No one likes it when you call it Frisco

Last weekend I made the slog north to San Francisco to meet up with a few friends for my buddy Jim's birthday. It began with a rather inauspicious start, as one of the chief organizers came down with some sort of stomache flu that entailed him making embarassing sounds on porcelain, or should he stray too far from that tiled room, in his pants. There was more too it than that, I'm sure, but frankly, isn't that enough to keep you from hopping on a plane?

Once there, though, the four of us who could make it did settle in nicely. We've all known each other since high school, and despite the years that have passed, it never ceases to amaze me how quickly and comfortably we realign into our old group dynamics. I don't mean this in any sort of caste system sense: we don't have any fixed designated 'leader,' 'bitchboy,' 'gimp/sex-slave,' or 'backup vocals' slots. Rather, it's simply how much we can be and are ourselves with each other, despite the spatial divides between meetings or temporal ones between conversations.

Per the birfday boy's wishes, the first night entailed going to bars in the Marina. It was my first public outing with the wedding band but sans wife. Apart from the more traditional reading of such a ring as your devoted commitment to another human being, I'm already starting to read it also as a green light for being a jackass to women who talk to me in bars. For instance, later on in the night, when asked if I was really sharing a beer with Nick (I was--he hadn't wanted one that round, then changed his mind), I flashed my ring and told her not to worry, because I was married and Nick was my husband. At that precise moment, my wife smiled to herself somewhere, not knowing why. Then she thought about it, rolled her eyes, and knew it had something to do with me.

The following night we hit a German restaurant Jim has been raving about for months, this time with Kate in tow. Kate is a girl we went to highschool with who I literally hadn't seen in a decade. And why was this? Because I never really talked to her outside of class, let alone in any kind of social context. She's absolutely great, and a blast to go out drinking with, but these weren't things I would have been able to glean during high school. Back then, I drew a fairly clear line in the sand between my friends who knew what to do with a twenty-sided die and those that didn't. And that line was between those people I hung out with. The rest of the school we hid that side of ourselves from, because despite the acts we like to play, you only want to be so much of a pariah in high school. We may as well have been spending our weekend sodomizing livestock, the secrecy we employed amidst the mainstream kids. And Kate was one of those.

But as I said, she's a great girl, and we had a blast with her on Saturday night. So I've gotten over this whole "us and them" mentality, right? Grown up, realized I should take my fellow man and woman for the special embodiments of God's love and Creation that they are, and enjoy the many exciting conversations that will result, right? Fuck no. I will readily admit that there are many people from my past and present who I probably have written off too quickly or simply haven't been able to get to know well enough, and that I regret. I'm working on that. But when, for example, Kate asked (already knowing the answer) whether we'd be going to our high school reunion in a few weeks, well, I don't know language emphatic enough to express the negative response. I mean, the RSVP actually asked, amongst other things, who we had a secret crush on in high school. Really? That's how they're going to try to entice 500 young professionals to return to their hometown and stand awkwardly in a gymnasium for three hours? I would rather hump a burlap sack of broken glass that was only sleeping with me to get even with its ex-lover. Twice.

Below are a few pictures of the guilty parties involved. Names and captions are used to underscore the guilt of those depicted and, hopefully, instill a deep feeling of shame.

Jim the Birfday boy and Kate. I realize his hand looks disporportionately large on her shoulder, considering the size of the rest of him, but don't let that take away from the 2 litres of beer--the real star of the picture.

Nick, our humble iPhone photographer, is the one in the middle, desperately praying that he is not the roast beef in a sweaty manwich.

Because sometimes, eating a Pizza Bite with sleeves on just isn't gay enough.

Colonel Gentleman and the Don. I'm the white guy wearing a blue tshirt.