good david vs. bad david

You know, these things shouldn’t come as a surprise anymore. All one has to do is look in the mirror to get a clue, yet, the way things have always worked in the past gives one hope. I guess.

Out and about, getting a crappy sub from Subway because I’m much to lazy/uninspired/not willing to deal with gaggles of jarheads to go to a local indie shop for my sandwich fix. Coming back, there is a pretty ugly accident at the local hangout, aka the BP station with a McDonald’s inside. A motorcycle vs. SUV as I have so named them after seeing so many of the damn things going all the way back to my Arizona days when I lived with three cyclists -- one of which seemed to make a living at getting hit by motorists and living off the settlements, because, “the car is always at fault” he said.

Anyway, I’d noticed before leaving the office that the cute reporter named for an emotional state of being -- Hope -- was the reporter for the weekend. I still shudder at the thought of one reporter working in an office on weekends. Even I remember the days when a reporter never really had a “day off.” Instead, they’d work from home when the news happened.

“Hell, we publish 365 days a year,” a man I respect a little more every day told me when I was a young cub reporter. Hell, I wasn’t even a reporter, I was a skinny, long-haired, wide-eyed lost person who stumbled into a weeklong tag-along with a couple of real reporters. I was 21 at the time. They were in their late-20s or early-30s. The man, he was in his sixties. Last I heard, he was still writing his clunky, but always correct prose. Most likely scaring the crap out of what passes for journalists today, and hopefully inspiring some other young fool to follow in his footsteps.

“And that means we work 365 days a year.”

He also drank a lot. And was divorced twice.

I drink a lot. Haven’t been lucky enough to be divorced twice. Let alone married once.

Hope, she’s a cute lass, as the old guy would’ve called her. She wasn’t a very good reporter. I’d read her copy. Heard her weak excuses for not having things in them. I think she wants to be a good journalist, but if you don’t have any mentoring you, there is really little hope. (Ugh.)

Anyway, again. My time at the paper has been kind of strange. Pushed aside from the beginning, I just carved out a niche as the broody, quiet guy over in the corner. However, in the last few weeks I’ve kind of come out of that shell. It’s my usual pattern. I make a couple of friends, become kind of a dominant part of the discussions in the newsroom while we’re in the place, but not really branch out. Then, one day, the branching begins and before you know it, you’re talking to everyone all of the sudden. Usually, this leads to going out and drinking with, etc. It has not this time. It’s led to curious looks and smiles, mostly.

After doing a bit of manuevering to take a look at the crash, it looked somewhat awful. The motorcyclist was being attended to by three medics and there were two ambulances there, a fire truck there and a couple of cops. As I drove down the road, a third ambulance was en route.

I got to the office, walked over toward the cute reporter. Her cubicle was a bit of a maze to get to. Just as I enter, my boss yells out my name. Awkwardness. She sees me right behind her, holding food and looking dumb. I look at her, then at my boss. I start to walk towards him.

“Huh?”

“Can you take that story again?”

“Um. Yeah. Sure.”

“Sorry, bro.”

“Not a problem.” I had suggested taking a story on a kid who got paralyzed in a football game from him to put on the sports pages due to lack of space. He agreed. We set it up. Then he took it back.

“Unless the obits run long,” he said.

And now, two hours before deadline, two hours after obit deadline, he has decided obits ran long.

Eh, whatever.

I turn back to the reporter. She’s back at looking on the internet. A favorite pastime of journalists now. Especially those under the age of 30.

“Hope,” I meekly say.

She turns and smiles, then says “Yes sir?”

Taken aback a little by this, I stutter out “I saw something…might make a story.”

I then explain the wreck, clumsily. I’m still thinking about being called “sir.”

She asks me how bad it was.

“Looked not that awful,” I reply. “There were three ambulances.”

“Ok,” she said, turning back to the internet.

I walk away. Feeling sorry for myself.

I am old, I guess. At least to a girl who graduated from college in 2008.

I think about asking her about David Bowie, since I'd been jamming to what the old folks would have poo-pooed on the ride to work "China Girl" and on the way home "Suffragette City."

I think better of it rather quickly.

Me and my boss start talking about “remember the days when…”, further solidifying our own demise.

barstoolery

Shitty beer drives the want to drink right out of oneself.

At least it does for me. I buy shitty beer when I’m especially poor, which is a good and bad idea. One shouldn’t drink at all when you can’t afford it, but when one can’t afford much of anything, shitty beer seems like the best alternative.

Well, going to a library would be better, but it’s Sunday.

Miller High Life is about the shittiest beer I can tolerate now. I have no idea where it stands on the shittiest beer in the world list, but I figure there are plenty below it. Last year sometime I had a sip of a Milwaukee’s Best Ice beer. It was so bad I could only take that one sip before just putting it on a coffee table and leaving it behind.

To think that was how I lived for so many years.

Finding out that beer can taste good was a great thing. I course, I still remember those early days of swilling down Coors Light. Why Coors? Because it was a cool beer at some point. I did grow up watching Smokey and the Bandit, for Christ’s sake…

My first forays into drinking “other” beers came in Arizona, really. I lived with a guy that brewed his own and it stuck. No, I’ve never gotten into the whole making it for myself thing, which is a shame, because I probably would have become obsessed with it at the right time. What do I mean by that? I mean, I would have gotten good at it when micro-brews started to catch on. Maybe I would have actually opened a brewery/bar. There are so many of them now, it’s a bandwagon missed.

But there I go, musing on the unobtainable. Only because it’s a past and present and future that didn’t occur. Even if you could have made it happen. I tend to do that, if you haven’t noticed. (here’s where you silently think to yourself, no shit Randy…)

But guzzling down a cold (it has to be cold) High Life reminds me of how I don’t want to be a degenerate drunk who drinks swill. If I’ve got to go down that path, it’s good beer. Even if good beer to me is the Shiner Family. Which, many folk hate. It does taste a little like laundry detergent. Huh. There I go, analyzing things again. What the fuck do you mean analyzing, Randy? That was a statement of fact. Well, Emily introduced me to it again. And I only drank it for a bit. It was the only beer she would drink. Well, that and fucking Michelob Ultra. But all chicks will drink that. Even the ones who say they won’t…

But I usually forget the origins of Shiner in my palette. A good thing, no doubt. But as I’m wont to do, I remind myself.

That’s why I wish I could get Lone Star beer here. It would satisfy my obsession with Texas and deliver a buzz without a single piece of that redheaded bitch attached to it.

Redheaded bitch? Damn, Randy, have you been drinking a lot?

No, I haven’t actually. I’ve had half a beer after a stroll on the beach. I said hello to about 20 people. One chick say hi back. The same chick who always does, from her porch. Although she was with the beater guy today. It’s funny. I know these people by their behavior. I assume they do the same. “There’s that loner dude. He does seem polite, though…”

I don’t go to the beach enough. I also don’t go to the local pub enough. It’s right there. Full of other wasted opportunities and lost ambitions. But, I guess that means it’s all well and good that I don’t end up there. Or is it? I mean, I could meet a beautiful woman there. Well, most likely just a woman. But maybe one to test the “fup, fup” theory of life. However, I go into the bar with no money, it’s likely I come out of it without a buzz or a fup.

It’s times like this I wish I was still in Richmond. At least there, I had a partner in barstoolery. A word that I just had to add to the Microsoft dictionary to get it to stop changing it.

I haven’t had the urge to drink since my debacle in Raleigh. I still haven’t mustered up the courage to just ask what I said. Yep, big pussy. Or more like the Fast Times version -- Big Hairy Pussy. Of course, Phoebe Cates never walks in on me when I’m beating off.

The smell of garbage just wafted in from outside. The bar across the street must have served some food yesterday. The dumpster is overfilled and sending whatever rotting carcass smell into the air that it wants. Great, that means flies will be in abundance tomorrow. No opening up the doors to get a breeze.

Speaking of no air conditioning. Woke up today, it was 76 degrees inside my house. I was freakin’ chilly. Greatness, that is.