Helping her Cheat

So I’m sitting here waiting for Hurricane Sandy to be born and to launch dozens of roof tiles and metal L beams through my living room window, and I’m reflecting on a pile of weird ass shit that’s been gunking up the ole life lately.  (WARNING! It’s a long one, there’s video breaks, I couldn’t be bothered to proofread after about halfway through.  I will later if we’re all still alive). Continue reading Helping her Cheat

Adventures in Koreatown, The Beginning

Oh man.  Ohhhhh man.  So here’s an interesting thing.  Depending on how I tell this story, my Friday night was awesome, or it was bizarrely pathetic.  I will now attempt the awesome version.

As you know, this Friday was the Friday before a Saturday Halloween.  So.  Sort of a lot of pressure, on account of there’s not much excuse for not dressing up or doing something because you have aaalllll day Saturday to get yer shit together.  Except noone really wants to throw something together that last minute if they don’t have to, right? Right.  Hence, Friday night.  In fact, the special lady and I had attempted the trip to the costume shop (Ricky’s) on Thursday, failed, and instead pigged out on burgers and mac and cheese at Odeon.  I highly recommend that.  Much more fun than last minute costume shopping.

Ricky’s on Friday was a mad house.  Line around the block (ok only halfway, but the rest of those people were packed into the super stuffy sweaty panicky basement, frantically scrambling for last minute costumes, or wigs, or blood).  I almost bailed, as I was feeling a little reely from my recent successful swine flu vaccination and flu shot.  I prevailed.  I got a creepy latex dead pig’s head mask and some skeleton wings.  Swine Flu, and people actually got it.  Success…  But that’s Saturday! What about Friday, jackass?!?!

Ok, I take my bag of costume parts up to 34th St to meet the lady friend and a work friend of hers at this place.  What was it called?  Maru?  Something incredibly 90s trendy.  The bar top normally cycles continuously through the rainbow spectrum (red is especially annoying), awful top 40s dance pop, and asian fusion food.  And the only European whiteys are the ones you come in with.  Pretty awesome, actually.  The bartenders are super nice, sweet actually, and they have this deal.  For $35 you get a bracelet that lets you drink anything within reason all night until 12.  We got there around 7:30.  Fast forward to 10:30, after some truly terrible fried calamari (think frozen onion rings) and some really good yakitori’ed shrimp and pork belly, we three drunk white douches were trying out their high end private karaoke room FOR FREE.

Now, I’d like to play this off like we scammed them with some bullshit story, but the truth is our story was legit: we wanted to get a room for New Year’s Eve karaoke madness.  So they took us up, fired up the crazy remote controlled disco lights and handed us the toaster-sized control pad.  Problem: the karaoke book was only about an inch of laminated pages thick.  And of that, only about 5 pages were English songs!  DAAAAANG.  So we fired up a Britney song, pounded it out, and took the elevator to the OTHER super trendy Korean owned private karaoke room establishment in the building.  We gave them the same story and got the same treatment!  Awesome!  Except they had even fewer English songs.  I think we did a Gwen Stefani song (by “we” I mean “they”) and left.

Here’s the part that makes it tragic: they were utterly unbooked for New Year’s Eve.  We could have had a sweet pad in Korea Town with an awesome view and basically unlimited drinks for like $300.  But there weren’t anywhere near enough songs to fill even an hour of time.  Even so, my sweet lady had her checkbook halfway out.  It was that awesome in there.

End of the story:  Another hour of free drinks, taxi, and we held onto my costume! Yes!