Painting concrete and piper lore: What I learned over the weekend.

Two weekends ago I was at a party in Indiana, drinking Jameson right out of the bottle. Hey, there was less than a quarter of it left. It was the right thing to do. Plus, at that point the White Sox were handing the division to the Twins, only to take it back, only to look tattered again against the Rays in the playoffs. It's tough to lose to a team that changed its name because marketing research showed people in Florida were offended by the original name, the Devil Rays.

But at least I am not a Cubs fan.

This past weekend, I took pity on one of those poor souls and helped him paint his b asement while his sig other was out of town - and painting concrete is an apt task for anyone who roots for the Baby Bruins. I am not a Home Depot kind of guy, but painting is one task I am semi-adequate at, and this was my first experience with such a surface.

If you are going to have a basement, kick it old school. Just get a freaking ping-pong or air hockey table, a fridge, an old TV and stereo, some posters from the 70s and let it be what it is. People will understand. They will gladly enjoy a place where their true slob can come out and play.

But if you must turn it into an "entertainment space," what I learned was, that if decide you want to do this, pick a color that blends in with gray.

Orange would not be that color. Actually, they don't call colors anything that simple anymore. This was something super fabulous like "outrageous orange" or "orgasmic orange," but actually it looked like baby shit or pumpkin pie. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

First their was block fill to apply, thick as the crap you hear on Fox and MSNBC, which a salesman convinced my friends would magically fill all the dimples and pock marks you find in concrete. And the fill was tinted with the orange, but it came out looking the color of a Push-Up or Dreamsicle. All of which accented the small gray holes and knots on the wall.

Mind you, we were doing this after watching the Sox lose to the Rays (Ray what? Sting? Manta? Sun? Ray-Ban? Ray Charles?), from 9 until midnight. And I did a good chunk of this myself because my buddy had to go back out for supplies. And we had to move all their crap to the middle of the room. And another lonely-on-a-Friday-night pal of my friend showed up to critique and lend his meticulous touch - and by meticulous I mean fucking slow like it was the Sistine Chapel and not a basement. And a dog and a cat kept getting in the way. And I was barefoot and eventually splattered from the rollers.

I didn't care. I was in a zone, slathering this shake mix onto the wall until I was silly tired and ready to head home.

That was just my first lesson for the weekend. Saturday night I deejayed with another friend at a wedding reception for a mutual buddy's kid. We used to do this sort of side work, but got tired of hearing the Macarena. What I learned was that at white people weddings, that's still the stuff you have to play. And, oddly, songs that are considered gay anthems are big at receptions: "Believe," by Cher, YMCA, any Madonna. Odder still is when a 14 year old dressed like a Mormon on a door-to-door mission wants you to play Led Zeppelin, which would be a song his grandpa would have liked.

Yet, it was fun and was nice to catch up with people I had not seen in at least a year. Life is like that, and who knows why? You say you're gonna call someone, you don't, they don't call you, and next thing you know another year is gone. Or you call and email and don't hear back and wind up feeling neurotic about it, but you still occasionally try, then worry they might think you are a stalker, but then feel stupid about that, so you keep trying, knowing people aren't all single knuckle-heads like you are. And by you, I mean me.

So I slept that off Sunday, then headed to paint some more. The pumpkin was going up, but my friend's little buddy was doing the edge work - not the easy way like I would, with tape on the floor, but with an edging tool. I stared at him from a distance like a confused dog for a bit, but took to putting on the paint.

The Sox were winning, progress was being made, and I headed to hang out with my Irish friends, who took me to a uillean pipe recital. Actually, it turned out to be a lecture with music, and with but one Guinness in me and no air circulating in the small room holding 90 people, I fought off sleep. I was afraid there was going to be a quiz which I would fail.

But a Diet Coke at intermission revived me. I was still confused about pipe lore - for instance, who the hell thought up the bagpipe in the first place, and how and why did the Irish convert it from something you blow and squeeze and finger to something you just squeeze and finger? And why does that sound so sexy?

But I did learn that there were an awful lot of blind pipers; that one of them killed some kid who was mocking him, which would make him a rapper piper; and I picked up a handful of fun phrases I can sprinkle into my writing and conversations.

Those would include, "as lazy as a piper's pinkie" (which is because of the way the pipes are designed you don't use that finger to play); "a piper's invitation" (which can mean you show up uninvited OR you're invited only because the host felt obligated, much like they would feel toward musicians for the party); and "a poverty of pipers" (which is what you call a group of them, apparently because they don't get paid much).

One day you're painting concrete, then next you feel like a piper. You learn something everyday.