Tonight I dropped Jimmy off in SoNo on my way in to work. This was 5pm he started drinking. At eight he wanders into my peripheral, up to me on my parking lot stool. I know he's drunk because he stands two steps closer than sober people stand to someone they're conversing with. You know, in the bubble. My bubble. And two steps closer means the alcohol molecules dancing in his breath don't have to travel so far to permeate my face. After he tells me one story three ways he ambles back down the street for two more hours of boozing. Two more hours til ten, when I'm off. At ten I decide I'll go have a few drinks with the girls. Jimmy's game.

In the Rattlesnake bar&grill, Jimmy shoulders his way deep into the people like a headstrong sperm. I don't go to bars to drink. I go to socialize, I drink to make the socializing easier. Allison, Jessie and I set up shop and start drinking. Start socializing. Allison is big on humbleness. Which basically means she'll cock her eyebrows at you if you say you're good at anything. Where most girls appreciate a little confidence, Allison tunes out the accomplishments of others. I'm no psychologist, but my connect-the-dots skills are fairly honed from years of Highlights magazine; and I'm willing to bet that it has something to do with the fact that she sees herself at The Brewhouse, "Forever." I don't conclusion-jump, this is over a month of conversations. Allison drinks more than all the other waitresses combined. She knows all the tenders at all the bars, and she stares like she's gazing through a wormhole at herself doing the same thing ten years in the future. It's sad. She's a smart, personable, attractive girl. All she offers by way of advice is, "What are you going to do if you're not an actor?" She smiles when she talks about her hollow future. Allison looks down on confidence because she has none. And I don't mean in herself, as a woman. In fact, she is attractive because of her confidence. She has an air about her, this soft, strong voice that almost makes her intimidating. As far as aspirations go though, she acts like my father. Like she's 47 and that's quitting time. Roll up the carpet, throw in the towel. It's ridiculous. And each time I go out with her, I leave with more of an edge for next time. What she doesn't know is she isn't changing me, or scaring me. Making me worry about my career. She's in fact, making me ecstatic that the least that I have are dreams. Dreams I have made steps to achieve.

One of the beer taps is a crystal ball with a rattlesnake head in it. Down the shaft it just says, VENOM. I tell the bartender I'll have "some of that VENOM shit." It's caramel color. Dark like strong tea. I hate dark beer. halfway through it Allison tells me that they don't make the Venom Ale anymore. That there used to be a string of Rattlesnake pubs, and that Venom Ale was their signature draft. Once the chain started dying they stopped making the beer. It's now just a fancy rattlesnake tap connected to a fat keg of Sam Adams. I don't like dark beer, but I could choke it down easier when it had venom in the name. You know, snakes and all.

Jimmy charges back up through the people, disappears outside. Allison darts out for a smoke and I'm left with a hostess I've seen a thousand times and never spoken to. I don't even have a guess at what her name is. She's very sweet though, so I chit and chat, buy her a drink. Some guy's girl spills wine on my leather jacket; I had it draped over a chair. I go to smile and say don't worry about it. But he offers to buy me a drink. So I take it. When it becomes clear Allison isn't coming back I say goodnight to go find Jimmy.

I head over to O'Neils, an Irish pub I think he may have gone to because of the live music. No Jimmy, but the place is nice. I should start going there. A good crowd. Good sized place.

A bum fakes interest in the book I'm holding so's he can scam a couple bucks. Don't ask why I'm carrying David Sedaris's, Holidays on Ice around on a bar hop. I decide to leave Jimmy. He knows I am his ride, why would he just take off without telling me?

In the dark of the parking lot I make out a weird mass on the hood of my car. "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING!?" I scream at the corpse. No breath, no movement, no reaction. THEN, he suddenly starts to life. Looks every which way but at me to figure out where the voice came from, and then trips and stumbles around to get to the passenger door.

"I knew you'd show up here." He slurs.

"Of course I would, it's my car."

He throws up in the bushes.

Van Helsing was a turd. A 200 million dollar turd. I forgive you Hugh Jackman. But that's it, NO ONE ELSE GETS MY FORGIVENESS! You all pissed in your 200 million dollar beds, now you can all go lie in them.

That's as meaty a review as I can muster. I am doing so little that I have nothing to write about. Nothing to say.

Just waiting to work.

2 hours, 15 minutes and counting.

When my father was a kid, so many kids would show up at the sandlot after school to play baseball that they had to play two games simultaneously. Just too many kids. In stark contrast to that, my friends and I, over many years, honed and perfected the rules to a Tennisball baseball game that would retain the excitement, intelligence, and competitiveness of baseball, but could be played by a total of three people. Not because we were antisocial, but because thisday&age there are more fat kids sitting on couches playing baseball with their thumbs than there are kids willing to get sweaty and dirty. It was a game fashioned out of neccessity, one that could be scaled down to accomodate nearly any size arena. But it found its legacy in the three combined fenceless yards that came to be known as Shep Nation Field.

The game became a weird crux of our friendship. No matter time, distance, change, even feuds that seemed relationship crippling; we somehow always ended up back under the outfield oaks. Trying to curve a seamless Penn, or Dunlop. Swinging for the leaves. Because we smashed more roundtrippers than anyone ever privilaged to play the game with us, we dubbed ourselves The Bash Brothers. A wittingly egotistical title that somehow transcended its cheese and came to exemplify a large chunk of my young adult life. Before I moved away, we danced among the cacti one last time. And when the game was over, we buried a baseball bat under home plate. Baby Blue, we had called the aluminum Easton for so many years; she had finally lost her "POP," which resulted in a lot of lazy fly balls. A lot of doink basehits that felt nasty off the bat, in our hands. I ad libbed a eulogy as she was lowered into the long narrow pit that had been dug between the batter's boxes. We sang the George Strait song she was named after and each dropped a clod of dirt on her sad blue body before covering her up. It was comical, and strangely serious...

SO WHEN JOEY AND CHANDLER HAD TO DEMOLISH THEIR FOOSBALL TABLE IN THE SERIES FINALE OF FRIENDS, it provided yet another superlative example of why the show was so important to me. Relatability. They each took a moment, and with heavy hearts said some kind parting words; it was comical, yet strangely serious. It was the end of an era.

FRIENDS, like the grunge-rock movement of the early 90's, started a few years too early for me. Or I was born too late. The romantic fiascos of a bunch of twentysomethings was hardly so relatable at 12. Even 13, 14. 15 even. Then however, comes the symbiotic mesh of social intelligence, relationships with more weight than a recess together in the big cement tube, and syn-di-fuckin-cation .

I dove right into the middle, into non-linear reruns that muddled the storyline. One night Ross was gonna drink the fat for Rachel. The next he was planning a marriage to some weird-Brittish-Emily-girl. Monica was all up in Tom Selleck. Then the next week she was secretly fucking Chandler. There were all these weird boyfriends. There was Paolo. And Tag. There was, "I Ross, take thee Rachel..." There was, "WE WERE ON A BREAK!" It didn't matter the order, I became enthralled in their sensibilities. In their idiosyncrasies, in what made them people instead of joke spraying robots. Seinfeld, was fucking funny. But I couldn't have cared less whether any of those characters lived or died. Themselves, and all of their countless relationships were vehicles for Jerry Seinfeld's jokes. Walking punchlines. That's not to say that Seinfeld was not an absolutely brilliant show, it was. No doubt about it. But my gravitation to FRIENDS was in its heart. In its relatability. I use my humor as a means of fitting in, like Chandler. I invent overcomplicated games and put an inordinate amount of emotional stake in winning them, like Joey. I have been in love, and dedicated a great deal of my life to someone as perfect and strange for me as Rachel is for Ross. (Plus I've always been a dinosaur geek.) FRIENDS was a soap opera. A soap opera with talented actors, great characters and intelligent witty writing.

After a time, of 6 and 6:30pm on the WB, of 7 on TBS watching random episodes, I just had to know how they'd all gotten where they were. I dished out 65.95 for the complete first season of FRIENDS, and 70 bones don't come easy to J-Remmy. At a big fat lonely low point in my life, I watched all 11 hours in a weekend. Nothing outside of a movie theater had ever made me forget, or not worry, so much. Two days ago, in a moment of monetary weakness I bought Friends: Season 7. It was in response to a silly day before, Friday, when I moped around feeling strangely empty because of the day before that. Thursday.

The day the TV died.

I have -gay as it may be to admit- from the pilot on, over 150 consecutive episodes of FRIENDS. I've seen them all, in order. I know their pets and parents and pasts. The series finale was no more or less funny than any of the "serious" episodes. The ones with weddings or births. I laughed the way I do every Thursday night; every 26 seconds or so, give or take. It had its highlights, it had its problems. Monica got her baby(ies). And Rachel got off the plane. That was all we were owed after ten years. It needn't be any more spectacular than any episode before it. They were all pretty amazing. It just needed to wrap things up. There was never a worry that the friends would have to go away to college, that they would graduate and the show would change locations and suck. They weren't entangled in a complicated web of espionage that would have grown tiresome after five years. All they had to do, was grow up. The show followed a natural, predictable timeline, and ended exactly when it should have. When they all grew up. And it was a little sad. It reminds us that we will too. Grow up, get older. That you can't play fireball in the house or own a big white ceramic dog forever. FRIENDS built such an enviable reality. One where an incredible dynamic of people get one another through the ups and downs of their crazy fucking 20's. Through the muddled bullshit that is being twentysomething. So much bullshit has been written on the FRIENDS phenomenon in general, but especially of late, that there is no resource untapped. No angle un-covered. I am rambling, coming to grips with the fact I don't really have the words to explain it. I have put off writing this for days, expecting a revelation, a hook to my goodbye.

All I've got is that I truly loved all six characters, cared about them like they were real.

The show was perfectly relatable, endlessly funny. And hopelessly romantic.

So...

Phoebe, Joey, Chandler, Monica, Ross, Rachel...

Thanks. You really had an impact on my life.



P.S. --I've since caught up on all that grunge I missed too.