feather2pixels

Christmas Eve. The most boring night of the year. I couldn’t even find an open grocery store, so instead of running an errand for my family I listened to Joanna Newsom’s new album the way it was meant to be heard: in a dark corner of the Super Fresh parking lot locked in my mom’s brand new SUV.

Joe and Anna announced their engagement at Rich’s Other Place on Friday, which is as good a place to tell your friends you are getting married as it is a place to cut high school. She wore black gloves until the unveiling and I am glad to report that Rich’s grilled corn muffins are back to the excellent standards of ten years ago. It was actually the first time I met Anna. Even if I didn’t like her, I would obviously never trash talk her on the internet, but she was friendly and I took to her right away. A smart woman makes her fiance’s best friends feel welcome. I can see what Joe sees in her.

After breakfast, Joe and I bowled a three game series and played six games of air hockey. He bowls with his dad’s old eighteen pound ball, heaving it in to the air as high as possible so that it lands with a left hook. When hit just right, it detonates the pins with a furious explosion to hell. Any other time it splits them. On Friday, though, he was rusty and I beat him with a reliable 13 pound house ball that apparently used to belong to a Chun C. Chung. Back at my house, we realized that Joe never signed my senior yearbook and so I handed him a pen and he got his big chance. I had almost forgot what it felt like to have friends who know the way to your house without directions. (Not to downplay the significance of Ben, who probably still needs a map for his own special reasons).

That night, Shal and Ammora joined us for drinks at the nation’s second largest mall, where she works (and had just personally completed $33,000 in home theater sales). Our server has a thick, juicy Philadelphia accent but there was an unsettling lack of smoke in the bar. Side note: apparently in Philadelphia proper, there is now an official smoking ban. I went down there last night with my cousin Rebecca to investigate and I am happy to report that at the Locust Bar–on tenth at Locust, where The Rascal and I used to get loaded when she was still nineteen–there is not only smoking, but an ashtray at each table.