This Existence
Friday. Met at what is now becoming the usual place in San Francisco last night, had a Guinness or two, a shot or two, then a Guinness or two at whatever it was Irish bar we migrated to after. Home before nine where I piddled around doing whatever it is that I did before getting to bed (at a decent hour) up today feeling as if I'd been drinking all night without any sleep. A nice lunch with some of the old crew in downtown Oakland, Ms. A buying be lunch to celebrate my birthday last month, home again to take a nap to balance the nap I'd taken this morning. I don't think I want to repeat this experience for a while. Perhaps a long while as I don't want to admit I've been this stupid.
You didn't go that far off the farm? You really serious?
At this advanced geriatric age of sixty-five I'm thinking I'm no longer in any condition to keep up with these “kids” in their fifties. Got to set a good example for myself if no one else. He said.
I was talked with one of the managers in his office at the company after lunch when he got a call informing him that a friend had been taken to Stanford hospital and was in a breathing machine waiting on a lung transplant. A lung transplant. Did he smoke? Not a lot? A list of others at the company followed, most of them managers whom I knew, but not well, many younger than I who'd recently either cashed in their chips or learned after a doctor's visit that not all was as well with them as they'd been hoping. Where have I heard that before? Suffering from a hangover while listening I was wondering what any of their relationships might have been to say sake and/or Irish bars? Or if they kept an online journal where they bitched nonsense day in and day out? Complicated, this existence.
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