So, I'm sitting around the apartment, and figured I'd do a little blogging.  It seemed like something better to do than spending hours slo-mo'ing through old Star Wars movies looking for nip-slips.

No, I'm not here to talk about the effects of alcohol on men.  I'm here to talk about what happens to members of the weaker sex.  Men may do some stupid things in the haze, but some things that women do leave me dumbstruck.  For example, when my doorbell rings at 3:00AM.  This happens more often than you'd think, and is almost always one drunk girl or another.  Ahh, the single life.   Unfortunately for me, it's usually the strange, pot-smoking, "18" year old  neighbor, hitting me up for spaghetti sauce.  I usually give it up, even though my current financial situation leaves me with about two packets of spaghetti sauce per week as my sole source of calories.  What can I say, I'm a saint.  Wednesday night, however, it wasn't the neighbor, it was my girlfriend who rang the doorbell at 3:00AM.  Deeee-runk.  Blotto.  Cooder Brown, she was.  No, I don't know about most guys, but when I show up drunk at my S.O.'s place at 3 in the morning,  it's not to check the meter, except maybe in some clumsy metaphorical sense.

So, I'd had a couple of beers myself, at a separate location, and I figured we're on the same wavelength.  But women are different, and can be difficult to read.  I cajoled her with tales of travel; I plied her with extravagant promises, such as introducing her to Acidman, whom I've never met, and judging by some of his recent posts, probably won't get a chance to.  But, women being what they are, drunk or no, she resisted my advances.  Turns out, she had her own ideas.  At some point she told me to go to bed and wait for her there.  "Oh yeah", I stimulus-responsed, "this is the life".  After a while, I think I fell asleep.  At any rate, my girlfriend, who was indeed drunk in case I haven't mentioned it yet, managed to invent food in my kitchen.  There was no food, none.  I can vouch for that fact.  There were noodles, yes, but the neighbors had already nationalized any sort of noodle-sauce there might have been.  There were some "vegetables" in the refrigerator, but only for show, and certainly nothing identifiable by phylum.   Nevertheless, she managed to concoct some sort of delicious, fiery-hot curry to eat with the noodles.

And then she cleaned my kitchen, and went to sleep.  I'm still not entirely sure what all happened; it's like some sort of weird dream.  My kitchen looked like the apartment from trainspotting when I went to bed, then my drunk girlfriend shows up at 3 in the morning and cleans it up, cooks dinner, and goes to sleep.

Dames.

SCORE!!!

Winter, 1999
Paris, France

Walking down a street in Paris, I notice a large, wrought-iron gate in front of an old building with the words "Le Mtropolitain" ornately engraved on it.

"Le Mtropolitain," I muse aloud.  "Is that an opera house or something?"

My travelling companion, mouth agape, turns to me and says, "It's the subway, dickhead."

Hallowe'en is still in its infancy here in the Germany.  The kids don't really get it yet, as far as I can tell.  First of all, they don't dress up.  Two of the little freeloaders just came by about an hour ago; and instead of costumes, they merely had their faces painted like Gene Simmons.  Well, to be fair, one of them did have a red trash liner hanging around his neck like a cape.

Unfortunately for our little kobolds, they came to the one house in Germany that is not supported by the all-encompassing nanny state.  I should put up a sign that says "Auslander" on my front door.  Then again, with the strong German influence on the new EU Constitution, that  will probably come soon enough.

One thing that's really nice about being an American in Europe, is that some things that are absolutely un-cool in the States have value here.  For example, I have an "Apollo 13" promotional t-shirt with "A13" on the front, and a "Hardee's" logo on the sleeve.  In the States, I wouldn't even dream of wearing that horrible piece of shit for anything other than yardwork, but over here I've actually gone clubbing in it.  And gotten compliments, I might add.

In that vein, for my greedy little hallowe'en geister I had nothing to give, candy-wise.  I considered dropping a couple of smokes into their bags, but thought better of the idea once I saw I didn't have many left.  For a desperate moment, I even considered filling a couple of Zip-loc bags with Quaker Quick-Grits and telling them it was heroin. Fearing the retribution that might come from German children who get shorted on dime-bags, I scrounged further until I found a couple of Pez refills.  I tossed them into their bags, and told them it was actual, honest-to-goodness American candy they were getting.  Good thing they didn't speak English, or they might have actually read the wrappers.

The little morons actually thanked me.