Here's to Good Times

Tonight is Kinda Special.

We're all about supporting small local businesses. Passionate. We're at the Greasy Chinese food buffet next to the Days Inn Adjacent to Route 8, with rows upon rows of tables with steam trays filled with three kinds of pudding next to the macaroni salads, or anorexic crab legs next to grey dough balls labeled dim sum and six kinds of fried rice. Our fellow diners look like they shop at Wal*Mart and/or live at homeless shelters. We fit right in, even though English as a First Language is hella optional here and we're not wearing beer paraphernalia or sleepwear or anything marking us as cowboys.

DOB: This food is good, they have everything I like.

TCG: And it’s cheap too, about $25 per person, including this amusing little $20 bottle of cooking wine labeled Pis Du Chat '02.

DOB: Yeah, I don’t know why people go to more expensive restaurants when you can get this kind of good food so cheap. And you can get as much as you like. We could spend the whole day here.

WISIMH: (Contemplating the prospect )And that’s not even taking into consideration the scintillating conversational topics which include such old favorites as how good your mangy dog is, how you were up all night, and how we “need to go to the store” for you (which we "need" like we need an ice pick in the ear. As much as I like the crab legs, I also enjoy chicken wings coated in dark red 30-weight sweet grease, and fresh spring rolls that you could also use as chocks to level your motor home on your front yard. And plus, I like to eat at restaurants where they have tablecloths).

UCC: How’s J? (your daughter in Florida who calls every day) Has she called today?

DOB: Well, she’s tired at the end of the day, so she usually just comes home from work and gets into bed before she calls me. Sometimes she’ll go out with one of the other girls for a sandwich.

WISIMH: (To myself) This is conversation #4. You already know the script, why do you do this?

WISIMH: (Back to myself) Well, because the other options are equally disappointing. We could have had conversations:
#1 - Sandy is a good boy…
#2 - I just tell him I’m going to the store and he lays down by the window to wait for me…
#3 – this food is good. They have everything I like…

WISIMH: Yeah, but there’s always the chance you can spark The (always entertaining) Mystery Conversation. The one where she tries to talk about some news story she saw on TV but which ends up as a game of 20 questions as you try to figure what the fuck she’s talking about.

(Begin dream sequence in Vaseline focus with scary music like a disco Star Wars medley or barely recognizable cover of Cindi Lauper’s Time After Time in a minor key by Alvin and the Chipmunks)

Rod Serling Voiceover (RSV): The mystery conversation usually begins something like this…

DOB: J said we’re wrong about shootings in Florida. Fort Hood is in Texas…
Or
He was trapped on an ice flow with three polar bears and a condom. In the day room eating prunes. If I had a knife, I’d cut you...
Or
Garlic mashed potato recipes from the Civil War have always been a matter of great curiosity to me, which I can trace back to the food I enjoyed so much as a child at the dawn of the Age of Fast Food: the best nouvelle cuisine fusion of What Mexicans Who Have Scurvy Eat and Pan-Asian-Thai smug things with too much msg, on vegatibles and fruits in suspiciously tropical varieties, with a sprinkling of roasted garlic. And why, accordingly, today, many patriotic citizens see gay marriage as a threat to the institution of monogamous marriage between a hypothetically straight man and a (ditto) woman as exemplified by some of the best fallen christian preachers. Salt to taste of your own tears and top with a sprinkling of majnoon (crazy) …
Or
As Antigone said, to Electra, on Oprah, you can bend over and kiss your ass goodbye, Bitch, or was that what Oprah said to You? I’ve put up with your smartass crap with as much patience as I can muster between diaper changes, and what do I get? More smarmy ironical bullshit, pardon the execrably bad pun. I’m old and senile. I get it. Let’s move on…
Or
If our intertwined lives together had a subtitle, I nominate:
An Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times with Some Wackjobs
Look Who’s Fallen and Can’t Get Up And I don’t mean Lily
You Need to Do Something for Me. Can you guess what? Me neither.
We put the fuck you into dysfunction
The Story of the Founding of Duchebagonomics by the Family that Personified the Term
Who ARE These People Anyway?

You get the idea.

RSV: But mystery unravelling isn’t the only fun. Try to cover up the smell of piss with too much cheap perfume, have dinner where this fragrance marries with the odors of a saltwater tank of Garabaldies, seafood just beginning to go off, and burnt trans-fat-laden oil byproduct and corn syrup. Hilarity follows as the sea follows the moon above. Well, not quite so steadily, you understand.

(End Dream Sequence effects)

Insert standard ‘Goodnight-John-Boy’ scene and fade out to happy ending. Get your mind out of the gutter.

Name That TV Show

TCG: (Walking in from the TV room) Thought I’d visit you.

UCC: (At computer) Well, hi.

TCG: There was a commercial.

UCC: In what?

TCG: In what I was listening to.

UCC: What were you listening to?

TCG: So I didn’t have to listen to it.

UCC: What TV show were you listening to before the commercial?

TCG: Oh. Heavy metal something like.

WISIMH: Duck! Here comes Abe Simpson’s gathering darkness. Such diminished conversational capacity that it could probably rise to the level of a successful defense against a charge of acting with premeditated passive aggression. We still make each other laugh, but that doesn’t make up for provision of mutual solace and support as we approach the scary door. I wish that that which will not kill us will make us both stronger.

“My Whaa?” A Scary Tale in Two Acts

(Dinner at Iraqi restaurant named for a Quintessentially Southern American city in Georgia, with upscale Current Gen Martinis with sweet liquor added for the little ladies. A handicapped parking space steps from the door, dinner for 2.5 people.)

TCG: Did Mother tell you about her memory?

DOB: My whaaa…?

TCGL Your memory. How it’s been improving.

DOB: Oh yeah? Oh, yeah! I’m making more sense than I was, before, you know, after, when I fell and hit my head? Much better memory oh yeah.

WISIMH: Hyperbole is such an overused word these days. It’s a shame, really because then, when a situation comes along that seems to advance the very postmodern definition of “memory” as including the brain as some epheremal sprite, which tends to desert us in old age and whatnot. And such as. Query: Is another overused word passion? As in, “I’m passionate about my new French manicure,” or “About my new diet that starves your shrinking oxygen-starved brain into a tiny walnut-shaped shell of its former self?" Amid such existential musings:

TCG: … It could be the vitamins your taking too, right?

DOB: My whaa?

TCG: The supplements from Life Extension?

DOB: Oh yes! My Vitamin 12

TCG: Right! Your Vitamin B 12

WISIMH: Seriously? That’s the best ya got? My vision is blacking out at the edges, narrowing into a hallucinatingly alternative universe where there was liberty, and justice, and Vitamin 12 For All. Under frickin’ god. And I’m an atheist.
Query: They say there are no atheists in foxholes. Which, of course, they’re wrong. But notwithstanding the foregoing however, staring insanity in it’s cold and trembling watery eye before the first martini kicks in? Would that make an atheist pray for god, for death, for those Japanese knives on QVC? Personally, I’ve found my own god. I’m a Frisbeetarianism. I believe that, when you die, your Soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.

A (not so) Cynical Look

“In conversations I more and more often catch a puzzled expression on the other person’s face, an eyebrow raised questioningly, a slight frown on the brow. I am increasingly obliged to stop and add a footnote. “I was joking. Sorry…”
There are two possible causes of these misunderstandings:
a) I have changed, alas, and I am slowly moving towards the pathetic prospect of an old age spent making boorish and foolish social gaffes;
b) I have not changed, but the world around me has, so my message increasingly misses its target, or at least so it seems to me.
Both possibilities equally threaten my relation to the world. And if that relation is not improved, my position may soon become completely isolated.”
- Dubravka Ugresic, Thank You for Not Reading, “Come Back, Cynics, All is Forgiven!” (1997)

Neither possibility frightens me. I have stared into the abyss and it has stared back and spit in my face. My relationship to the world is deteriorating. Look World, I need some alone time. It’s not you, it’s me. Isolation is not unwelcome most of the time – Mommy likes her alone time. But sometimes it gets lonely in here, mainly when my roommates are in particularly challenging manic and/or depressive states.

But what the hell. It’s only life, and mine isn’t so bad here with the L’Stranges. At least they’re not robbing liquor stores, conspiring with terrorists, kicking dogs, babbling ominously, writing screenplays, appearing in police-chase videos, or setting fire to their hair. And if some might say that is cynical, I prefer to say po-TOT-o.

Trash Crusade

TCG: I’m going to take a couple of trash cans down to the curb. I wanted you to know, in case I didn’t make it back by Tuesday.

UCC: Don’t worry. These days, the trash is picked up early Tueaday afternoons. There will be plenty of daylight for them to spot your body.

WISIMH: Ooops. I said that out loud.

Moby Dick and Lemon Drop Martinis

Dinner w/DOB and TCG at fancy sci-fi place decorated like the bridge of the Enterprise, lots of gauze curtains with gold thread. Wine, who wants wine with dinner? Give me a raspberry lemon drop vodka martini, and give me some bread and butter, and make it fast.

DOB: mutter mutter, mutter.

TCG: We can’t hear you. You’ll have to speak up.

DOB: MUTTER MUTTER. MUTTER.

UCC: That’s better. Thanks.

WISIMH: Hurry up with the martini, Brittney.

TCG: (To Brittney, as she hands UCC her martini) I could take you away from this: dinner, a movie, a weekend in Acapulco.

Brittney: (To UCC) Does he always do this? Hit on the waitress?

UCC: Yeah. Why do you think I wanted the martini so urgently? I’ll take another martini, please. (To TCG) Best waitress reply, ever.

WISIMH: Have I ever mentioned I hate when you hit on women when I’m sitting next to you? Oh yeah, only about a zillion times. You dick.

DOB: What do I want for dinner? I’m not really that hungry. I want spaghetti and meatballs.

TCG: They have macaroni and cheese.

DOB: I’m not really that hungry, mutter mutter….

UCC: (Reading menu) How about chicken parmigian? You can get a side of macaroni and cheese.

DOB: Ok, but as you probably know, I will have completely forgotten this by the time Brittney comes back with the bread and butter, so you’ll have to remember, and when she asks me what I want, I’ll look at you completely mystified and that will be your signal to order for me.

OK, she didn’t really say that. What she actually said was lost in the spittle and dribble, as she daintily sipped her pink wine, and stared in hella surprise at the bread and butter that had magically appeared out of nowhere. Let’s see now, whose diarrhea shall we talk about first….

TCG: How’s Sandy?

DOB: He’s a good boy. I just tell him I’m going to the store, and he goes to his bed and lays down to wait for me to come home.

WISIMH: Ahhhh, THE scintillating dinner conversational topic. It’s not like we haven’t covered this ground a million times either. Why does my life totally feel like Groundhog Day?

UCC: What do you think about the symbolism for homosexuality in Moby Dick? Does the very book’s title suggest a phallic preoccupation, do you think?

Brittney: Here’s you (second) martini. And no, I don’t think the title foreshadows the many men-on-men relationships. I think it refers more to Ahab’s fatal obsession, and how there’s a tipping point where the classic heroic flaw, e.g. Achilles’ heel, overtakes a man’s soul and he goes over to the dark side.

Busboy: (removing my first empty martini glass) Actually, I think it’s an allegory about the conflict between good and evil, with a bit of an oral fixation involving Ahab’s pipe that might suggest either fellatio, or a dependence on tobacco to face the ugly reality of a one-legged whaling ship captain’s life. In my Master’s thesis, I focused on Melville’s treatment of race and class, and concluded that the author wasn’t a fan of racism.

TCG: (To Brittney) You’re working very hard. Here’s my 25% off coupon, but be assured, your tip will be based on the pre-discount value of the meal.

Brittney: Oh, be still my beating heart. What a good man you are. Your wife must be so lucky to have you.

Ok, I made up most of the above conversation. I maintain that the world inside my head is often more interesting, lively, stimulating, and funny than the stuff that happens in the actual world, even after two raspberry lemon drop martinis and a glass of pinot noir. I also admit I haven’t read Moby Dick since high school, although I’ve been halfway through re-reading it since, approximately 2002, but I can’t seem to overcome the inertia to get back to it.

The Circle

What’s worse than waking up in bed with a blurry black and white photo of a one-armed man, a post-it note that says “Warning: zombies will eat your br---” four feet of braided twine with a tin can on one end, and a handicapped parking placard?

I’ll tell you what’s worse. Waking up with a premonition of doom, opening your eyes and staring into the green eyes of a cat who is invading your personal space, smelling your morning breath, and purring ominously. How can a cat’s purr be ominous?

I’ll tell you, how a cat’s purr can be ominous, and by the way, remember that my mom says cats don’t have souls. Purring cats are ominous only in retrospect when, at the end of the day, you realize the cat’s blank eyes dramatically foreshadowed the subsequent realization that your day turned out to suck worse than a draining bathtub when only the hair-infused grey soapy scum is left.

My day also included the near-death trip du jour, with a driver whose skills are declining sharply. This was after a dinner or waffles in which TCG poured 4 Tablespoons of HFCS on his waffle. Did I mention, he’s hypoglycemic. Usually his post-dinner sugar crash coincides with is post-dinner nap on the couch and no harm is done. Last night, it happened like a kick to the back of his head, halfway to Spring Valley to pick up eggs. Clammy sweats, woozy head-shaking that could easily be mistaken for a swoon of love. He made it to our destination. I drove home, amid rumblings of diarrhea .

I went to my happy place where there were no conversations about practicing my skills at fellatio or other metaphors about sucking. I made myself mad crazy cranberry vodka martini with enough tomato juice to make me feel like a youthful werewolf, at twilight, drinking the blood of a young virgin goth boy, with facial piercings and a blue-hair dye-job that would outdo my Grandma’s blue hair circa 1965.

We must have had angels on our bumpers as I drove home in the dark with only the light from my white knuckles reflecting TCG’s shiny face, scrunched into a rictus of cruciatas curse. Kidding. We do have the saving grace of growing old together, still making each other laugh, bugging the crap out of each other, and getting the heck over it. Whether it is for better or for worse, we’re in this together. And what could be worse than that? I’ll tell you what’s worse…