01/07/2006 - 4:17 p.m. | there's two things in life i ain't never seen: a UFO and a nigga i need

This time!

Thursday night, after the Illini game (there was an Illini game?), Kyle, Dank, and I stayed up way too late watching the crummiest movies we could find. Stealth topped the list.

�So wait � was the airplane a good or a bad guy?�
�Good guy � it helped Matthew McConaughey* find Jessica Biel!�
�But he also killed Jamie Foxx��
�He�s black; we aren�t supposed to remember him.�

*Obviously the actor in this film was not Mr. McConaughey, but both Dank and Kyle know how much it irks me when they identify an actor as someone they vaguely resemble and thus do it pretty much for every minute of a movie, shit-eating grins on their faces. There will be bloodshed over this someday. No doubt.

I think the best part was how the smarmy director was talking about this shitheap like it was the second coming. On one of the 30 or so hour-long featurettes about the spawning of this hell, they�re interviewing him in like 2003 and he goes, �I�ve been trying to get this thing through for 11 months now, and I�m not stopping until America sees it.� Oh, I�m sure America is just lining up to thank you, Mr. Cohen. But even worse is that he has been at work on this steaming pile since the time I started here at U of I. Which of us has been more productive with our time, it�s hard to say.

Next up was National Treasure, starring Nic Cage (�Jon Voight� to Dank), Boobs DeLux, and Jon Voight (�Nic Cage�), leading to an interesting scene where Cage and Voight are standing next to each other, left to right, and Dank goes, �Look! It�s Nic Cage and Jon Voight�. from right to left!� Have to give you points there, son. I wish we could all have adventures using our knowledge of history, but alas, it is not to be.

Dank left at this point (around 4:30) and somehow Kyle ended up turning on HOSTAGE, or as it should be known, Never Send Bruce Willis into a HOSTAGE Situation, as It Will Only Result in a Clusterfuck. The only lesson I learned was that negotiation is for suckers. Gunning the fuckers down is the only path to sweet success.

After that, we started watching childen�s shows on TV, and we were just exhausted enough to be enthralled. I believe I told you about the penguin puppet wearing a pot on his head, beating himself with a spoon? We watched plenty more of him. He is named Paz, �peace� is Spanish, which I only point out because he is the most grating motherfucker in the entire world. Kyle loved him immediately, of course, and has taken to doing impressions of him when he feels particularly annoying.

We spent at least an hour lusting after the cast of this children�s variety show, �Hi-5� (Yes, yes, an AIDS joke! I know!). Don�t dress up some Asian nugget like a cat and have her all rolling around, purring and shit, because you will just end up with two dudes with boners, trying to track your ass down over the internet.

I was ready to go out and get McDonald�s - I liked the idea of pretending we were just normal early-rising citizens � but Kyle flaked out, and I spent the next hour or two reading and eating stale old white bread.

I woke up surprisingly early but spent the day in a stupor as a result, finally coming downstairs with the promise of some MSG-laden chicken turd Shelly had built out of a box. God bless you, monosodium glutamate. I was scraping the plate of that hell just for a little more sauce.

I guess Shelly�s coworkers had given her a bottle of sparkling chardonnay, and since both of them thought it tasted like aspirin, it was up to me to down it. It did taste like aspirin, admittedly, but the pain of watching �Room Raiders� while I drank it was plenty masking, and there I was, drunk at like 6 o�clock. Good start.

Plenty drunk, too, where I was just sort of wailing in the shower, tumbling over and pretending I was in a warm rain storm. I collapsed up here for a while to recover (and look, only 7) but was eventually forced out to get supplies with Kyle.

He bought a little airport bottle of Hennessey that had him hurling off the front porch within a single sip of it. Yum! I purchased a bottle of Seagram�s Gin and Juice (of the Hunch Punch variety � with ginseng!). I can just imagine the board meeting on that one. �OK, let�s take the flavor and consistency of cough syrup� and fucking add rubbing alcohol to it!� I was not at all displeased when it somehow got confiscated at the bars that night. Had I kept it, it would have eventually meant I would have had to drink it.

I wandered some apartment building and tossed some eggs and spaghetti sauce into the street at Shelly�s request. I was very happy to take it slow for the rest of the evening, but somehow a 3-man Circle of Death game got started. Years and years without a drinking game ever, and somehow we pull it out the night I�m already saying �trunk� instead of �drunk.�

Kyle prepared some concoction (I�m told it had bumps in it), which I barely managed to keep down, Jevon came on over, and we were on our way. Out to the bars, as nobody had a goddamn party listed anywhere.

The bar scene did not fair any, any better. We hit Firehaus, Joe�s, Station, and they were all dead dead dead. It occurs to me I probably had a drink at each of those, impacting my overall antics for the night.

See, Smacko had dropped out of the ski trip, leaving a spot open� for yours truly, apparently. I had no desire to go, so I made what I thought was a ridiculous proposition: I�d only go if I didn�t have to pay a single thin dime for it. Somehow, everyone agreed to this, and I was right fucked. Luckily, there was a backup plan: Drink to oblivion and no one will force the hungover child to go. The fact that I�m writing this is proof that it worked. I feel pretty fucking great, all things considered.

So, we had flipped around and were heading towards home, Taco Bell, I dunno. We had thought to stop at Brother�s, figuring on more of the same, but then we spotted the line streaming out of Clybourne. Very well. We stayed there the rest of the night.

You know me, I can�t be in a place long without fixating on a girl. I was hardly in the door when this one popped up, though. She was like the skinniest one there (always the most important), and I thought she was pretty � Shelly said she might not have been, but for the dim light. I would have the thought the same advantage would have worked in my favor, but it seems otherwise. Shelly and I kind of hovered around this girl all night, Shelly giving me the most ridiculous pep talks. �I can by how she acts she�s shy,� Shelly slurs. �She�s awkward and isn�t used to attention from boys. You guys would be perfect together!� Shelly keeps hammering in this message, over and over, mysteriously vanishing at key moments that me and this chick might dance together, but it was just not going to happen. During one of these solo periods, I am positive I was the subject of evaluation among her little circle of friends. In case you hadn�t heard, it is much harder to talk to a girl within the confines of her entire peer group. Even if she had been interested (possibly explaining why I was on the table at all), her friends were not, and I more or less got snubbed.

But that�s fine, that�s fine. I�ve been refining my fears lately, trying to figure out what makes them tick, and I think I�ve nearly got the girl one figured out. It�s not so much that I�m afraid to go up and talk to the girl � it�s that if I want any real shot at all I�ma have to stick around for quite some time. Think of it like my fear of commitment, simply on a smaller scale. Nobody is going to just leap into bed with me, so I have to be a constant presence, which requires a moderately long period of being confident, thinking of things to say and do, enduring a group of friends who most likely do not like me, plus the fact that she might not like me either. It�s just too much for my poor little brain. I could go up to a girl, maybe even be confident for a couple minutes, but then the doubts would start flooding in, and I would want more than anything just to take off into the night. I kept an eye on that girl all night, and her main suitor, this short dude in an argyle sweater. He wasn�t much better looking than me, I don�t think, but he had the balls to just hang around and possibly be an annoyance� except he no doubt does not see himself that way. And therein lies the key. How do I ever get that notion out of my head?

Anyway, that shit always in the back of my mind, I spent the evening circling the bar with everyone else. I wanted Jevon to try and get some ass, so I could at least live vicariously through him (or even play the unfortunate wingman), but he did not see himself as either drunk or clean enough that night. Too bad. I got involved in a couple of weird little scenarios. I was standing by our little corner grotto (so social are we), and there was this sort of couple (the guy may have been guy) doing like the silliest, funnest dances ever. I must have been spacing off or something because the girl in the pair is suddenly like an inch away from my face, dangling an open tube of chapstick at my mouth. �Uh, no thanks,� I said, but somehow this must have come out as, �I challenge you two to dance-off.� I flailed about ridiculously while they both gestured frantically at my crotch and ended with these comically fake judgmental looks. Now, see, why can�t have I relationship like that? I would love to go out, flail around like ninnies, and fuck with retards. That seems like love to me.

Anyway, as a result of our little dancefest, this other girl comes up to me and says I should join her little dance troupe across the room. Feeling this leaves me vindicated and welcome somehow (although my presence must be explained), I join up with them and shake tail for a minute. Now, I feel like I�ve calmed the fuck down considerably, but apparently my dances are just ridiculous regardless, and I kind of feel like the butt of the joke again, some sort of dim-witted mascot. I�m about ready to leave when the same girl who invited me comes over and says, �Buy me a drink?� I feel the proper answer to this is �yes.� It was too loud to explain in detail the absolute poverty in which I spend my days and how breaking that last twenty is about the most depressing thing in the world. So I buy her Jack and Coke and take it back to her, and I start thinking, �OK, I really am being abused her, for my stupid antics, for my money � Jesus!� Maybe I could have stuck around and gotten somewhere, but it�s that commitment issue I just spoke of. I tapped the fuck out and went upstairs.

Kyle, Shelly, Spritz � all left. Jevon was bored but sticking around until I got the hell out (No man left behind, I guess). I ran into Dustin, who was there with Fitz, which would probably explain why everyone else was gone. I think he and I were on all right terms, though. Then again, I couldn�t really understand what he was saying, so I might be completely off. We ended up at the upper dance floor, and there was that first girl again, now quite drunk and in the arms of argyle sweater guy. I would just as soon not seen this (a hundred different emo songs ran through my mind), but we continued bumping into each other all damn night. Nobody was willing to dance, and I was not willing to go alone, so we all just stood there. And gaped. Dustin bought me a drink, which was sort of funny, and we talked about the Amazon roaming the bar, and though I wanted to leave as much as they did, I was not giving up hope until it completely slipped away.

In the meantime, I ran into John Grisham (�Ace�), my old coworker at Insomnia Cookies and Inside Scoop. He was drunk and for some reason right pissed at me. I asked him about it, and apparently he believes that I was somehow responsible for getting him fired at Insomnia, which is complete and utter bullshit (I think). Story is that someone at Insomnia asked about Ace as a worker at the candy store, and I gave him a negative evaluation. First off, I was probably already gone from Insomnia by that point. Secondly, I was also never the damn manager of that place. I may have acted like it, but I had no more hiring or firing power than he did. We were right the fuck equal. Now, truthfully, he might not have been the best worker, but I would still never have ratted him out or anything. The worst workers often tend to be the most fun. I tried to explain all of this to him, but he did not seem very believing. Oh dear, one more hates Nate Walsh.

Hope ran out, and we ran home. We milled out first, though. Dustin stopped at Jimmy John�s, and I managed to grab a bag of jalapeno-flavored chips on the floor, deftly scooping them up the back of my coat while I pretended to tie my shoe. I was probably not that deft. Those chips were just glorious, though. I could taste the sin in them! We all eventually went our separate ways, and I stopped at the garage under Maly�s old building to pee on the bikes. One of them was not locked, although the reason very quickly became clear. It was one of those little tiny trick bikes, but the tires were flat as hell. This did not stop me from sluggishly riding the thing home and into the house.

I managed to rouse Kyle the only way I knew how (�Do you want to watch The Pacifer?�) and tried to dodge any real hangovers by drinking a ton of water and eating an entire pound of SpaghettiOs. I made it about twenty minutes into the film, but here I am to tell the tell, no worse for wear. Well, my pinkie might be broken, but we can forgive him that.