During this football season the barn that I live in played hotel to several friends, most notably Jennifer Jones. One weekend when she came down I spent the entire day getting drunk with her and her law school friend Brad Goodwin. Brad looks pretty stoked in this picture, huh? We shot the shit and he turned out to be a solid guy, in addition to having slept with more Virginia Tech cheerleaders than I have.

Now, it might seem surprising that I've never been to Richmond before, but since my car has been broken into many times already I've never really had a reason to. Until recently. It seems like a bunch of my friends have migrated in that direction for either jobs or grad school, so I figured that the trip back from the funeral was as good a time as any to drop in uninvited. I decided this about a hundred miles out, so I called Jennifer to inform her that she would have a guest for the weekend. On Halloween I had also run into one of our old Fraternity Dream Girls Danielle, and had somehow coherently strung together enough words to get her number in case I ever made it to the fine capitol of the South. I called her as well and made very loose plans to meet up later.

An interesting Perry fact is that I inherited my mom's keen sense of smell, in fact I am a master of the car game, "Guess who farted." Everyone's house, clothes and car have a particular scent. Our family room, for example, should be named "varsity wrestling practice" because there is always a dozen half-empty Rockstar energy drinks laying around, and Rockstar smells of sweaty armpits. My room, for example, would be sold in bottles marked "Garlic Feet" while my car would be "Sun Ripened Grass Clippings." You get the picture. Whatever the case, it smelled like Jennifer lived inside a xerox copier.

I threw on one of Grandpa's leftover Polo shirts and gave Danielle a call. It was probably 11:00, and she picked up the phone sniffling.

Me: "Hey, are you out?"

Her: "No, I'm back home."

Me: "Are you crying? Are you ok?"

Her: *slurring speech* "No, I went to a party and someone threw ice at my face, and now I have to go to the hospital."

Guy in the background: "No you don't, there's barely a bruise."

Her: "YES I DO! MY FACE IS BROKEN!"

Me: "Holy shit, are you serious? Who threw ice at your face? "

Guy in the background: "It's not that bad."

Her: "EVERYONE! MY FACE IS BROKEN, AND NOW I'M UGLY!!"

Me: "So you're not going out, huh?"

Her: "No, goodbye." *Hangs up on me*

Just like the good old times in Blacksburg. I turned to Jennifer and informed her that it would only be the two of us, so we headed to the bars. We decided to go out and meet up with some of her friends in an area popular with the U of R students called "The Fan." The fan is nothing but a maze of brick row homes and one way streets. The bars themselves are remodeled row homes, which is decidedly inconvenient because row homes are very narrow. Once you add in a bar on one wall and booths on the other, you're left with millimeters of maneuvering room. They are so narrow that if Shaquille O'Neil stretched out his arms he could probably touch both walls. That is, of course, assuming he were smart enough to open the door.

I get older, my poses get gayer.

Getting a late start on the night, we wasted no time and started pounding beer and shots. Each bar was jam packed and dimly lit. The law crowd (from what I saw) consisted of mediocre girls with dark hair, and guys sporting dark coats with combinations of long scraggly hair, beards, and goatees. The whole thing felt like England with less fog and better teeth. Everyone was friendly and the drinks were cheap, so we got bombed and went back to the copy center (Jennifer's place) where I made fun of her highschool yearbook pictures and then snored all night long.

Since she was too nice to throw me out, and since Brad was coming back into town, I stuck around for Saturday night as well. Trying something new was a welcome change from the monotony of recent Blacksburg weekends, and it turned out to be a good decision. I ran into two fans of the site, Gretchen and Mike. Gretchen clarified the last time we had seen each other, it was "after Foxfields where (I) had spent all day under a truck." That Foxfields was my favorite, sleeping in the dirt under a truck all day was a weak preview for the Bus Ride From Hell where I fought with my then girlfriend for the entire 2.5 hours home.

We headed over to Jennifer's friend Suzanne's house for her birthday, and drank in the alley behind her house around a fire, showing all the homeless people how to do it right. I got a shot with my Richmond reader base before heading to the bar. Soon there will be a section of the website dedicated to gems like this:

Jennifer, Mike Owen, Gretch504, Me, Brad, and Francis.

After the homeless style drinking, we headed to the bar and did completely necessary rounds of tequila shots and beers. We drank,

And drank,

And drank.

By the time we left the bar and wound up back in the alley, I was too drunk to shiver. Or talk. The best I could manage to questions of departure were guttural grunts and moans; the usual drunken autism had fully set in. It was great to get wasted and meet some new friends in Richmond, and experience first hand that it's not nearly as ghetto as I thought it'd be. Cheers to the capitol of the Confederacy.