As\u00a0we\u00a0roll\u00a0into Pittsburgh, it’s as though a\u00a0Shankha\u00a0trumpet announces\u00a0our arrival\u00a0from Mount Washington,\u00a0awakening my friends\u00a0out of their moderate, thirtysomething lives and regressing them to their wild twenties for a weekend.\u00a0Simultaneously, local pubs are warned to ready their booze-slinging A-team for the coming onslaught.<\/p>\n
Shortly after, we arrive at\u00a0my favorite\u00a0pub and before I sit down at the bar there is a quadruple shot of Rumpleminz\u00a0placed in front of my\u00a0projected seating arrangement. Collin gives me a terrified, ‘please mommy don’t let the bad man hurt me,’ look and I respond\u00a0by saying to the\u00a0bartender, “Give him a Jamesons.”<\/p>\n
Collin shoots me another, far less cuddly,\u00a0glance.<\/p>\n
I feel a trite guilty and look back at the bartender, Turner, and say, “Make it a double.”<\/p>\n
Collin’s\u00a0face goes from confused, to angry, to the look a guy gives in a\u00a0slasher film right before he realizes\u00a0that he should have called the police and not gone down into the incredibly creepy basement with a butterknife.<\/p>\n
Like that man, Collin shall pay for his crimes.<\/p>\n
If you’re familiar with the story of Brigadoon, the\u00a0mythical\u00a0Scottish\u00a0village that awakens for one day every hundred\u00a0years, then you might have some inkling of what it’s like when I return to Pittsburgh. I lived there for ten years, went to\u00a0university there, bartended\u00a0there,\u00a0caroused there, forgot loads of important facts there,\u00a0damaged my liver there,\u00a0damaged others’ livers there and left.<\/p>\n
And now, I go back once a year, and by doing so, I evoke some sort of revelous Brigadoon.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We drink with people in their early twenties who, early on,\u00a0regard us with condescending humor and later with slurred awe.\u00a0We tease them with\u00a0parental love and torture them with no mercy. We overrun the pub, laughing and being wittier than our prefrontal lobes should\u00a0allow after this much acute damage. At one point, I purchase a waitress for $16.95, plus tax.<\/p>\n
I lose track of Collin,\u00a0who’s busy having 21-year-old girls fling themselves at him like linebackers into a tackle pad. The bartender Turner dutifully pours him enough liquor to\u00a0render him as sexually useful as a dinner napkin. Even though Collin is on the Over 30 Roadtrip, he is not over 30, and you pay a price for being under 30 at this bar, this night.<\/p>\n
Hints of our\u00a0age do sneak in, on occasion. There are tales of\u00a0births, pictures of kids, mortgage complaints, career goals, honeymoons, bragging of report cards. There are\u00a0aching backs stretched and\u00a0heartburn pills taken. There is an entire\u00a0hour\u00a0devoted to woe of the hemorrhoid.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, we laugh and tell old, finely-tuned tales of\u00a0drinking benders,\u00a0near arrests and glorious debauchery. For this weekend, we have stopped being teachers and doctors, writers and managers.<\/p>\n
On Monday morning, Jason goes back to\u00a0teach summer school, Amie goes back to her marketing firm, Meghan finishes an\u00a0article for a magazine, Glenn\u00a0goes back to the Clinic, Jake is\u00a0up at four a.m. for a delivery, Jimmie becomes a restaurant manager again. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Twentysomething\u00a0Brigadoon is\u00a0asleep for another year.<\/p>\n
As if to\u00a0augment this fact,\u00a0I\u00a0am tortured with\u00a0a five-hour rainstorm on my\u00a0journey back home and back to the real world.<\/p>\n
Your favorite Brigadoon weekend?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As\u00a0we\u00a0roll\u00a0into Pittsburgh, it’s as though a\u00a0Shankha\u00a0trumpet announces\u00a0our arrival\u00a0from Mount Washington,\u00a0awakening my friends\u00a0out of their moderate, thirtysomething lives and regressing them to their wild twenties for a weekend.\u00a0Simultaneously, local pubs are warned to ready their booze-slinging A-team for the coming onslaught. Shortly after, we arrive at\u00a0my favorite\u00a0pub and before I sit down at the bar there […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1EvEu-2M","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=172"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1084,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions\/1084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}