Night, Street, Drugstore, Light

Wer&Wif and I, like so many have reported attempting to do before us, set out to drink all the beer and wine in Portsmouth. Not whole-heartedly, but we did want to have a good time, and none of us had work in the morning.

Rather than go into a tedious and likely-to-be boresome play-by-play, and knowing how much You People™ like pictures, here's a graph of the night.

Figure 1: The Quest for Consumption
Consider yourselves lucky I didn't also take a map of downtown Portsmouth, render it into a Lord-of-the-Rings script, and mark our path on that. I was tempted to. GIVE ME THE RING, FRODO.

A few words to be said of our venture (because I find the fragmentary form, though I haven't pursued it to its logical and foggy-minded extreme, more indicative of the night):

POCO'S drove us out because, according to their music, their preferred clientele was born between 1972-1977, already dying of skin cancer, and still appreciated the fine and intricate melodies of The Thong Song. I wish I was joking. Of strange, the-Universe-still-smiles-upon-this-venture importance, the one song that three of us could actually stand (and a far cry from the mid-1990s, middle school dance tunes around it):

Take these broken wings
And learn to fly again

Heh heh. I'll accept that personally and graciously, universe. <3 Icarus.

To describe The Black Trumpet I think Kurt Vonnegut said it best: "It was beautiful, and they shared." Lots of cheese, some olives, some wine. I may have coveted some of the paintings on the wall, but thankfully 1986 laws have not yet come into full effect, and thought-crime is not quite yet real-crime.

Two words for TJ's. "Sayam Summah." I just wanted to see what it was like in there because I had seen it so often from the outside but never gone in before. Like Pandora before me... I was so intimidated by the atmosphere and denizens that I put on a Boston accent in the ordering of my beer, not wanting anyone to know I can actually pronounce word-final r's, thank you very much.

As for the Coat, I have just this to say: Who thought that giving inebriated people sharp and pointy weapons was a good idea? Darts in a bar is like some mildly-accepted, half-hearted form of Darwinian social control.

Returning to the question of Universe-smiling-upon-this-venture-itude, and returning likewise to the statue of young Mr. Hovey, killed in action in the Philippines at the turn of the century -- when I went on a walk through Prescott Park the next day, a task of which we had spoken but in doing we failed, I saw, in Hovey's fountain, a single white seagull feather.

I make things more symbolic and exciting than they need to be.