So I took Big Carter out last night for his 30th birthday, and was accompanied by TJ and Douschebag (nope, not his real name — how’d you guess?).

First we went to Doulie’s, a famous grease dive over where midtown intersects the foothills of downtown (aka the trendy ghetto), and stuffed ourselves with burgers and fries and onion rings and fried shrimps and itty bitty little bottles of Coke.

We sort of felt like little puntzes, drinking out of little sissy bottles like that.

Then we went to the Alien Abduction, which is a pretty cool bar at the old train station downtown. They have 200+ different beers to choose from, many of which are on tap, but we only tried 13 of them between us. Or maybe it was only 11… Big Carter kept ordering the same thing, I think.

Yes, he’s sort of a puntz.

TJ ended the night with some queer-as-Seattle apricot ale. I say that not because TJ is a fairy (though he acts that way a good bit of the time) but because Pyramid apparently comes from Washington State.

Yes, he’s also sort of a puntz.

We found a free couch in the “biergarten” area, and most of us snuggled up on it together. Douschebag sat separate, though, which was good. He had a good mackin-on-the-waitress vantage point, and pushed that as far as it would go. At one point I think she asked him if her boobies were too big.

What a puntz.

We sat there for a while, stinking up the place with our magnum-sized cigars, and then the cover band from Waukeegan started up in the other room. It wasn’t good. But then, neither was the conversation it was interrupting.

We were mostly telling Douschebag what a puntz he was.

Then after a spell, a decision was made on high to move the band from the main bar out to the room we were in, and we were asked to vacate the comfy little spot we had stained with beer, cigar spittle and bodily fluids. Very unrighteous. Douschebag complained to the not-owner-but-maybe-manager-or-something-chick, though, and scored us another round on the house.

What a puntz. A helpful one, I reckon, but still a puntz sumprema.

Not-manager came by later, and by then Big Carter was sitting by himself on a couch they had relocated to the bar area for us. The rest of us were a little too self-conscious to lounge out in the open like that, but Carter’s different in the head, and he had no problem. He was all stretched out and chewing on the little smoldering chub of a cigar he had left, and not-manager thought he looked just like Jason Alexander. “He’s adorable,” she proclaimed, and almost sort of squealed a little bit. “Look how cute he is with his little cigar and poofy little hair. Awww…..”

She thought he was just the cutest little puntz she’d ever seen.

Of course, when I told our waitress her boss thought Carter was a cutie, she finished with, “…Like a little baby!”