As a part of my self improvement regimen I’m trying to become a little less rigid, a little more spontaneous, and a lot more fun. Not in a way that betrays who I am, just to relax a little and get out of my comfort zone which is, coincidentally, about the size of my couch. Last night I went to a show in downtown with a single lady friend and dropped fifty bucks to see a band I hadn’t heard of until last week. We danced as hard as we could in our assigned nosebleed seats of the Historic Orpheum Theater and Heather did her best to try and chat up the guys standing next to us, but they weren’t having it, so we just enjoyed our drinks and tried not to spill them on the heads of the folks in front of us. We spent a lot of time identifying from afar who looked like the most fun, and the prize went to the guy in the blue shirt who looked like he had literally just rolled out of bed, hair all sticky-uppy and a drink in each hand, rocking out, punching the air with his beer bottles. There was also the guy who spent the entire show glued to his phone checking football scores, which would have been less funny if he wasn’t dancing the entire time (maintaining a very steady hand and a straight gaze into the screen). It was a really fun show: there were banjos and basketballs and mohawks and a lot of great beats. Check out the chandelier: I looked it up online and the thing weighs 2,000 pounds.

We went out for a drink at the jukebox bar next door afterwards, mingling with the superfans, taking our time until it was time to go. We found ourselves just a few minutes later in a deserted parking ramp with a dead engine, lights left on in the car, and panicked a bit until we decided that, rather than taking a taxi home and avoiding the problem until tomorrow, we could pay the taxi driver to come into the parking ramp and open his engine to Heather’s jumper cables. Sweet, sweet success.