Worldwide Suicide, Pearl Jam, Pearl Jam (3)

The Year of Idiocy is hard to describe - there was a lot of alcohol, many hours at Burke's, and well, just general idiocy. It was the year of the Albanian, the Candy Man and meeting Smoove. Here are some highlights.

Herm…Ahh, Smoove.  What’s interesting about Herm is the way we met, and then I guess the fact that we are still in touch.  September, 2007 – Baltimore v. Yankees in Baltimore, and neither of us lives in Baltimore.  Darr and I headed to the game that she was supposed to have gone to with her boyfriend and another couple, had she not discovered one month earlier that he had…well, that’s another story.  Anyway, we went to the game, and as this was the precursor to the Year of Idiocy (see: 2008 below), we had a few drinks before the game.  What a nice park they have there – love that whole area behind center field!  Which is where we were, when we met John (later referred to as The Serial Killer), by removing food from his tray as he walked by.

Yes, we randomly took food off a stranger's tray as he walked past us at the game. This of course prompted conversation, which prompted hanging out for the remainder of the game and then going to a bar, in Baltimore, with 5 or 6 NY guys that we didn't know (reminder: precursor to year of idiocy). Herm was the quiet one with the camera, and I gave him my email address to send me copies of the pics he had been shooting throughout the evening. And then all of a sudden, Darr decided that John was in fact a serial killer. Seriously. She was convinced that his name, John Painz, on his business card he gave us was a veiled threat of things to come if we didn't RUN to our car, looking over our shoulders, and drive back to Westwood immediately. Never saw John Painz again, but did keep up a healthy flirtation with Herm for quite a while.

And then finally decided that it was time to act upon it, so we made plans for him to come to my house. Did I mention that Herm is black? Oh, yeah, well, everything they way about black men is true. They are on CPT - that's Colored People Time for you politcally correct people. Wait - you thought I meant something else! OK, truth be told, that part is true too. (But I kinda already knew that from going to the naked beach at Sandy Hook with the Cyborg - I may not have mentioned that earlier.) Also, if you were politcally correct, we probably wouldn't be friends and you wouldn't be reading this...ok, back to the story.

So Herm took the train, from Irvington (where there are no white people) to Westwood (where there are no black people), and spent the night. And then I could not get him back on the train fast enough. I felt like I was in a Seinfeld episode and I was Elaine, when she has that guy she wants to get rid of, and she's in her nightgown, telling him to "shut up and pack!" Just under the wire, we made it to the train station, and Herm was on his way. We've stayed in touch, and although there haven't been any more sleepovers, there's plenty of flirting still going on.

As part of the Baseball Stadium Tour of 2008, which was really the summer season of the Year of Idiocy,  sis and I went for a weekend to see the Yankees play the Blue Jays in Toronto.  We drove back to northern NJ from the shore, hopped on a plane to Canada, and landed right in the middle of Canada’s largest gay neighborhood.  Not Toronto’s largest gay neighborhood, mind you – or even Ontario’s.  The whole fucking country.  What tipped us off was the rainbow flags everywhere, the YMCA-like poster of an Indian on a billboard, oh, and then there was the fact that everyone was male…and they were holding hands and having dinner with other males.  Of course, the handy map from the hotel of the area also provided us with the information where it said, “This is Canada’s largest gay neighborhood.”

So we were wondering why (again) God hates us (although I still think he only hates me and Darr is just along for the ride).  We went to dinner, and then, feeling a little weirded out, went straight back to the hotel for a drink at the hotel bar.  Various small groups of people were there, none of whom seemed to fit the neighborhood’s demographics. And that's when we met the Albanians.