This is an ominous beginning

I feel I should start all this by saying it was a long and sordid night. And it was all, it was all because of that god damned bear constume. Lindzey wanted Veronica and I to go to this costume party in the Barrio Gotic, but not in a squat. It was on the third floor of a real live apartment building and by the time we got there it was 1 and the karaoke pop coming threw the door gave me a bad feeling in my stomach. I had asked Lindzey if the Thunderdome people were going to be there, what was the scene going to be like? She said it was new people. What kind of people? She said it was a gay party. OK great. That I can handle. At the door, in our costumes, I was begining to have second thoughts. Perhaps American Gay diverged from Spanish Gay in some kind of shocking and startling way that I was unaware of and unprepared for. But it was Saturday night and it was too late to turn back. Veronica was dressed as some kind of antique space moon colony cadet, all tin foil shinny with a fire hoses coming out of everywhere and blinking flashlights affixed to her glasses. Her hair was definitly in some kind of antique space moon colony cadet hairdo, and she had some alien scrawl on her face. But it was my costume that was making me feel uncomfortable. I was wearing the bear suit. And I had to take drastic, although not entirely unprecedented, actions to get into it. I think you know what I mean. I gutted the crotch. These pictures I attached speak only to the pregame optimism that we all shared. How often in life is preparing for a costume party so much better then the party itself? The big groin level hole attracted alot of attention. From alot of the wrong sorts of people. I was accused of being everything from a zoophiliac to a furry. They were serious and it wasn't pretty. Only the Americans dressed up and we had no other option than to take full advantage of the open bar and the dark back rooms. Like I said, it was a dark and sordid night. Nothing about it will prevent the bear suit from being worn again. These costume freaks are worse then a sewing circle. It just wasn't a good showing from the oldest democracy in the world.

After we left things really went downhill. I took Veronica to the airport a couple hours after we got home. We were still drunk, and it was only after we were almost there that I realized that she had a RyanAir flight and there was no way in hell she could get to Girona in time. So we spent the day sobering up in the airport emailing friends and family until she could get a ticket to Dublin that night so as to connect with her flight back over the big pond. While we were waiting for people to write back and all of the necessary communications to be made we scoured what eateries the airport had to offer: mostly soggy french fries and most of sandwiches. By 8 o'clock when she boarded her plain and I headed back on the train, security was happy to see us leave. Although it was sad to see Veronica step on that escalator and get pulled up to the second floor and then the sky, I was glad to be going home, to a place whose ambiguous legal status at least made some sense.