Where for art thou, Beer?

After a month of consuming almost 40 gallons of liquid, none of which contained a single drop of alcohol, my liver had been asking me what he had done to deserve such a wonderful break. Well, little fella, break time is over.

This past Friday, the long wait came to an end as I joined my brother and one of my employees, Matt, at Caddies in Bethesda for a couple beers. As I have stated in past posts, I have now attained the ability to drink out of glasses and bottles, and my speech, though slurred through the wires, is somewhat recognizable in normal circumstances. I figured I was up for it; plus, I'm going crazy here not being able to do normal stuff, and being newly single and alone piled on top of that just makes things exponentially worse.

So, I sucked up the fact that I wouldn't be hitting on any ladies for fear of scarring (yes, you read that right) them and just went to re-establish my relationship with Miller Lite. To my surprise, the bouncer at Caddies was an old employee of mine, Hector, so it was nice to see him and have him give me a "Holy shit, what happened to you!?" as I walked in the door. Solid start, I'm not self-conscious or anything.

We walk in and do a once around the first floor before heading upstairs. Kevin and Matt are trying to meet up with some ladies that they know, so when we don't locate them upstairs, we grab a brew and decide to just shoot the shit for a while. Unfortunately, I hadn't realized how much louder a bar is than a normal setting (yeah, even Caddies?!) and it is a struggle for either of them to hear me. No wonder ventriloquist use microphones. This forces me to lean in on most conversations, which can border on being kinda gay, especially if the listener turns the way you weren't expecting. No, I will not make out with you!

And I will not go into many of the details of the evening, because quite frankly it wasn't all that impressive, though a nice return to normalcy...or so I thought. Here are some of the finer points from the remainder of the evening:

• Upon meeting up with the ladies, my brother is not quick enough to take charge of the conversation before the girl he knows starts making her own introductions and makes her way to me. I'm uncertain what to do, but I extend my hand and try to say my name despite the noise. Unfortunately, the "f" is pretty much the hardest sound for me to make and when I do open my mouth, she gets a gander at my 'grill'. She definitely took a step back, like I was about to expel acidy spit from my mouth, before she put two and two together and realized that I was Kevin's brother...the one with the broken jaw. Yeah, I'm not self-conscious or anything.
• After one beer, I'm buzzing. After two beers, I'm bloated. After three beers...wait, I was too full to finish a third beer. And I drank three waters, just in case. Wow, tolerance and beer belly volume dwindle rapidly.
• Apparently the beer numbed the feeling in my lips so that I couldn't feel the wires digging into them throughout the night as I spoke with different people. When I awoke on Saturday morning, the inside of my top lip looked like ground beef and the bottom one was not far off.

So Saturday and Sunday, I enjoyed an inability to move my swollen lips as I sat around my house all day rinsing with salt water, only leaving the house twice to walk Chloe. Looks like drinking is gonna have to take a few more weeks off. Enjoy the break, liver. Start rebuilding.

Wow, weekends really aren't what they used to be.