A drunken review of Cincinnati Ohio
I’ve been slow to post anything. I could make all kinds of excuses, but really, I’m just lazy. Here’s something that I started writing a couple of months ago (and by started writing, I should say wrote the first sentence).
Over thanksgiving weekend I went to Cincinnati to visit my recently relocated brother, Jason. Here’s a few stories from my time in the jewel of the mid-west.
Cincinnati is not somewhere I ever really dreamed of going, but Jason is there and he had a good trip planned. Fly in on Thursday. Have a small Thanksgiving dinner and campfire with his stellar employees on Friday. Learn to blow glass in his shop on Saturday. Bengals vs. Browns game on Sunday. Fly home to Phoenix on Monday.
Jason lives in a super nice house in the middle of a crack neighborhood. Which is what every neighborhood seems to be like in Cincinnati. Every street was super nice house, crack house, crack house, super nice house, crack house. The house is owned by the owner of his glass shop, who is apparently a hoarder and flamboyant homosexual. But all the hoarding was done offsite in random warehouses around the city, so the house is super nice.
The post-Thanksgiving dinner and campfire was a good time. Although, anytime I’m around a group of people that work together, I spend most of my conversational skills trying to get people to talk about shit other than work. And half my conversation skills amount to a level 1 or 2, which raised up to about a 5 or 6 when I had a few drinks, then got back to a 0 or 1 when the slurring started.
On Saturday, I woke up with a wicked hangover. Jason informed me that nothing cures a hangover like working in a glass shop. He was right, in the sense that I sweated so much I barely noticed I was alive. Learning to make some glass cups and paperweights was a really awesome experience. I have a picture of Jason turning some glass in the furnace, but there are tons of those everywhere. So, I won’t even bother. Maybe I will get around to drawing an artist’s rendition of me turning glass.
That night, Jason and some of his coworkers and I went to a bar or three. Somewhere along the way we were playing billiards and around the third game is when things get a little fuzzy. There was a stranger who looked like he was in the band Nickleback. He kept trying to challenge us to “play for the table.” Probably because we were terrible at pool and were taking forever to leave the table. Eventually, Nickleback convinced us to play against him for the table. After he won, things were getting really fuzzy, but now we could at least sit at a table on the patio. A few more drinks and we decided it was time to go, but I had one more thing to do. I figured maybe I should go apologize to Nickleback, in case I had been rude in my drunkeness. On my way to the billiards table, I saw that Nickleback and his friend had their backs turned. I changed gears and grabbed the 3 ball off the table. I didn’t feel like apologizing anymore.
The next morning, I was double hungover. But we had a football game to attend. Jason told me we would be getting the tickets from his boss. But as the morning continued, the plan unfolded into us going with one of Jason’s less intelligent employees. Jason was excited for me to meet this guy, because of his lack of mental prowess. The kid was nice, but his dad came. Who was awkwardly insulting to his kid the entire game. Additionally, he kept pointing out that I am a Browns fan and trying to talk shit about that. I had to keep reminding him, that the reason I am a Browns fan, is to avoid just such a conversation. Because I really just plain don’t care. The tickets were awesome and we had a gift card that could be used at the bar. I had a couple whiskey cokes, which unfortunately made me uncomfortably drunk.
Jason had this neighbor who was a tiny, old black dude. According to Jason he just sat on his front porch drinking all day. When he sees someone smoking crack down on the corner he walks down and takes a few hits. Then he returns to his porch and keeps drinking. I looked at that and thought “man, that… is… so… awesome!” In retrospect, I shouldn’t have felt that way. Between this and being uncomfortably drunk at the football game, made me think I should stop drinking for a while.
I lasted about 6 days and 23 hours. But I do need to get my life together. Seriously.
