SeanWard.org

Nicole picked me up at 8:30 in her Mustang Cobra. It’s a nice ride, stick, convertible, red and black racing seats that pull you into them comfortably during acceleration. Nicole is an ex beauty queen, still a beauty, and works for a local corporation as an Information Architect and Project Manager in the web design department. I’ve known her for several years.

We met her man Carl at a small Mexican restaurant where we devoured chips and salsa, tortillas, rice, and chicken enchiladas. Carl had a steak and a cactus salad. Everything was tasty. Afterwards we headed off to a friend’s house nearby and discussed the finer points of his web site, solutions to video and email concerns, and the use of iframes. Then we looked at horrific web sites and laughed. It was geektastic.

Our friend showed us a large stack of hundreds from his latest Internet venture. He mentioned that between our brains and himself, we could all be wealthy, and I really thought about that. Here I have all this knowledge about how to make sites work, how to make money on the net, and have been helping others do so for a decade, merely selling my services. It’s high time I supplement offering my services with capitalizing on my skills in other ways.

We soon headed out to a local bar, and it was just like that scene in Star Wars where Luke walks in with Obi-Wan and finds a motley array of aliens of questionable morality. It must have been ugly night at the pub.

The doorman stopped Carl and demanded his ID. I looked at him and reached in my pocket. “Need to see mine?” He didn’t. We plastered ourselves up against the wall adjacent the bar and took in the scene while guzzling a few cold beverages, but the ice in the drinks didn’t help curb the heat. By the time we reached the bottoms of our glasses, we were all sticky, and I was sweating. All those people and no air conditioning.

We were there for at least three rousing karaoke performances. I tell you, those hammered trolls could sing!

There was a little Sheryl Crow:

If it makes you happy
It can’t be that bad
If it makes you happy
Then why the hell are you so sad

Some Alanis:

An older version of me
Is she perverted like me
Would she go down on you in a theater

And we waited until this song finished before heading out (Clearance Carter):

I stroke it to the east
And I stroke it to the west
And I stroke it to the woman that I love the best
I be strokin’

There seemed to be something thematic about the song choices, their delivery, and the overly friendly crowd of ogres.

We skedaddled.