The China Match

I’ve now been “out” in San Francisco exactly twice. Both were pretty memorable.

The first was a week ago in this place called Smugglers Cove, which apparently was ranked by some random international booze site as the 19th best bar in the world in 2011 / has been voted the best bar in San Francsico apparently, yadda yadda. I’m only finding out all this now. All I knew at the time, and all I knew up until ten minutes ago, that it was a) on Connor’s street, so maybe a five minute walk from home, and b) is that is a pirate bar.

Not a pirate bar in that just like, the bartenders wear nautical-themed clothing (though they do) or the drinks have silly names (though they do) but that it’s a full-on, this-might-as-well-have-been-built-by-disney-except-wait-oh-there’s-booze-everywhere, completely balls-to-the-wall decorated to look like a piratey cave thing on the bottom floor, a ship’s deck on the top floor, and a big ol’ bar on the ground floor. it’s nuts.

Probably the coolest thing I saw there was this gigantic bowl of godknowswhat for four or five people that the bartenders (waiters? they were in the cave part) cover with cinnamon and then light on fire, which is then promptly manipulated somehow into a column that reaches to the ceiling and leaves the whole area smelling like cinnamon and rum and badassery for like five minutes. Oh and the corners of the bowl are little volcanoes that continue to stay on fire as the people drink the contents down via two-foot straw. Which sounds so corny and stupid until you’re there and it smells and looks awesome and shiver your goddamn timbers, you want to have some too. I had, among other things, a drink called a ‘grog’ where one of the listed ingredients is just straight-up water. Best drink I’ve had in a long time. Maybe not worth $9.

Far and away the most important event that night at Smuggler’s Cove concerns (and what doesn’t?) the Irish boy band called The Wanted. I can’t even remember if they were playing or if Connor’s friends and I were just talking about them but that doesn’t matter. What matters first is that you picture this, as clearly as you can:

So we specifically discussing this song called “Glad You Came” (hehe, get it get it) and everybody was laughing heartily at their hilarious pronunciation of “can” in this line when this next part comes up, wherein the singers intone: “You hit me like the sky fell on me, fell on me // And I’ve decided you look well on me, well on me // So let’s go somewhere no one else can see, you and me”

We got to talking about how uniquely baffling that middle line is.
Interpretation 1) was what we had previously thought, IE “[boy] thinks that [girl] looks good, provided [girl] is on top of [boy].” this is obviously pretty dickish for [boy] to say but that’s fine
then 2) one of us realized that maybe a better interpretation was “[boy] has decided that [girl] looks well UPON [boy], like the girl could look at him poorly, or scathingly, or whatever but she looks “well” on him so maybe she’s checking him out. This was all well and good until this british girl who we were hanging out with came back from getting more drinks (we drank them; we could) and told us we were all idiots and didn’t know UK slang well enough.

INTERPRETATION 3 AND THIS IS CRITICAL: the Brits (and I guess Irish) use ‘well’ in the same way that they use ‘properly,’ which itself is abused in slang but like… you know how if a girl is ugly, a brit might say “She’s a proper minger!”
Turns out “well” works the same way, namely is used for emphasis, so it can in can be interpreted similarly to how American kids use “legit” in slang. So that line actually just translates from silly Irish boybandese to “I figured out you were really looking at me.”
We were of course trashed by this point and that was way too much of a knowledge bomb so we all shouted really loudly in comprehension, except that we were all speaking in accents so we were actually shouting british nonsenseisms at one another in excitement. We left very shortly thereafter. My brother’s friends are great.

Oh shit this is already way too long and I have to get in a car and drive back to Berkeley.
Condensed:
Last night, we were wandering around because all the bars were full and we wound up in a bad part of the tenderloin, whereupon some sort of bomb or gigantic firework detonated on the street corner that we were on, maybe fifteen or so feet in the air and forty feet away, which doesn’t sound that exciting now that i’m typing it but it set off a street full of car alarms and threw off a shitton of smoke and pretty much sounded like how i think of a bomb sounding like. which is kinda scary when you’ve been drinking and caused us to hustle away which earned us the mockery of all the druggies on the street. Now that I think about it though, what I bet happened is some kid had a bunch of fireworks left over from the 4th and his mom told him he could only light one last one tonight, so he just took all the gunpowder from his leftover fireworks and threw em in one of those mortar shells. Or maybe a convenience store just actually got bombed right in front of us. It was loud, dammit.
Oh and that whole night, one guy in our group was wearing a suit made entirely of velvet who told me all about the finer points of taking acid, as well as these parties they have in san franscico called “party in play” EDIT: apparently “party and* play” which i was going to elaborate on here but then i realized that it was fucking gross, and i’m out of time, but mainly it’s just fucking gross. cya!