April 2007

Don't let anyone tell you different. The Boston Marathon is the world's greatest holiday. I went to school in Boston and many of the best times there were on "Marathon Monday" as the locals call it. Some people run the race. For everyone else it is a festival of nonstop drinking that begins at 9AM and ends when you blackout, most people somewhere around 6PM or so.

The year after I graduated was a pretty bad one. I had a very undefined job (see "How Youtube Lost My Job"), Living at home with my parents was a bitch, and I had developed a nasty alcoholic streak. I clearly felt at the time that I needed to go back for some more Marathon Monday magic.

So when the day came, I made up some excuse to miss work, grabbed some pre-game material, and boarded a bus for Beantown, without telling anyone. I made the catastrophic mistake of bringing my computer with hopes that I would get some work done on the combined 8 hours on the bus.

I didn't have anyone to stay with, so I decided to turn my old favorite bar on Beacon Street into my home base. I found a corner to put my stuff in, asked some dude to watch it, and began attacking the beer.

I saw some old college friends- who were very surprised, if not happy, to see me, saw a lot of horny college girls, and was generally having a blast drinking at 3PM on a Monday for no particular reason. But I never even came close to realizing how drunk I was getting. One thing you have to know about Marathon Monday, because of the abundance of wasted college students, there is also an abundance of large, angry bouncers.

At one point around 6PM, I was in the middle of talking with someone at the bar, I think it was a girl. I could not even move a muscle or say a word in protest before I was forcefully grabbed from behind, lifted in the air, carried out onto the street, and literally thrown to the ground in one continuous motion by a large black bouncer. Through all the drunken fog in my brain, I still remembered one important fact- ALL MY STUFF WAS STILL INSIDE!

I argued consistently with the bouncers for the next half an hour. I probably repeated about a million times "I have important stuff in there. You HAVE to let me in". I even sent some random girl in there to retrieve my stuff. She couldn't find it. After half an hour of trying to reason about as calmly and lucidly as a shit-faced drunkard possibly can, the bouncer threatened police involvement. I ran. Bad memories (See "The Worst Night Ever"). I wandered around aimlessly for two hours attempting to sober up- and as a result I was kicked out of another bar.

By the time I came back to the place it had all started, the bar had closed. I asked a waiter exiting at the time if I could go in, or if anyone had found a yellow bookbag inside. I couldn't, and they didn't. I banged on the door about a million times- no answer. OK, time to suck it up. Rejected, depressed, and angry as hell, I boarded the bus back home sans my laptop. Winner: Bouncers.

As dejecting and depressing as these kinds of losses may be, I would rather play this game than any other major sport. Anyday. Bouncers can win a battle or two, but they will never win the war! (Postscript: I did get my laptop back, thanks to a very lucky Facebook break.)