Adventures with Mace

The dog has been spared, for now: her health had deteriorated rapidly, but then it improved just as rapidly. Here's to her living to see her 18th birthday.

A few weeks ago, M. threw two parties back-to-back. It was an exhausting weekend. The second party was an underground affair--twice as exhausting, a zillion times as risky, and, it turned out, maybe half as successful as the legal one. The main act canceled at the last second, claiming that it was all M.'s fault for something-or-other. For an hour and a half I "worked" behind the bar selling drink tickets. Having never worked in any sort of retail, I was absolutely useless at making change, and the veteran bartenders happily let go of me once it started getting busy.

The night ended abruptly at perhaps five-thirty. First the smoke machine set off the fire alarm. Then there was a brawl. A nice nerdy hipster kid from Minneapolis was socked in the face, and someone, we don't know who, sprayed his assailant with Mace. Being a warehouse with no ventilation, the place was soon rendered a box of wheezy fiery pain; the partygoers fled, leaving us there with lungs full of spice and boxes and boxes of booze to bring home to our garage. Heed this advice: underground dance parties are NOT worth the bother, and this one lost money, too.

As long as I'm talking about staying up 'til dawn, here are a few of the heat-wave circa-solstice sunrise pictures mentioned in this post: