Sober, even

 Jesus, the Dave Matthews Band! Is all I can think. I’m sitting in my kid’s dentist office when I notice that I’ve listened to an entire DMB song.

I can’t say it’s the first time, as I think it happened by accident somewhere in my past, but it sure as hell ain’t the third time. It was always somewhat of a badge of honor, being a graduate of the University of Virginia (read as nasally as possible) during the years of 1989 to 1993, and an extra year of being in C’ville while one girl broke my heart and I started another down a path that ended with me breaking hers…

“Does it always go back to a woman, Randy?”

Apparently.

There is ice on the ground and it’s cold as shit outside. I don’t know how I ended up this far north.

“North Carolina is north, Randy?”

Apparently to me it is.

I left Virginia in 1994 to go to Arizona. I remember being in shorts all year long, even on those rare below freezing nights at the bar, that would almost always lead to at least 50, but most likely 70-degree days.

After that, New Orleans. For not long enough. I still dream of that place. Just how magical it was. And just how much I seemed to fuck up the possibility of living there permanently.

“If you’re honest with yourself Randy, you’d probably be dead if you’d stayed.”

Yeah, probably. But damn never really knowing.

I know things wouldn’t have worked out, in my mind it was beyond repair. The redhead wasn’t the cause, she was just there at just the right time.

“Right time?”

Hell, I don’t know how to articulate anything. I’ve never been any good at talking about it, mostly because there was never anyone to listen to me. Not having “die for me” friends, is you don’t get to have those conversations. Internally, yes. But that really doesn’t help.

Eight sessions with a therapist. That’s it.

“I think we should have talked about her,” was her last words to me. That kind of scared me away from therapy. Shouldn’t have. But it did. That and using all my EAP on those sessions and getting laid off for the first time just weeks later.

Two years later, I had shittier insurance. But, I didn’t take advantage of 8 more EAP sessions.

Today, I’m working on myself again. I have too much baggage. I want to do the John Cusack thing, but I think most of the people I want to talk to would be like “who the fuck are you?” except one, who would be “get the fuck away from me.”

Funny. Not funny.

I downloaded any app. Those Instagram ads really work, I tell ya.

A few sessions in, lots of close to tears writing and AI responses and it dawned on me that yep, I need a therapist. Seriously don’t want all of my baggage being absorbed by AI and spit out back at me. I’d guess one day, my AI buddy would suggest a beer, a bullet and a bye-bye. So, doing a quick Google search brought me a bunch of options. But how do you pick a therapist nowadays. Too many options. Too many fake reviews. And who wants to lay it all out, then find out you picked a shithead. Then have to do it all again?

Eh. You are a coward.

“This beating myself up, isn’t helping.”

Thank you mind for pointing out the obvious as I sit here listening to Lucero, not drinking and trying to justify gaining 13 pounds in the last three weeks.

It’s cold.

Been working at home.

New job.

Terror. (GWB voice, please)

I want to get in my car and drive. South. West. Not North. Can’t go much more East.

I had tickets to the Glossary reunion show in Nashville. No one wanted to go with. Then, snow back-to-back weekends and the chance of going solo died in icy roads.

My mom has been gone almost 3 years now. That’s a skull splitter for me. It seems like yesterday. Nothing else seems like yesterday anymore.

Not the breakups. Not the miscarriages. Not the lies. Not the truths. Not even the good times. They’re faded. I think my early stage dementia is real. I have really hard times with words – but only when speaking. I really loathe speaking. Unless I’m drunk. And I don’t get drunk anymore.

I am also promising myself to get off the phone. I’m deleting apps as soon as I reach the end of this typing road. I wonder if I’ll stay committed to finally doing this again?

Sober, even.

By the way, copilot things I should write that “I am considering whether I will remain dedicated to undertaking this task once more.”

How the hell do you follow that with “Sober, even.”???

Drinking hurts now. Maybe that’s fitting. The hurt now lives elsewhere. It’s pretty to think so. Ha!

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.