5.29.99

    I feel like ash. I smoked too many cigarettes last night. Why is it that when I feel the need to celebrate I also feel the need to smoke. I'm happy to report, however, that the smokes didn't seem nearly as great as they have in the past.

    Last night, for my birthday, we met some of The Girls for dinner at Flander's Street Pub. The food was grubbin' and the beer plentiful. The atmosphere is very pub/hunting lodge with long wooden tables and blackwatch plaid carpet. I had the standard cheeseburger and two pints of Black Butte Porter.

    Afterwards, we went to the Crystal Ballroom to dance to the groovy tunes of Hit Explosion. They are a 70s and 80s cover bad out of Seattle and the people I was with had seen them a few times. The Crystal Ballroom is an amazing venue which is a good thing because tickets to the show were way more expensive than I thought they should be. The Ballroom is upstairs, above Ringler's Pub on Burnside and 14th in Northwest Portland. It's huge with vaulted ceilings and ornate carvings along the walls. There's two small domes from which hang giant chandeliers. Along the walls are benches and ashtrays. What makes the Ballroom so unique though is its floor. The entire floor is built upon a series of rockers and ball bearings. It moves when you walk. For every step it feels like two. You cannot actually walk across the ballroom floor, you are forced to strut.

    We got there early and sat along the wall near the entrance drinking and talking. The place filled up pretty fast and then the DJ started playing Bee Gee's "Stayin' Alive" except that it wasn't a DJ but the band! They sounded exactly like the song. The cover was so perfect it was impossible to tell the difference. Every song that night was right on the money and the band had an excellent energy. The lights for the show were rainbow colored and the mood playful.

    During a break between sets, T. and I went and sat up in the balcony and watched the crowd. We waited until the band started playing and marvelled at the sea of rainbow-colored bobbing heads.

    We both had a lot of fun and worked up a sweat. My first year in college I never gained a pound for dancing all night long. I found it amusing this mass of people gathered to listen to 70s music. It's very playfully sexual music. The grunge movement was somewhat the antithesis of 70s music. And, industrial is the dark side of sex, the black part of our psyche. I wonder if it means anything when a genre of music comes full circle like this. Of course, it's not really full circle if you're shakin' your "groove thang" in Dockers.

    I'm glad to be 24. It's seems like I have been 23 forever. So much has happened in a year. So much. I can't even wrap my brain around it.

    We've had Oz the cat for two days now. He's slowly settling in. He meows a lot. Sometimes it sounds very plaintive and I hope he's not unhappy living with us. On the first day we were trying to keep him out of the bedroom but that just didn't last. Since the first evening he's taken long siestas under the bed. I think he likes his dark, hidden place. There's a cubby hole space between the oven and our kitchen cabinets. He kept trying to crawl in there and we pulled him out by his tail. The space is rather deep, it goes all the way to the wall. It's big enough for a cat to squeeze in but I'm not confident that the cat can back out. Besides it's probably really dirty back there. He might find some piece of six-year-old salami, eat it and die. Then what kind of cat parent's would we be?

    Today, we're going to a friend's to watch the Blazer game and then out to a nice restaurant for dinner. T. has really done a fantastic job for my birthday. Things couldn't be better.