The first and last time I tried Absinthe.

That subject line there could be filled in with various amounts of drugs and alcohol I've tried over the years but there aren't too many that I wouldn't give one more whirl, except for fucking absinthe. First off, the shit tastes horrible, and I've never been under the assumption that if I drink some I would go into a hallucination fit and cut my ear off or start seeing pink elephants all over the place.
I know that you have to drink large amounts of it over long periods of time and probably in much stronger doses than what you can buy at the local liquor store, but I do know that absinthe as with anything else I drink, too much of it, and you're gonna end up doing some dumb shit anyway.
Now up until about a year ago you weren't able to purchase this tasty treat. Unfortunately for me my roommate at the time was good friends with a lady who owned the liquor store down the street from us and she let him know the day she got the stuff in.
I come home from work one day and he informs me that he just made a purchase at the liquor store and brings out the bottle to show me. Now originally our plan was to wait until that Friday to crack into the stuff, but another one of our chronically drunk asshole friends was on his way over to watch the Monday Night Football game with us, so I immediately know the chances of that bottle making it sealed till Friday are now in the 0% range.

Now these guys are definately not gonna want me splashing their names all over this page because they still want to maintain what little respect they have amongst the local business community, so I will refer to them in their aliases for the remainder of the story. Chief Hairy Back(the Roommate) and Chief Bald as Eagle(the Chronically Drunken Asshole Friend).
 CHB starts telling CBaE as soon as he gets over to the house about his recent purchase at the liquor store. Someone, and I'm not sure who, ME, says that maybe we should just try a little bit and see how it tastes. Now anybody who has had a sip of alcohol in their LIFE knows what I just said  is bullshit. Nobody want's to just see how some liquor taste's you just want to know how bad is it gonna fuck you up. So basically I'm saying let's open this shit up and see how fucked up we can get, and I'm just waiting for one of them to give me the go ahead. They both are just as curious as me so we crack it open and read the instructions that it came with on how to pour it. Now the bottle comes with this stupid spoon that you're supposed to put a sugar cube on and then pour the booze over it and then stir and drink. I've taken lots of shots with stupid names and even stupider ingredients, but anytime you get a bottle of booze that comes with instructions and you have to purchase something else that you're pouring the booze over, you're night is already starting off in the wrong direction.
We follow the instructions and down the first shots. If you've ever tried Sambuca or Ouzo before, Absinthe tastes about the same, kind of like black licorice,  Warm green liquid black licorice, with shitloads of sugar floating in it. Yum. We are a bunch of idiots and the taste alone is not enough to ward us off, so we proceed to pour shot after shot, while slowly losing track of the Football game that was supposed to be the focus of the night. Now the stuff doesn't make you see shit but it is like 170 proof so it's basically like liquid fire.

Obviously we kill the whole bottle and now none of us gives a shit about the Football game and we decide there is only one thing to do with this crazy train and that's get the fuck out of the house and unleash some madness on the town.  It's a Monday night so there's not alot of bars open. We head out of the house and stop at the first bar we see that is open The Short North Tavern. We walk in and there's not very many people in their but there is a table of about 5 girls who are gonna regret coming to this bar in about 5 minutes. We sit down at the table next to them and start chatting them up. It turns out their out on the town for a  bachelorette party(kind of lame since it is Monday). CHB is talking to two of the girls and asking what their plans for the evening are and if they want some company, meanwhile next to me CBaE interrupts the brunette sitting next to him to ask her what the rest of them are talking about and she says to him "We're just busy trying to decide which one of you guy's each one of us is gonna take home tonight".  This conversation just got awesome. So me and CBaE start helping them decide who is gonna go home with whom and
CHB has gotten himself  into a deep conversation with the two girls next to him, they've  told him that they are lesbians and somehow convinced him to be the father of their unborn child. He's so fucked up though that he thinks they want him to carry the child for them, as in he walks around pregnant for 9 months and births this thing for them. Me and CBaE try explaining that they just want his sperm and one of them is gonna be pregnant with the kid but he's just not getting it. At this point they finally tell him they are kidding, that they're not lesbians and they don't want him to donate his sperm to them. He get's all upset and start's telling them they shouldn't be fucking with his emotions like that and gets up and goes to the bathroom. I get up and follow him in there and tell him what the other 3 girls have told CBaE and that if he'll just get over the whole lesbian sperm pregnancy thing that each one of us is getting laid tonight and maybe by multiple women. He won't drop it and says he wants to leave and he's pissed that they would fuck with him like that. I try to get CBaE to talk some sense into him but we're not having any luck and CHB walks out the back exit of the Bar.

Me and CBaE go back over to the table of girls and they obviously are confused as to why our friend is making a big deal out of the whole joke. We don't really have a good explanation for them except that he's wacked out of his mind on Absinthe and now he want's to go to another bar. Me and CBaE see him walking by the front door of the bar so we decide to go outside and try talking him into coming back inside and not fucking up the sure thing we have here. He's not hearing it though and just keeps saying "Fuck those bitches they're just fucking with my head". So we leave. I'm not happy about this still.
We head down the street to another bar where we know the bartenders.  We go in sit down and right away CHB notices that the bar has a bottle of Absinthe. Fucking great. We just killed an entire bottle of this liquid piss and now we're gonna consume some more. Fuck.

Now at this point we are all in the, I'm drunk and I know I'm drunk but I don't know how drunk I'm gonna be in 30 minutes when all these shots hit me phase. So we just keep downing these shots of Absinthe like water thinking everything is gonna be cool. About this time things start to get a little hazy, and I'm not quite sure if the bar's bottle of Absinthe was empty or we just decided we've had enough of it, but at one point I remember looking down at a full glass of whiskey in front of me. Why on earth I thought that switching from shots of Absinthe to glasses of straight Jack Daniels was a good idea and why this bartender is still feeding them to me is beyond me, but one of us in this scenario hates my guts and I don't think it's the Bartender.
CBaE is the smartest of the 3 of us at this point and has cut himself off. Actually he's just a huge gaping Vagina and can't hang, and think's he's gonna be productive the next day at work. Fucking loser. We all are now in no shape to be sitting at bar stools putting drinks away and agree we should drag our asses back home. As soon as we get out of the bar CHB starts running around,  arms stretched out swerving back and forth from street to sidewalk  while making airplane noies. We live less than a 1/4 mile from this bar but I immediately know it's gonna take us an hour to get there. We come up to a busy intersection right by Goodale park in downtown Columbus and CHB has now crash landed into a street sign at the back end of a church that is under contruction and is laying with his feet in the road and the rest of him on the sidewalk. At this point something posseses me to jump onto the hood of a moving taxi cab right by the intersection and stand up and start banging on the windshield and yelling jibberish at the driver and the completely freaked out passengers. Think about this scene for a minute. My friend who thinks he's an airplane has just crash landed into a street sign and is laying half in the road half out, I'm on top of a taxi cab yelling at the top of my lungs banging on the windshield like I'm King Kong, CBaE told me the next day it was pretty surreal and never wishes he had a camera more at any moment in his life.  I dismount from the hood of the car and notice that CHB has dissapeared and I ask CBaE if he knows where he went. He doesn't have a clue and is completely baffled by what is going on, we spend a considerable amount of time looking for CHB but with no luck. We decide that he probably went back to the house and we should head there ourselves.
As we approach our house I notice there is some sort of road sign sitting on the sidewalk right in front of the stairs leading up to our front door. It looks like it has been destroyed and then somewhat half-ass put back together. I don't really care about this right now and just want to go crash out before I do anything else that might  get me arrested tonight. CHB is already crashed out in bed and CBaE decides to drive home. He's really determined to get something done at work the next day, way more than my plans of sitting on the couch eating bad food and wishing for a quick death.

We wake up the next day and I go outside to sit on the porch and one of our neighbors is outside and she asks what were we up to last night. I said we just went out and had a couple drinks. She says that it had to be more than a couple because she was out on her porch last night when all of a sudden CHB comes walking up dragging a broken down street sign and stops in front of the house and starts putting it back together. She said the entire time he was doing this he kept yelling me and CBaE's names and telling us to hold up the sign while he hammered it back together. She said he was having an entire conversations with us as if we were standing right there. He says he doesn't remember anything after leaving the bar but does vaguely remember dragging the sign back and thought that we were right behind him the entire time. He also doesn't remember getting all pissed and thinking the lesbians wanted him to carry their child for him. Fuck Absinthe.