It wasn't my first time at the Nut-House, though you can never be sure.

I just home from a late-night peanuts and pints salon with a guy I've known since high school. I haven’t really seen much of him since our graduation, save for one otherworldly night of chemicals and poppy seed cake and a more grounded night of playing Spades in a Calvert County beach house. Though we hardly ever see each other, we get along because we both yearn to be less disaffected than we think we are, and talking to like minds helps. Hanging out feels like opening an umbrella in a rainstorm.

I think we both get a little high-falutin around each other and have conversations that are more abstract than the ones I usually have, but it's not pretentious so much as invigorating. When I talk to him I feel like it's late 1998 and I'm seventeen and just starting college and staying up until dawn talking about what we think are important ideas with someone whose tray I bumped in the dining hall, an experience that I don't think I've ever had, but that I've constructed, absorbed, and idealized. It was a nice to feel young and spry and able to take conversational risks on weird ideas, and not even feel like a pathetic drone attempting to replay the more agreeable moments of a youth she never lived. Anyway, kindred spirits are nice to find.

He drove me to what I learned tonight was the "alternative" Palo Alto night spot: Antonio's Nut-House, on California Avenue. Miraculously, a pint of Newcastle was $3.25. I wondered what it was about New York pints of Newcastle that made them worth $2.75 more; the ambiance? The weather? The real estate? The floor of the "Nut-House" is covered with what I initially thought was sawdust, but what I later realized was peanut shells. Antonio is a classy lassie.

I saw a person with whom I took a class in 2000, though I don't remember him except for his lacerated voice and cherubic face, which is now saddled with about 50 more pounds of fat than I remember it, and I saw about fifteen people I thought I knew. I wished I had a schnozz to cover my face. Boy, it's time to blow this pop stand. This time tomorrow I will be in my drafty, tiny, expensive, dirty shitbox of a place that I call home, in a post-orgasmic stupor smoking a cigarette that I fall asleep without extinguishing so that I burn to death in my sleep. No, wait, that's a Tennessee Williams poem. Anyway, I'm flying back to New York. Not a moment too soon.