colby's law. or the spirits of don locke.

(while listening to simple twist of fate. holy shit can bro write a song.)

you may remember my treatise on my spirits. if you dont, god help you.

two weekends ago, as predicted in my last post, i went down to baltimore to attend stanton and carolina's wedding.

firstly, let me say that this was a great wedkend (wedding whose events take the whole weekend; you heard it here first) all around. everything and everyone was really elegant and nice, and it all went off without any major hitches. i was the best man, and even the spirits gave me a reprieve while i executed my best man duties. for example, during the ceremony i was responsible for holding the rings in my pocket, then producing them when called upon, placing them on a silver plate the priest was holding, then holding said plate while the father sprinkled holy water on the rings, then handing the plate back to him. not only was i able to extricate the wedding bands in a timely manner without having to take my pants off, and to drop them on the silver without having them clink and roll around on the plate like spinning pennies, but i didn't even come close to fumbling either hand-off with the man of cloth. so yeah, the spirits gave me a break, until something else needed extrication - me!

saturday night/early sunday morning. i had come back to my hotel room to chill with some of the other wedding guests. at around 1.30 am, we were going to go down to the hotel bar to chill in a different locale and whathaveyou; everyone left ahead of me, while i stayed back to change. thing was, when i myself soon tried to open the room door to leave, i found that while the handle turned, the bolt didn't move, and the door wouldn't open.

at first, this wasn't too worrisome. the hotel uses that keycard system, where you use a faux-credit card to open your door instead of a key; in this hotel you also needed it to press your floor's button once you were in the elevator. and the whole wedkend, this thing had been giving me fits. it usually took three times to get my floor lit up in the vator, and it customarily took five or six tries to get into my room, and counter-intuitively, a few times to open my door from within my room (i know, it makes little sense; why would opening the door from within, where the card wasn't nec., be problematic? yet it was.)

so late sat., as i was about to leave my room to join my friends at the bar, the door wouldn't open, yet again. no worries, i kept at it. fifth attempt, diced. whatevs, it'll give eventually. tenth attempt, diced.

push the door in and try again. diced. pull out and try. diced. the door was just not opening. in utter disbelief, i called the front desk:

'um, yeah, hi. i'm locked in my room.'

'do you need to come get an extra card?'

'no, im locked in the freaking room.'

'you're locked in the room?'

'HELP!'

so the proverbial 'they' sent someone up with a card. he couldn't open it. then they sent an 'engineer.' he didn't fare any better.

i, fueled by incredulity and moet chandon, called the front desk again and bitched them out, calling for a refund:

'i didn't come here to be imprisoned! you dont even have hbo!'

then, fueled by moet, i fell asleep. i woke up around eight, to the telephone. it was a woman at the front desk, who told me that they were comping one night of my two-night stay, as a reparation, and also that they had stopped trying to get me out last night when they assumed i had dozed off. i was glad to hear about the comp, and still very tired, so i went back to sleep.

then, around nine, i woke up to the sound of a knock on my door. i assumed it was the team of engineers. but it was stanton (he and carolina spent their first night of marriage in the hotel, on my floor). i said:

'hey man! how's married life?'

'good, good, what's goin' on?'

'im locked in my room.'

he didn't believe me - why would he? - so i passed him my card under the door, and when he couldn't open the door, he believed me. i went back to sleep.

anyway, to make a long story shorter, i next woke up round ten, to the sound of stanton, his father, his father's best friend, and a team of hotel people at the door. they all told me to stand away from the door, while they took a hatchet to it, which was the only way of removing the metal card-lockbox, which was apparently not affixed with simple nuts and bolts.



it was straight out of the shining, kind of. and the tremendous pounding did not help my not-huge-but-not-tiny headache.

when the door was finally nothing more than a loose framework of splintered wood, everyone pushed through and profusely apologized to me, and stanton told me he had, in the interim, gotten both of my nights comped. apparently, after i originally told him i was locked in, he went straight to the front desk and read them the riot act. at first, the managment told him they'd only comp one night b/c the first one-friday night-had been smooth, but stanton convinced them that this was not the point. anyway, the hotel books any weekend night reservation as a minimum two-night stay, so their own logic bit them in the ass.

during the sunday brunch that stanton's parents held at their house, my little adventure was a main conversation. those who didn't previously know me found the story remarkable. those who did know me agreed it could only happen to me.

one of stanton's main pts of why the whole thing was so egregious was that the hotel had let me stay in the prison room over the night without fixing the problem, because, as they said, i had fallen asleep, and more or less consented that they could try again in the morning. stanton brought up the fact that it shouldn't have even been my choice, b/c if god forbid a fire had broken out in the hotel, i'd be toast (i was on the tenth fl., btw, with no fire escape).

stanton opined that if i indeed had become toast, he would have owned the hotel by that very morning, and would have sparked a national law that would require that hotels rectify spontaneous prison rooms without delay, no matter what time of night, nor what the guest says. the law would have been colby's law, much like jude law.

everyone also agreed the spirits had been at work, slithering through the keyhole and lock mechanisms themselves (rather than simply holding the door closed). but this time, as jordan might have said, the spirits clumsily helped me, rather than harmed me.

coupla early wedding pics:

nora and i do what we do best together - yap, while behind us, stanton and carolina do what they do best togther - be all in love with each other and junk.

'im unbearably classy, and you know it.'