Weekend Of Sin And Excess

I just dropped Maggie off at the airport. This will be the second weekend in a row that she’ll be away. Last weekend she was in Iowa , and this weekend she’ll be at the Contraceptive Technology conference in San Francisco. She has named the event appropriately on our shared Google Calendar—”M to San Francisco for Conference and Binge-drinking”.

In response, I have added my own calendar item—”Jeff’s weekend of sin and excess”—from Wednesday to Saturday, with some additional Sunday reminders—wash out stripper scent from clothes, return empty keg to liquor store, repair trashed house.
Obviously, I was kidding. There will be no keg. As I said in the most recent Bar Club¹ email:

I’ll admit, I haven’t been drinking a lot of beer lately. Is it just me, or has it been more of a liquor month? It has for me, anyhow. Today I took another step closer to possible personal doom; I purchased the ingredients for making my own sidecar—Cognac and Cointreau. Dangerous—Brandy was my alcoholic grandfather’s liquor of choice.

Sweet, sweet, danger.

I’m a fan of classic cocktails, and wish to discover more of them. Tough to do, too, unless you find the right type of bar. Not sure what they’re teaching in bartending school these days, but I have a feeling most of it centers on the subject of bottle caps, and recommended techniques for removing them.

I hope to make this weekend more eventful than last, where most of the time was spent figuring out how to live without a wife again. What do I do alone? Why does this dog keep whining? Do I need to feed her? Where do we keep the food? Oh, the realities of being institutionalized to marriage.

I did eventually get some good man-alone-time last weekend, though—most of my meals were eaten standing up, many hours were spent sitting in the same place staring at a computer screen blissfully, and several hours were spent watching movies made before 1980, with minimal emotional value. In previous episodes of “Without the wife: Man’s quest for survival and entertainment” I watched a couple of Dirty Harry movies, and Platoon, all of which I enjoyed thoroughly. Last weekend I watched the The French Connection², followed immediately by hours of bonus features. Glorious.

It’s good, though, this sort of thing.  Spend some time apart. Rediscover your independence. Watch some movies your spouse wouldn’t want to watch.  Just not for too long.  After all, life’s tough when you’re on the outside.