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The sales folks came to town yesterday. At least two of them did. So that meant that we all went out to take them on the town. Spence had been to Boston only a few times so someone hatched a plan to show him some of the places in town while he was here. He had gone out with some folks the night before and I put up a stink about not having been invited to it. For a night on the town we started close to home by drinking downstairs at Flat tops and then we moved on to Tommy Doyles. To pass the time we all tried to guess various aspects of what was going on with Kevin. At first we were mostly just betting against him appearing at all since we figured he would probably be quite lame. John had inside information on whether he was coming or not and got us all to tell him that we would bet that Kevin wasn't coming.

We did manage to get the key questions of what he was doing and what his favorite Dunkin' Donuts donut was. I had guessed correctly that he answered that he was watching porn for the two hours and Susan and a couple other people had figured out that he liked glazed donuts even though his favorite kind of donuts are Krispy Kreme. I got into a nice long debate and argument with Kevin because he is a pretty big supporter of the republican party about how we are at risk of being governed by the religious right. We did agree that neither of us like Arafat.

I ended up downing a lot of alcohol quickly between the two locations. I think it was because I ordered a Stella Artois at Tommy Doyles and they served it in a tall glass. Then I got another one. As we were about to leave someone accidentally ordered a third one. Although I made people help me finish the third one I believe I drank about two liters of beer within an hour. Since I had my bike and Hattie had to go get her organic vegetables we stayed behind while everyone else piled into a clown car and drove off to the Cactus Club on Boylston street. What a great tour of Boston - The Cactus Club?

So Hattie and I debated what to do for a while. She needed to go get her fresh vegetables. I called Sarah who put me on the phone with an eight year old named Aaron. He was studying division so I quizzed him on successively larger numbers until I got to 144 divided by 12. He couldn't divide any number bigger than 100. It reminded me of my Java test where one of the questions boiled down to whether I knew what -7%5 was. This doesn't mean negative 7 divided by 5, it means what is the remainder when you divide negative seven by 5. My guess was the answer was negative 2 but I didn't see what it had to do with whether I understood Java or not. Hattie and Sarah talked for a bit about their hopes and dreams and then I left to bike to town.

At the Cactus Club, as always when I am out with Robert, we got into a bit of a recruiting mood. That is how these events get established. At first we just talk to each other and then at some point it bubbles over and we start using it to meet other people and test whether we are the only people interested in doing something or not. In this case the big thing to push were our ski trip and the upcoming Frozen man concert. We didn't have much luck getting interest for either at the table across from us although one woman at the table was starting a bar and had interest in having her bar become a stop next year on the Swedish nurse pub crawl. I downed a margarita with the rest of the gang and we were scrounging around for guacamole for our Fajitas. Susan let everyone know that she usually could only hang out with sales people until about 10PM because sales people are usually guys and they say things that they regret the next day after 10PM. Then Susan and I got into a long argument about the 8 year old boy who had sex with a 29 year old woman. I thought that he would be fine and that he would be a hero among his friends throughout high school because of it while Susan thought that he would be scarred for life and require lots of therapy. I wasn't trying to be insensitive to his abuse but I don't think it will be that bad for the kid overall. Ian thought that eight year old boys don't have a sex drive at all. That wasn't my experience as I confirmed that all men at the table had at least had crushes on girls at age eight. I wasn't about to call back Sarah to put Aaron back on the phone to investigate further. He was likely sleeping by then.

After the Cactus Club Spence and crew disappeared as Robert and I left and attempted to recruit random people for the Frozen Man event. We then bought six Krispy Kreme donuts because we had been talking about them earlier and tried to offer them to random strangers. Strangers fear donuts from other strangers. Maybe people in general fear donuts when they aren't prepared to see them. The person who seemed to fear the donuts the most was the hostess at the Top of The Hub. She confiscated the remaining three donuts before allowing us to enter. I had actually eaten two of them and Robert had eaten one.

The table everyone was sitting on was too small for us so we saddled up to the bar and went to chat with the two women hanging out at the bar. One of them, a half Brittish woman Kate, lives right next door to Robert and is a real estate agent. So Robert spent about twenty minutes explaining about his desire to live in a sustainable setting in a dome on roofs and Kate was talking about potentially making it happen or finding some real estate. She also wanted to organize a party where we all ate some kind of dumplings at her friend Betty's noodle bar that is on Huntington near the Huntington theatre.

Her friend Joanna was a windsurfing instructor who had lived previously on a barge in Charlestown in a semi-sustainable living situation with a group of other barge dwellers. She had recently gotten her degree in what sounded like Commuter Information Systems but it turned out she had gotten a masters in computer information systems. She actually had the same professor as I have for Java last year. We enjoyed chatting about his cute way of saying "Okay dude" after every other sentence and his fat orange cat that he puts into the background of his computer as he ticks through his powerpoints at each lecture.

Eventually Johan, the former barge-mate of these women came up to meet them and I chatted with him about life. After about twenty minutes of that I was ready to try to find the gang who had claimed they were going to VOX. So Robert and I retrieved our remaining three donuts and continued on attempting to give the donuts away as we went. We didn't find our friends at Vox. They probably had gone on to the smallest bar or given up for the evening because Susan had sensed the sales guys were about to start making those late night mistakes in speech that they might regret in the morning. We did manage to find a taker for a donut outside of Vox and Robert traded a cigarette for it. I think it was easier to trade a cigarette for a donut than to give one away. We almost gave away the last half of a donut as a group of women went running for a cab.

Figuring the evening was dying down we trotted over to Bukowskis to wind-up the evening. We went to the wheel of beer and I ended-up with a Hennessey Cream Ale while Robert got some bad IPA that he refused to drink more than half of. We sat next to two girls who were ignoring us so we were chatting with each other about whether the people in Bukowskis really had read any of Bukowski. Robert asked them and one of them had actually read Ham On Rye so they were excused. The girls then left to go to the bathroom and left us in charge of watching their bags and sweaters. Robert and I discussed that if either of us were Bukowski we probably would take their bags and things, run outside, and urinate on them. We thought about doing it but decided against it before they returned.

I was tired and in pain because I had wiped out on my bike crushing my calf muscle earlier in the morning so after the Hennessey was done I opted to leave and got home after a short cold bike ride.


Last night I had some crazy dreams. In one dream I was in a bathroom filled with people who were all naked including both men and women and were urinating on the floor and bathtub. I wasn't embarrassed to be involved and then I made a very large and loud fart that made me suddenly very embarrassed that caused me to leave the room. Later in the dream I was involved in a situation where there were three women staying over at my house. One of them seemed like a love interest for me so I flirted with her and at one point she took her top off but nothing else happened. Then later I was in a conundrum because the women had also brought their three boyfriends. So we all went out to a bar where I bought drinks as they all handed me folded bills that I handed over to an elderly midget who was a bartender that barely reached the top of the bar with his head.

Today I met with Jeff Kahn, an old former Channimal sales person. We chatted about old times and he updated me on progress for his Garage Grids. He thought that trying to make a business go is like sitting in front of a giant panel full of one hundred thousand buttons. With Garage Grids he has pushed about 50 of them and none of them were the one to make the business take off. So now he needs to figure out how long he wants to continue to hunt among the buttons for the right one. So he is making a video that he can distribute to dealers. He showed me pictures of his new house and kids. He had an idea to make web sites for schools to help parents, students, and teachers all stay more in the loop with each other. It sounded like a good idea to me. I'll put some time into helping him with it and see if anything comes of it.