She may possibly have been cute, but I'm not sure

Another week working at the super-duper startup is drawing to a close. Thursday already? Lately the days seem to just blur together as they speed past me, cliche as that sounds.

So it's Thursday already, and Ben and I are off to see High Fidelity at the Alamo Cinema and Draft, and I'm excited because I haven't seen High Fidelity and it's supposed to be good, and before High Fidelity they're showing some Tenacious D stuff and ever since Bryan played "Sex Supreme" for me I've been hooked on the Tencaious D. "We don't mind sucking on toes... good luck finding a boyfriend who sucks toes..."

Also, this is my first Alamo Cinema and Draft experience, and it's supposed to be great.

"Can I see your ID's please?" the girl selling tickets says, and Ben breaks out his ID. I awkwardly take out my driver's license, my driver's license that has a picture of me at 16 without a beard so that I look like a 12-year-old girl, my driver's license that in huge red letters says "UNDER 21" on the side, just in case some bouncer isn't so great at math.

And I sort of awkwardly fumble it and hand it to her.

"Yeah, we're going to have to X your hands." Which is fine, I'm not trying to do anything illegal here. Sure, no problem, I don't need to drink to have fun watching a movie. So she draws these huge black X's on my hands. I thought every place had switched over to wristbands because of the relative ease which people could just wash their hands and then be rid of their under-21 pox. But I digress. I don't want to drink anyway, I just want to see Kyle and J.B. sing some nasty tunes, and then watch High Fidelity.

Me, my screaming loud X'ed hands, and ben go upstairs and meet joanna, and then enter the theatre. And wow, the Alamo Cinema and Draft is like the greatest thing ever. It's like, you're in a movie theatre, except that there's a little bar to put all your food and drink on in front of you. And you can just order food and stuff, and then they just like bring it to you during the movie! It's so awesome. I love it. So, so great.

High Fidelity is good. But it reminds me again how much we all rely on cultural product consumption to define ourselves. And I hate that. I'm not arguing about it's validity for me and almost everybody else, I just hate it. Who the hell cares what music you listen to, right? We're more than the cultural products we consume, right? It's so silly and stupid. But I don't have time to really develop these thoughts, and even if I did I'm sure someone else has expressed them more eloquently elsewhere. Any idea I've had has already been had by someone else, and expressed by someone else more eloquently. I have a weird relationship with the post-modern, not that I even know what that means. Blah blah it's all pastiche blah blah blah. Especially this web site. I wish I could break out of it and create something truly original and creative. I wish I still believed in the concepts of originality and creativity.

And then ben and I are drinking coffee, waiting around until 9:30 when we're supposed to rendezvous with a bunch of people. Not just people, WEB CELEBRITIES really, you know, they're super-human. And not just web celebrities, but WEBLOG SUPERSTARS jason kottke and peter merholz. (Any of you "normal" non-web celebrities reading this, you should know that "web celebrities" are just like you, only better.)

Ben and I walk on over to BAR NAME WITHHELD BY REQUEST. Plan a - just act normal and walk in. I mean, I have chops, nobody is going to fuck with me. I have chops! I'm fucking Wolverine! Grr!

"Need to see your ID's" the big, burly bouncer guy says.

Great. So. Plan B. I'll just casually take out my UNDER 21 license with my X-ED hands and I'm sure everything will be DANDY.

So with my x-ed hands, I give my screaming red Under 21 license to the bouncer, and he just sort of stares at it for a while.

"Yeah, I'm under 21, but you see I have these big black X's on my hands, and I promise I won't drink, we're just meeting some people in there." Nothing like blunt honesty to confuse people.

"Yeah, I can't let you in."

Dammit. Here's the part where chops aren't enough, and I need the adamantium claws to shoot out from my x-ed hands.

Ben chimes in with, "But umm, we're meeting a bunch of people here and..."

"Are you employed by the Texas Board of Alcohol?" the bouncer asks.

"No," I reply.

One of his bouncer buddies says, "what, like that means anything."

And the bouncer is like, "no, they're not allowed to lie about it or else it's entrapment or something." Another long pause as he stares at the license, I'm sure laughing on the inside that whatever bad ass chops facial hair I have now, I look like a 12-year-old girl on the license photo. "Yeah, you can go on in. And if you wash those stupid x's off your hands you can drink," and then proceeds to have a good hearty laugh.

"Thanks man," I say as I attempt to do my own hearty laugh, and ben and I proceed into BAR NAME WITHHELD BY REQUEST.

Five minutes later Bryan finds us. Now, nobody is quite sure how old Bryan is, but current estimates indicate that he is 13, maybe 14.

"Did you have any trouble getting in?" I ask him.

"No. I'm bryanboyer."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"I just walked in."

Figures. I excuse myself to the bathroom and spend 20 minutes trying to wash off the X's from my hands, and they're mostly gone, but still a little bit of a faded outline remains.

But even after that I don't order a drink because I'm sure the instant I do my under-21-ness will somehow immediately become apparent and some huge bouncer will magically appear from behind the bar and drag me by my shirt collar to the back door and then drop kick me out of the place and then I'll painfully land on the ground, then continue sliding until I hit my head on a conveniently placed dumpster and I crash to halt.

It will go something like:

"Hi, can I have a..."

"Are those faded, washed off, under-21 X's on your hands?"

"Umm..."

"BRUNO!"

And then all of a sudden I'm throw out into the alley, cartoon-style. So I decide not to drink. And I said I wouldn't drink, and I'm an honest man. Except for the times I blatantly lie to further my own interests.

The rest of the gang (and by "gang," I mean SUPER COOL WEB CELEBRITIES who are better than you) shows up, and everybody has pleasant conversation. Everyone except me, because somehow my seating is conveniently placed to allow conversation with a big wooden support pole-thing.

But that wasn't so bad because the pole had a lot of interesting stories to tell. And normally, people just talk at the pole, but me, I was having a dialogue with the pole.

I talked to Pableaux and Arianna about my "future" and "going back to school" and all that other stuff I'm not worrying about until next month, because I can't talk to the deepleapers about it and I can't talk to my parents about it so anybody else that's willing to talk to me unfortunately has to listen to me babble about it. Unfortunately, next month starts like tomorrow or something ridiculous. So I'm thinking of rebranding next month to be September. I've been rebranding "next month" at the end of every month this summer.

Sorry, there's no climax to that story. Like I said, this texty text is crap. Sorry about that.

I mean, uhh, I'd write more but it's TOP SECRET because WEB CELEBRITIES were there and I'm not at liberty to discuss the fascinating and TOP SECRET WEB CELEBRITY stuff that went on. Remember, there is no such thing as the blogger cabal.

So let's just move on, shall we? I meant that rhetorically, you can scream "no adam, make a real conclusion to this episode you talentless hack of a writer, you sub par story-teller you" and it won't make a difference. Nope, no difference what so ever.

Friday night bryan and I decide to go to Katz's for our midnight dinner, because they have the good fries. We haven't been to Katz's in weeks because the last time we were there we saw a cockroach. It wasn't so much the cockroach as much as seeing it cause a commotion, then get smooshed into the carpeting by a waiter. After that, it doesn't matter how good the fries are.

But we decided to give Katz's another shot, just this once, but we get there and it's super crowded so we decided to pursue alternative dinner plans.

We end up going to Kerbey Lane for our late night dinner, and for the first time in months I have my most favorite thing in the whole world: eggs benedict. Ah, eggs benedict. And they're pretty bad, and the hollandaise sauce is way too thin and runny, and the canadian bacon is overcooked, and the muffin is under toasted, but still, it's eggs benedict and I'm happy. I'm a simple man, all it really takes to make me happy is some cholesterol filled breakfast foods.

And the waitress was cute. Well, not exactly cute, she could have been cute. I couldn't exactly tell. Bryan couldn't either. It was weird. But after our yummy yum meal we get our bill, and it's super-cheap. So I look and see it's because we weren't charged for our drinks. Now, there's a few possible explanations for that. Explanation A - she's just forgetful and didn't put it on there by accident. Explanation B - she left it off on purpose in an effort to encourage us to become regulars.

Becoming a regular is no easy thing. There's definitely an art to it which I haven't mastered. Either that or regular is an outdated concept, and today's waiters and waitresses just don't care abou tit.

I've eaten out so much this summer, you would think I would be a regular somewhere. And I'm not. Not even at Ken's Donuts, which I go to almost every night. It seems that no matter where I am, I become a regular at the donut shop. Normally, this is great, because you get free donuts and stuff and have great conversations with the clerks at 3am. But not at Ken's. Nope. They take their donut-making very, very seriously. In fact, they seem annoyed when we come in to buy donuts because we've disrupted their sacred donut-making process. And we never, ever, get free donuts. But oh, oh, the hot glazed donuts are so good I don't even care.

Anyway, not only does our possibly very cute waitress leave off the drinks from our bill, but also mentions to us that if we have student ID's we can get a discount at the register. And I'm like, hey, I've got a student ID, and bryan's like, hey, I've got a student ID too, we're like fucking a man, fucking a.

Our total is 13 something, already cheap, and our discounted total is eleven dollars. Eleven dollars! They're practically giving the meals away. So I leave a five dollar tip. Because becoming a regular involves tipping generously, and besides, the meal was ridiculously cheap. And, I think our waitress, let's call her "Lauren" because that's what the bill said her name was, may possibly be very cute, and may possibly have been giving the "hey there, you should become a regular here" signs. I'm not sure. But either way, I'm determined to become a regular somewhere, and no matter how many times we go to Guero's they still treat us like crap. And no matter how many times we go to Magnolia at 2am, they still say things like "here's the check, pay whenever you're ready." But that actually means "here's the check, get the hell out of here you useless diner rats who only order toast and coffee and pie and make room for real customers," and we always feel uncomfortable just sitting there for hours because they give us dirty looks. Also, there are scary waitresses with poorly painted-on eyebrows. So I think I'm going to go to Kerbey Lane more often.

Appendix A - persons mentioned in this piece, or who should have been mentioned in this piece, but were not, and who have web sites that you probably have already heard of, but this isn't name dropping, because really, they were there, even if only for a minutes.

joanna vaught
ben brown
bryan "13-year-old" boyer
jason kottke
arianna french
peter merholz
lane becker

Appendix B - persons not mentioned in this piece, but who talked to me during the making of this piece,

connie "i hate adam and am pissed that i'm in this list" kariya
natalie "too cool to be 15" haynes
lance "anything adam does, i can do funnier arthur. ok, well, technically, lance didn't harass me, lance doesn't exactly "talk to me," i just read the latest life serial while i was making this.

Appendix C - persons not mentioned in this piece, and who did not talk to me during the making, and are included here for no real reason

andy "talentless hack" pressman.