Folks, this is what happens when your friend gets a new girlfriend.
Email 1: Hey Jon, Jonathan’s birthday is coming up and I want to throw him a surprise party.
Well that’s awesome. I love surprises and parties. I know my friend Jonathan (we actually call him Jon but that’d just be confusing) and he enjoys consuming a healthy amount of booze. This sounded fine. I told her we’d be there, just tell me the when and where.
Email2: Hey we’re going to rent the Barcycle! We’ll spend the day pedaling up Main St. from bar to bar.
Okay, what just happened here? One second I’m agreeing to show up at a bar or apartment and cheers the day away with my friend on this 30th birthday. This was last month, and I think we are all aware of how unbelievably hot it has been. Pedaling up Main St. on a giant barbike? Was it too late to opt out? Could I just stop talking to Jonathan and find other friends? That option looked pretty appealing.
Because I am an awesome friend, I sucked it up. I never bothered to tell my wardrobe that I’ve been living in an endless summer for the past six years, so it was a struggle to find anything to wear. In the end, I’m pretty sure everyone wore jeans. I am so glad I did not wear my American Eagle cargo shorts from 2002 because they make me look like a dad and there is seriously not enough bronzer in the world.
We met at The Firehouse in Venice, which is just a really weird place. The draught beers never have heads and I think they’re trying to pull off some kinda sushi bar theme nowadays. Whatever, they were dicks to us at the end at the end of the night so they are not getting a hyperlink.
The Barcycle was parked outside and we got the lowdown from our, captain(?) The deal is this: You’re actually not allowed to bring booze onto the Barcycle, so it’s not really a bar, but it does allow you to cycle to bars… so I think the name still works. It’s sorta like a merry-go-round in that some of the seats don’t do anything, except in this case you’re not sad that your horse isn’t moving up and down, you’re psyched that you don’t have to pedal.
The pedaling is harder in some seats than others, but that said, not very hard. The harder you pedal, the more wind you get in your hair. You will, however, be the sweatiest crew in the bar when you arrive.
We hit a few bars on Main St., the first being O’Brien’s. I don’t know what it is with that place, but the crowd there always seems to be one whiskey away from riot. That could be an Irish thing, my family reunions go pretty much the same way. Our birthday bar friend ordered a round of Jager bombs. He quickly learned the lesson that age 30 is the year your body starts rejecting Jager bombs.
We hit a few more bars, and then pedaled on back to The Firehouse. There, one of the waiters told my exhausted fiancée that she looked too drunk to order (she only had a couple beers, she was driving) but then returned with a (headless) beer for her saying “Just drink some water first.” We used that weird interaction as an excuse to escape actually a Firehouse meal, and I’m pretty sure we were the only members of that party that woke up the next day without a hangover.
In the end, that Barcycle was pretty fun and I am allowing Jonathan to stay with his girlfriend; though I will require a lot of advance notice about next year’s festivities.
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