Blood Alcohol Levels

The best adventures are the most unexpected ones.

Since arriving, I've done my best to try and cultivate friends, considering I have none. I so far successfully gleaned a good deal of acquaintances - but no real friends.

As an effort against this, I met up yesterday after work with a girl named Hannah, 24 today, with mischevious eyes, a devious smile, and a thirst I admired. (Hannah is the ex-girlfriend of a Luxembourgish gent I studied with, or more precisely drank with, in Europe.)

We met at 5:30 at a small jazz cafe where she conveniently knew the bartender and I conveniently became a sight of his attraction. A decorous introduction beer turned into about seven, punctuated conspicuously by a car bomb and Brazilian casaveras (sp?).

By 11:30 our stools started trying to get away from us, and our glorious bill: $10, the actual cost of the Mediterranean platter we ate, which consisted of nothing more than over-processed pita bread and a plate of runny hummus. Thank god it was free - and I think I managed a date out of the situation too (which always amazes me when I'm that faded) even though he'll have to wait two weeks.

I wasn't initially sure if he was of similar sexual proclivity so as I drank more I managed to slip a subtle joke about My Fair Lady (I know, dork humor, but I can't resist), and when he smiled at me knowingly, I knew he was mine. Appropriately enough, when I woke hungover as hell this morning I couldn't get 'I could have danced all night' out of my head and nearly died when I went so far as to attempt a little spin in the shower (which reminds me, I need a new shower curtain)...

As much as I enjoyed meeting him, I enjoyed meeting Hannah even more, the way alcoholics get excited when they meet a new enabler. And we certainly did...sit at the end of that bar for five hours drinking, and laughing til our faces hurt (and you know my cheeks, it doesn't take much). Sad though that she's leaving for Indonesia in a week. It's also sad that I flirted so overtly with her close friend, it will make it that much more diffiult for me to hit on her other friends - mind you though, I simply said more difficult.

For her going away Hannah is having a pirate party (which I hope in some way is a gay reference, though I doubt it) that will take place on her roof, a small five story building in the center of Midtown. We went there last night until the vertigo from the fifty feet down and the paranoia from the hundreds of feet up made me dizzy and I nearly puked and fell off.

The scene is stunning (when safely sober and away from the edge). Buildings that small are rare in Midtown and among the elevated skyscrapers that encircle the rooftop, the monolith of the Empire State Building unifies their towering presence and makes you seem a small child among Gods.

As much as the furious pulse of the city is pronounced and ubiquitous, the throbbing is increasingly consuming in this perspective, as though you really are a single blood-cell forced through a throbbing vein by the beats of millions of frenzied hearts interwoven into one collective subconscious moving in passion and beauty and forward creation.

But then again, maybe I was just really drunk.