You know what's weird?

When you're standing at the bar next to a friend, then another friend comes up and starts making out with the first friend.

That's what's weird.

Not in a bad way, just in an unexpected way.

Last night, after exhausting the rest of the draft selection at The Tilted Kilt, I tried a Kronenbourg 1664 lager. I didn't think much of it:

(draft) An absolutely terrible, bland, watery excuse for a beer. Tastes exactly how it looks - weak and boring.

Next I had a Fat Tire. I've had this before several years ago. I liked it:

(draft) Very well-balanced ale, probably meant to be a copy of Newcastle Brown Ale, and it is a very good copy indeed. A little more malt than the Newcastle. Very drinkable.

Other than these two beers I stuck with Newcastle all night in-between nervous breakdowns.

This morning I made a wonderful discovery. There's a bar at the Rio that carries Alaskan Amber!!!

It's bottled instead of draft but still, what a pleasant surprise.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

(see previous entry for clarification of the above statement)

Without getting too specific, there's a lot more than the letter t making this:

It's pretty cold up there.

different from this:

It's pretty cold up here.

The bartender at The Tilted Kilt had to spray me down with the drink thingy to snap me out of my seizure.

Just to clear up some recent confusion:

ahhhhhhhhh: Wow I sure am relaxed now

aaaaaaaaah: I am freaking out!

awwwwwwwww: What a cute little kitty!

ohhhhhhhhh: I understand that now.

oooooooooh: That's really cool.

Keep this handy guide with you.

I've mentioned before some of the unusual searches that lead people to my site.

This morning I saw this Google search in my server logs:

Why does my cat hiss at me?

Typing this, I imagine, is some poor little girl, perhaps eight or nine.

It's just so sad. I hope her kitty still loves her.

Yesterday was not about beer, though there was a lot of beer consumed.

Yesterday was not about sleep deprivation, though I went about 30 hours without sleep.

Yesterday was not about Las Vegas, though I'm here.

Yesterday was about the fact that I couldn't stop laughing.

This is a new kind of insanity for me. My mood became so much better than it'd been for the past couple of weeks that the whole evening and night was like an extended emotional orgasm or something. I didn't want to go to sleep because I was afraid that the reality of the situation would somehow claw its way back to the surface of my mind.

Well I did sleep eventually, and while I'm no longer laughing, I'm still grinning.

Things are still gloomy, but they no longer threaten to completely obliterate me. Things are actually back to exactly what they were three weeks ago. The cruelty being directed at me was not coming from the person they pretended to be. At least that's the story and I'm sticking to it.

So I've managed to scramble back into the frying pan, and that's what yesterday was about for me.

There was beer involved too.

Most of my day and night consisted of a simple two-step dance:

1. Drink a couple of beers.

2. Try to get some sleep.

This dance repeated a half-dozen times, so I drank a lot of beers. I rotated between Newcastle, Smithwick's, and Guinness, and at one point had a Stella Artois. What crap. Here's my rating:

(draft) I asked for a Belgian and got this awful thing. I don't like lagers, and this was a pretty bad lager. Bland mixed with boring.

Now it's Sunday morning and I'm surprisingly not hung-over.

I'm sitting here second-guessing a decision made a couple of weeks ago, and second-guessing has become second-nature to me, so I'm back to normal I suppose.

As normal as I get anyway.

Just a quick entry to say I arrived in Las Vegas safely and I sit here more confused than ever.

This may be due in part to the fact that I had to wait four hours before I got my room assignment.

But only partly because of that.

I wish that was the whole reason.

That was fun. Not.

After our Thanksgiving meal today we went out to the woods and shot up a car with a machine gun, of all things.

It was very cool, but I now know that I'm much better with the virtual machine gun in Half Life 2 than with a real one.

Rambo I'm definitely not.

In the movies the guy almost always wins the girl in the end.

Of course, he first has to deal with obstacles, mistrust, poor timing, and all manner of pitfalls, but in the end, some grand gesture will usually win her heart.

Then the credits roll and most everyone assumes that the couple will live happily ever after.

Not I.

I know that reality will soon set in, and that's when the real tests will begin.

This is the problem with grand gestures. The other person falls for it, not you. It's like some elaborate bait-and-switch scam. You fall in love with a person that only exists for a moment then, once that moment has passed, you're stuck in a relationship with a comparatively boring person.

What happened, you wonder, to the person that threw everything away to be with you? What happened to the person that serenaded you, that sent flowers to you at work, that walked through the desert to profess their love and bare their chest as if to say my heart is yours, you may do with it whatever you wish?

That person no longer exists. Born of a moment of passion and desperation, that person ceased to be the instant the moment had passed.

I've made a grand gesture a few times in the past. It's got me laid more than once (though that was not my sole intention), and it got me a relationship that lasted a few weeks.

It's also at times been met with rejection and scorn.

And there's the rub.

To put it all on the line of course means risking it all. This is scary enough, but to risk it all with a lie, with a grand gesture that, if successful, will shortly be held up as the standard by which the entire relationship will be measured - that strikes me as insane.

Then again, I guess love is a form of insanity.