How I retarded my way into Bill Cosby last Saturday.

I had to work last Saturday and it was kinda lazy for it being a holiday weekend. One of the bartenders at my work asked me "Do you want to go with me to Bill Cosby tonight at 9:30, my date cancelled and I don't have anyone to go with."

I told him that I would. I was thrilled to go. Bill Cosby is old, and I doubt that another opportunity to see him again will present itself, especially for free.

He had two shows going on that night. One at 7 and the other at 9:30. It was a pretty lax night at the brewery and I was somewhat peeved when I started to be inundated with tables right when I was supposed to get off (no doubt many of them from the early show getting off). I saw the ticket that the bartender had left for me on top of the counter where our cash tips were left and put it in my box. I hustled best I could to get my tables closed out before the show and transfered the rest to another server.

It was a serendipitous series of events that followed. If I hadn't rushed table 31 through their meal, if I hadn't ran to the locker room to get changed, if I hadn't taken the short cut to the venue, if I hadn't transfered my tables to the other server when I did, if someone hadn't been asking the ticket taker for directions to somewhere at the exact time when I was having my ticket scanned, I would not have been able to get to the show. I didn't think anything of it when the ticket gun made a funny sound and flashed red and green instead of green. I went to my seat and looked for my friend the bar tender, assuming he would be in the seat next to me. The whole row was empty.

The show was great. It should be noted that the Bill Cosby I knew was Cliff Huxtable, fixed in my mind as the late 30's early 40's doctor and family man. In truth, he is OLLLLLLLD! He spoke in two word beats, gathering his thoughts and sometimes losing where he was- even in this well-rehearsed act, but dammit he was funny. I'm glad I got to go.

I texted my friend afterward lamenting that I didn't see him at the show and thanking him for the ticket. I received a message back saying "I went to the 7-o'clock show and I didn't leave a ticket for you."

So I guess I just found some random ticket and waltzed my way into the show. Go me! I doubt it would have worked as well if I knew the ticket wasn't legit.

Sliver

Danny came over and sat next to me on the couch. He winced when he put his hand on the armrest, putting his weight on it to sit down.

"What's wrong with your hand Danny?"

"I was making a tweak pipe with a lightbulb and it exploded in my hand, I still haven't gotten out all the glass shards."

"How long ago was this?"

"I don't know, a week."

"Danny are you fucking kidding me?! We have to get that shit out now."

I pulled out my little swiss army knife. The blade was blackened and sticky from using it to scrape pipes, I put a lighter up to it to melt it off and sterilize the blade. I looked at Danny's hand. I could see places where the skin had actually began to heal over the tiny shards of glass.

"This is gonna hurt Danny boy."

He shrugged. "It's gotta come out somehow."

He took a pull from the plastic half-filled bottle of Popov vodka, I did too and used a little to clean off the knife a little more.

The knife worked well for the bigger shards, and the tiny tweezers were ideal for removing the jagged fragments from his palm. The whole process took about a half an hour and Danny took it like a man, hardly wincing even when I dug into his palm to get the deeper rooted shards. When we were finished I had him dump a little of the vodka into his hands and we both took a pull from the bottle to celebrate the successful surgery.

slow poison

My roommate Leif is quite the minimalist and I would like to emulate this. My mother is kind of hoarder and I'm curious to see how things pan out when they move to a smaller house this summer. I look around and see all this extraneous stuff that I would like to get to eventually, but haven't for years and perhaps never will. I have a slew of origami books that I never look through anymore, a heap of things that I need to file, and other shit that just needs to go, but I don't have the heart to throw away. It felt really good to leave a pile of skateboarding magazines at Out of Bounds, granted I went through all of them again page by page looking for things to make buttons with, but it was nice to feel like I didn't just trash em, that maybe they found a good home. It was cathartic to take my old computer, that I had for a decade, but haven't used for quite a few years out to the range and blast it with a shotgun. No one is getting anything off that hard drive. My sister had a fire that burned up alot of things and I wonder how she feels about it now, after having to move across the Atlantic and having to downsize tremendously.