OTfest: San Francisco

Last week, Glyph, Saul, Aaron David, and I got together for drinks and dinner, the occasion being that the one of us who isn’t more or less local was visiting from the land of Disney World and kudzu. We met at a typical downtown San Francisco bar, meaning it was crowded, loud, and overrun with people who really don’t look old enough to drink. (Overheard conversation: “The best metaphor for that situation is recursive DNS lookup.” SF, where a geek can be a geek.)

It turned out that we don’t have a terrific amount in common, expect perhaps pairwise (Glyph and I both have unfortunate senses of humor, Saul and I are both culturally east-coast Jews, Aaron and I have a lot of tastes in common like science fiction and the Coen brothers, Aaron and Glyph both have fascinating family histories, Saul and Glyph both have a deep love of music, Saul and Aaron … OK, nothing immediately comes to mind), but we were all instantly comfortable together, which is one of the great things about OT: the fact that it’s created a geographically sprawling but close-knit yet frequently bickering extended family.

So we got on pretty much like a house afire. We discussed the important topics of the day, like best gangster movie ever (Miller’s Crossing) the best drug movie ever (the consensus was Trainspotting, with one vote for Up in Smoke), the best 80’s Polish TV series ever (The Decalogue, directed by the same guy as Three Colors who also wrote Me and Bobby McGee), as well as less contentious subjects like Obamacare and what to do about ISIS.

I very quickly lost my resolve to leave early to catch the last boat home, and we wound up staying until almost midnight, with our waiter warning us every so often that various services were closing for the night (hot food, cold snacks, drinks, and I think we left shortly before they rolled up the floor.) All in all, a night to remember.