes we clearly deserve, and I respect that.

So he works about 7:30am-5pm, and if I run into him around 4:30 on any given day he usually makes a comment like "almost out of here" or "quitting time soon," whatever it might be. And I realized today that I think I've fallen into the awful pattern of always having the same boring response each time:

Yeah ... for you.

Ew. Yuck. Ugh. Pick your one syllable word for disgust. I'm better than this (I think). And now that I've noticed it, I have to try and force myself to be a little more creative in how I respond. Just like I have to be careful not to say "Not a problem" on the phone, but that's a story for another time.

Listening to: Heartbreaker - Led Zeppelin
About to: catch up on some Colbert