of skyline and squirrels

I was intentionally being weird in this photograph,
I want to establish that from the get-go.

Jessie was in town, so she and her husband and I met up at Skyline Chili in Price Hill. It's probably the most ghetto Skyline Chili in Cincinnati. I haven't had Skyline since Monica came and visited when I first moved down here; three cheese coneys and a side of fries sprinkled with salt and pepper, all washed down with diet mountain dew and some oyster crackles bathed in a light hot-sauce glaze. It was so good getting to talk to her, getting to catch up. We reflected on earlier times, hilarious moments in our friendship, when we lived in an entirely different world: she wasn't married and hadn't even met Tony, just had her heart broken by Kyle (who's now married), and I was head-over-heels for this Thai chick with no idea why. She was there for the tail-end of my Karen escapades, and we grew super close as we meshed into the same friend group: Gambill, Kyle, and me paired off with Deshay, Jessie, and Sa-Rah. Gambill had a thing for Deshay, Kyle and Jessie dated for a bit, and I was swooned by the Thai (again, with no real reason why). As much as life's currents twists and turns, and as much as worlds change and grow apart, it's really something special that Jessie and I can pick up where we left off and just get to hang out again like no time's passed. 

Oh: one of my koala outbursts startled our waitress, and she exclaimed, "What the hell was that?!" and I raised my hand across the dining area and said, "That was me, nothing to worry about." Jessie was all up in stitches: "I've never seen a waitress react to your little weird quirks like that!" Oh, it happens often.

Later on in the evening T.J. came over, and we drank beers and shot zombies and with the weather a bit warmer, we hung out on the front porch after sunset, shooting the shit with Blake and Rob. T.J. and I always have interesting conversations. One minute we'll be talking about cosmonauts who don't give a shit (Russian astronauts are flat-out crazy, there's no way around that) and the next minute we'll be calling down hellfire and brimstone on squirrels just because, well, they're squirrels and they probably deserve it. We're getting Dusmesh tomorrow: I was scared I might miss it this weekend what with all the Thanksgiving festivities, but T.J. stepped up and made it happen. Kudos to the kid.