I can't help but think of my first marriage when I think of the Buzzcocks. I didn't want to marry this woman, but through family pressure on both sides,
and a shoulder shrug on my end, I found myself in Las Vegas, with a date with an Elvis impersonator the next day. Yeah, it was tacky, it was a little trashy,
but enough about my ex wife.
It was hotter than balls, and I was resigned and weary, tired of the strip and all of the flashing lurid disgusting excess
that it represented, and so we ended up just walking as the sun set, and finding a dive bar called the Double Down off of the strip.
I was intending to get not just drunk, but blotto, shit-faced, obliterated. As I walked in, Ever Fallen in Love? was blasting on the jukebox, and I couldn't help but note the irony of the situation I found myself in, 1000 miles away from home in the disgusting hot desert, in a town that smelled of piss and desperation.
I started drinking. Hard. Meanwhile, someone in the bar had chosen the entirety of Singles Going Steady, and one Buzzcocks number after another played.
I remember laughing at the fact that instead of "Mens" or "Ladies" on the restroom doors, they had life size portraits of Lux Interior and Poison Ivy
painted there, and the toilet paper was secured to the wall with a chain. The bar's special was a concoction called "Ass Juice." I felt at home in the squalor.
We filled an entire round cocktail table with shot glasses and cocktail glasses, dead soldiers containing the dregs of my future regret, and I puked the second I got back out into the heat. That was the high point of the entire trip, and as I rode in a cheap stifling limousine with a pounding headache and guts full of acid the next morning, all I could hear in my head was
"Ev-er fallen in love with someone- ever fallen in love- in love with someone- ever fallen in love- In love with someone you shouldn't've fallen in love with?"
We had our date with Elvis, and somewhere around here I still have a DVD of the wretched awkward tacky ceremony, even though I left the ex wife behind seven years ago. Even though the ceremony was trash, and the four years of marriage were trash, the drunk the night before was golden, and it was thanks to the Buzzcocks.
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