The 15-Minute Drinking Party

June 15, 2007 Revere, MA Evan's Apartment

I felt a good place to stop the last entry was at the party because I didn't feel like explaining the concept.

After we went upstairs.

Before the party, presents were doled out to each of his friends: Gwen and Jess received their respective bottles of alcohol, Boyd received a knife and a hat with "Living Legend" embroidered on it. Packaged inside the big box—you guessed it: a Fisher-Price basketball set. My expectations were shattered needless to say.

After the presents were doled out, the people and alcohol congregated around the living room table to drink heavily in the 15-minute party. The theme is genius: what happens is someone sets a timer for 15 minutes, and everyone imbibes as much alcohol as he/she can, after 15 minutes is up, everyone is supposed to stop. But what if alcohol remains? What are people supposed to do the rest of the night? That is the beauty part—no one stops drinking after the 15 minutes are up. It is kind of like having desert after you've had way too much to eat.

I cannot remember much from the night, but I do remember this from the total pandemonium:

• Some guy named Pevner projectile-vomited a quadruple+ shot of Jager all over the kitchen
• Cake was smeared/thrown at Alex's face by Graham
• Graham spilled beer on me, I retaliated by pouring beer on him

That's about it, I woke up later that day with a raging hangover. I was thirsty (for water) and very hungry. So Graham, his brother Evan, a high school friend Boyd, and I went to the local Vietnamese restaurant. Most of the dishes revolved around vegetable/meat/seafood on vermicelli, an angel hair pasta. I can't remember what I ordered, but it hit the spot.
We went back to the house to jam cds and play a strategy game called Puerto Rico. Drinking beer, primarily Pabst Blue Ribbon (fuck that Heineken shit!), jamming metal, and Puerto Rico occupied most of our time the few days in Boston.

For dinner, a party of us headed downtown to the Midwest Grille, a Brazilian restaurant. Graham was giving me the silent treatment about the whole concept of it so I was extra-fuckin'-excited to eat there. Hell. I had never had Brazilian food before. For some reason all I could think about was skewered bugs and spiders...I was pretty close.
The place was packed, a reservation was obviously needed to come close to eating here. Aromas of garlic and meat filled the room. For some reason I gave the name "Crux" a few hours prior. How it works is everyone sits down (at a table), and these friendly waiters whom I will call the Meatmen, come around with swords or skewers of meat. The barbecued meat is called rodizio. It's as close to a viking mead hall as I could ever get in America, and a place definitely not for vegetarians. I was glad Graham made an exception to eat meat for RTOTF. We ate Garlic Lamb, Sausage, Pork, Beef, Chicken, and Chicken Hearts. The salad bar was also exceptional, I remember the chicken salad destroying my world. The friendly Meatmen do not stop ushering meat until the octagonal card on the table is flipped upright telling all the waiters to STOP!. It was a kingly feast!

Blast-off

June 14, 2007
Novi, MI to Revere, MA ~14 hours

Graham and I awoke around 8:30 am. The weather was sunny without clouds which was ideal for driving. Though we slept little, anxiety would triumph over any feeling of tiredness. My parents cooked us a light breakfast of eggs, toast, and coffee. This would be sufficient until lunchtime. Stops had to be minimal at a rate of 1 per 3-4 hours of intense-concentration high-speed driving.

After we hastily ate, we loaded the provisions in the car. The checklist ensured that this task would be foolproof. In addition to piling my large travel bag, backpack, and cooler into the trunk, Graham's car was stuffed with presents for his friends in Boston. The entire back seat housed a voluminous wrapped box, I hadn't the foggiest of what the [mal]contents were.

After said my respective goodbyes to my dad, mom, and sister, it was time to depart.
We had officially crossed the line.

Two possible routes led to Boston, one was a more direct route through Canada, and one led along the periphery of Lake Erie and through the brunt of New York. We chose not to take the Canadian one to avoid dealing with border assholes and immigration. They do not take kindly to freaks and longhairs like us and would have held us up for hours for no logical reason.

The highway was about three miles from my house. After we got to the off-ramp, we balled the jack, or "hit the road," in the parlance of our times. Obviously, I would describe the phrase as the initial burst of acceleration to get to the constant highway speed. I put on the Zeke CDs "Death Alley" and "Til the Livin' End", the riffing is dirty, raw, and fast, the drumming upbeat, which makes perfect anacrusis to kick off the RTOTF.

I felt anxious and very inquisitive at the beginning of the trip. We would have unlimited exposure to concepts, ideas, absurdities, music et al. What music and how much would we be listening to? We had packed at least 300 CDs. What destinations would we hit in the proposed itinerary? Would events go as planned? Would problems arise with the vehicle? Would we be murdered by a gang of banditos? Enough! On top of all of this, I was optimistic. After all, No Expectations, No Destinations was the mantra for RTOTF.

Somehow we started talking about tautologies, after I impersonated my former boss with the quote, "It is what it is" in a smart-ass tone. As you can see, the last quote means absolutely nothing, which is basically what a tautology is, a useless repetitive repetition of repeats. Waste!
Re: it is what it is: if it wasn't then it wouldn't be. This would be the beginning of many abstract conversations.

We had each made some mixes to introduce new artists to each other. Graham's was called the EPIC mix, it was 3 different cds of epic songs from his repertoire. It totalled around 210 minutes, ranging from Nile to Bjork to Radiohead to The New Deal. My mix was mostly metal and punk. I had burned about 25 other cds (from Abscess to Zappa) so I wouldn't have to worry about losing them—which is a pet peeve of mine.

We drove by many signs that said: "No HC zone." I wasn't sure what that meant, but I think it had something to do with the amount of semi trucks pulled over. We had blazed through Ohio, the tip of Pennsylvania of which we could see Lake Erie from the road, and New York with only three stops until we hit Buffalo, the beginning of the Appalachian mountains. Epic vistas had been minimal until that point. The rest area rate increased to one per ten miles. We made a final stop around east Syracuse to stop for food, and liquor for the party when we arrive. We bought snacks at Wegman's Grocery, the liquor store was down the road on Erie St called Pascale's. There, we picked up Svedka Vodka, Hypnotiq (for Jess), gin, and crown royal (Gwen), two items per person. We needed to fill up gas, which the national price was about $3. Outside the traffic circle in east Syracuse we stopped. Graham was on the phone with his friends from Boston to coordinate a simultaneous arrival.
We drove through the Massachusetts border around dusk. Instead of rest areas every 10 miles it was toll booths that dotted the Mass. Turnpike. Weather has been partly cloudy and calm all day, no rain impeded our driving, light to moderate traffic also helped us get there speedily. The most exciting part of the drive according to Graham was the treed foothills stretching out for miles. Other than that, the terrain was generic. It was only about an hour from the first destination.

The Cadaver and the new Slayer albums recharged our batteries. After 13 hours energy drinks do not cut it.

We hit Boston around 12am. We still had about 15 minutes to drive through the network of city byways to go northeast to Revere, a town about one mile inland of the Atlantic Ocean. I took a few snapshots while driving through the tunnels, the abstract blurry effect proved cooler than a static shot. We eventually arrived at 12:15am to the apartment building. Boyd, Evan, and Gwen were hanging out on the front porch. I was glad to see them, and glad to finally arrive so I could relax. More of Graham's MIT friends awaited us inside to open their presents and begin the 15-minute drinking party...

Pre-road trip

June 13, 2007

Several months before the RTOTF, Graham ran by me a transcontinental trip via car. Apparently, this idea spawned from our mutual friend Dalby (who could not caravan with us this time), and the gravity of the concept did not hit me until I started making a comprehensive list of provisions. Most of the trip planning was done by Graham, but I helped him with the provisions part, as many items are needed for the road and gear for camping/hiking. No item was to be left out: floss, CD player, extra oil, batteries—every item on the list had utility. I made a checklist by category on Excel which could be used as a template for future excursions. The categories which I chose and kept were clothes, car, hygiene, chilling, and places to check out. Most of the items I had already owned, I acquired most of the other items from garage sales, people on Craigslist, and as a last resort, actual stores. Economically, it made sense.
The planning process also includes obtaining maps and routes, and consulting others' opinions and advice online. I had discovered a road trip forum, which people would post hypothetical routes and the moderators of the forum would confirm/undermine the feasibility of the route. Our route was loosely orchestrated and had many destinations, states, and miles crammed into a two-week period. In two weeks, we would have traveled from Michigan to Montana via Boston, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Nevada. Naturally, the mods scoffed at our proposed route not only with disdain, but with utmost condescension. Damned by judges.
One of my favorite fortune cookie messages (that ironically was not a fortune) was, "A cynic is someone who looks down at those above." It was time to battle the mods' cynicism with even more cynicism...at least a zanier kind.

Graham was to arrive at my house in Novi, MI Wednesday, June 13th via Missoula, MT. While I was toiling away at my final statistics project and deciding which media program to burn cds with, he had been driving like a bastard for nearly two days including stops. He finally arrived at 3am (I must be lone-lTHBPBBB). I opened the front door. Diagonally postured, Graham looked like he was about to fall over in exhaustion. Anxious to catch up at least for an hour, we put off sleep and listened to a handful of tunes (ediT and others). We had to be gone by about 8:30am that morning, a departure standard for the whole trip if we wanted to confute the mod fucks.