I am not as drunk as I look

I promise.

Look at the pretty, pretty girls that are still happy to see me. I capped off yesterday by going to the Holiday Party for my previous job. It was, really, the right thing to do.

Let's back up, though.

On Tuesday night somebody's pimp ride nosedived into a sink hole right outside my apartment building. I walked along that avenue late that night and saw every crack and fissure and clumsily patched divot in the block. Not so much the visions of sugarplums more the visions dying horribly crushed under the weight of my entire building.

Yesterday in the pre-noon I was at work, I was fairly well pulled together, organized for getting changed for the party and looking appropriate for both, I was getting some work done and my cell phone rang. It was Chili. She'd called to say that our friend, April, had been killed in a car accident.

Backing up further, Chili set up The Girlfriend Group a bunch of years ago. At the outset it was 10 women who talked via e-mail and got together occasionally, getting to know eachother, cracking jokes, getting advice, all the normal stuff. April and I bonded specifically on a couple of issues and were close for a while. For reasons that are, honestly, beyond my comprehension the Girlfriend Group dissolved. We still keep in touch once or twice a year for updates.

I was IMing with Mr. Chili later and he said, "It was just shocking." I feel slightly removed from the event but he's absolutely right, it was just shocking.

What Chili didn't tell me is where she was calling from. She was at her mom's house cleaning up after a dangerous, but thankfully not injurious, electrical fire.

If you believe that these things come in threes, and I do. I was really, really wishing for the days when I had a landline at home and my old answering machine. You could call in for your messages and press a button (5 I think) and listen in to your house, see if anything was awry. I don't know what I'd hear but I wanted to call and listen to nothing, hear the dog breathe and the cats beat the crap out of eachother maybe. Those days are gone and I managed, barely, to keep hold of myself and not call my neighbor, who was going to walk Emily, and ask her if the pets were alive and the building still standing.

This month B died, my cousin Sara's dog was diagnosed with cancer and will likely be euthanized tomorrow, Mrs. X is in a rapid decline and we may or may not see her at Christmas, another friend named April had surgery in connection with her months-long struggle with throat cancer, Audio Girl goes under the knife tomorrow for what we expect to be her last cancer and boob related surgery, my mother still has no job (it's been over a year, maybe more, I'm afraid to calculate), Auntie Blanche has had a couple of fairly serious falls, MKAEP and her dad's whole deal...none of it is on me, not really, but it's all just sad and bad and...and...I already really don't like Christmas...and...Aaron Sorkin did that thing with the musicians and I realized how much is still not fixed from the years before and...

I just went to the party. It was in Chinatown, about three blocks from my first New York apartment in the old Bowery Bank. The place was beautiful and I got a glass of champagne and ran into my old friends. It was the right place to be and it was fun and I toasted April and I drank the tiniest bit too much champagne.

I swear I wasn't as drunk as I look in that photo, though.