Weird texting coincidence: 2 same texts from 2 different people.

The other night I was texting people about plans – my one friend from high school who runs an integrated homelessness / domestic violence shelter about catching rides to my hometown for Labor Day wekeend, and the sister of my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend who’s now also my friend about concert plans for the upcoming week –and both conversations ended with them having to get back to me about something.

The next time after that when I checked my phone, I had 2 texts, 1 from each, and they both said –

Will do!

. . .

To see 2 exact same texts like that from different 2 senders was very freaky.

Even on the phone screen when the texting inbox was open, you could see they were both the exact same, but each under a different sender's name.

Situation defuser: My mom at a fish-fry.

My mom was telling me how the other week she and my dad went to a fish fry and there were all these people from downstate there, including this one woman who was just awful.

My mom had gotten a taco salad, and for some reason the taco salad was just huge, it came out of the kitchen that way.

At the very next table, though, this one woman was there with her two daughters, and her daughters had gotten a taco salad that had come out of the kitchen normal-sized and were splitting it between them.

So, the woman looks over at my mom’s taco salad and is like, “That taco salad is big,” and she said it with a lot of attitude like she’s going to take it up with the waitress.

“That’s because I paid extra,” my mom was like.

“Oh,” the woman said, and shut up.

Two bar memory lapses (2 of 2): Karaoke.

The very next night after that conversation, my one hippie friend from Michigan and I were doing a crossword at the (black) neighborhood bar, and the DJ played this house song with a simulated orgasm very often intertwined with the beat.

“Remember my first time ever at karaoke and there was a French anesthesiologist singing that one song with the moaning?, my friend was like.

“No,” I was like, and then paused.

“Male or female?”.

“Female,” she was like.

“Was it [name of a French woman I know]?”, I was like, “Or did we not know her.”

“We didn’t know her, but we were talking with her afterwards.”

Then, she was like, “And the karaoke host had a mullet,” which was obviously this one karaoke host who I used to patronize year ago, though after a few more questions, we couldn’t figure out which bar we must have been at.

“Don’t worry,” my friend was like, brightly.  “You’ve been to so many bars, it’s understandable!”

She also was pretty sure the song that the French anesthesiologist sang was Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby”.

She then shrugged and grimaced.

“Whatever she sang, it was *not* a good karaoke song,” she was like.

Two bar memory lapses (1 of 2): Hispanic neighborhood.

Two times over two days a friend has mentioned having some very specific bar memory with me, and I just don’t remember it all.

First, my one (Asian-Canadian) friend was reminiscing the time we did this long barhopping night in a poorer (hispanic) neighborhood in the city, and he was like, “Being in  that one bar creeped me out.”

“Which one?”, I was like.

“The one where the bartender said not to worry, he used to be a wrestler and would protect us.”

I then verified that it wasn’t the small run-down bar occupied by an old (Mexican) guy across from an industrial yard and with an interior bar on the left that had a small wooden roof, or the bar down the street where people warned us against it because trouble happened there but it turned out to be rather mundane, with cool-colored tiles and photos on the walls and a couple tvs mounted high up on the walls playing, with an old lady bartender and a very quiet clientele.

Instead, he said there were a lot of small round cocktail tables to the left, and the bar was at the end to the right and wooden and had shelves or a rack at waist-level up, and the people were mostly Mexican couples and stared at us suspiciously and so we went to the very end of the bar where we wouldn’t be as conspicuous.

“And what did the bartender look like?”, I asked, and my friend said he was built kind of big and was a Mexican or Mexican-American in his early 30s.

My friend also confirmed that it didn’t seem to be one of those Mexican bars where they pay women to sit around dressed up and have drinks with you.

“I felt safer at the bar where they patted us down,” he then added.

“The one where you played pool with everyone?”, I asked.

“Yeah,” he was like.

Oddly, he described where the bar was, but nothing rang a bell, though so much else did about that night – I could remember the bar where we started out, and the 2 bars I suspected that bar was (including one by name), and the bar where they patted him down at, and this bar with what seemed like 3 young latina lesbians working, and at the front they had a scary Halloween dummy dressed up with a gigantic black dildo tucked in its pants (that was the other bar that I remembered by name!), and then finally the last bar of the night, in this reputedly violent (Irish-American) neighborhood where I had been before...  

At that bar, we had satten in the middle-right of a U-shaped bar and the then-new Taylor Swift song “We Are Never, Ever Getting Back Together” played almost as soon as we got there, and we discussed the spoken voiceover part of the song.

I also remember on that barhopping night seeing this one bar with a blue neon sign just down a side street and having it be open the first time we passed and closed when we returned the same way, so a whole different time I had to return to the neighborhood just to go to that bar, and it had high ceilings and beige walls and bright lighting and was run by a (Polish) woman who kept her mail out up and down the bar like a messy kitchen table, and the clientele was Mexican, and a short suited (Mexican) guy on a guitar had wandered off the street and was standing towards the entrance and singing there for money as I walked in.

I’ll have to go look through my barlog and see what I wrote down for that night, especially for that bar where my friend remembers there was a wrestler.

Awful experience: Match whiff.

The other day I was in my apartment's bathroom lighting a match to light a candle, and the way I held it, after I struck the match, it blazed and a cloud of ignition fumes rose right into my nose and made me snort and choke.

Memories of grade school: Bartender at the student bar.

This one (mixed race) bartender at the student bar and I were talking the other week – he was hanging out there either after shift or on his off day – and somehow we began talking about slurs, and then segued into memories of youth.

When he was a kid, he was in Catholic school in a rust belt city in Ohio, and his father had this weird disease that his family just found out about and were grappling with.

He was still trying to figure out how to tell his friends, but that day at school, at the end of announcements, they mentioned his family as part of prayer intentions for the week.

He hadn’t said anything and neither had his family, but someone had heard and just put them on there, and suddenly everyone knew and everyone in the school all got told without his permission being asked at all.

He just shot up out of his desk and ran out of the classroom and down the hall off of the schoolgrounds, and after a teacher got in a car and finally caught up to him, they said he ran like a mile-and-half full sprint, and he told me he was dodging down alleys and everything, just trying to get away where no-one could find him, though he says in retrospect that it probably was less than a mile-and-a-half that he ran.

He never got in trouble for that, and his dad turned out to be fine.