Yesterday I worked at the Local Liquor Store at eight am. Since it was a game day, there were customers there before I was. I have been sick for the last couple of days, so I downed some cough medicine in the bathroom when I got there. It worked great, but I ended up blowing my nose all day, which was a pain and somewhat gross. So when I left to go to work at the Rock Club last night, I decided I had best take something that would combat both my lung funk and my sinus issues. I decided on Dayqui1. Wow was that a mistake. It only took me a minute to get my bar set up, and then I went to have a beer with the b.h. before the club opened. It didn't taste good at all, which was not a good sign. I was feeling very antsy and headed back to the club, finishing up a few details and greeting my fellow bartender, who it turns out was also ill. I can't really describe what happened for the next couple of hours, except to say that I have never done acid but I now feel like I have a good idea what it's like. The club proceeded to get packed, and I was on auto pilot, sweating and swilling bottled water and trying hard not to fall down. Everything was just- swirling. I felt all floaty and weird, but not in a fun way at all. I was, for the first time in a long time, thankful for the smoking ban, and I was also relieved that I didn't have a headache, since the lineup included comedy and heavy metal. Whew! Weird. I started coming down around midnight, and after that I just felt like shit until I got home and went to bed.
I am not good at being sick. I don't get sick very often, fortunately, but when I am I tend to be kind of pathetic. Today I stayed in bed until after one, at which point I came down to the couch, where I have been for the past nine hours.
So anyway, I'm going to try to backtrack over some of the past week and a half. I am currently hopped up on said cold medicine again, so forgive me if this is convoluted.
That trip to Asheville last Saturday was super cool. The b.h. was playing at the Rocket Club. I was assigned by my beer geek co-workers to go to Bruisin' Ales, a specialty beer shop, and pick up some stuff that we can't get here in Georgia. There was some question as to whether or not we could get there before they closed(9pm), but I was bound and determined, because we had also found out that Bar@ck Obam@ was speaking at a rally on Sunday, and if we intended to get to that, there was no way to get to the beer store as well. I ducked out of work at five (I should mention that I had to be at work at nine in the morning, after having worked at the Rock Club the previous night, and after having had virtually no sleep for the prior two nights, reasons for which I will explain later) and raced home to pick up the b.h.. We hit the road around five thirty, and sped toward Asheville. The b.h. had gotten directions online, and everything went very smoothly up until the last turn we had to make to get to the Beer Store. If you haven't been to Asheville (I hadn't up until then) then you can't possibly conceive of how totally and completely fucked up it is. Streets start and stop and pick up again in other places. They turn without warning, become one way, curve unnecessarily - oh, and they're also packed with people and cars on a beautiful Saturday night, and many of those folks were from out of town also because of the whole Obam@ thing, and the town isn't that big, but the Beer Store is really small, and let's face it, how may people are really that into beer? - so we had trouble finding anybody who knew where it was. I tried repeatedly to call W, my co-worker, because I very stupidly did not write down the phone number for the Beer Store, but W had just gotten a new cell phone two days before and failed to give me the number. Fuuuuuck. So we drove and drove and circled and cussed and swerved, and I was just about to give up (it was five minutes to nine) and try to find the club instead when lo and behold, we found it. I jerked the car into a parking lot and practically ran inside.
I greeted the owner, who knew I was coming, and he offered us a beer. Apparently, you can actually drink on premise in a beer store in Asheville. Nice. I cracked open a Bell's IPA, which was hoppy and lovely and exactly what the doctor ordered, and got to work filling orders for W and S, while Jason, the proprietor, waited on some other people.
It took about forty-five minutes, but when I left I had everything W had asked for, half of what S wanted, and sixty dollars worth of stuff for me. I was thrilled. We got back in the car and went looking for the club.
The only reason we found the club was because there was a guy outside smoking and I knew we were kind of close.
"That has to be it," was pretty much what I said, and then pulled a U-turn and got back to it. There was no sign, no address, and there were no other people outside at all. But there was Arrogant Bastard Ale on tap, so all was well. Turns out the guy who owns the place is from Chicago. He used to work at the Empty Bottle, which I frequented when I lived up there. He was really nice, and he introduced me to a couple friends of his that had just moved down from Chicago a couple weeks ago. I wound up talking to them for much of the evening.It was fun and it made me a little homesick. The show was very good but sparsely attended.
At the end of the night we went to the hotel and checked in and were both starving so we headed back out in search of food. The b.h. was really sick with a cold, so we stopped at a gas station and got him some drugs. The only food option was Waff1e House, which is never really good but can usually work for me in a pinch. When we got in there, there were only two tables and one guy eating at the counter. There were four people working. The b.h. ordered a pork chop dinner, and I got two waffles with pecans. What followed was surreal, like a scene out of a movie. I was so tired I thought I was going to puke, but I knew I needed to eat, and the b.h. was fevered and wheezing and wiping his nose. The guy next to us was slurping and smacking his food very noisily, adding to my nausea. He was clearly a regular. A pair of hippie kids came in and sat at the booth next to our seats. They were so high they could barely see out of their eyes. The two cooks both had dyed black hair and acted like they had either just broken up or were trying hard not to act like they liked each other. The girl knew what she was doing. She was fast and on top of it at the grill, and it seemed like the guy was probably being trained. He had a couple of facial piercings and a black leather Social Distortion belt. He might have been wearing eyeliner. The b.h.'s food was ready in short order. We watched them box it up and set it aside, and then drop the waffles. The waffles browned up in about five minutes, and the girl cook took them off and plated them and sent them away with the waitress to a table far away. I watched them go with longing. Five minutes after that, she put a couple more waffles on.
It took us at least half an hour to get our food. We stumbled into the hotel, I ate around the edges of my mostly uncooked waffle, picked the pecans out and ate those, showered, and fell into bed.
More later. I gotta get some hot tea.
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