Twitchy

Originally Posted Saturday, January 11, 2013

I am done with people.  Honestly.  They get worse each day, of course.  Then yesterday, after an especially trying week of work, knowing I had no plans and having no one to call--o.k., having no girl of my own to call--I got tired of being alone.  Tell me about that.  Maybe because I make up people for a "living" now, because all the people on this site are not real (including me), just maybe the real things are more disappointing.  I think I wanted a made up girl to come home to.  I've had the real thing.  Sometimes it is nice, but often enough you come home to just what you didn't want, someone with as much anguish and disappointment and frustration as you.  And too often, of course, you (I) are (am) the focal point of all those emotional strains, if not the source itself.  But I couldn't remember any of that on the drive home, fatigued and dissolute.  I wanted, at least, to go somewhere and have a drink.  That's what I said on the telephone to my mother. 

"Well go out.  You don't have to drink." 

Of course.  Why hadn't I thought of that. 

It was going on five o'clock.

"I think I'll just go to bed." 

When I got home, I opened a bottle of ale that was in the refrigerator.  "Fuck it," I told myself.  I drank a little bit of it sitting on the deck looking at the coming Friday night.  There were people meeting out for a drink after work.  There were cocktails and hors d'oeuvres and there was laughter.  There were boys and there were girls, and later, for those lucky enough to find love. . . or some emotion. . . there would be trysts. 

After half a beer, I decided to go buy dinner at Fresh Market.  But what makes you happy in the middle of the week is not so good at week's end.  Where were all the glorious women who shop there, I wondered?  Where were the women who'd stepped out of the pages of Town and Country?  The food in the glass counters looked like the same food that was there last time.  I decided to load up on pastries. 

It was dark when I got home, so there was that, I thought.  Six-thirty.  I could go to bed in. . . oh. . . two and a half hours. 

I decided to have a whiskey. 

Jesus, it had only been just two days shy of a month since I had a drink.  I could already feel a buzz coming on. 

I heated up the meatloaf and sat at the little table in front of the television.  A silly movie from 1999 with Billy Bob Thorton and his sleazy wife of the time and John Cusack and Cate Blanchett was just starting.  I'd never seen it and the cast was good, but from the start I could tell that it was a dumb, uninteresting movie.  But I couldn't think of anything else to do. 

Q called, but I didn't answer.  He left a message.  I knew he would ask me what I was doing, and I knew what he would tell me he was doing.  When I finished eating, I listened to his message. 

"You must be drinking," he said.  "Every time I call you recently, you pick up the phone." 

Fuck. 

I called him back. 

"Yea, I'm drinking." 

"I knew it." 

I could have lied, of course, but that would have meant I had a problem.  Fucking sober people.  It is like having a girlfriend.  As soon as you start flirting with some woman in your office, she will call.  How the fuck do they know? 

"Hey, honey.  What are you doing?" 

When we hung up, I switched over to some strong herbal tea.  Mmmm-mmmm.  The movie finished as stupidly as it had begun.  The booze had made me tired.  I went to bed. 

The day is lousy.  It will rain and be unseasonably hot and steamy.  My nerves are jumping.  I must do something, take some kind of action. 

"Move, man, move!" 

I will.  I will get into motion.  But sometimes, Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, that seems all there is. 

Here's a picture of someone else you could think of as mom.  I have, of course, made her up.  It is what I have.  It is what I do.