Silly + Stupid = Fun Sometimes

Was thinking about three scenes from my early twenties today. Not sure why, except perhaps that, in light of the nice time I had at a neighbor’s Superbowl party last night, and having to do some 401k work this morning, I couldn’t help reminiscing about more carefree times. In this case, three events that all happened in 1989. They all involved two or three of my good buddies from back then, and , uh, beer.

First happened in August. I may have written about that elsewhere here; if not, it was in an email sent to one of the chums after we reconnected on Facebook a few years back. Anyway, that summer we went to a lot of Yankee games. By “a lot,” I mean maybe three or four. I was not a big baseball fan (still ain’t), but the tickets were affordable and me and my two pals would go there, drink a couple of beers and down a couple of dogs and enjoy the fresh night air. This time in particular, we came back to one of my friend’s house, and continued the evening doing some nocturnal swimming in his pool and guzzling more beer. It was a tremendously fun day and evening. No chicks, no worries, no fighting, nothing but three guys being stupid and silly together.

Flash forward two months. A cold, pea soup Saturday in full Fall, nothing going on and nothing to do. A few phone calls later, me and my two pals are driving south, not sure where or for what reason. But we wind up at a neighborhood bar in some town I’d never been to before or since, about mid-way down the shore. They have a pool table. Now, none of us plays pool, but the bar was empty so we picked up some pool sticks and racked up the table. Oh, and we probably drank a pitcher of beer between us for every game, all afternoon. There were lots of laughs and we had the whole place to ourselves. A great time, an uneventful time, probably a wasted time, save for the fact I am writing about it now, and the fond memories that silly and stupid afternoon brought me.

The third scene takes place a couple of days before Christmas. There’s snow on the ground. Though I have a girlfriend at this time, I am not with her. Come to think of it, I think this was one of those planetary-alignment rarities where we all had girlfriends at the same time. But for some reason we were solo, and I seem to imagine this, too, was something that just spontaneously popped up. Having nothing better to do, we hopped in one of our cars and drove to a nearby bar. Another bar in which I’ve never been to before or since *, though it was in a more urban setting than my pool-table bar. We sat around a circular table for three and the pitchers of beer kept flowing. There was a live band, which was cool, and one of my chums kept flirting with some chubby blonde chicks at an adjacent table all night. I don’t remember laughing harder than I did that night. And then – guess who comes in? Santa! Santa Claus blusters into the bar with a big rucksack and hands out all sorts of treats to all of us – I got a foam beer mug holder, imagine that!

This morning, twenty-plus years later, I’m doing groundwork for a 401k and financial retirement seminar for the employees at my work. I can’t help thinking how far behind I am in financial planning, how it seems like I’m in a big hole that gets deeper and deeper the more I try to climb out over the side. Hmmm. Is it any wonder I’m wasting time fondly reliving a couple of events oh so long ago when I had no responsibilities to anyone but myself and the only pressing urgency was to have a good time, however stupid and silly?


* Contrary to the nature of this post I never really enjoyed going to bars; still don’t. Over the dozen years after I became legal and before I got married, I probably went out clubbing or barhopping at the most a hundred times (out of over 600 weekends if you think about it … that’s but 8 or 9 times a year). And of that hundred, probably a quarter to half were at the local watering hole in town, where I could walk home from if I had too much to drink. The majority of Hopper’s nightlife episodes occurred in the late 80s and a brief but insane spell around 1994 or 1995.