Current location:	The Homestead
Current mood:	lethargic
Current music:	CBS Evening News on the TV

Can We Say "Hammered Dogshit"? Yowza . . .
Yikes. After taking yesterday off and whooping it up to show The Man who's the man and so on it was a grim day today in Longly land. Things started off well enough: ate fun snacks, played some John Madden football, and then started watching (again) Hustle & Flow. I was up to the point where D Jay is starting to punk Skinny Black when Mel(ody) called to say that she and one of her adjunct teaching buddies Jim were coming by the house to pick me up so we could go eat. Or drink. Or eat and drink. Or drink and eat. Whatever. You know what I mean. I was already into Busch beer #5 at that point so I was easy.

As we were driving along listening to The Louvin Brothers' immortal classic "Satan is Real" we found ourselves at a local bar/dive/shithole that used to be a regular hangout of Jim's although neither Mel(ody) nor I had ever been there before. I mean, it was bad. I used to hang out at a place on north Burnet in Austin called the Poodle Dog Lounge--it was in one half of a cinderblock building with a muffler/transmission shop in the other half and their side was painted pink with giant blue poodle dawgs painted on it--and I mean that place was a dive but it looked like a hangout for the rich and famous compared to this place. I mean, I haven't been in a place this rugged since Dwayne and I used to drive up to Mingus--just north of I-20--to the City Limits where it was a bunch of dirt farmers sitting around a bar drinking Natural Light. Natural Light! My god, drink that shit all you want at home but, please, people (peeples!), hide your shame in public.

Jim used to be a regular in this place although he hadn't been in there for almost a year. It was like the return of the conquering hero. People were buying us beers, buying us shots, and whooping and hollering and talking drunk talk that was always on the verge of leading to fisticuffs. I drank mucho beer and mucho shots of Jim Beam plus peanuts and Andy Capp's hot fries out of the vending machine. It was all very surreal and got increasingly more so as the afternoon/evening progressed. Toward the end I thought that there were probably several likely candidates to be breaking their fists on my face I would have to deal with before making it out the door. Thank Gawd that after 2-3 hours the bartender, a skinny blindingly bleached blonde 59-year-old grandmother called Dee Darlin', cut us off so that by 7:15 we were on our way home after kicking Jim out at his house. I mean, I felt baaaaaad today but if we had kept drinking for another hour or two there's no way I could have done into work today. Once upon a time I would have thought this was the greatest place ever. Now I'm just glad that there is no compelling reason that I ever have to darken its door again.

Anyway, Mel(ody) couldn't use her C-pap machine because her nose was stopped up from all the cigarette smoke so she was snoring all night and that left me sleeping on the couch, every time I woke up thinking/hoping that I might feel better if only I could sleep for another hour. But, there's this stray cat that's beating up our cats--even running through the pet door to fight in the den--so at night we get the cats in and then lock the door so they can get out but not back in. Then, in the morning we unlock it so they can get in. But, last night, every half hour there would be a cat tap tap tapping on the outside of the pet door trying to get it open. So I would get up and hold the door open but of course that would freak them out and they would run away. So I'd have to sit and watch TV for five minutes so they could get in and then I could lock the pet door again and resume the crash position on my couch of pain. Even under the best of circumstances it would have been a long night . . . and these circumstances weren't even close.    

So, I had to go slow at work today. Day 2 of nanowrimo has come and gone with no writing from me at all just yet. I did get a lot of work done at work, mainly because I was so tired that I could just ease along at my own pace. I'm glad Friday night can come tomorrow with me taking it easy all the way into Saturday morning.

That's what I'm saying now. But, perhaps, just maybe, there is yet another dive in this stinkhole town I can seriously damage my liver in tribute to. After all, as Dr. Johnson said, "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."