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Life: Which Direction to Take?

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Not toward the liquor store, evidently.

😀

Imagining that I craved a glass of wine, along about 4:00 p.m. this afternoon I blasted out of the house and sailed toward the little booze store in the shopping center on the northern edge of the ‘Hood.

Got about two blocks along the way to the place and found myself thinking Why the f*** am I doing this????

Seriously: What on earth did I need a bottle of wine for? Or a fifth of whiskey? Or whatever I imagined I was gonna buy…

And, to my infinite surprise and delight, I found myself headed back to the house, empty-handed.

Yes. Turned around and came straight back to the Funny Farm: sans booze purchase.

For reasons I don’t clearly understand, my brain has decided it does not want its human to consume any more booze!

How weird is that, I ask you?

Truth to tell, I don’t think I drink to excess…at least, not by the standards of the crowd I run with.

My parents always had a cocktail or two before dinner: usually Canadian Club. Yes: every afternoon. After I came of age and was home from college, I would join them.

All my boyfriends guzzled merrily.

Dear Ex-Husband and I had a daily bourbon and water before dinner and wine with dinner. And that was for years. 

After he and I parted, the subsequent gentleman friends continued that tradition with me.

Understand: we weren’t getting sh!t-faced. We were just having a tipple or two.

After I found myself living in singletude, I continued that tradition: would break out the whiskey or the wine before dinner and pour a swiggle. Sometimes more than one swiggle….

Then one day it struck me that any more than one of those swiggles was making me…well…not high as a kite, but for sure, mildly inebriated. Maybe even more than mildly. And that was not good when one was loafing around the house all by one’s self.

So I decided to knock it off with the afternoon cocktails. Which I did.

But I continued to have a glass of wine (maybe a glass and a half) with dinner.

Time passed. Eventually it struck me that ANY swiggling was probably NOT a good thing. Dinnertime or no dinnertime.

So I quit. 

Yeah: cold turkey.

Have not had an alcoholic drink in some weeks.

And y’know… I don’t miss it!

That, I consider to be weird. 

Or maybe not. Maybe it was just time to knock off the swiggling and climb aboard the wagon.

Weird or not, it strikes me as a good thing. An exceptionally good thing, come to think of it. Because enjoyment or not, I do think consumption of alcohol — in any incarnation and in any amount — is not a good thing.

The Mormons and the Christian Scientists have got it right: booze in ANY amount just ain’t healthy! And the best thing you can do for yourself, if you’re a drinker to any degree, is to knock it off.

So…that’s what I’ve done. And the weird thing is…I don’t miss it!

Earlier efforts along these lines have indeed left me feeling deprived. But now? Not so much. For reasons I do not fully understand, I really, truly do not have any craving for a swiggle before dinner. Or a glass of wine with dinner.

So…yeah. This is a bit of a new direction for me.  We shall see how far I can travel in it. 

 

 

BEAUTIFUL Evening!

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Gosh, it is SO gorgeous out there this evening! Ruby and the Human just returned from circumnavigating the ‘Hood…  A little hot and damp out there for the purpose, but not too awful. 😀

Ruby is now fed and the Human has a giant cup of iced tea and here we are loafing on the bed, peering out the back window at the beautiful sunset.

Dinnertime, alas…so we didn’t see any cute kids playing outside under the watchful eyes of their wonderful young parents. They’re a prime attraction of this neighborhood, IMHO. They come out to play, and it’s great fun to watch them frolicking as the Dog and the Human are trotting up the sidewalk.

High, wispy clouds this evening. Not so wispy that they won’t make for a spectacular sunset, though! So we lurk by the bedroom window waiting for the light show.

Eeek! Not to say ARF!

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Egad!  Ruby and I (foolishly, it develops) started our early-morning stroll…not realizing how thick that cloud cover up there is!

Thundering. Celestial threats. “Egad!” is an understatement.

We veer back toward the house and head home at a trot.

…RRRRUUUMBBBLE…

Dart in the door just as it starts to rain, lightning sparking all around us.

Whew! Just in time!

Now we’re loafing on the sack, watching the threatening weather and listening to the thunder serenade.

Gosh. I didn’t realize it was this close to raining.

That ain’t just rain out there, though. THAT is a gathering storm, galloping in from the north.

Hmmmm…  Let’s see what Wunderground has to say about it, if anything…

76 degrees. “Active weather warning”…. Y’don’t say? 😀  43% chance of rain, isolated thunderstorms this morning…”  I charged up my computer for this?

How funny! Ruby is already conkered out on the sack! Darned if she isn’t snoring!  Dogs…what entertaining critters…

Egad! $$$$$

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Just realized that two of the five Panasonic telephones in my house are gone. 

Yeah, I had five extensions. Now I have three.

Ducky.

Got a suspicion of who the perp is: one of the cleaning crew. But which one? No clue.

Generous of her to leave me three, eh? Some kind soul came into my home and stole TWO of my phones.

Not sure how to cope with this. If I buy new extensions, can they be programmed to work with my system? Or….what???

Without a car, I can’t get to the store where I bought the phones. So replacing them will not be easy.

What the FUCK is the MATTER with people?  Stealing some old lady’s phones? SERIOUSLY????

Looks like it costs somewhere between $14 and $60 to replace one of these handsets. Here’s one online: $53!!!!

To get new ones, I’ll have to go up to a store in the nearest shopping mall, which I can’t reach without a car.

Can you believe this?????

RUN away!

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Yeah. That was a guy I needed to get away from: as fast as I could run!  My parents were right, right, and righter than right: he was a certifiable jerk.

***

I was crazy in love with the man. And when I say “crazy,” I mean “no IQ.” We’d met at the University of Arizona’s swimming pool, while we were each spending the summer in school in Tucson.

Reckon I was too young to know any better: I was 17 years old at the time, just a kid, in the context. He was in his early 20s.

I thought he was just the handsomest thing that ever came along. And he was polished at seducing young girls. A perfect match, eh?

Welp…my parents sure didn’t think so.

They were dyed-in-the-wool bigots. If you weren’t white and American with a Western European ancestry, you weren’t marriage material for their dear daughter. My hero was Bohemian by heritage: as Eastern European as you can get.

They were simply horrified when I brought him home from the University of Arizona to meet them. LOL! To this day, I remember the aghast look they shot each other, there in the living room as I was introducing him!

😀
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So they set to work to split us up.

This had the effect of committing me even more solidly to the relationship.

Yep. I was in love, in love, and in love…with élan!

Nothing they said and nothing they did would convince me that he was the jerk they said he was. I knew about their racist tendencies, and I figured they just didn’t like him because his folks were Eastern European.

So we continued, for month on month: in time planning that we would marry when we finished our degrees. (I was an undergraduate; he was in a master’s program in Education.)

Kinda don’t think he was a jerk because of his ethnicity. He was a jerk because his jerkitude. And…

I came to understand that, one afternoon when we were laying in his bed and he remarked admiringly on his best buddy’s behavior:

F*cking a waitress the guy had met in a bar, thereby relieving his lust, which was revved up by the fact that his wife was eight or nine months pregnant and so couldn’t accommodate his dong.

No kidding. This was about THE most brilliant thing he’d ever heard of!

At first I thought he was kidding. Putting me on.

But…he wasn’t!

He was serious. He truly believed screwing some waitress was the way a guy whose wife was advanced in pregnancy should get his rocks off!

Well.

Forthwith, I realized that if he thought this was OK for his buddy, he would think it was OK for him. And for me.

My parents were right: he was a jerk par excellence.

I’m not sure he ever understood why I showed him the door to our relationship.  Within a week or ten days, I said good-bye.

And felt glad to be rid of him!

Close call, eh?

Another Soggy-Doggy Day!

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Just back from the morning perambulation of the ‘Hood. This is a Rubyism: she needs that daily walk…and truth to tell, so does her bird-brained Human. If I didn’t have Ruby the Corgi dragging me upwards of a mile around the neighborhood, I would have been loafing since I rolled out of the sack.

But…yech! It’s almost as hot and soggy as Saudi Arabia, there on the shore of the Persian Gulf where I grew up. Sterling unpleasant place to live! The air hot and wet, or else wet and hot: take your pick…

Anyway, Ruby and I survived. Waved “hello” to a neighbor or three. And made it back into the house without expiring.

Arizona really is an ugly place to live. Especially in the desert. I truly hated living in Sun City when my parents proudly decamped to that gawdawful venue, dragging me here before I finished high school in California. Ended up in Phoenix after graduating from the University of Arizona. But really, really…I’d druther be in San Francisco.

Where I belong…