Saamba

August is probably the worst time of the year to catch a cold. In case any of you have plans to be sick during the hottest point of the year, always remember these friendly tips:

- avoid sitting in the sun for long periods of time with your friends at a racetrack.

- avoid drinking large cups of Dunkin Donuts coffee, with an extra shot of espresso, just before you go to sit in the hot sun for long periods of time with your friends at the racetrack.

- avoid doing triple-shots of Jack Daniels while sitting in the very hot sun for long periods of time with your friends at the racetrack because most of your beer was confiscated at the gate since you are a dumbass that forgot that bottles are not allowed, even though they were expensive bottles designed to impress your friends and you cried like a school-girl as you watched the guards throw them in the trash.

- avoid thinking that because you just lost $30 worth of good beer, that you have to make up for it by betting more money on the horse races than you originally intended to.

- avoid telling your friend, in an effort to appear macho, that the drink they just poured for you in the very hot sun which consists of 85% vodka and 15% soda is "just fine" when they suggest that they can "add more soda to it if it is too strong".

- avoid thinking that you have some mystical ability to predict the outcome of a horse race after you have been drinking Jack Daniels, Vodka and espresso on an empty stomach in the very hot sun with a severe head cold just because the middle name of one of the horse trainers is "Nigel", which sounds an awful lot like "NyQuil", which you have also been drinking, so it must be a sign that you should definitely bet on that horse.

The only way I could have possibly lost more money yesterday is if I had been doing heroin and fed my wallet to a horse. However, it should be noted that the purpose of yesterday's visit to the track was NOT to make money or have a good time. Not in the least. If either of those things had happened, it would have been a bonus. The purpose of yesterday's visit to the track was to impress our friends with how cool we are.

You see, some of the friends that we were meeting at the track (we'll call them The Jones') are ex-coworkers of ours. I used to work in a large firm with Mr. Jones, and my girlfriend used to work at a different company with Mrs. Jones. Mr & Mrs. Jones are an extremely cool, hip couple. They even dress like superstars, and I mean that in a good way, not an obnoxious-posing-wanna-be way. They are naturally cool and hip without even trying. We admire them, and aspire to be more like them.

A few years ago I quit my job working next to Mr. Jones to start my own business, and have ever since wanted to show them (and everyone else) that I could be successful at it. Likewise, Mrs. Jones has quit working next to my girlfriend and has also gone to work somewhere else. Needless to say, I knew that when the four of us got together again there was going to be a lot of catching up on old office gossip, and questions like "so how is work going?".

I would be totally lying if I said that I didn't want to hear Mr. Jones complain about things at my old office. I wanted to hear him complain. I wanted to hear about the low morale and the pay-cuts. I wanted to hear that half the staff had quit, that our old supervisor had a nervous breakdown and that the bitch in section 24A was fired for biting a man's head off - literally - and that now everyone there understands why I didn't get along with her and that I wasn't really the bad guy after all even though I tried to push her down the stairwell seven times and regularly peed in her coffee. That sort of thing.

It's kinda like going to a high-school or college reunion. You want to arrive in style and show everyone how successful you've been since you left that dump of a town they still call home.

This was my mind-set getting ready to go to the track. I could give a damn about my head-cold and whether or not we actually could afford to be spending money gambling - this was all about appearances. As such, we each took about an hour deciding what to wear in an effort to look as cool and hip as Mr. & Mrs. Jones. This was completely futile, as my wardrobe cannot live up to this challenge, and Mr. Jones showed up wearing an assortment of clothing items which I would not be caught dead wearing, either separately - or especially, together. His outfit looked like something he threw together from pieces of clothing he found in a dumpster outside a modeling school in Paris. Yet he somehow manages to look cool in it.

I even made the mistake of "identifying" the brand of watch he was wearing, which I thought was a "Fossil". He looked at me all-kinda-screwy-like, as if to say "Hell, no. I wouldn't be caught dead wearing that." It turns out his watch was made by some company I had never heard of like "Danshzliglietz PodPod" and are all hand-crafted by an 87 year-old Czechoslovakian man out of very thin slices of purple granite and scrap metal from the Mir Space Station.

I thought of lying and saying that I had read an article about the watch a few months ago, or I had thought of buying one, or something like that, but I was worried that he would say that the watch company was only invented about 0.34 seconds ago, and I wasn't cool enough to know about it, so I didn't.

My last effort to compete on the "coolness" competition involved my new cell phone. The other day my girlfriend and I used a rainy afternoon to spend time "let's just go browsing" in the local shopping mall, and ended up both walking out with new cell phones, among other things. We didn't need new cell phones, but that's besides the point. We went home and spent the next several hours playing with them and trying to program all the right features and contacts into them. My new phone had a feature called "Predictive Text", which means when you try to enter text into the phone, it tries to "guess" what the hell you are writing. This feature is about as helpful as having a defense attorney with Tourette's Syndrome. The thing that kills me is that it made me feel very old. I know that 10 or 15 years ago I would have been all over this predictive-text thing like white-on-rice, and would have been able to enter the text of the Treaty of Paris in three keystrokes. Instead, I couldn't even figure out how to turn the damn feature OFF, let alone how to use it properly. The result of which looked like this:

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......*delete* *delete* *delete* *delete* *delete* *delete* *delete* *delete*......*POWER OFF*....*POWER ON*

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これは日本語のテキ�� ストで�� 読めますか

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Me: "Nothing! There's no emergency! My phone dialed you by mistake!...I'm sorry!"

911 OPERATOR: "Sir, if you are in danger, and cannot speak freely, say the words 'I AM FINE.' ok?"

Me: "No, really I am fine. NO WAIT! I take that back! I didn't mean that...there is nothing...I mean...SHIT."

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Haha! You like I dial girlfriend parents when you have sex? They hear pleasure goodness from pocket!

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So that is pretty much how I spent my night programming numbers into my new phone. I felt like an idiot. I eventually managed to turn off the predictive text feature, but don't know how I did it, so I suspect that someday I will accidentally turn it back on again.

So I used the excuse of having a new phone to whip it out and ask for Mr. & Mrs. Jones' phone number while they were there with us at the track. It turns out they weren't impressed with it - they don't even have cell phones themselves. They don't like them.

I spent the remainder of the afternoon trying to downplay my obvious symptoms of heatstroke and insobriety while throwing money around like it was candy. The idea was that if they see me throwing money around, it would mean that my business must be doing really well, and I would avoid the need to do things like brag and lie. This seemed like a pretty smart plan at the time.

Mr. Jones and I had fun catching up on old times and comparing notes about work. I was satisfied to learn that he had many complaints about our old office, and that things there were just not very good. It turns out that a lot of people have left the company, and that moral is pretty low. He even said that it was a good thing that I left when I did, because after that, things went to hell.

Me: "Oh, Sure. I make my own schedule, after all."�� *blows nose with $20 bill and discards on ground*� *sniff*

Mr. Jones: "Great. Hey, you wanna hit the casino with me on Monday? I am getting in on a poker tournament."

Me:�� *retrieves $20 bill and wipes on pants - puts back in pocket*�� "Sure, I'd love to."

Me: "Yeah, lemmie check...." *reads listing in cell phone* JARSLANK SLAPTYDANCE_?

I can't wait to see how that is going to turn out.

By the end of the day I had managed to lose $30 worth of beer, lose every race I bet, bet more money than I had budgeted, lost my ability to think rationally, pickled my brain with intoxicants, caffeine and cold medicine, sun-baked to the point of hallucination and agreed to do most of this again on Monday. Nice job. The only thing I didn't do was vomit, which I count as a major success.

By the time my girlfriend and I left the track I was already getting a first-class hangover, and we were on our way to have dinner with her parents. I'm quite a catch.

Anyway, gotta go now - I have to go buy some stylish clothes and do some research on what this game called "poker" is.