I never drink and drive, except the one time when I did. And I wasn’t just drunk on four beers and two shots of tequila that one time; I was also drunk on new love. A fresh arrival to California, I was twenty-three with dreams of buying a van and heading north to Canada. I thought I was over the guy in the ska band I met in Colorado years ago. We had stayed in contact; both of us deeming our long distance attraction as “geographically tragic.” And he eventually ended up dating a girl I couldn’t stand, so forget him. But forget him I did not, and when I showed up at his Santa Cruz home looking for a (platonic, yeah right) place to stay, we locked eyes, and it was electric. I mean crazy, soulmate-type electricity, and I believed zero in that kind of thing.

Thus began a…