yesterday was in fact a very long day, so this long sleep was natural and expected, regardless of anything else. i think i'm up now.

i've been going to late night parties in detroit for a while now, and the legal licensing of more late night spots is starting to mix the crowds up a little. i would be on the side of the bar owners, actually, in mostly keeping more exotic drugs out of the space. and, of course the bar owners want you to drink, regardless of their own habits. see, that's kind of the irony of the mess, right - when the cops go in to these places, the reason they go in is to shut down the drinking, even when the truth is that only a small number of people are actually drinking, which they must actually know.

and, alcohol has bad statistics, truly, but it's also by far the most widely used substance, so it suffers from a lot of questionable causations from what are admittedly clear correlations. i'm not really convinced that alcohol makes people more violent than other drugs, for example - i'm only convinced that more violent people have easier access to alcohol than they do to other drugs. there's a loop there; if you're a violent person, you're going to get cut out from various social circles, leaving you with old legal alcohol as your last choice. then, when you're violent, they blame the substance, rather than recognizing that the alcohol dependency is a consequence of the anger issues in the first place. it would follow that substituting for something else isn't going to actually solve anything, because it's not actually the problem in the first place.

but, i digress; i'm just pointing out that you need to be skeptical about alcohol statistics. the truth is that i actually don't run into a lot of drunks, or a lot of obvious ones, anyways.

following the crackdown in 2016, the late night spots were all nitrous bars for a few years, which meant i got to experience some people cracking out on what is really a weird drug. i never tried it; initially, i hadn't done the research (and, if you're going to try something, at least read up on it first), and after i had, i really didn't want to. i'll dabble in psychedelics infrequently, but pretty much the only drugs i have any interest in are marijuana and alcohol - i'll turn down pretty much anything else. watching people try to move in any way, let alone dance, after a nitrous hit is pretty eye-opening, though. i don't really want to make fun of people with neurodegenerative diseases, but it's along the lines of what it actually looks like.

you didn't see people come into these spaces with other drugs, though, besides maybe cocaine, and you don't really see people experience cocaine, or at least not from snorting it. i guess it's too short, really. no mdma, for example.

so, i'm recently becoming re-acquainted with the e-tard, and it's a different reality because they're all a little older, now, you see.

i met one last night that couldn't find a charger for his phone, and couldn't handle that fact. it was a serious crisis; i don't think he ever figured it out. and, he looked a little older than me, which would put him in his mid 40s.

i walked by another one to stamp out a cigarette that apparently felt smothered by male attention and was in some kind of desperate requirement of female attention. she was about my age, maybe a little older. she just kept looking at me and stuttering "female", as though she was e.t. or johnny 5 or something. she seemed to want me to sit beside her; if there was a further request, i'm not certain what it was, and in the face of such poor articulation, i actually didn't feel particularly obliged to help, so much as i felt an urge to walk off. a small posse of men cleared a spot for me, though; they seemed to want me to sit down, too. in the end, did she find a girl to rub up against, and perhaps awkwardly try to make out with? i don't know.

i did have fun dancing, though, as i always do. the night ended a bit before 4:00, but it was a bit of a ride back to the tunnel, and the bus was there before 6:00. factoring in that i needed to take walks for urination and coffee, and that i needed to finish my "mountain dew", i didn't spend much time waiting. i expected that finding another party for 4:00-6:00 wouldn't be worthwhile, so i didn't look; i think that was the right decision, that night. the 4:00 end time on a friday night is always iffy - 3:00 is too early, and 5:00 is just right. when i'm a block from the tunnel, it tends to lend itself to awkward waiting, but it was fine for last night. this is different from saturday night, when the bus doesn't come until 8:30 on sunday morning, and you need to find a party until 5:00 or 6:00 or even 7:00, depending on where it is.

i did make it out to see the psych/punk band early, although i missed the first few tracks. they were making more of an attempt to be abstract, but it sill wasn't quite enough for me; i would have preferred something that was trying less to be generic punk and trying more to be weird, but it's a fine line, and they're not me. the second act that night struck me as a little bit safe and kind of boring. they were doing a video shoot, which is maybe a big step forwards for them in terms of exposure, even if what i actually heard was a small step backwards for them in terms of interestingness.

and, that is that. for a while. next weekend might be long and wacky, let's hope it works out.

for now, i have a lot of legal writing to do.

reviews will appear here periodically as i sort through the massive list of tabs i built up.