As part of my see-all-my-friends-in-the-US-before-I-move-to-Switzerland initiative, I headed to Dallas, TX (OK, technically Denton) to see my best friend, Jason. Jason and I have known each other for 14 years. Jason just got Benny, his guide dog (Jason's blind), and hence lots of pictures of Benny.
My time out there, as it always is, was spectacular. And the best way to demonstrate this in short, is our quotes list. It's note worthy, to understand the second quote, that Corena is a lesbian.
Annoyingly my flight left an hour late, partially due to waiting for the plane to arrive, and partially due to having to wait in line to take off. Fortunately, we only arrived about 30 minutes late.
I got to Jason's about 8pm, and we headed to "The Green House," a restaurant a few blocks from his house. We (and we alone) sat outside. In addition to catching up, we had a lot of fun joking with the waitress. At one point she accidentally said something in a bit of a British accent, which we joked about, and then all three of us proceeded to talk in a British accent to each other for the rest of the evening. When we paid the bill she said it was the most fun she'd ever had with a table. We asked if she wanted to hang out later, and she was headed to a party, and said she'd get her friend to give us directions. Her friend, another waitress, gave me her number and said she'd get them from her house and give them to me. At this point we found out that our waitress didn't have a home phone, cell phone, email, or any method of communicating with her other than actually going over to her house. Wow. That's pants, as the British would say.
After heading back to Jason's, I showed up a CD of Metallica covers by a Buddhist band, which we both quite liked. We actually did interpretive dance in his living room through most of the CD. Cause we're cool like that. Around midnight, we called the waitresses, as requested, and they said they were getting out late and were tired and were going to skip the party and go home. Ah well. Jason and I stayed up chatting until around 2am.
Jason and I both woke up about noon, and tried to decide where to find breakfast/lunch. Meanwhile I took pictures of him and his new guide dog:
We had considered Mexican when we called his friend/neighbor Erica to see if she wanted to join us. She said she was in the mood for breakfast food, so we wen tout to the "Old West Cafe". It was a strange cowboy hick diner. However, the food was fantastic.
After breakfast we went to the square (Denton has a town square) to check out Recycled, a really neat book store with tons and tons of used books, a huge spiritual and occult section, and even some, tapes, CDs, and records. The store is in an old playhouse that's an amazing and beautiful building. The store is incredibly well organized - the spiritual section alone was broken into at least 20 different sub-sections like Shamanism, magic, Satanism, Wicca, Tarot, etc. Anyway, during our stay, Erica found a book called Erotic Book Plates. For those of you who don't know what a book plate is, it's one of those plates with a design on it that, in the early days, people would use to stamp their name or a design into the front of a book to denote ownership. This book was a collection of such plates that were erotic. So Erica brings this book over to us, and since Jason is blind, we're describing the pictures to him. Imagine standing in a book store and saying stuff like, "well, there's a devil with two penises for horns that are ejaculating and a naked women is collecting it in two dishes" or "there's a women masturbating with the spine of a book"... needless to say, it was quite entertaining. Erica decided she didn't want to pay $8 for this book, but I knew I had to have it, so I chose to purchase it. I proceeded to bring it to a few parties we went to, and it was always a huge hit.
Here's Jason and Erica getting out of the car at the square to go to Recycled:
And pictures hanging out at Jason's house afterwards:
That evening, we went to Megan's birthday party. Just to set the scene a bit, Jason and I were the only men, and Brandy, who is married, was the only straight woman. It was definitely a lesbian party. And Denton being the second hippy capital of the states (after SF, of course), there was guitar and drum playing, smoking, and the like.
Jason and I sat next to Brandy, a girl Jason knew, and a friend of Brandy's, Carina. Carina was stoned, and finding everything funny. No, that's not right. She was Holy-hell-I-didn't-think-there-was-that-much-weed stoned. Usually, I find that annoying, but she was really entertaining. Anyway, after 20 minutes, Meg didn't feel well and kicked everyone out, so we invited everyone over to Jason's. About half the party came over and continued the fun. After they left Jason and I chatted a bit and then headed to sleep.
We woke up, once again, about noon and went out to grab lunch at The Loophole, a local bar at the square. The waiter walked in and asked what we were drinking, and we explained this was breakfast for us. A minute later we realized that it was St. Patrick's Day. Ah. I ordered this Beef-Cheddar-OnionRing-BBQSauce sandwich which was amazing.
We went home and realized we needed some St. Patty's day plans. So Jason made some calls and we decided we'd bar-crawl around the square.
After much deliberation, Jason decided to go ahead and bring Benny. While he doesnt' like very loud places, we figured that it would probably be fairly calm since most people were out of town for Spring Break. In addition, Benny definitely attracts the girls. Since I'd been wanting to see Jason work Benny (he generally does sighted-guide instead of dog-guide when he's with other people, since Benny paces significantly faster than most people can walk), we decided the walk to the square would be a great time to do this.
I have to say, watching Jason and Benny was one of the most awe-inspiring and beautiful things I have ever seen. For starters, just seeing Jason be able to fly through the streets by himself was really awesome. But it goes well beyond that. Jason and Benny have a bond and read each other. They can sense each others' movements and needs, and they work together with a beauty and grace that I couldn't do justice in description. Benny is a truly amazing dog though. At one point he stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, and Jason realized he wasn't at a curb, felt up and there was a branch about an inch from his forehead. He ducked under it and praised Benny and told Benny he could keep going. It was really heart-warming and uplifting and amazing and awesome and beautiful.
Anyway, we got to the square and started at the Boiler Room - a decidedly not-cool bar, but the only place Jason's friend's boyfriend could get into after losing his driver's license. He met Misty (Jason's friend), and her boyfriend, Aron, and had a few drinks. Aron didn't say much, but Misty, who also has a guide dog, was really cool. Since Aron couldn't get in anywhere else, Misty and Aron stayed at the Boiler Room. However, it was really loud in there, with very bad karaoke and an unpleasant crowd, so Jason and I decided to continue on our night. On our way out we ran into two of Jason's other friends - one of which owned another bar on the square - and exchanged brief pleasantries. Next stop was The Loophole.
The Loophole was more crowded, but less loud. Surprisingly there was a table in the front - sort of in a little alcove by the window, so we grabbed it. The crowd was older and not as annoying. They had their standard Monday night dollar-beer deal going on, much to our surprise. However, they'd run out of Guinness! How you run out of Guinness on St. Patrick's Day is beyond me. Ah well. An off-duty bartender and his friend sat at our table with us and Jason bought the table Fancy Pants (vodka and some orange energy drink) shots after our drinks. Next stop was Sweetwater.
Sweetwater, apparently not typically a fun bar, was awesome. It was fairly calm inside, and we grabbed to seats at the corner of the bar. I was sitting next to an unfathomably hot chick, and Jason was on the other side of me. Benny, as he always does, curled up under Jason's bar stool. After we had ordered drinks the girl next to me looked at Jason and said "did that hurt" and pointed to her nose. I explained to her that Jason was blind and couldn't see her hand gesture, and explained to Jason she was referring his septum piercing. A conversation on blindness and piercings ensured, and we found out her name was Jordan. After a few minutes, Jordan's friend, who I guess had been in the bathroom came back and sat on the other side of her, and Jordan introduced as all to each other. Her friend, whose name I can no longer recall, was wholly uninterested in talking to us. Jordan was clearly more interested in Jason than me, so I played wingman. Once Jordan discovered Benny, she went into girl "oh doggy!" mode for a while. Meanwhile, Jordan's friend kept trying to pull her out of talking to us and into conversation between them. I tried multiple times to involve her friend in the conversation, which would work for about a minute, and then she'd remove herself from the discussion again. Ah well. They called last-call remarkably early - around 12:45. So, when we left, Jason asked for Jordan's number, to which she sheepishly said, "Well, I uh, have a boyfriend, and I don't think he'd like that too much." I swooped in with "oh, how long have you been together with him" and she admitted, "Not very long. He's actually out of town at the moment." This allowed Jason to say "well, here's my number, feel free to call me some time and we can just grab some lunch as friends" which she gladly accepted.
Next stop was Haley's, since it was still well before the bars should close. Sure enough, they were still pumping. A very cute door girl named Meg stopped us to ask for ID, and Jason and I spent a while trying to find his, since it was in his pocket and not in his wallet. After that was sorted out we went to the bar to order drinks, and Meg walked up and started cleaning. I offered to buy her a drink, and did. We talked a bit before she said that she's trying to work her way up to bartender and so she had to get to cleaning the bar. I gave her my number and told her to call or stop by Jason's after she got off work. She said sure. While all this was happening a hot Russian woman named Vladir had been talking to Jason. It turns out she's a bartender there and had bought Jason 4 shots of Kettle One! Shortly there after, they called last call and we headed home. One thing I will say is that Benny is a total chick magnet. Anytime we were standing (and thus Benny was visible), girls just flocked to him, and by proxy, us.
We went home hoping for calls from Meg and Vladir respectively, but didn't receive them. We stayed up for a bit chatting and then headed to sleep.
We woke up quite late, and had a small breakfast/lunch at the apartment. We had plans that night to head to Inez's house where she'd be cooking us fajitas, and we didn't want to spoil our appetites. Erica, Jason and I headed to Inez's house that evening, and I met Inez and her husband Ramero. She had made fantastic fajitas and guacamole for us. FANTASTIC. We also tried shots of what has got to be the smoothest tequila on the planet: Tarantula. Unbelievable. We then had tons of conversations about life and sex, and anything else you can imagine. In the pictures below, Jason's across the table from me, Inez is on the left, and Ramero and Erica are on the right.
At one point, Jason made fun of one of the dogs howling, and we all started cracking up at Jason's amazing ability to bay. So I decided to take a video of it. After much more laughter, we decided that it would make a fantastic dating video, so we made a dating video of it. Check it out!
We left their house late, me packing a take-home container of beef that Inez insist I have (admittedly, I didn't argue).
Today the plan was that Erica was going to use her lunch break to come make us her famous french toast. However, she wasn't feeling up to it, so we headed to The Loophole instead and had the aforementioned beefy heart-attack sandwiches. It was here I realized I didn't have my credit card anymore, so we headed back to Haley's to see if it was there. After 20 minutes of trying to track down the owner between the two restaurants he owns across the street from each other, he didn't have it. Jason then realized I actually paid at Sweetwater and he paid at Haley's, so we headed there and got my card, thankfully.
We then drove into Dallas to check out Rock Barrell a huge crystal and stone store and then have dinner with Jason's parents. I picked up a few crystal ball stands, and some stones and just generally had a lot of fun looking around Rock Barrell. It's a huge and amazing store.
Then it was off to dinner with Jason's parents. We met at an Italian restaurant (which was surprisingly hard to find, despite being right next to the street). We had a good dinner and chatted about my move to Switzerland, Jason's family and other stuff. After that we headed back to his parents house because Jason wanted to give me his old German dictionary that was there. And that's when the dictionary quote from above came in. We then headed back to Denton as we had plans with one of Jason's friends, Emily.
Emily showed up with a few of her friends. We listened to music, chatted, and otherwise had fun. They left around 1am, and Jason and I stayed up talked. It was a hallmark Jason-n-Phil chat. We talked about life, life lessons, God, spirituality, love, and all kinds of other stuff. At about 4am, I realized I had to get up at 6am, so we decided to call it a night.
I got to sleep around 4:30 and got an hour and a half of sleep, got up, and headed to the airport.