Finally back in town

I haven’t stayed in town for the entire month of August. I just kept making plans with old friends, new friends, and random people until before I knew it, I hadn’t seen Newport on the weekend for an entire month.

It started out like a great idea. I was drinking way to much and starting get in trouble running around town at night — which is a sure sign of a lonely young man. I decided to make a bunch of plans so I could sober up and get away from town for a while. It didn’t exactly work out as planned.

It started out with a music festival in Bridgeport, CT, which, contrary to all the promoters propaganda, turned out to be more ghetto than most parts of Providence, RI. The concert area was on the beach and was secluded from the ghetto, so no badness went down, but the dilapidated area gave me a surprising jolt.

I immediately followed that surprising jolt with another, mainly to my digestive system, as I filled it with various alcohol-soaked chemicals until I was no longer a member of this planet. After seeing some great acts like Deep Banana Blackout and an amazing set by Buddy Guy, and countless other acts, my body was in revolt. I had to drive home, still hallucinating. I reeked of absinthe and body funk. It was a fucking blast.

The next few days I was uncontrollably sick. I felt like I had the flu mixed with mono or something. Straight up death. I went to the doctor and they told me to slow way the hell down. So I did…till the next weekend.

The next weekend was my birthday, and as usual, I went to drink at Pour Judgement in town with a couple of friends. We started on margarhitas at about 4 in the afternoon. By last call we were still slamming Irish carbombs and belting out Bob Dylan tunes while beating on the table….good times.

Then came this past weekend, which I am still recovering from. It was labor day weekend and my old buddy Tim wanted to go to the Sacko River in Maine, which proved to be a college party up and down a river. The basic idea is to put as much beer and booze into your canoe and your body as possible, then float down a river. Then you set up camp. Then you do it again the next day.

Joe came with us and before I knew it I was with my punk rock high school crew. That means TONS of drinking and acting completely foolish. It can be fun at times, but when your buddy Joe drinks too much Jager and Red Bull and starts yelling at random campsites, kicking your other friend’s car’s ass and just making a general ass of himself, it can get tiresome. Not to say I didn’t reach and breach some new levels of debauchery myself, but still, you didn’t see me fighting anyone. After three days of living on clear canned beer, hot dogs and raw madness, it was time to go home.

On the way home I visit the bathroom while Tim stops at the New Hampshire state liquor store. I pull out my Johnson to piss and notice a patch of red itchyness on my upper thigh. I instasntly start trying to think of any skank I got down with on the Sacko, but none come to mind. I am reminded of the Sublime lyric

“Get down on your knees and start to pray…

…Pray my ichy rash ‘ll go away.”

Now, I really need to slow down. Waking up with random rashes next to your cock after partying your ass off for the last month is not a comfortable feeling. I feel like…I need to see a doctor immediately. And I need to stop drinking so much. I literally drank over 60 beers, most of a bottle of Belvedere and a little bottle of Jameson last weekend. I’m going to be a full blown alcoholic if I keep this up. Then I puke into the urinal. Yep, still hung over.

That was yesterday when I was so hung over that I couldn’t get my writing done for work. I vowed to slow the drinking down.

Then tonight on the way home from work, where I did get all the required work done, I decided to have pasta with red sauce and veggies for dinner. “I should get a bottle of wine to go with that. It’d be perfect!” Oh wait. Can’t. Shit. This is going to be harder than I expected.

I think being terminally hungover one day and waking up the next and craving more alcohol is a BAD FUCKING SIGN!!!!

What am I doing with my life?

It seems like it’s time to start the cycle over and become a reculse until I get so lonely that I start drinking uncontrollably and making and ass out of myself in town so I’m forced to leave for a month and party way too hard, wake up with a possible STD and a hangover, and then stop drinking for a few days. Yeah.

Summer Surge Slowing in Newport

After leaving town for a few days, I come back to find that things are pretty tame. There are definitely plenty of tourists still running around Thames and Bellview, but there are not nearly as many as, say, early July. Maybe things are winding down?

Hopefully this is not a fluke. With so many people vacationing in my new town, it really brings me down. I try to go out and have a good time like (seemingly) the rest of the town, but I don’t have enough money to. I try to chase the beautiful girls dressed in their sundresses, but I don’t have enough money to. I try to drink every night at Pour Judgment on Broadway, but I don’t have enough money to.

I know this is largely my problem. Who else can I blame? But still, it brings me down to see the rich happy people getting drunk and having the time of their lives while I sit in a park and poorly play guitar.

I hope the summer surge is slowing, and it probably is. The weather is certainly starting to turn. I was awoken the other night by a frigid blowing through my window, a sure sign that autumn is coming. I haven’t seen Newport, or even Rhode Island, in the fall and I’m looking forward to it. I wonder if it can compete with the amazing beauty of Western Mass.

Surfing Newport RI

Finally, after weeks flatness, the Ocean kicked up enough waves for Southern Rhode Island to go surfing.

I hauled my soft pale frame onto Second Beach along with dozens of other desperate surfers, aching to peel down a monster.

At first it seemed like competition would be rough with so many riders in the water, but I quickly realized that there was plenty for all, and everyone had a smile.

I, too, soon stretched a grin across my face, the first I can remember for a long time. It’s a strange paradox: the summer usually makes everyone happy. It’s really everyone but surfers. There are no waves in the summer, and it becomes maddening.

In the winter the water turns frigid but the waves turn mean. You can see surfers carving in December with a nor’easter blowing in, having the times of their lives. They don’t get tan, but they get crazy.

I paddled till my arms could paddle no more and I hit up Vicker’s Liquors in Newport on my way home for a bottle of wine to relax and cook dinner.

“Thank God,” I said to myself. “I was starting to lose it there.”