slap-happy

My liver needed further lessons in the school of humility, so Saturday night I treated it to a fifth of tequila and some red wine.

On the train home, this guy came and sat right next to me. The train contained maybe five people. I was wearing headphones and knitting, so it should have been easy to ignore him. But he wanted to talk to me. I don't like being rude to people; it just doesn't give me any satisfaction at all. I'd rather be polite and still make them feel like an asshole if that's what they deserve. But I was kind of drunk and I just kept telling him that I didn't feel like talking, and doing the thing where I keep taking one earbud out, nodding, and then saying pointedly, "Look, I'm going to listen to music now. Have a good night!" I could have been bitchy, but maybe I was just too out of it to get to that bitchiness threshold. He even put his hand on my leg and even though I had every right to be pissy, I just said, "Don't do that. Please don't touch me."

This cool chick sitting close by us, after observing this debacle for a few minutes, decided to intervene on my behalf. She was like, "Hey man, just lay off her, okay? Christ. Can't you see she doesn't want to be bothered?"

He said, "Hey, I think she likes you."

We chatted for the next 40 or so blocks, and she got off at my station. I had an empty fifth of tequila and a quarter-full bottle of Jack Daniels that I found on the ground, and the bottles were clinking together and sticking out of my purse. As cool as she was, I guess I was not drunk enough to hit on her.

I slept from six to eleven, then tried to clean myself up and head out to what I think was craigslist date 10.1, which makes me feel like I should get a free sandwich or something. On the train back to the Lower East Side, I was listening to the new Clap Your Hands Say Yeah album, and the song "Satan Dance" came on, which promptly produced a flashback to the previous evening that I never would have remembered. I was smoking outside this really fun bar on the called Sweet Paradise talking to a guy who looked forty but was younger than me. For some reason we were talking about how we both thought we would die at 23, which for him had not come yet, and for me that had passed. I don't know what it is about that age that screams Death!!! but I thought I would cure him of his fatalistic attitude by slapping him. I was slapping his face and his chest, mostly, and saying something like, "Don't be a fucken shithead!" His responses to my slapping ranged from "Why are you doing this?" and "I've never been treated like this before," to "I kind of like that," and then, "Can I buy you a drink?"

But wait, the reason why "Satan Dance" brought this back to me was that after the third or fourth chest slap, he said, "You're hurting me," and lifted his shirt to reveal SAtAN hand-carved and still scabbing over in five-inch high letters. "You're hitting my scars."

I think I said, "Serves you right, you fucken drama queen."

I was still kind of lost in this flashback when I met up with 10.1, a guy who, thanks to my slight hangover, seemed totally humorless. He was also short. And he was cold. As in, we had brunch outside and he was cold. For some reason, he totally lost me when he said, "Aren't you cold?" In response to that, I took off my jacket to further emasculate him. I wanted to share the SAtAN story with him but decided against him. That was a Freudian slip that I'll allow.

I guess in addition to my drinking problem, I'm also kind of a bully. And a hypocrite. I need to have a heart-to-heart with myself today. My horoscope told me so.