So, recently, my friend Ben took the bar exam, after what I understand to be a ferocious 4 years of night law school. During the weeks that he was studying, he twittered that he could really do with a kegger. So I decided then and there that I would fulfill his wish. After consulting with Meghan, we decided that August 15th (at the time about a month and half away) would make a good date for this kegger, completely forgetting that she already had plans to be out of town for a baby shower in Chicago (whoops).
After some additional thought, it occurred to me that this was actually a sort of serendipity, since any kegger I would throw for B33n3r would almost certainly involve members of the Jabberboard, and so would be a perfect opportunity to replicate The Jabbergathering. As it happened, the original Jabbergathering also occurred on a Saturday when Meghan was out-of-town, and a second edition of this grand event seemed the perfect thing to take my mind off the fact that my wife would be gone. And so, Jabbergathering 2.0 was born.
Thus, much of my work week last week consisted of me finally venturing back downstairs and cleaning up after the Kobold’s party, whose remnants were still lurking in the shadows of our house’s most forgotten room. Honestly, it wasn’t that bad, but I did find some interesting artifacts, some of which had nothing to do with the party and everything to do with the digestive tracts of mice. But I got it all cleaned up and restored the room to a state where a couple people could sleep down there on the couch, and a bunch of guys could gather around an electronic drumkit and jam out some Snoop Dogg.
The Jabbergathering was to officially commence around 4pm Saturday afternoon, but the Wilc0xes and Mr Daddy Dispatch arrived a bit earlier, so we got to hang out and chat for a while before things really got going. After the Toiler Paper Dispenser Incident of the previous Jabbergathering, I was determined to not get quite so hammered this year, and so held off drinking anything until 10 to 4 (yes, 3:50pm… a marked improvement over my 2:15pm start time last year) and refrained from any hard liquor (aside from one swig of Jameson late in the festivities). As a result, I think I was a bit more evenly buzzed throughout the night and was able, for the most part, to avoid any zombie shuffling.
About a week before the party, I had made up an itinerary as the Jabberboard threw around ideas for things we could do at the party. It was silly, but throughout the night I was often struck by how well we adhered to my plan:
4pm – Meet up, drink and hack.
6pm – Grill meat, eat
7pm – Leinie’s drinkin’ picture
8pm – Walk over to Four Firkins. Buy weird beer.
9pm – Stringed Instrument Jam
10pm – Attempt to play Dungeon, fail to figure out rules due to drunkeness.
11pm – FUCKING CHAOS
2am – Poker.
4am – Sleep.
That’s fairly close to how it went, except we moved poker up to 7pm and what I’m calling chaos was actually initiated closer to 9:30pm. As far as I know, Dungeon never happened, so from 9:30 on, it was basically just FUCKING CHAOS*. LOL
Shortly after everybody finished eating, the womenfolk gathered up the youngin’s and headed home, leaving what I like to refer to as a Sausage Fest. We played a little bit of poker and then 5 of us decided to take a walk over to the Four Firkins for weird beer. I know this was around 8:30, because I was little bit concerned Four Firkins would close before we got there. Luckily, they were still open so we all got some fun craft brews.
On our way back to the house as we were walking up the hill on Rhode Island, we heard a loud crash, almost as if there had been a car accident nearby. Had we been sober, we probably all would have freaked out, but since we were all fairly buzzed, we basically let out a collective “WTF?” and laughed a lot. As we neared the top of the hill, we did start to get a little worried that one or more of our cars had been hit, since we were taking up both sides of a fairly narrow street right next to a stop sign and intersection. But as we rounded the hill, there wasn’t any evidence of any car accident whatsoever. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who wondered at that point if we’d imagine the sound to be louder than it actually was. As we came down the hill, we noticed a bunch of my neighbors were standing at their front doors looking outside, apparently also wondering what the racket was. When we got two houses away, we saw that a branch had fallen in the neighbor’s yard right across the street from our house. We didn’t realized how big of a branch until we got to the house and saw this:
Except it was dark, and the tarp wasn't there.
Yeah, at it biggest point, that branch is about three feet wide. It is the length of that house.
Strangely, nobody from inside our house had come out to investigate*. Beer, LOL.
It was at this point that I decided CHAOS had been acheived. The rest of the night consisted of the playing of instruments, the drinking of beer, and the hugging of enemies. I ended up lasting until just after 3am. And I managed to not destroy anything or puke on anything (nor did anyone else that I know of). I’ll call that a successful party.
* – No, they didn’t cause it to happen. A lack of tree-trimming did that.
