Most resolutions end in failure. I try to get my failures out of the way quickly, and that’s how I’ll describe the absence of a post yesterday. I had friends over the first time since the pandemic began and focused on that instead of cobbling a post together.
I’ve lived in Washington since 2006, and the city has been expensive to live in for my entire time here. In 2010 my group house got sold, and I found a two-bedroom place with a roommate; in 2016 I bought a two-bedroom place of my own, with a spacious backyard, easy to tend with the grass under bricks. At every place, I’d occasionally have parties; after every one I’d wonder about the cost-benefit analysis, of spending hundreds of dollars and hours of prep and clean-up time. (That said, two of my friends claimed to have met on their way to marriage at one of my parties, which takes care of the CBI.)
At my current place, I began to host very infrequent dinner parties: Invite a few folks I hadn’t seen in a while, and make food on the grill. More frequently, I’d pick an occasion for a few dozen people to come over - the weekend of the Juggalo March, for example - and unload the beers I’d been picking up during my work travel of the last few months. In my late 30s, my friends drank less, and had developed a sense of guilt or pride that led them to pick trash up on the way out.
I hadn’t invited more than a single person over in 2020, and the idea of a pre-inauguration get-together was appealing. So I invited a total of nine people over, seven of whom said yes, no more than six being out in the backyard at any given time. It worked. The patio heater I’d bought for the winter burned away my worries that I may have been scammed by Amazon and given a lemon; the firelogs burned, and taught me that “firelogs” as purchased in hardware stores are actually compilations of easily-flammable material, mushed together.
The first part of the evening felt dystopian. One guest had said in advance that he’d have to leave if protesters who’d come to Washington ahead of the inauguration became violent. The frequent sound of low-flying helicopters, while distracting at first, emphasized how hard that job would be if the protestors tried it.
Over five and a half hours, the sound became less notable. The party went fine. It will probably be the last one I hold under these conditions.