Absinthe-minded

You could say the absinthe kind of made our trip and ruined our trip. The absinthe was a bar set too damn high. We waited and then we grinned and then I asked Dave once more if he noticed any green fairies dancing around us, and when he shook his head no I told him I totally wished the mirror’s reflection showed The Great Gazoo hovering above my shoulder, winking approvingly and giving me a thumbs up, but instead I just felt extremely smart all of a sudden. “I feel so alert, yet drunk,” I remarked, sitting with perfect posture in my chair. “This state of lucid drunkenness is an opportunity. I feel like I could go back to our room tonight and get some substantial writing done. I feel like I could defeat anyone, one on one, in a game of Sudoku.”

Dave spoke with his hands a lot. As his own clear-headed version of inebriation progressed, Dave didn’t grow smarter, he grew stupider. He studied his bill and asked me what fifteen percent of one hundred was. Later, he laughed semi-uncomfortably and said, “You mean, as in, nigga?” after I explained to him that my novel would contain lots of black humor.

And as my intelligence expanded at an exponential rate, so did my rudeness. Don’t call us townies, that chick waiting in line told me. Call us locals. Then she got all red in the face when I asked if calling her and all of her friends a bunch of Tahoes would suffice.

And the stupider Dave got, the more whipped he got. He stared at his cell phone anxiously, waiting for his girlfriend to text him back. He pretended not to

see anyone when I nudged him and pointed with my chin in the direction of a leggy blonde. He suggested that we call it a night, right after midnight, right before the go-go dancers were supposed to come running out in their coconut bras.

After we left, the lines of the physical world were sharper than ever and the night sky was big and free. I walked up to the border and put one foot in California and the other in Nevada, pondering the duality of my current “state”, pun intended. It was a great night, but the thing is we knew nothing could be perfect anymore. Not the sashimi on Saturday, the lobster and steak on Sunday. Not the cigars on Monday. Not the day’s worth of rain which created a half foot of fresh snow up in the mountains, encasing the quiet trees in ice the morning after, putting chains on everyone’s tires. We would snowboard down a horrific double black diamond, but all we could think about as wind and icy snow bit into our eyes was how empty the adrenaline all felt, how meaningless it seemed. It was like going to Wrigley to watch the Cubs and then finding Dennis Haskins sitting next to you, the novelty and sheer joy of being in the presence of Mr. Belding rendering the baseball game in progress irrelevant. It was the opening band trumping the main act. Nothing was as good as it could have been, not with the absence of absinthe.