“Drinking is fun! It makes me feel horrible and sexy!”
~ Warren Ellis
So, last night P and I took our usual preprandial walk, only this time down to Wegman's to pick up a prescription and a couple other sundries. We love being able to walk to the grocery store, and down Market Street with all its cool shops and restaurants. And last evening was particularly fine, 57 degrees and sunny after a gloomy day of rain.
I looked at my watch as we left the grocery store and noted it was already past 6:30. "Let's just grab supper on Market Street," I suggested. P, not excited about cooking after a long day in the operating room, concurred.
But, alas, the grand post-pandemic reopening crushed our plan. Every place we considered dining had a line and a wait list. Both of us have decided we've reached a point in life when we won't stand in line for anything, and gave up after the third restaurant was completely booked. I groused about the whole situation as we walked back across Denison Parkway with our grocery bags.
"What about the Elks Lodge?" P asked. I had thought that an email I received earlier in the day announced the kitchen was closed, but when P called on her cell phone the cheery voice on the other end gave us hope. "Nope. We're open. Taco Tuesday!"
Now traveling with hope, we walked up First Street to the Lodge, where it turned into old home week with our new neighbors. Steve, who grew up within two blocks of the place, was there with his buddy Tom, a heavily tattooed chef who'd recently moved back to town. In keeping with the custom of this Lodge, two members were handling food service, and on this evening it was our friends Kim and Dale. Their daughter just took a job as a curator at the Rockwell, and she stopped by the bar so Peg could talk her up about perhaps giving up an insider's guided tour of the Corning Museum of Glass, where she worked during her high school years.
The tacos were forgettable, but the Jameson's kept flowing and soon your correspondent turned back into the funny, fighter pilot raconteur who used to occupy this tired old frame. We pretty much learned the whole life story of our bartender, Jesse from Addison, now an elementary school teacher and also an Elk, doing her volunteer bartender gig that night.
Eventually, but not soon enough, Peg shooed Donk the Terror of the Skies Over Iraq out of the lodge and back up the hill to the Solarium apartment. I slept the sleep of the dead, then awoke burdened with the consequences of this excessive jocularity. I made Peg some coffee, fixed her breakfast, snapped the photo above from the solarium window . . . and fell back asleep while reading the paper on my tablet.
Maybe it was a coping mechanism for all the abject stupidity filling the morning news.
Paying $50 as reparations to attend a Pride event if you're white? YGBSM.
And apparently there's a new term for the various sexualities that seem to be accumulating right here in our midst: LGBTIA2S+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, asexual two spirit+). Don't ask me to explain that one, because I have no clue. In any event, I'm not paying fifty bucks to participate in their parade.
Meanwhile in Israel, someone is pushing to disinter a dead lady and move her to another graveyard because she was only pretending to be Jewish, and in fact was a Christian.
And in Tampa, some poor guy has two very sore testicles when it should've only been one:
It all makes me want to go back to bed, but there's yet another deposition on the calendar in a few minutes, and the alimony payment comes due in a few days whether I'm feeling puny or not. Lesson learned. As if I hadn't learned that one a few times already. Tonight will be a health night.
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