WARNING 2: CURVES AHEAD !!!!!

by JENA_78.

A. knocked on my door at 11pm to invite me for drinks across the hallway. She was gathering friends together to walk down to Clear and watch J spin the tunes at the local watering hole for "beautiful people." She is one of the few people that can pull me away from my piano and laptop.

"Sure."

I like her friends. They are stunt people; spending their lives jumping through windows, freefalling from edges of buildings, are nice, and are a "tribe that protects their village." The last time I went out with them, an "outsider" guy was not making himself pleasant company with the girls in our group, A's friends got hold of the situation and next thing I knew, the guy was invited outside the bar by the bar managers.

A's friends helped me with my escape last night as well. Several wolves on the hunt spotted me and in order to avoid the final kill I decided to walk home before they noticed my disappearance. There were wolves waiting outside too. One guy turned his car around and followed me halfway up the block before my words sank into his head that his game was not working.

Aside from the wolves, I had a great time with friends dancing, drinking and taking crazy pictures of our little outrageous tribe.

You can't reason with drunks nor wolves. I tend to not go to bars or clubs at all because people go there to put reason away on the shelf and lose their minds and inhibitions. Since I hardly drink, its a foreign world to me and I feel like a tourist in the jungle.

Looking at someone can be misunderstood as an invitation. I had interesting conversations last night....

"You like her fuzzy boots. They sell them on Melrose. I'll take you there and buy a pair for you. What's your phone number?"

"Ooohhh, I'd like to take a bubble bath with you." (this was the funniest and most random quote)

It's tricky wiggling out of being cornered sometimes but the tribe was looking out for me and knew how to smoothly include themselves in the conversations and walk them away from me so that I can find my way to my group again.

Bars are funny places.

They are great places to relax and get a bit silly with friends. But then there are others who are there with different agendas. And there are some very unhappy people hanging out too. It's a world away from the places I tend to hang out at. The energy is high but it doesn't seem to touch me in a way that inspires me to return frequently. I'd rather hang with my friends in other places.

A peculiar energy at bars unsettles me; a comedic flambouyancy that weighs on me like a sad cloak. Maybe part of the fun IS the pretense and I just don't get it. I always have a great time with friends but witnessing things on the periphery is like driving through a third world country and experiencing poverty of a different sort. It's like trying to have fun but seeing that there's a lot of homeless people on the sidelines. Part of the bar scene is to learn how to ignore that as a fact of life....

Maybe I'm naive and this is how the world rotates and I'm too sensitive... Maybe people actually say yes to the fuzzy boots, the bubble bath and live happily ever after and maybe there are girls who will look at a guy and his car and say "sure, I'll spend the night with you."

I think in some ways we all do say yes's to promises of some sort and offer promises that sound great until reality sets in.... Hope can be beautiful or it can be a cheap harlot... It just request a chance. A chance at shining as truth aside from the randomness.

But I don't know if that's the conversation that bar-attenders have in mind.... at the bar or outside.....