originally written Wed Aug 13 11:34:29 AM:

i had the urge to go drinking last night, by myself. a few people have told me that, perhaps, i have a problem. well, i know what that problem is, really. it's that whole damned novelty-seeking thing. my D4 receptors are seriously thwacked.

anyway, i haven't really had a drink in quite a while now (not since the weekend, heh), and it used to be that tuesdays were one of the nights me and a good friend would meet up at my neighborhood bar (last summer, we had all the days of the week worked out, except for, for some reason, wednesday. that was the only day we never figured out a place to go to.)

so i order a stoli martini with olives, and watch whatever they're playing on tv. it was seriously wacko shit. one tv was playing, of all things, the learning channel (the other was playing the cartoon network), and apparently it was an urban legend debunking show (what's with these things? since when did they become all the rage? damned internet.) but i didn't know this going in. given that, obviously, the audio had been muted, all i saw was the cabin of a passenger airplane. one of the passengers was apparently complaining about a weird noise in the window. the flight attendant checks it out, and immediately gets sucked out of the airplane and dismembered, instantly depressurizing the cabin, and splattering the hapless passengers with blood. this clip gets shown over and over again, with diverse experts (aerospace engineers, deep sea divers, doctors) chiming in every so often. i have no idea what they were trying to debunk, exactly, but it really weirded me out, seeing the cg animation of the flight attendant's dismembered arms and legs plummeting from the sky over and over again. not a nice thing to watch when you are mentally altered. i think there was a point i wanted to cry. and then another point that i wanted to laugh. (and then there was that k-y jelly commercial....)

(ADDENDUM: i just couldn't find this urban legend, whatever it is, on google. entering "sucked out of an airplane" yielded a story about a woman committing suicide by jumping out of a small plane and this urban legend that you can be eviscerated by the vacuum caused by an airplane toilet.)

by the end of the martini, i was pretty drunk, which, really, is unusual, given the size of my liver. maybe it's because all i had for dinner were potato chips and a red bull. (healthy, huh?)

i also learned the casinos don't pump oxygen onto the gambling floor. it's something that i've been passing along whenever i've gotten the chance. after all, it makes sense. if you believe tyler durden from fight club. to paraphrase, oxygen gets you high. that's why in all those safety cards in the pockets of an airplane seat, the people are smiling and serene. impending doom is much easier to handle when your neurochemistry has been tampered with. of course, i realize that it would be economically prohibitive to actually try to up the oxygen content of a casino gambling floor. for one thing, smokers would completely counter the increased saturation of oxygen in their blood stream. (not to mention the fact that a lot more things would catch fire) for another, just on room air, your blood is pretty much at full capacity with regards to oxygen. another 1-2% probably isn't going to do much. now, if they introduced trace quantities of nitrous oxide, maybe, or put mirapex in your drinks.... (yeah, the administration of this drug for treatment of parkinsonism was correlated with an increase in gambling behavior. go figure. the wonders of pharmacology.)

in the end, i stumbled home singing to myself. and ended up watching half of fight club. (let me tell you, this movie is excellent even when you aren't drunk.) (i only watched half because the dvd player crapped out, and i didn't have the mental capacity to fight with it and instead, i decided to pass out.)