At about 8:00 last night, N called to see if I wanted to join him at his favorite bar for karaoke night. I’d been to the gym after work, which means I took a shower and hadn’t done my hair or put on makeup. I’m not big on karaoke and was vegging comfortably on the couch in my jammies when he called. So I hemmed and hawed about it for a few minutes. When we determined that the soonest we could see each other, if not last night, was Friday, I said, “OK, I’m gonna throw on some jeans and mascara and head on over. Don’t expect me to be in my full glamorous glory though.” He said not to worry about it, so I made myself presentable and ventured out.

He tells me to meet him at his place so I can park in front of his house. This takes care of the parking in Fremont problem, which he’s heard me bitch about before. Upon arriving, I knock on his door. He answers and says, “Give me just one second,” and shuts the door. I think, “Um, OK, I’ll just wait out here in the alley then.” He comes out a few minutes later and we start the two block trek past the Fremont Troll to the bar. On the way, I ask him if he goes to karaoke night often. He says, “Yeah, I find it’s a good creative outlet for an artist who doesn’t otherwise have one and isn’t in school.” I say, “Oh, are you an artist without a creative outlet who isn’t in school?” He says yes. I then tell him I remembered he told me he’d been in a band before, but I didn’t know what instrument he played or anything. He tells me the band was half here, half in Mass. and that he was the singer. At that point, I think, “OK, I think karaoke is lame, but I can see how, if you are a singer and you have no other way to express yourself, this would be one way to do it. Plus, it’s kind of cool he’s this passionate about it.”

We get to the bar, order beers and sit down. An adorable, tiny, old barfly named V asks N to play a game of pool with her. He explains to me that they have been trying to get a game in for months but never get an opportunity. I told him it was fine, I’d sit there and watch Monday Night Football while he played. They weren’t going to start the amateur singing until the game was over anyway.

Eventually, the singing begins. The MC announces that the first person to sing will be doing so acappella. The singer gets on stage and says, “This is one of mine,” and launches into a surprisingly beautiful, 8-minute-long Irish ballad. After about five minutes, N turns to me and says, “I love that he’s doing this because I bring in my own stuff to sing to and I always feel a little weird about it. I’m so glad someone else is doing it, too.” I start to get nervous.

The Irish guy finishes and we all cheer and go back to drinking and talking. N grabs a few CDs out of his backpack and says, “I have to warn you, I’m singing Gwar tonight.”

“I don’t have any idea what that means,” I confess.

“They are kind of hardcore and kinda spoken word, not so much singing,” he tells me.

“So you are going to stand on stage and screech for about five minutes?” I ask. He affirms.

“Well, thanks for the warning.” We both laugh. Oh God.

Several renditions of “Mack the Knife” and “Enter Sandman” later, it’s N’s turn to shine. He seems comfortable on stage and cracks a few jokes I can barely hear. Then the music starts. “Speed metal” is the only way I know how to describe it. If you’ve never heard Gwar, well, I’m envious. N knows every word, sings, or rather gnarls his teeth, along, and seems to really enjoy it. People in the crowd cheer loudly when he is finished. When he gets back to the table, he says, “I fucked up a couple of times.”

I sit there a bit dazed for a few beats and then say, “I’m fascinated by two things: 1. that you like Gwar AND the Arcade Fire [which he’d heard in my car on date #1 and said he loved], and 2. that you can understand any of the lyrics of that song, let alone memorize and “sing” them.”

He is surprised. “You didn’t understand the words?”

Um, no.

“OK, well I promise the next song I sing, you’ll be able to hear every word” he promises.

Half a beer later, his friend S joins us. S says, “Dude, thanks for singing that song. I really needed to hear that tonight.” S is adorable, young, and, I find out later, from Tennessee. He’s very nice and we chat some while N is thinking about his next musical choice and getting pissy about how many people are getting to sing between his turns on stage.

When he is finally on stage again, I’m talking to S when I hear N say, “This one is going out to Girl!” [only he didn’t say “Girl,” he said my name] and he is pointing at me. Once again, I can’t really hear most of the words. But about half way through the song, I reach over to S and yell, “Is that line in the chorus ‘I want a piece of it’?” He shrugs. The one line I do hear clearly is the last one: “I WANT YOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUU!”

When he sits down, I don’t have any idea what to say. So we talk about the guys playing pool. One of them leaves to take the stage a bit later and S says, “Is that Felt Rubber?” N says he doesn’t think so. “Felt Rubber?” I ask. They tell me he’s this guy who plays pool there, but every time it’s his shot, he rubs the felt by the cue ball before he shoots. N says, “He should be in the ‘Underground.'” I ask what that is and he gets up, walks to the door, grabs a magazine, and shows S and me a section of this fetish magazine called “Perverts we know.” Or something like that. You get to write in about people you know and the weird fetishes they have. I continue browsing through the magazine. It doesn’t quite disgust me, but it’s definitely not something I’d normally browse through. I look at the back page for a while, which is filled with color photos of peoples’ weird tatoos. N leans over, sees what I’m looking at, and says, “I know, the back page is crazy. That one isn’t even bad. I have a bunch of back pages that are way worse I could show you.”

Um, great.

S says that some of the ads in the magazine make him think of that picture that circulated on the web of a kitten with the caption, “Every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten.” N says, “Oh yeah, last time I went Clowning, that was the phrase I said over and over again.”

Clowning? I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know. N decided to tell me anyway.

“Sometime in the next month, if you want to come with me, I go out with a group of people who dress up like clowns and protest things around town.”

Gulp, “What?”

“We dress up like clowns and protest things. It’s kind of performance art, but it’s mostly to protest the Patriot Act.”

I say, maybe a little too snobbishly, “Yeah, I don’t think I’ll be doing that.”

“If you want to come, you don’t have to dress like a clown the first time. This next time will be the first time I go in full clown costume. I’ll be fully inducted then.” He explains. Like that’s supposed to make me more comfortable. I squirm and don’t say anything.

“Do you like to do things that raise questions and make people think?” he asks me.

“Um yeah, I like to raise questions. I’m a big fan of people having good conversations about things they care about. But I wouldn’t say I’m an activist in that kind of way. I’m not really that radical, I guess.” I tell him.

“It’s OK, I’m not judging you,” he assures me.

“I wasn’t really worried about it.” I assure him.

Then we go on to talk about politics and how he thinks there is a percentage of people who think correctly and are right and the rest of them know they are wrong. I disagree and tell him I think everyone thinks they are right. “No one sits around thinking, ‘Well, I know it’s incorrect, but I totally believe it.'”

S tells us he is leaving to get something to eat and he’ll be back later.

N says something about the two party system being obsolete. I disagree, again, “It’s not obsolete, though I think the one we have in place right now is flawed.” He agrees and says he thinks major things need to happen in order to shake things up.

At this point, I’m afraid he’s about to launch into some Fight Club-esque diatribe, so I say, “I’m gonna get going. I’m really tired.” He says OK, asks me to wait a second, tells me he’ll walk me to my car, and leaves to talk to the MC. When he gets back, I tell him I can find my own way if he wants to stick around for his next song. He says “OK, can I get a hug?” I hug him, he tells me he’ll call me, and I leave.

Outside it’s cold and raining and my car is two blocks and a big intersection away, uphill the whole way. And I was still happier to be outside the bar than in it.

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