Friday - Saturday - Wednesday - Friday - Wednesday.

Two Fridays ago everyone I knew got an acute case of karaoke retardation and dropped out on me at the last minute. I ended up going out for drinks with people at a local bar and ended up running into my friend who I watched "Hairspray" and "Valley of the Dolls" with not too long ago, and she was there drinking with her Belgian friend.

As it turns out, they would have been game for karaoke but it was already too late to head out. She was telling me that once when she was in a bar in a small town in Pennsylvania with a friend, they sang the theme song to "All in the Family" and everyone went nuts, and at the end of the night when it was time for last song everyone started pounding their beer mugs and chanting for them to go up and sing it again, which they did. We started discussing, too, how the songs from "Valley of the Dolls" had been stuck in our heads, but both of us couldn't remember the melody and would start humming the theme to "Mahogany" instead, but we didn't have that down and her Belgian friend corrected us; he knew the song really well because it would be played every week on Belgian radio when he was growing up to start off this contest-show featuring the work of Belgian songwriters hoping to hit it big. At some point someone pulled out an iPod or iPhone or whatever those things are that can hold video clips now and showed me a clip from the Muppet Show, but at that point in time things were getting pretty fuzzy from the whiskey.

The next day, the Saturday before Halloween, I went to go see this death-metal rock band "Captured by Robots!" which is where this MIT grad rigged up this perverse animatronic band and programmed them to play along to his singing, only he created this back story where they're these evil robots from outer space who've come to take over the world, only since they can't do that yet, they've captured him, a guy who only really wants to sing folk songs, and chained him to the middle of the stage and make him sing and dance death metal for your pleasure. He also wears an S and M mask and somehow has microphones rigged up so he can throw his voice to the different robots so they can browbeat and humiliate him on stage and occasionally make fun of him for being Jewish (he is in fact Jewish and goes by the name "J-bot").

Sadly, though, for whatever reason, this guy has decided to do political shows and has the robots dressed up like political figures and he wears a George W. Bush mask to sing, which is retarded. There were only two cool parts to the show:

1) He had Secret Service plants in the audience, so when people started giving him the finger, he would yell out "Secret Service, get that man!", and then some guys in suits would come out and tackle whoever was giving him the finger.

2) The opening band had this fat lead singer crammed into dress that showed her jiggly belly, and she invited a guy dressed as jackalope on stage to take her picture with him. There were also four mid-20s girls dressed as old women who were wearing loud floral prints and tons of gaudy gold jewelry, and as we were heading out the fat lead singer was out on the street in the middle of them posing for a picture and all at once they were like, "1 - 2 - 3 - BEA!" and the photographer snapped the picture.

The following Wednesday, everyone retarded out on me for $4 martini night.

The following Friday, I went to go hear Jens Lekman, the Swedish singer-songwriter. I had to wait outside with all these hipsters for tickets. One of them was this tall skinny redhead guy in tight tapered pants and a navy-blue truckers cap and a really skanky handlebar moustache, and he was on his cellphone being like, "So dude, what's up with all that bullshit with Tom and his LSATs?"

Inside the concert, too, my friend's friends were hipsters, mostly, and I kept saying, "I cannot believe that Jens Lekman is here! I hope he plays "Fernando"; every time I hear that song I could just shit." No one laughed.

Also inside the concert, Jens was going off on how the audience in Toledo the previous night sucked because of all the hipsters, and how he woke up that morning with the words of Billy Corrigan running through his head: "Tonight," he said dramatically, "Tonight," he said again, slowly, "We crucify the insincere tonight." The audience was a good third hipster, and they didn't seem to know what to do.

Jens's band dressed up in pale blue and white uniforms with Chinese embroidering on them that made them seem like odd little children, and Jens had rolled-up pants, and for some reason the DJ who would play electronic pants had one of those white Chinese hats on and my friends kept calling him "DJ Kato". The drummer was this blonde Swedish girl with big expressive eyes and the same kind of hat, only with blonde curls peeking out of it, and she could really keep a beat. The bassist didn't have a cap, and had a bowl haircut and looked like she was eight, though as soon as she would get off stage she would start pounding Red Bull.

Jens's encore song had this intro that totally sounded like "Heatwave", so as soon as that song stopped and he was taking requests, I was like, "Heatwave!", though he went on to play one of his own songs, then, oddly, "You Can Call Me Al".

Tonight is $4 martini night again, and I'm going. I've been telling everyone that I'll buy them their first three.