10:08 am | 05 June 2003 | High Adventure!

I know i said i'd tell you this story last week, and then i didn't. Deal. I'm flaky that way.

So about a month ago, SBF emails me. "Um, i have a company dinner that i have to go to...it's at some high adventure club. You might think it's funny." The words high adventure swirled around my brain, conjuring up images of rock-climbing walls, ropes courses, and bungee-jumps. I LOVE that kind of shit. "Yeah, i'll go. Remind me closer to the date."

So the event rolls around and i ask for directions. "Okay. Directions are here," he says, and upon visiting the site i realize that their idea of "high adventure" has got less to do with Outward Bound-y stuff and more to do with a very Kipling-esque Imperialist-occupation-of-India British-Empire you-must-have-a-grand-set-of-moustaches-to-belong ideology. I gulped.

Upon arriving, we greeted SBF's coworkers who seemed uniformly nice, 45, and conservative. That was okay; i had my game face on. I took a look around. Every wall was lined with partial or whole dead animals, taxidermied with varying degrees of skill (one water buffalo looked indescribably mournful). A gorilla by the door was wearing a tiara, which i found endlessly sad and disgusting. A whale's penis* hung over the bar, where an indeterminately Slavic man presided. "What you have for drink?" he slurred. (He bore a striking resemblance to the Little Man From Another Place, only normal-sized.) "Jack on the rocks," i said, intuiting that there would be no sweet, sweet Jameson here. He slapped two tiny cubes of ice into a giant, giant tumbler and sloshed Jack Daniel's up to the very brim. "Thanks," i said, struggling to lift it with both hands. (Seriously, there was a full pint in there.) So freaked out was i by The Adventurers (sic) Club that i finished it in an hour.

Other high (adventure) points of the evening included:

� Being nearly hit upon by an unbearably cheesy dude with a violently crooked face and all the "game" of a Whole Foods market;
� Realizing the guy who owns the company, apparently some kind of raging millionaire, was the one who was wearing a woman's headband, an orange cardigan, and a yellow motherfucking ascot;
� Picking up a pamphlet which strove to convince me of the wisdom of concealed weapons, based somehow on the logic (?!) that if 'the mentally retarded,' 'recent asylum patients,' and 'wife beaters' are allowed to drive cars, which are potentially dangerous, then there's no reason why Joe Average shouldn't be packing heat;
� Stifled (only barely) the urge to jump up on the table, fling out both arms, and start all "Tyger, tyger, burning bright/in the forests of the night/What immortal hand or eye/Could frame thy fearful symmetry?" (addressed, of course, to one of the several dead and grimacing tigers placed around the room);
� Assiduously avoided the case containing 'the world's largest collection of shrunken heads' as i was having a portabello mushroom for dinner;
� Craved a cigarette so badly (stress) i thought i would actually die before we got the hell out of there.

So yeah. I left full, slightly drunk, and with the urge to own a pith helmet. "Surreal" doesn't even begin to describe it, my friends. clm.

*Thanks to my mother, i knew that the whalers' term for whale-cock was "dork," which no doubt went a long way towards impressing SBF's crew.