Bachelor party, Keystone, and Crickets

It was sometime after midnight that Wilson, Hogan and I stood poolside in McKinney's backyard. Everyone else had gone to bed and we were heading that way soon, just wrapping up a piece of forgotten conversation.

For some time I had been tuned in to a conversation between crickets and cicadas and I couldn't leave the outcome unknown. I climbed into my sleeping bag at the side of the pool and watched the clouds swallow the stars as I eavesdropped on the crickets and drifted off to sleep to a symphony of insects.

I woke up at around 5 am soaking wet with rain coming down hard and only getting harder. My clothes layed out neatly by the pool were in a puddle of water and my sleeping bag was soaked through. I retreated to the comfort of home.

Breakfast was at Waffle House with Regan and Wilson. First visit to a Waffle House since January of 2009 when I seized on a Houston sidewalk 30 minutes later. Apparently Waffle House is not directly related to epilepsy, only deliciousness.

The bachelor party started that day at noon and finished at 11 when most of the participants were passed out or off to the bars. We spent the day lounging by the pool drinking copious amounts of Keystone Light, Coors, and sipping whisky.  By the end, Tex was racked out on his couch, a frozen pizza slowly charring into a blackened husk to be found in the morning while Regan and I awaited Pizza Hut to deliver our salvation contained in a greasy, doughy pie containing the secret to late night sobriety, and some chicken wings. Over lots of water and pizza and wings, we waxed philosophically, defining the night with good conversation and somehow went to bed sober.

Regardless of who remembers how much or how little it was a successful reunion of old friends brought together by a future union of two people meant to be together. We sent McKinney off in proper fashion with the drunken toasts of well meaning and unintelligable friends, stories of long ago, and in anticipation of stories to come.