Score

I found an unlimited metrocard with 2 weeks left on it. Score. Also found a cash card a few days ago, with eight bucks on it.

I wrote a lot today. It was nice. I came away from those hours feeling charged and at peace, as contradictory as that sounds. The server move is done so I can do creative thinking again. I wrote a story I’ve written many times before. About the day I and some grade school friends found beer in a ditch at the far end of the school yard. I did not write the story as well as I have at other times. It’s an amusing story, though. This time I added a point that I don’t think I did before. That when I drank the beer — this was the 8th grade  — I had a flashback to being 4 or 5 years old and drinking beer from little Dixie Cups in the basement of the house my family lived in in Alexandria, Virginia. Our dad let my sister and me drink small amounts of what was probably Budweiser and we thought that stuff was great. Our mother was there, too, so this wasn’t some rogue fathering going on. It was cool. I later learned that a few people I’ve known had this same experience of drinking beer when they were very young, under similar circumstances.

Thinking about that incident in the school yard now I remember most the reactions of the kids later, after they drank their two shots of beer and considered themselves unbelievably drunk, stumbling around and acting stupid. They were faking intoxication but it was in good fun, at least at first. To me it quickly became irritating. I mean I know we were just kids and all, with virtually no drinking experience, but to think you could be visibly or dangerously intoxicated on that little booze is stupid, and I thought so even at the time. I grew up with a dad who drank to very limited visible effect. One time I remember him busting out into laughter over something on the television, and my mother groused “He’s drunk.” That’s the only memory I have of seeing him out of character drunk, although for all I know there just happened to be something unbelievably hilarious on the television. He was laughing a little too hard, though. Snot came out.

Later in the day we had to go back to classes. Some of the kids were super serious, making every effort not to look drunk. Others, like me, were normal. I, for one, enjoyed the feeling of camaraderie and of sharing this secret from our teachers.

I wonder now if that incident functioned as some kind of litmus test for who would become an alcoholic and who would not. I wish I could remember now who behaved how but I imagine the more serious-seeming kids seldom drink now and if the ones like me who took their 2 sips of beer in stride all drink heavily.

Had we found a bottle of Hennessy or something nuclear like that it would be a different story. Couple of swigs of that shit would put any 8th grader away.

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“we can’t take the cone of shame off the dog because he won’t stop licking his ass”… i saw that somewhere on the internet today and thought it read like a metaphor for my life right now….Just logged on to AIM. saw that my “offline” friends include someone who died in August. Yep, she’s offline all right.

i remember after AOL bought time-warner I sat in a meeting where one of the AOL guys was bragging about how many billions of IM messages were passing through AOL servers every hour. It was kind of insane seeming at the time. Today’s useless stat du jour would reference however many hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, every hour, every lifetime.

holy crap just as i typed that an e-mail from the woman i was grousing about yesterday arrived. one again i thought she had given up on me even as a friend. she was writing to say she got rejected by a poetry magazine that i read. this after i had said it would be cool to see her name in that particular magazine. the email was 3.4k but when i saw that i thought it said it was 34k, which would have been more typical of her voluminousness. i just do not know who this person is. Every interaction opens a new frontier of “But I thought you were…”

now she promises to make good on last month’s intention to send something to my 181.

…speaking of the 181 i got a letter there today from a friend who texted yesterday to say he had sent something to my “81”. i texted back “i hope you meant 181”. he responded that when the letter was returned to him he would hand it to me in person.

my first thought was that the postal folks at the 181 know me well enough that they might recognize the error. they know me by name and by my 181 number. they like seeing me because i am nice to them, while most customers approach the workers there like they are dogs.

I was right. someone at the 181 saw the misaddressed letter and corrected it, delivering the item not to 81 but to my 181. that was pretty cool. having friends in the bowels of rockefeller center makes me never want to leave new york, as I’ve been contemplating doing the last 48 hours and 2 years.

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