Last Saturday I got probably the most wasted I’ve ever been, at least the most wasted I’ve been in a long, long time. I went to the birthday party of someone I barely know because she used to work at Bose (before I got there) and everyone at work wanted me to go. I didn’t really think I was going to go, and really didn’t make a decision until about two hours before closing that night. At that point I could really use a beer, and I figured why not? You can always leave if it’s not cool.

So I get there and basically know no one, except for the few people there I actually work with. You know what keeps you busy so you don’t have to talk when you don’t know what to say to someone you don’t even know? That’s right, alcohol. I got started on the fruity tropical drinks pretty early (the theme of the party was luau). So I did that, loosened myself up a little, had a little fun with all the other crazy people.

Then my friend pulls me and another one of my coworkers aside to the parked cars to go smoke some weed. So I smoke up, get pretty toasted, and I’m enjoying myself even more. We go chill out with everyone else for a while, and then go back to the parking area to smoke again.

This is where the trouble starts. I take some pretty big lungfuls and start the coughing, which right there is an instant indication that I’m going to get fucked tonight. Sure enough, within a half-hour reality has pretty much changed for me.

Now I’ve gotten drunk before, and I’ve gotten really high before, but I’ve never really done the two at the same time before. I’ve had like a beer while high, and a toke while drunk, but never anything substantial. Not like this. I’ve gone from completely functional to comatose in like thirty minutes.

Here’s what it was like: It was like every moment was like two steps forward and one step back, or like a record skipping. Ben time did not sync up with normal time in the slightest. An hour felt more like three hours. In the background was playing Andre 3000’s new OutKast disk, and each song felt like an epic jam. It took all I could muster to look normal. Not that I had to try hard, everyone was pretty fucked up that night. But the entire time I was doing this little twitchy dance thing, where if anyone was actually looking at my legs they would think I was on coke or something. I was pretty much dancing from foot to foot with like two little knee jerks in between. Eating was an event that took one’s utmost attention, because it took seemingly forever to chew something because of the effects of everything combined with the fact that my mouth was bone dry. Everything I had was put into not looking weird, not looking twitchy, and especially not choking, which would look REALLY bad. To put it bluntly, I was fucked up to the nth degree.

Then sometime after midnight, maybe around one, it all wears off. I feel (relatively) normal. So instead of going over to my boss’ place to sleep like I was suppose to, guess what I do? That’s right, I drive my ass home.

Reasons why this is not a good idea: A) the whole being really fucked up thing, B) the fact that it is already so late that by the time I got home I would just have to get ready to go back to work again, and C) the fact that I have NO idea where I am. I followed someone to the party, and although I was given easy directions back to the main road there was no way in my present state I was going to find my way back, in the pitch black night nonetheless. But I follow one of my coworkers out, and he gets me to where I need to be. But…

More reasons why this is not a good idea: D) it took me an hour to get home. When messed up, an hour long drive isn’t exactly the first thing you should be doing. E) on the way home, we come across an accident in the road. I swear to God, we get to this hill and you can see a line of emergency vehicles going up it. You couldn’t see what happened, but what you could see was a car on fire. If it wasn’t for my friend leading me home I would have been there all night. Scared the ever living crap out of me, which leads me to F) the fact that not one but two deer ran out in front of my car. If God was trying to tell me to be careful and that I shouldn’t be driving, boy was I listening.

So I get home around 2:30 and kind of half sleep, half feel like I have to vomit for the rest of the night. I swear to God, I felt like I was rolling around in a giant Bose speaker all night long. Either a 321 or a 301, I’m not sure. And at 7:30, after maybe 3 hours of sleep I have to get back up to go back to work.

I think the drive into work was probably more dangerous than the drive home that night, if only because I was having a hell of a time keeping my eyes open. But I got there, and felt duly like shit. But I wasn’t the only one. Everyone had gotten fucked up that night, and between the four of us I think we had like a total of 10 hours of sleep under our belts. But we made it through the day, thank God. I was still messed up for a while after that.

Which leads me to my next story, which is that that night, the night after the big party, Jesse had gone to the Phish concert. He knew that he wouldn’t be feeling good that next morning, so he and I traded shifts so that he wouldn’t have to come in early and I could get out early Wednesday and Thursday. A little back-story: just a few days earlier Jesse had put in his two weeks notice. Also, Jesse has a little problem with authority and/or doing anything to completion. So Wednesday afternoon he’s like “I got to get out of here. I’m gone,” and then starts doing the whole “it was nice working with you” thing. I’m like, “uh, OK” until it dawns on me that him leaving totally fucks up the deal we made. So I remind him of that and tell him to pretty much stop being a putz. But for the rest of the afternoon he keeps saying the same thing over and over, making like he’s out of there. I swore up to the moment I walked out that he was going to jet.

Sure enough, next morning he doesn’t show up. He fucks me out of my hours off that he promised me, he fucks my manager out of her day off, and he fucks Jeremy out of his vacation, because now he has to come in on the weekend. What a dick he is. On top of that he still has my Lady Snowblood DVD, which despite being one of my favorite movies right now is also one of the most expensive ones I own at 25 dollars. I’ve yet to see it back, which is really pissing me off. I’ll hound him to hell and back until I get that DVD back. What a bitch he is.

So now we really need people to work at Bose. With only four of us on staff now, I’m working a lot of 6 day weeks in the near future and a lot of 48 hour weeks. At least the overtime will be nice. I’m looking at making a lot of money in July, with overtime added to all the bonus’s we’re getting. Good thing, because it’s not like I’m spending any less money.

Speaking of which, my LS35 still hasn’t come in. I’m sad. I have fantasies of it, and so want to hook that badboy up. I’ve got a stack of CDs and DVDs I’m just dying to try out on it. Hopefully it will come Monday or Tuesday so that I can hook it up Wednesday on my day off. Man it is going to be so bitching.

I’ve become a music guru lately. 115 CDs I’ve already bought this year. Frighteningly, I’ve also bought almost as many DVDs. But CDs are the big thing now. Armed with my Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums issue and some great deals at BMG I now have something like 100 out of the 500. Man I love music. Personal favorites right now are the Velvet Underground and the Stooges. I love that punk, underground, garage band type sound. Talking Heads are also a current favorite.

None of that compares to getting the new Sasha CD today though. I didn’t think much about it when I got it. For the most part dance music pretty much sucks now, and nothing really sounds as cool as all the trance and house stuff I listened to when I started to get into it around 2000. So I preordered the new Sasha disk not because I was really looking forward to it, but because it was from Global Underground and the first Sasha mix in like four years. Big mistake. By about half way through the second song I turned the volume way up, turned the lights out and just melted into the music. AMAZING. Everything I first fell in love with is in this disk. This is just about the most perfect DJ mix album ever made. That’s mainly because it isn’t really a DJ mix, but a DJ mix REmix album. He took apart every track on the album and reconstructed it, and then melted everything together seamlessly. It’s like floating on clouds with waves of sound washing over you. Just amazing. Sasha, where the hell have you been all of these years?

Just to give you an idea of what Sasha means to the world of dance music, back in the sixties in London you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing “Clapton is God” written on a wall. In the mid-nineties you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing “Sasha is God” written everywhere.

And he is.