On Sunday morning I woke up around 6:00 am, smoked a bowl, and finished Saints Row: The Third, which is probably definitely the worst game I ever stuck around to finish.  It was only about 7:15 at that point, so I smoked another bowl and decided to try Gone Home, a just-released indie game which I had purchased a few days ago based on a mostly-forgotten recommendation from Kotaku from last fucking year.  

Within two minutes I was hooked into the story ("Where the fuck is everybody?" and also delighted that your character and I were the exact same age at the time the story takes place (June 1995).  Of course, your characters is a 21-year old white girl named Katie Greenbriar, and I'm not a girl named Katie, but this is the second game I've played this year where I personally felt like I could, in some way, inhabit the character as if it was me.  (The other game was Max Payne 3.  "I couldn't remember the last time I'd felt anything but regret.".)  

The credits rolled 100 minutes later and I was sad.  Sad that it was over (it is a pretty quick game), but also just sad.  There's really only one significant voice actor, the girl who plays your missing younger sister Sam, but she by the fourth or fifth audio diary I heard I could feel my heart breaking for her.  Oh, Sam.  

While the father and (especially) the mother's stories aren't quite as filled in as Sam's, the dad's story intrigued me enough to play another 40 minutes of it to find all of its pieces.  And wow, there is something familiar and sad about finding out about the people you call Family by creeping around the house when they aren't home.  I stopped doing that when I was in high school because I got upset with the stuff I was finding about (e.g. evidence of a previous marriage and kids, ugly correspondence between my parents, any kind of porn in my brother's room.)

In about 13 hours I'm catching a redeye to Jacksonville to see my family.  It's been eighteen years since I was 21, and in 1995 our family home was in San Diego.  And really, there's not much that my family has or had in common with the Greenbriars.  But the game has me even more worried and sad (there's that fucking word again) about my family and how everything has turned out with me and them.  I don't know, I guess I'm just sensitive to the Family Buttons that Gone Home managed to push so well.

In losing sixty pounds (and trying to keep it off), I've been forced to drink a lot of vodka because I have to destroy my life and liver somehow.  My preferred vodka is Ketel One.  With the hullaboo about gay bars banning Russian-owned vodka because Russia is not liking the gays very much nowadays.  If Ketel One was Russian, would I stop drinking it?  (Maybe!)  

Luckily, Ketel One is, to my amazement, Dutch.  (Also amazing: Ketel One's rather sparse Wikipedia entry.  Why not more info about Ketel One, Wikipedia?)  Anyhow, they like gay people in the Netherlands, so I will continue to drink it.  

"California's New Pot Growers: Not at All Earth-Friendly," The Atlantic.  

We met up beforehand at a bar, and it turned out he/we had the hot ticket(s) in town.  Mastadon, High on Fire, Quicksand, Hot Lunch and some other band.  We weren't even sure if we wanted to go, but our friends were quite ready to murder us for the tickets, so we got a cab at 7:00 and went down to Slim's.

I learned that Nike, d/b/a Converse, sponsored the show, along with four other shows this week, to promote the Converse store that's opening on Friday(?).  No one paid for tickets; you either won them or you were on the guest list.  And there were a fuck ton of people on the guest list, at least two of whom I knew.  

After waiting in line for twenty minutes, one of the Converse pod people (white t-shirt, new black Chuck Taylor's) told us it was going to be in one in, one out, meaning that you would only get in if someone else left.  Another five minutes and we would have made it.  So we waited, and there is no place I would rather not be than waiting in line.  (Well, maybe Syria.  Or Amanda Bynes' vagina.)  But there was progress.  We went from sixteen people ahead of us, to eight, to six, to four, to two.  Just two guys ahead of us, we were almost in!  

And then we waited.  And waited.  And waited.  Finally, after a grand total of an hour and forty-five minutes of standing in line and hearing High on Fire from the sidewalk and watching the cool kids just walk in, we surrendered and went across the street to take a leak and get a drink.  We had an impromptu pissing contest once we hit the bathroom, because oh man, our urine had built up like a crowd of Mastodon fans and was storming the doors to get out.  It was a helluva piss.  After twenty minutes we stepped outside to get a smoke and saw the two guys who were ahead of us still waiting.  By the time we left an hour later, though, they had disappeared. 

After a couple of rounds we went back to the neighborhood and drank more.  And I ate nothing but a salad and some bar popcorn the entire day.

Anyhow, that is the most "me" story ever:  I had an opportunity to do something cool but was just a little too late and didn't get to do what I set out to do, missed out on what the cool kids were doing, and just said fuck it and got drunk.