Attack of the Clones

Party at Topaz on Friday night, and I'm sitting on a blue couch in front of a blue table in a blue room, the people around me sipping azure martinis the color of Pine Cay water before you hit the reef. Also sitting at the table was a marketing director of a local firm and the husband of someone else I know; when the waitress (blonde, short, shapely grad student) came over, the latter turned to her, squinted, and said, 'Hey, you look familiar - do you work in the adult film industry?'

At this point, if the speakers hadn't been blasting Chill techno, you would have been able to hear the fabled pin-drop. The waitress, frozen smile on her face, probably hoping against hope that this guy orders some food so she can spit in it, says, 'No,' and walks away.

Marketing Director turns to the other man. 'What the hell was that?!?'

And the man replies, 'Hey, dude, I'm being a good wingman. Now you can find her and apologize for my behavior.'

The human race: Always reaching new depths of moral bankruptcy.

We'll Look Back on This and Laugh. Or Cry.

Last night I went to a house party on 13th and Harvard populated with so many hipsters, you could have wiped out half of Death Cab for Cutie's audience with one bomb. The suspiciously underage band in the living room was setting hard guitar to lyrics about how their mom had destroyed their dating life; the per capita of people wearing Buddy Holly glasses and t-shirts with slogans such as 'Vote for Pedro' and 'Team Jolie' was at times distressingly high; the decorative motif of candles on every riser of the stairways leading up to the second floor was a Brooklyn Theatre Disaster waiting to happen.

The weird thing was, I recognized everybody there. Not as individuals but as archetypes. The Russians and Indians turned think-tank brains; the K Street junior associates on their never-ending quest for Truth, Justice and as much pootie as they can reasonably seize without getting a juicy case of VD; the scenesters 'between jobs' trying to talk up Donnie Darko or their latest Korean movie find; the budding nuclear scientists trying to take revenge for all those years spent in the library on the nearest bottle of vodka. I kept walking up to people, honestly thinking they were somebody else, only to realize from two feet away that they were merely a near-clone of someone from work or Chicago or some other location of my short and wayward life:

Me: 'Jimmy?'

Not-Jimmy: 'Um. No.'

Me: 'Thank God. I was going to throw you over the balcony otherwise.'

Not-Jimmy: 'Um. No!'

Me: 'Are there empty glasses over there?'

So I spent a half-hour amusing myself by convincing a group of interns that I worked for the CIA as some sort of cryptic Jack Bauer badass, then the next few chatting with some random people who had been sitting on the stoop smoking cigarettes in the cold and passing a bottle of whiskey around. Then the friend I had came with ended up too drunk, wandering around clutching a bottle to their chest while trying to lick my neck, so we extracted. A bunch of us went for late-night pizza afterwards. I crashed into bed finally at a quarter to five.