Unstuck in Time

What a weird experience!

Around 2 in the afternoon I fixed a full meal — wonderful piece of steak, salad, pile of garlicky black beans. Along with this, I took it into my little head to have a gin and tonic.

Usually, I serve up hard liquor to myself in the tallest, widest glass in the house. It holds 16 ounces — two full cups. This habit has a couple of advantages:

First, because the glass holds so much, it takes a lot longer to drink my favorite hard-liquor potable, whiskey and water. This means I probably won’t pour a second glass.

Second, a single shot of liquor is much diluted in 15 ounces of mixer, making it a lot less likely that I’m going to get blitzed over dinner.

But yesterday I decided it would be nice to have a gin and tonic in a low-boy glass, not a long-tall-Sally sort of a glass. My short cocktail glasses hold eight ounces, half the amount the taller glass accommodates.

This meant the drinkey-poo in question used only about a third of a can of tonic water. But it tasted like a drink, not like faintly booze-flavored soda pop. That was nice.

So while the food is cooking I almost finish off a swiggle. Pour another. That lasts through most of dinner. But a third of a can of tonic remains, so I pour a short one — about half a jigger of gin, but still…more gin. Pick up the kitchen, read an e-mail from the client asking me to do still more complicated stuff on the interminable index; decide I’d better wait until full sobriety returns to respond to that. Wander off and fall into bed.

Wake up. It’s dark out. I think it’s the usual 4 a.m. wake-up. Get out the flashlight to check what miserable time of the morning it is, and see it’s QUARTER TO SEVEN!

I’ve got to be out the door no later than quarter to eight, because we have an eight a.m. choir call for today’s early service. This is a once-a-month gig the pastor dreamed up and that I personally dislike intensely — usually choir call is at 10 a.m.

Damn! Fly around, feed the dog (think i don’t think i fed the dog last night!), dunk in the tub, wash my hair, paint my face, find something more or less acceptable to wear, and FLY out the door at quarter to eight, pissed off because it’s still dark as pitch outside, I haven’t even had time for breakfast, and the goddamn paper’s not here.

Pretty Daughter’s son has got his car-repair workshop, locally known as his mom’s garage, open and he’s fiddling with a neighbor’s car, which evidently wouldn’t start this morning. Amazing neighbor who can get a teenaged boy out of the sack at this hour on a Sunday.

Streak down Seventh Ave. Shoot into the church parking lot to find…

no. one. there!

I’m totally mystified. I’m sure this is the morning we’re supposed to be there for the dratted early service, because yesterday Joan said “I’ll see you tomorrow.” I must either have the wrong time or she and I both must be wrong about the early service day.

Puzzled, I drive home. I’m thinking I need to tell the choir director I’m just not gonna do these 8:00 a.m. choir shindigs, because I hate hate HATE getting out of bed with my feet running.

The paper still hasn’t shown up. Pretty Daughter’s kid has gone indoors, and there’s no one around. It’s still dark as pitch. On Thursday, SBA Prez Marshall remarked that the longest day of the year was coming up. He wasn’t kidding, I reflect.

Not until I pull into the garage do I think…wonder if it’s actually 8 P.M. instead of 8 a.m.?….. The digital clock in the car doesn’t have an a.m./p.m. indicator; neither do the ones on the stove and the microwave. All the rest of the clocks in the house are analogue.

Park the car, close the garage, charge back to the office, turn on the computer, and…

Yup! It’s 8:10 p.m.!!!!

Sumbiche!

At this point I have no idea how long I’ve been asleep. The last e-mail I opened came in at 3:10. The next one, which I don’t think was on the server when I stumbled away from my desk, came in at 3:19, but I can’t remember whether I fell directly into bed after seeing the client’s latest round of arcane instructions (he has in mind that I’m going to do electronic searches of 300 page proofs for 25 single-spaced pages of indexing terms) or whether I went into the kitchen to wash the dishes. Whatever I did, I didn’t get far, because the leftover beans are still on the stove.

If I fell asleep around 3:30, then I slept for three hours. Don’t seem to have a hangover and don’t feel especially drunk (but obviously shouldn’t have been driving!).

Even after all these revelations, it still felt like morning.  To make things stranger, later in the evening when I went to make something to eat, I came across the Bombay Sapphire: not that much was gone. It was still full almost up to the top — so I was right in thinking I’d been pouring pretty short shots.

The dog and I went for a walk. We live in a neighborhood of Christmas light enthusiasts, so it’s pretty gaudy out there at this time of year. The burning bush, which slowly changes colors through the night-time hours, was mostly red with a little white as we strolled past.

The head finally clear, I started back to work on the index. Finished the latest round of changes around 1:00 a.m. Sincerely hope the latest iteration will satisfy the client.

Strange. This kind of thing has happened to me before, when I was much younger: waking up from a nap thinking it’s  morning, only to find it’s actually evening. But in those instances, the sun was still up — as soon as you can see the sun’s position in the sky, you know what time of day it is. It was solid black last night as I was racing toward an empty church. You can’t see the stars well here, this being the eighth- or ninth-largest city in the land…otherwise you’d think I might have noticed Orion in the east, a bit of a give-away.

Oh well. Second childhood: ain’t it grand?

Images:
Glassware, shamelessly ripped off from Crate & Barrel.
Orion. Mouser. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.