As I lurch towards adulthood I have found I have not only less time for the things I love, but also the things I hate. This weekend I was to go to a soccer game during the Saturday morning prerelease and to teach various pointless lessons during both Sunday prereleases, and midnight prereleases exemplify the things I hate the very most about Magic culture, so I could only make it for Saturday evening, which was when that one LGS (I didn't check the others because I am an imbecile) was holding two-headed giant.
Two-headed giant is only offered once every three months because that is about how long it takes for each team to get over the trauma of playing that true miscarriage of a format. Our pool was as ghetto as a Harlem natatorium; not only was it devoid of value, but its "bomb rares" were the most ineffectual bombs since George W. Bush was last commander-in-chief. It was also, like McCarran Pool, to be shut down prematurely -- but not before I ingested a small dose of mushrooms, a tardy birthday present for a friend who had also showed up under soberer circumstances.
Round 1 I was feeling fantastic and not even a boring-ass win over dorks who looked apprehensive about even being there could dispel that. Round 2 we got paired against a couple of dull software drones, the kinds of people to get fired from Amazon after no less and no more than a year, and took a cool 22 from a flying Heroes' Bane; I really love it when the prerelease promos decide the games; it's nearly as cool as facing a Black Lotus and a Sol Ring and Upheaval when the best you could do was some midrange thing. Meanwhile dire omens were beginning to appear on the periphery; the birthday boy, who had shoehorned our playgroup's strip club DJ (and token Black guy) into playing, became mildly upset that said impresario had insisted on including more combat tricks in the double Scourge of Fleets deck; I dunno what kind of standards you guys have for pools, but I wouldn't let a Kraken come within a marathon's length of my backyard blowup. Rather than hang around my partner as he passive-aggressively got into a standoff with the boring fuck who had just 22'ed us (cellphones out to no particular end), I ate more of the shrooms and felt some narcissism for being the "adult" in the situation, even though (because?) I was on a bunch of drugs.
In round 3 we faced a particularly dumpy store clerk and her inexplicably devoted boyfriend; things did not go well; my partner really didn't want to lose, to the point of debating the meaning of the word "OK"; yet lose we did. This was excellent timing, as the strip club DJ (who left his card at the bar) had been abandoned by the birthday boy; the birthday boy then told me he was picking me up so we could go drink in Bellingham with the final head of our Underworld Cerberus, and by "drink" I mean "drink and shroom and smoke weed." Two hours and some amount of caps and stalks later, we burst into a bar of ambiguous sexuality, where the homies were surrounded on all sides by twenties women of low-cut dress and self-esteem; it's times like this that remind me of the lack of such a culture in Seattle, if you're gonna be miserable with yourself, you might as well fuck the world. But I digress. In a few of minutes, a bouncer with beard and build not dissimilar to the brave photojournalist in Crackstyle would appear, to throw out one of the crew, on a flimsy pretense; before then, we would see another friend appear before us, and triumphantly shout words that have rarely been heard in Western Washington since the mid-naughts, words that were all the funnier for having been so obvious and unspoken for so long -- "I'm gay!"
So then we ate some more shrooms and I was back in Seattle early enough to teach two five-year-olds the piano. All in all, this was one of the better prereleases I've ever been to.
I ended up switching to WB when I noticed that that part of my pool wasn't just a bunch of glorified 
