Half a kilometer.
500 m�tres.
Barely a blocklength about the Bastille, but I was at the front of it.
500 m�tres ahead of Georges, the overly flirtatious eventually picture-getting (you're not going to have sex with me, are you?) leader of the mad blader's troupe that Mapie, and consequently a handful of the restuvus have tumbled, bruised and sore, into.
500 m�tres in front of Mapie who's been shedding pounds and practicing for hours daily, 500 m�tres ahead of H�l�ne, the new-to-Paris-from-Normandie student in book-binding with the beautifully soft brown curls who taught me an idea or two for when mine are insisting on playing unruly pierce-my-eyeballs games.
Several hundred more m�tres ahead of "SALUUUUUUUT LES CANADIENNES" dragueur-professionnel marathon "staffer" who's been one of the many to make it perfectly clear that bending over to adjust your bindings while coasting down a road is cause enough to have your rump rumpled.
There are twoonie-sized blisters on my archless feet to match the fist-sized tightnesses in my lateral abs, a bruise shaped largely like some great blobby thing on my left buttcheek, and vociferous aches just about everywhere else south of my hair.
On my head. I MEANT the hair on my HEAD.
Johnny-Walker apparently makes a single-malt, you see. Not a whisky that has ever called out to me before (aside from one particular "I really wish I weren't sober and on the m�tro right now" attentat incident in which I found myself in a locked and frozen m�tro car staring at a photograph of molten liquor).
The bartender of the Polystar, Paris' tiniest gay Karaoke bar, apparently serves it free to girls who wander in on Crystal's lovely, but also happily platonic, young arm.
My skull, however, in all its ryhtmic throbbing is only just beginning to make itself heard, eleven hours into my day, since everything else had been screaming considerably louder up until the muscle-loosening half-hour march to le Restaurant Cr�ole ce midi.
And if it weren't for the residual sore-gut-wrenching hilarity of my semi-ambulatory state...
...I might just be stressed by the fact that we lose Eric le Roux tomorrow.
The highlight of my weekend is the added dip in that disembodied voice when he pointed out how gloriously the two hours sped by, each in our respective living rooms, each on our respective couches, each bathed in each other's greatest sense of wonder.
Two hours of taking the time for each other... Two hours of nothing but chatter, without bosses and friends and disembodied russian voices milling about.
The highlight of my weekend despite achievements and late night whisky shots in a karaoke bar.
But for once, I have no complaint as to the placement of my priorities.