Uber hung over

I curse you Uber. Which I am convinced is an amalgamation of, "I used to be sober."

Allow me to explain.

Every so often I will get together with some old ad buddies from Team One. Though saddled with one of the worst clients in advertising history, a man who spoke no more 300 words of English, we had a unique camaraderie at the offices on Grand Blvd. in the heart of smelly El Segundo, where the the refinery meets the sea.

These infrequent occasions are marked by laughing, drinking, more laughing, and more drinking.

To wit, the plan was to grab a long table at Alejo's Italian Restaurant near LAX, guzzle beer and down enough garlic bread to stave off all the vampires in Transylvania. For those arriving early, there was the pre-dinner promise of ample whiskey at the Hacienda --a Mexican dive next door with a full liquor license.

We never made it to Alejo's.

Knowing what would transpire I did the mature thing and Ubered (the newest verb to enter Webster's dictionary) from my house in Culver City.

Unencumbered by the thought of having to drive home, fingers crossed, with a mouthful of breath mints, one rotgut Manhattan led to another and another.

One wouldn't normally pair up a whiskey drink with tacos carne asada, but we weren't there for the food.

Unlike our NY advertising brethren and their foodie tendencies (I'm very well acquainted with the steak and pom frite at Rauols), we weren't there to drop C-notes and regal each other with stories about starfucking parties on the Upper West Side. Or Studio 54. Or wherever NY elitists gather these days, with their Tony Jacklin golf clubs and bleeding masonic handshakes!

To make a long drinking story mercifully short, we ended up closing the place.

Sadly, we dispersed before Stan Toyama could amuse us with his stinging and deadly-accurate impression of Mr. Chikuma, the aforementioned Team One client who made our lives a miserable hell but also bonded us and gave us a lasting brotherhood not unlike the one shared by survivors of the Bataan Death March.

Fortunately we had the wherewithal to ask the waitress, or for all I can recall it could have been a waiter, to snap a photo of this legendary night.

And whether it was through serendipity or the guiding hand of a posthumous former CMO, we have this unimaginably fortuitous, perfectly timed snapshot for our scrapbooks.