Work sucks, everything sucks. The kids seem to hate me lately, the job's turned into a gigantic pain in the ass, and the car's on the fritz to the tune of eight-fifty plus tax.
I need to figure out how to pay $3,700 worth of bills due by Monday with the $3,200 I'll have to work with. And the taxman lurks around the corner, looking for his $1,500. Man, it pisses me off that motherfucking GE's gonna get a zillion-dollar refund to add to their eleventy-billion in yearly profits while I'm gonna havta scratch my ass and figure out which Peter can rob which Paul to give 'em their yard and a half next month, but that's 'murrika. We're number one, after all, and we didn't get there with progressive taxation, now did we? Always somebody gettin' over on the top of someone else, since the days when George Washington was telling lies about just who chopped down that old cherry tree.
It's enough to drive a man to drink, I'm telling ya, and that's just what I did tonight.
The weather sucks, too.
As a lifelong upstate New Yorker I do like me some winter, but this is getting ridiculous. Just went outside for a smoke, and it's like the middle of January out there. The middle of March is supposed to be a little better than this. Shouldn't have to switch hands in the middle of a smoke at this point. Should be able to do get the whole thing in left-handed, the way I like.
&&&
Had a bottle of wine and some beers leftover from the last time, which was a little less time ago than I'd like to admit, but anyway, I got involved. And now it's pushing one in the morning, my ride will be here in seven hours, and I'm wide awake and buzzed. Last night I didn't have a drop and what did I get but a night of tossing and turning, listening to the freezing rain and then the snow pelting the windows, dying a little with each anxious breath, exhaling loudly enough that at one point Sheila woke up and asked, you alright, baby? What's going on?
I lied and said I was fine, and she got back to snoring in a minute or two.
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I used to remember every last anniversary, and I'd commemorate them in my way.
But I just realized I let one pass, a good week ago.
The first night I met her.
I think it was March 6th, 1992, but I'm not sure anymore. I'm almost positive it was the first Thursday in March of 1992, but would I wager on that now? I don't know.
Met her in a bar. Ralph's. The corner of New Scotland and Madison, in Albany, NY.
I may not remember the date, I may have failed to properly observe the anniversary, but I still remember it like yesterday.
"...Holly's not invincible, in fact she's in the hospital, not far from that bar where we met..."
I went against my will and I walked in and scanned the room, looking for a guy I knew from one of my classes, and there she was.
She looked up at me, and I looked at her.
This voice inside me said, run! Run! This is not going to work out for you!
The fact that I had that feeling about a complete stranger who I would one day marry and then one day watch die when she was but thirty-eight years old has often made me question my very own deeply held agnosticism. I knew. I knew, without fully realizing it, I knew, the very first second I saw her, what would happen. And thankfully the part of me that wanted to run lost out to the part of me that wanted to see the cards she held.
"...Holly's insatiable...she still looks incredible...but she don't look like that same girl we met...on that first night...she was golden with bar-light and beer..."
&&&
Sheila used to run a community garden, she's got the touch with that stuff. Now she counsels sexually abused children, and she's burnt.
I can't do this much longer, she says.
We need the money, I tell her, full of shame.
I miss the garden, she says. I miss my hands in the dirt. That felt better than this.
We barely make as it is, I tell her. You're gonna make up that money growing stuff?
I wanna farm, she says.
It seems crazy. I do alright but I don't make enough to fund a side-project of dilettante farming.
And this impulse shames me a bit, fills me with despair. Amazing, I think, how getting a little older and having some kids and moving on up to the middle class can turn a guy into a coward.
I take a long pull on an ice-cold bottle of beer. About a third of it left now.
I think about that first night, about myself more than twenty years ago, young and with little enough to lose to take a chance on anything, to take a chance something deep down inside of me told I'd lose.
There's not much time left; a few hours until I'm back at work. Time enough maybe for a couple more pulls on that beer, a smoke out in the cold, and a shower. Not much time, but maybe enough.
Enough maybe to get in touch with the kind of guts I used to have. Back when, back on a long-ago night.
Back on that first night.