Evening with Brian
Rush hour heading towards Greensboro wasn't as bad as I had remembered and I was passing my old college within an hour. My friends Brian is my only good friends left in Greensboro after almost everyone else I knew here has moved on to other places for work or more school. A few others will be heading back to town Friday to visit with me, but for now, it's just Brian and me. I'm not complaining. I've missed Brian and it was so great to have some alone time and talk like we used to talk. After I was settled in and didn't feel so sticky due to the humidity, we went out to dinner. Our initial idea for the rest of the evening was to pick up a bottle of wine, or two, and catch up back at Brian's place. Then, I remembered that our friend, and my former bartender =), Michael, had sent me a text earlier saying that he was working. So, we dropped off the wine to cool in the fridge and headed to Jake's. Ah, Jake's. My local hole-in-the-wall pool hall and bar of my college days. How I have missed that place. I was amazed at how much has changed since last year. Yes, I left North Carolina 3 years ago, but I have been back every summer! What upset me the most was the juke box. They had one of the old classics, but it finally died at some point during the last year. It's been replaced by some fully electronic juke box that looked very out of place to me. Brian reassured me that there is way more music on the new juke box and that everything would be ok, but he was wrong. I had a little routine at Jake's. With my second drink, I always picked out some songs, which usually involved either Billy Idol, Aerosmith, or Madonna, and always included a couple Radiohead favorites of mine. To my astonishment, this new, special juke box did not have one single Radiohead song! I was absolutely crushed. I searched and searched for some good backups, but I could not find anything that I wanted. So, my reunion with my dear friend Michael involved a bit of me yelling at a juke box while Brian laughed at me. Oh well. We decided to just spend the evening catching up with a few drinks, a few games of pool, and a lot of photo hunt. I never want to come back to Greensboro, or anywhere else in NC for that matter, but being back always makes me miss my friends out here and the good times at Jake's so much. When everyone else arrives tomorrow, the fun will really begin. After last year's reunion, who knows what will happen. All I do know is that at least I have some excuses for any crazy behavior, like too much air pressure =). I'm sure it won't have anything to do with anything else, but I'll still say that it does =).
