Bruce’sOnline Journal |
| “I write because I don’t know what I think, until I read what I say.” — Flannery O'Connor |
Week of March 5, 2001
March 6
Try as they might, the weather forecasters aren’t able to keep Rochesterians home in the snow. All weekend they were screaming like Chicken Little and life went on. Yeah we had the largest snowfall of the year overnight from Sunday to Monday. We got six to eight inches atop an equal amount. Big whoop.
We got a couple more inches overnight last night. The most notable thing on the news this morning was that the newscasters actually had to read, off paper, the few closings and cancellations they had. It seems the computer, which would ordinarily put the list up on-screen, was down. And that had the newscasters all screaming Chicken Little again. After all, if they have a disaster (?) certainly the sky must be falling!
The only other issue I saw anyone having, was a twin-screw Kenworth in the grocery store parking lot. It had stopped, pointing uphill on a very slight incline. We’re talking slight enough that old people can push their loaded shopping carts up it. But it was covered in ice. He just sat there and spun. I watched for the ten minutes or so I spent waiting for the bus.
Downtown was it’s usual mess since there’s really no place to put the snow. The little sidewalk plows were pushing it into the street. The street plows were pushing it up on the sidewalk. It was like a job security program or something. Of course, the city workers, besides being government employees, are also unionized…
Even if you just paid attention to one half of the contest, it was inefficiency on a scale only a government can provide. In the five minutes I waited for my transfer downtown, a city pick-up plowed the curb lane (on to the sidewalk.) Next a dump truck with a plow and salt spreader came down the left lane, pushing all that snow into the freshly plowed curb lane and dumping salt into the left lane.
Next in the parade were two garbage packers with plows. One in the left lane, the second in the curb lane, just the way it’s supposed to be. Except, the first one was pushing the freshly spread salt to the next, which put the salt with all the snow, up on the sidewalk. Then another sidewalk plow came along…
The buses were all right on time and everything else was running, nice as you please. No big deal.
A friend turned me on to an author I’ve never read, Thomas Lynch. He has three books of poetry out and this is his second collection of essays. It’s titled Bodies in Motion and at Rest. I recommend it highly. And for a most unusual reason.
Psychoses aside, everyone’s heard of a writer’s “voice.” It’s the trademark way someone writes. It includes their use of language, phrasing, pacing and so on. Most people I know who write (at least those who are willing to admit to this) hear their words in their head. So do I. But I’ve never before read anything by another writer where I hear the words spoken in my head in my own “writers voice.”
His style of writing is so much like my own, it triggered the voice that’s usually in my head only when I’m writing. It was a very strange feeling. Lynch writes in the exact way I’ve envisioned I’d be writing in ten years or so. Of course now, it’ll seem like I’m imitating him. Then again there are those unexplained hits from Michigan…
There’s one passage from pages 104 to 107 that the friend who lent me the book dog-eared to bring it to my attention. He said it sounds too much like me. When I got to that part, I had to agree. I’ve thought those same things, made those same rants and put them in the same way. Of course most of mine’s been spoken and what little I’ve actually written is in snippets here and there. So if I ever write on the topic, I’ll have to find some other way of doing it.
Still, it gives me hope that someday I’ll put together 300 pages and dupe some publisher into thinking they’ll make a profit on it at $23.95. Of course the only copies that actually sell will be to the 21 people on my notify list.
In recreational reading, I still enjoy my mystery novels. The one I started today is the most recent by John Sandford, The Devil’s Code. It’s the third in the series of Kidd novels and I’m loving every page. And I see that by some sort of osmosis, I’ve picked up a bit of Sandford’s style.
I’ve read most Sandford’s Prey series three and four times over, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I think it’s because the Lynch book had primed me for it that certain lines in The Devil’s Code leapt off the page at me. The first page and a half of chapter three for instance. Change a detail or two and the character could be me, what the character’s doing is what I do, he’s thinking the same thoughts to himself as I do and Sandford’s phrased it the way I phrase it. Or rather, I guess I phrase things like he does.
I’ve never consciously tried to emulate anyone and I suppose I could have done worse. It’s just so strange that two books in row give me that feeling.
I knew something was different when I woke up this morning. Something else had broken. Not broken as in fragmented, ruptured, torn or fractured, (credit my Webster’s Unabridged) but more like the way a wave breaks on the beach. It’s so hard to put my finger on it for myself, let alone having to explain it.
I’m thinking that maybe it began yesterday when I discovered that instead of storing stress in my upper back as I have for years; I’m now storing it in my feet. It was as if I was making fists with my feet. I finished up what I was working on and decided to put it away for a few days. Then I went to bed where I discovered the there are certain advantages to storing stress in my feet. For instance, I can give myself a foot massage. Sure it would be nice to have someone else do it, but I can do it in a pinch. And it’s something I can’t do with stress stored in my upper back.
Come this morning, I felt both tired and refreshed if you can imagine that. Everything seemed so smooth, easy and fluid, yet spending the rest of the morning in the sack held a certain attraction. Instead, I spent an extra couple of minutes in the shower, with it set just a notch below poach, simply because of how it made my mind feel. Meanwhile my skin was turning red preparing to blister so I had to cut it a bit shorter than I really wanted to.
But that feeling stayed with me all day. It’s that same sort of low-key happy that I first felt back in October and November. I’m finding myself with a smile on my face for no particular reason again. That put me in a minority of one at group today. Even the counselor was bitchy.
None of it got to me and on the bus coming home I sat enjoying the view of the gray skies, the cruddy, slushy streets and pedestrians wearing so much clothing they’re unidentifiable even by age, race or gender.
And going through downtown it seemed that by the time they quit for lunch, the city’s two plowing forces had reached an uneasy truce. They’d erected a wall of snow and slush waist-high along the curb.
March 7
Chocolate.
The craving hit last night with all the intensity of a pair of rams in rut.
Must have chocolate.
And of course I knew I owned none. The decision had to made. Do I, at 10:30 at night, all comfy warm in sweatpants and my bathrobe, put on umpteen layers of clothing to trudge out to the store?
No. The craving would have to wait.
Foraging downstairs in the kitchen, the choices seemed to be lasagna or tunafish. Neither bears even a passing resemblance to chocolate. Then, in the canister set, I spied (with my little eye) hot cocoa packets!
They turned out to be far less satisfying than I’d hoped. They were all decorator hot chocolate packets. Cinnamon cocoa, coffee cocoa, French vanilla cocoa. French vanilla cocoa? Gimme plain cocoa-flavored cocoa! (It’s hard for me to type that without making what’s no doubt a Freudian slip and typing coca instead.)
Is it just me? Am I the last person in the world who likes his flavors pure and unadulterated? I like chocolate-flavored cocoa. I like wheat-flavored bread. I like coffee-flavored coffee.
Coffee-flavored coffee. There’s one for ya. You can hardly even get it at Starbucks or even a greasy spoon any more. It’s all hazelnut this, French vanilla that and mint. If I wanted mint in my coffee I’d lace it with Listerine for chrissakes! And get a buzz on it to boot! Would you like your coffee with blue mint or green mint? Tartar control or regular?
What ever happened to plain muffins? All you can find has half the fucking produce section in it. Apple-cinnamon-papaya, blueberry-cantaloupe-mango, raisin-kiwi-pear, banana-strawberry-fig. What about plain old muffin flavored muffins? Is this too much to ask?
You should see the trouble I have a bagel shop.
“What kind of bagel would you like?”
“Plain, please.”
The look says, “Oh, one of those” like I’m part of the great unwashed.
“And what flavor cream cheese would you like on your plain bagel?”
“Cream cheese.”
“Yes sir,” sigh, “cream cheese. What flavor of cream cheese would you like?” He thought I repeated cream cheese back to him!
“Plain old cream-cheese flavored cream-cheese, please.”
“So you want pul-laaaain cream cheese on your pul-laaaain bagel?”
All the customers stop, stare and slowly back away, as if I’ve ordered pigeon guano on my dog vomit bagel.
Have I ever told the story about the water at The Mirage? No?
A few years back, Mark and I decided to have dinner in one of the fancier restaurants at The Mirage in Las Vegas. It was one of those tag-team waiter places where we even had a water waiter.
After we’d been seated the water waiter came over to take our order. “What kind of water would you like, sir?” he asked.
I’m sure my face said, “Duh?” Fortunately mouth got out, “Oh, what waters to you have?”
He proceeded to rattle off about thirty. It was a truly impressive list of what are no doubt the finest examples of H2O on God’s green earth. What did I settle on, you ask?
“Hmmm. I’ll have the Lake Mead.”
“The Lake Mead, sir?” Tap water was not on his list.
“Yeah, I’m not nearly pretentious enough to drink bottled water. If the Colorado River is good enough for them to use making Coors beer, it’s good enough for me to have straight-up.”
A smile spread across his face. Here was a working-class, beer drinking, water waiter! But he had to keep up the front at work.
“Of course. The Lake Mead it is, sir. And such a fine choice it is too. Did you know we use the Lake Mead to make our ice?” he asked with a smirk.
“No,” I cried in mock astonishment. To Mark, “Wasn’t I just saying how incredible the ice was with my scotch?” To the waiter, “Back home I usually have the Lake Ontario with my scotch, but the Lake Mead was truly special.”
The exchange with the water waiter earned us the respect of the entire wait staff. The service was exemplary that night and it was all with that sort of nudge, nudge, wink, wink kind of snappy repartee. I can’t remember what we had for our meal that night, but I remember they “forgot” to charge us for our dessert.
And the water! Lake Mead over Lake Mead ice. It was heaven, and I’ll remember that glass of water 'til the day I die.
So. Which cocoa did I have last night? I found two lunch bag brown packets of plain with mini marshmallows. Goddamned things. Whose idea was this to put floating pencil erasers in cocoa anyway?
March 11
I made a discovery yesterday that I’m sure everyone already knows, but about which, I’ve had no clue. While one part of me says, well duh! another part says, yeah but you have to face your issues in your own way and in your own time. Both parts have a point.
In any event, the profound revelation I had was this: “If a 300lb gorilla blocks your path, he won’t go away if you feed him.”
Duh! You can’t win if you wrestle with a 300lb gorilla, and they move surprisingly fast if you try to walk around them. The only remaining choice is for him to go away of his own accord. And he won’t do that if you keep feeding him.
I’ve been alternately wrestling with and feeding four 300lb gorillas, all silverback males, over half a ton of gorilla, for two months now. They’ve sat in my path blocking my progress and comfortably munching on everything I’ve fed them. Ever so slowly for the past week or ten days, I’ve closed the cafeteria. The gorillas are beginning to move on freeing me to do the same.
The first 300lb gorilla is, of course, my feelings for You Know Who (YKW).
I saw him on Wednesday, from the window of the bus. I was heading downtown on my way to class and he was walking in the other direction on Park Ave near the oxbow.
He was dressed entirely in black, boots, jeans, shirt, leather jacket, glasses, and hat, worn backwards as always. Even his backpack was black. I’m not sure, but I think he had a set of walkman headphones on. I was glad to see he hasn’t cut his hair. It was tied back in a ponytail and held in check with rubber bands spaced every couple of inches down it’s length. He looked good. But he didn’t seem happy.
How do I know all that when I saw him for only a fleeting moment through dirty windows from the wrong side of the bus as it roared by him in the opposite direction? It’s that infernal psychic connection again. I was sitting on the sunny side of the bus re-reading the drafts that had been passed around at last week’s class, thinking deeply and making notes in the margins. I had no reason to look up and across the bus to the windows on the other side.
Then came the ping on my radar. It hit at it’s usual 100 yards out. It felt both familiar and unrecognized. It took me a bit to process, and of course, because the bus was moving, so was the ping. I looked up just in time to see his image move from the window in front of the rear doors, through the windows in them and on through the windows in back.
He had just stepped from the sidewalk across a snow bank and was standing in Vick Park B, checking traffic before crossing the street. His head swept from left to right as the bus and I passed on his right. I don’t know if he felt my presence on the bus. I know that the only reason I looked up, mid-sentence, was because I felt his.
It was only because my left hand was full of manuscripts that I had time enough to think before it shot up and pulled the cord to signal a stop. No, Bruce. Keep going to Writers & Books. Your class is more important. Still, my heart continued to flutter and my thoughts kept turning back for the rest of the afternoon.
YKW called me on a Sunday afternoon a bit more than a month ago. He had just moved into his new apartment and he wanted to give me his new phone number and address. That was the weekend from computer hell and I was entirely preoccupied with trying to restore Mark’s PC and business records after I’d completely trashed them. So YKW got only the merest sliver of my consciousness as we talked. Or rather, as he talked and I pondered my predicament.
Since then, it’s bothered me that he may have gotten the wrong impression. That I was distant to him because that’s how I felt rather than because I was distant to everyone and everything that afternoon. Being in a panic does that to me.
It’s one of the symptoms of one of my diagnoses that I feel like anyone’s feelings towards me remain the same as whatever they were the last time we spoke or saw each other. It applies as much to YKW as it does for anyone else. I somehow forget that that others’ feelings towards me change, just as mine do towards them. And leaving them on a less than perfect note does not permanently change their view of me.
That and my codependency with YKW have kept him not far from the forefront of my mind for the past several weeks. I’ve been feeding the 300lb gorilla. Part of the fodder has been that as we left it, he was going to call me so we could get together to talk as soon as his schedule opened up.
I thought at the time that I was demonstrating to him that I was letting him set the tone and pace of our reconciliation. He hasn’t called and I’ve felt it was because of the way I left things during our phone call. He hates me, he hates me has been rolling around in me head. I haven’t called him because I wanted him to know I can keep my word and that I wasn’t pushing him and trying to wheedle my way back into that horribly enmeshed relationship we once had.
All of that, of course, is also part of my addiction speaking. It’s all about me, Me, ME! I never gave it a thought that he may, in fact, have a life of his own to live. It’s something I’ve paid only lip service to ever since we met. Because on I deeper level I’ve felt that somehow, his life couldn’t be fulfilled without me in it somehow.
Codependency is really what’s all about me. And it’s no fun at all.
The Universe intervened Wednesday night when, twice, I phoned him. Each time his girlfriend answered, telling me he wasn’t there. She was playing the role of guard dog, probably because of her feelings towards me, very angry and resentful, and because of the threat I represent to her relationship with him. Whether he was there or he wasn’t doesn’t matter, because it made me think.
What right do I have to upset his applecart? Suppose he’s happy. Or, suppose he’s not but he’s soldiering on anyway. Either way, my stepping in, if only to say hello, can cause that whole situation to become difficult for him. I love him too much to do that to him. And that made me think again of the commitment I made to him:
When you love someone, sometimes you have to set them free.
I do still love him. I love him enough that I won’t risk making his life more difficult by my presence in it. When the time is right for both of us, if that ever happens, the Universe will intervene again and make our paths cross.
I’m slowly coming to terms with my transition from rehab to the real world. It’s the second 300lb gorilla in my path since early in January. I’ve felt uneasy about returning to computer support for a living. The reason I’ve voiced is that I make too much money at it and that money could trigger a relapse.
What I don’t think I’ve shared is that the real reason I’m afraid of it is because of the way I take on every work issue as a personal one and can’t let go of them. That anxiety is what drives me to the brink of insanity and also what drives my return to use.
Actually, the money would be kind of nice. I have a ton of unpaid bills hanging around. After that, I think I can handle the money sanely and without running out to the nearest crackhouse. Those are two distinctly different issues, by the way. In the past I’ve handled money foolishly even when I wasn’t in active use.
My second choice, web design, is also frightening. I don’t have a lot of confidence in my skills I’m not sure if I can handle both the demands of meeting someone else’s changing vision and my own complete immersion in coding when I get into a project. Further, it can be solitary work done from the comfort of home. I need more social interaction so I can maintain and even advance the gains I’ve made against the Social Phobia.
“Project A” that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago has been my pilot testing of all that. It’s a non-profit charitable organization that I’m not exactly in lock step with philosophically, ethically and morally. The volunteer who got the site up and running had become pinched for time, and a friend, who is a bigwig in the outfit, asked me if I could revamp the site for them. I said yes.
(Sorry, I can’t share the URL or the name of the non-profit without outing my friend. They don’t permit homosexuals in management positions. He’s in management and therefore closeted at work. And who knows what they’d do if they found out their new Webmaster is a mentally ill gay alcoholic crackhead, albeit one in recovery.)
It’s a small site both in size and in traffic. It was less than 20 pages and averages less than a half-dozen visits daily. Significantly less. Both the code and the design had “volunteer amateur” written all over them. Still, the guy had taken them from having no website to having a pretty decent one.
That first week when I took the reins was that week I spent six days doing a two-day job because I did it three times over. Although one of the goals is a redesign, they asked me not to change the current design until after the next board meeting at the end of March.
Those six days I spent working on the site retained, for the most part, the original look and feel. There were a couple of aesthetic changes for the sake of readability, fonts and font sizes, I simply couldn’t keep myself from making, and I was prepared to undo them, but they were well received and have stayed.
Most important have been the changes to the back-end that visitors will never see. The visual and navigation elements were all hard-coded on every page. That made maintenance, adding new stuff and deleting old stuff, a real chore.
Now the page “headers” and “footers” and the navigation are completely modularized, as is the “look”, except for some background colors. Those parts now snap into the basic framework of the pages along with the content.
So although the visual design of the site remains nearly unchanged, at least the code now says at least “volunteer advanced-amateur” and perhaps even “volunteer semi-pro”. Server-Side Includes and linked Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are my friends.
I was concerned about my ability to maintain balance between work, recovery, socialization, writing and “me time”. After that first week, I was frightened by my lust for complete and total immersion in work. But I began to see it for what it was; an escape from the rest of my life and a vain attempt at self-validation. And of course work can’t, nor should it be, either one.
Since then, I’m learning how to balance those things. I’ve found that if I stay out of that part of my PC I can’t become immersed in that work. (NT is wonderful for that. I set up a separate user account (login) for the work on that web site. I can’t work on it unless I log out of my usual user account and log in on that one. And, none of the files get mixed up with my own.) I’m also slowly learning how to not feel guilty about learning how to resist logging-in to that account.
Even so, I’ve managed to come up with four new design proposals in addition to the first one I showed them in January. All the proposals are hacked together mock-ups of a few pages in each style, just enough to get the idea across. I hadn’t really thought much about the back-end code. Events Friday night and yesterday morning conspired to make me examine the way I’m going to do it once the board or the committee chooses a design.
Friday night I got into a discussion with an RIT student. He was saying how he’d read something in a book about XHTML. I’d never heard of such a thing and said it must have been written by someone who didn’t know what they were talking about and threw an extra HT into XML.
Then, on Saturday morning I was messing around with the newest design concept I had. I always look at new stuff in several different browsers and that’s what I was doing.
Last week I downloaded the newest version of Opera. I test with Opera because it’s strictly standards compliant. If the code carrying out designer’s intent is ambiguous, IE and Netscape will guess at the intent. Usually they guess differently and sometimes they guess wrong. Opera, on the other hand, won’t guess. It renders ambiguous code exactly as it’s written, even if the way it’s written is wrong. It’s great for error checking.
So besides error checking the page, I was messing around with the new Opera. I was looking at all the new stuff on the browser window’s right-click menu when I spotted “Validate HTML”. Hmmm. I wonder what that does?
With two mouse clicks, one right and one left, it sends the page you’re currently viewing to the W3C HTML Validation Service. The W3C is the global standards committee that writes the technical standards and rules that make the web work. And the report that came back on that page was enlightening and encouraging.
The first time through it wouldn’t analyze the page at all because I hadn’t declared a DOCTYPE and specified which standard I wanted used in the validation. I added the line and sent the page out again. The report came back with scads of individual errors, but they amounted to just four types of errors that were repeated in the page.
First, I always thought the ALT attribute in specifying an image was optional. It’s the thing that specifies the text that pops up when you hover the mouse pointer over a graphic. It’s required for the level of validation I chose. That was an easy fix.
Next, it found a </font> tag that was after a </p> tag, not before. That’s a genuine error. FrontPage sticks </font> tags in if I’ve forgotten to shut off a font at the end of a paragraph, which I must have done. FP just sticks them in after the ending paragraph tag instead of before. I usually spot them, but I missed this one. Still, it’s not a serious error because every browser I test with (all SIX of them) rendered the page according to my intent. Again, it was an easy fix.
Third, the page was a quickly hacked together mock-up and I used the old way of specifying a background graphic in a table cell. The browsers all handled it fine. That method, while standards compliant in the past, is just not according to Hoyle any more. I defined a new class in the linked CSS file to solve that one.
Fourth, there were a multitude of validation errors in the JavaScript supplied by HitTracker.net, even though the script works just fine. Still, I didn’t write that code and I never examined it. Instead, I obeyed the warning, “Do not alter this code!” Newly disobedient in the face of validation, I fixed all the errors but two. I don’t have the skills (yet) to fix the remaining two.
So, except for those two errors that I didn’t personally make and that I can’t fix (yet), the page that I’d thrown together the night before, half-asleep in a fatigued stupor, validates to HTML 4.01 Transitional. Cool.
The validation doesn’t prove anything beyond the fact that the HTML code is technically correct. In that way it’s not unlike a spell-check. You can write miserable, yet perfectly spelled, sentences, just as you can write miserable, although technically correct, HTML code.
Still, I’ve decided to use the W3C Validation Service on all the pages for that site. (I shudder to think about the reports these pages would generate were I to validate them.)
What I have to decide is, do I want to validate to “HTML 4.01 Transitional”, or do I want to validate to “HTML 4.01 Strict” and risk alienating visitors with older browsers?
Of course, where all this was leading, XHTML, turns out is for real and is a newer, higher standard.
I also learned to never argue technology with an RIT student.
And I feel validated in my work. 
Every day I come closer and closer to being able to make that balance between work, recovery, socialization, writing and “me time”. And that’s something I haven’t given myself the credit for. I’ve never been able to do that, and simply learning what the tools could be to achieve balance doesn’t mean I should know how to do it right away. I forgot to give myself the time to learn.
Learning, of course, implies making mistakes along the way. I still make them and I haven’t found the balance yet. When I get there, it’ll be the first time in my life. So I have to expect that I’ll lose it a few times before I learn how to maintain it. The second 300lb gorilla is preparing to wander off.
And I may not have to resort to taking a job where I have to wear a paper hat and ask, “You want fries with that?”
The last two 300lb gorillas are closely intertwined, but still separate.
One 300lb gorilla is my fear. Despite anything I wrote in November and December, I’m still very afraid of looking inward very deeply. I’m afraid the whole thing will backfire and send me reeling out of control back into the abyss I’ve only just slithered from. Yet I’m hoping I haven’t ruined my opportunities with my AA sponsor because of all this fence-sitting.
The other 300lb gorilla is my depression and mental health. I haven’t felt as far up, or even up at all, with the consistency I did before the holidays. While I never felt as far down as what I used to consider normal, it’s concerned me nonetheless. Ridding my path of the first two 300lb gorillas is helping in that regard, but so are the longer days.
I can see why it’s so hard to make a definitive diagnosis of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). I had three major issues bothering me at the same time SAD would have been reaching its peak. Now, when the SAD would be waning anyway, I’m coming to terms with those issues. You can’t call it either way.
I was in relapse with my codependency during the whole period. The same feelings of loss and grief I’ve had whenever YKW isn’t around all came back and I chose to wallow in them rather than deal with them.
I was also in relapse with that whole mess of stuff I attach to work. At least there, I knew what I was in for from the start. When I agreed to do the project I told my friend that part of why I’m doing it is as a way to work through my work issues so that, maybe, I’ll have them straightened out by the time I get a real, paying job.
Throw in the step four fears of being afraid of where facing those issues may take me. Then top it off with not feeling very well or strong between the ears and I guess I can justify feeling out of sorts.
With these four gorillas each stepping aside a bit, I feel I can resume my journey down the path to becoming well. And it feels good.
Yesterday was a day filled with AA. A bunch of them are organizing a “roundup”, whatever that is. If it turns out to be anything more than a giant all-day meeting, I’ll let you know. It takes seed money to that sort of thing and yesterday was a fundraiser for it. They held a euchre tournament at the VFW hall just a couple of doors down from where YKW lives.
A VFW hall is hardly the place you’d expect to find a euchre tournament for fags and dykes. Particularly not sober ones because of the bar. I don’t know if it was that they needed the money from our renting the hall, or if it was simply a case of, “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” But they put up with us, and we put up with them. And to my knowledge, no one from our group partook of the bar.
I haven’t played euchre in years and I haven’t played cards of any sort since I stopped drinking and drugging. And the only other euchre tournament I played in left me with an intense dislike of them. I play cards for fun, not for blood or money.
I went along anyway despite my preconceived notion that veterans dislike fags and dykes, despite the fact that there’s a bar on the premises and despite my fear that fiercely competitive types would become angry with me were I to make a mistake in play.
The veterans stayed out front at the bar and I stayed in the back away from the bar, except to have a smoke somewhere around the halfway mark in the tournament. It was really strange to be standing at a bar smoking, but not drinking, It’s the first I’ve been in a bar since last April and it’s only the third time I’ve smoked indoors since I moved at the end of September. Using an ashtray felt foreign. That particular bar smell of spilled beer and nicotine that once felt comforting actually was repulsive yesterday. It almost, but didn’t quite, trigger the gag reflex. Interesting.
I also made mistakes in play that cost us points and games and no one got angry with me, although I’m not sure if that would have been true if I hadn’t had a different partner in each game. In one game I accidentally reneged costing us the hand and two points, and I got us euchred in one of the other early games.
In the sixth and final game, my fatigue was showing and I got us euchred once and I failed to recognize a loaner (both bowers and an ace, with two off aces) when I made trump. Although I cost us six points, and my partner in that game couldn’t quite hide his disappointment, he never became angry. In fact, there weren’t any sore losers anywhere in the room all afternoon and no one seemed to be hyper-competitive.
It was fun.
There were lovely prizes for those who finished in the top half. I made it into the top half, barely. I came home with a free ticket to the next fundraiser, a spaghetti dinner, also to be held at the VFW hall.
I could go on and on about how yesterday afternoon, the Friday night meeting and last night’s helped me get past the 300lb gorillas, but I’ll spare you all the gory details. The result is that, notch by notch, my inner happiness has returned this week.
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