as you were

ruby left a pretty insightful comment the other day about how life just picks up right where you left off when you get back from a long trip, and how discomforting that can sometimes be. i guess because so many things can happen to you when you're far away (and how...) and then you get back and your friends are the same and you do the same sort of dumb things with them.

today it was really nice out in new york. we wanted to have a beer on a porch. but neither of us have a porch.

my friend, however, does live in a building that has a roof. a roof that's strictly off-limits to tenants, but a roof nonetheless. so, ignoring the sign that said the roof was off-limits except in emergency situations, he began to climb the rickety ladder with a plastic bag full of 2 large asahi cans. i mean these cans are big.

so he's about 15 feet off the ground on this ladder when the bag somehow breaks just enough to drop one but not both of them. i'm lucky it didn't break my head, i guess. i pick up the severely dented can, and carry it up with me as i follow him to the rooftop.

it's some serious shit up there. i guess the reason it's restricted is because the tenants of the top floor have staircases that go up to it and it's basically divided into two private porches for those two apartments. so there's one that's all fenced in with a hot tub and a garden and signs warning about trespassing and security cameras and lasers and guard werewolves.

the other one appears to be under construction. there's some 2x4's nailed together in what will eventually be a really nice deck, and some bricks in patio formation as well. and a bunch of ladders and supplies everywhere. so we're standing on this unfinished deck and just as my friend opens the beer he just dropped 15 feet (he was decent enough to volunteer to take that one) and tries to catch the firehose-volume spray in his mouth only to soak his entire face and head, the owner of the apartment comes up the stairs with this crazy-man look on his face like "what the fuck are you doing on my roof."

so he says "what the fuck are you doing on my roof," and my friend apologizes profusely and begins to clean up the huge amount of spilled beer from the outdoor wooden porch with his shirt (i think that was an unneccesary gesture, but to each his own). then the guy goes back downstairs and we decide to cut our losses and leave before he calls the cops or something. so back down we went, and instead of enjoying a beer in the sun on a new york city rooftop, we enjoyed a beer in his apartment and played video games.

usually i don't bother with stories like this because there's no way they could be as funny to you as they were at the time, but this time it just seemed indicative of the way life so quickly goes back to "normal" (hah!) when you return from a long trip.

everything is different, but still a lot is the same.