6/26/2006
Night in the ruts
How was my weekend?
Well, I walked Amanda downtown for the Art Gallery walk, and she was actually ready when I got to her house, though she insisted on stopping for a beer two blocks before the first gallery, so we were late, anyway. I liked the first exhibit and she wanted to move on.
I detested the second exhibit, where she lingered, and then she pointed out that I hadn’t ever taken her out to dinner and headed into a restaurant. It wasn’t devoted to a cuisine I didn’t care for, and it wasn’t too pricey, so I good humoredly acquiesced. She insisted on an appetizer, opting for fried, breaded mozzarella sticks, which she decided after one bite were too salty, requiring a pitcher of beer. She insisted that I order dinner, and I selected a smoked turkey/artichoke heart/ricotta mozzarella calzone. Before the waitress got that order to the kitchen, Amanda said she was bored and wanted to go sommeplace else. I reminded her that we’d just ordered dinner.
It was the methadone kicking in, I’m fairly certain, that made her forget that dinner was on the way three more times before I suggested that I have it wrapped and bring it to her house and that she precede me and walk the dog so that chore would be done before I got there.
Normally, I wouldn’t send a woman to walk home alone, but it was before dark and in good neighborhoods, and I was getting a little pissed about the whole whatever-the-hell-it-was that made her demand dinner, then reject the appetizer, then forget the dinner. With drinks and tip, I was looking at $48 here, for no good reason, and the gallery knoshing should have been the appetizer, anyway, so I let Amanda walk home by herself and I had another drink while waiting for the food.
It got there sooner than I’d expected, so I stopped at another bar on the way to her house, knowing how she’d dawdle walking the sonofabitch Rottweiler, Buddy Joe, and got there around 10. She was on the edge of unconsciousness by that time, so the rest of the night passed quietly.
I awoke at five Saturday, because I do, and stepped into her hallway to find a ghoulish abattoir. Amanda has a daughter who just graduated high school, there’s a thing you may have heard of called the “McClintock Effect,” named after one of John Wayne’s more violent Westerns, and the goddamn dog had eaten a bathroom trash can full of used sanitary pads and then yacked them up all over the hallway floor and to a wall height of just under three feet. I left it there.
Before leaving at noon, after she’d gotten up and I’d tried to fix some computer problems for her and we’d gone over the fact that she didn’t like turkey club sandwiches anyway and I’d given up on trying to tell her it was a calzone and not a club, and while I was devouring the whole damn thing myself, I was treated to a humorous anecdote.
You see, it’s a small world, and Loonville’s a small town in a small world, and I’ll be a ringtailed son of a bitch if Crazy Martha, Annie, Rhonda (last year … with bulldog) and Amanda don’t all go to the same therapist at Whackjob County Center for Mental Repair (multicounty government agency). Amanda’s anecdote comes from a few years ago, when she was trying to make her husband sicken and die by scrubbing his toilet with his toothbrush. She complained to Dr. Dingwad that this clever parlor trick wasn’t even making her husband sick. He (Dingwad) replied that her husband’s own waste residue would probably not kill him, and advised her to scrub someone else’s toilet with her husband’s toothbrush if she really wanted to kill him.
Let’s see, that takes us through noon, Saturday ...
Well, I walked Amanda downtown for the Art Gallery walk, and she was actually ready when I got to her house, though she insisted on stopping for a beer two blocks before the first gallery, so we were late, anyway. I liked the first exhibit and she wanted to move on.
I detested the second exhibit, where she lingered, and then she pointed out that I hadn’t ever taken her out to dinner and headed into a restaurant. It wasn’t devoted to a cuisine I didn’t care for, and it wasn’t too pricey, so I good humoredly acquiesced. She insisted on an appetizer, opting for fried, breaded mozzarella sticks, which she decided after one bite were too salty, requiring a pitcher of beer. She insisted that I order dinner, and I selected a smoked turkey/artichoke heart/ricotta mozzarella calzone. Before the waitress got that order to the kitchen, Amanda said she was bored and wanted to go sommeplace else. I reminded her that we’d just ordered dinner.
It was the methadone kicking in, I’m fairly certain, that made her forget that dinner was on the way three more times before I suggested that I have it wrapped and bring it to her house and that she precede me and walk the dog so that chore would be done before I got there.
Normally, I wouldn’t send a woman to walk home alone, but it was before dark and in good neighborhoods, and I was getting a little pissed about the whole whatever-the-hell-it-was that made her demand dinner, then reject the appetizer, then forget the dinner. With drinks and tip, I was looking at $48 here, for no good reason, and the gallery knoshing should have been the appetizer, anyway, so I let Amanda walk home by herself and I had another drink while waiting for the food.
It got there sooner than I’d expected, so I stopped at another bar on the way to her house, knowing how she’d dawdle walking the sonofabitch Rottweiler, Buddy Joe, and got there around 10. She was on the edge of unconsciousness by that time, so the rest of the night passed quietly.
I awoke at five Saturday, because I do, and stepped into her hallway to find a ghoulish abattoir. Amanda has a daughter who just graduated high school, there’s a thing you may have heard of called the “McClintock Effect,” named after one of John Wayne’s more violent Westerns, and the goddamn dog had eaten a bathroom trash can full of used sanitary pads and then yacked them up all over the hallway floor and to a wall height of just under three feet. I left it there.
Before leaving at noon, after she’d gotten up and I’d tried to fix some computer problems for her and we’d gone over the fact that she didn’t like turkey club sandwiches anyway and I’d given up on trying to tell her it was a calzone and not a club, and while I was devouring the whole damn thing myself, I was treated to a humorous anecdote.
You see, it’s a small world, and Loonville’s a small town in a small world, and I’ll be a ringtailed son of a bitch if Crazy Martha, Annie, Rhonda (last year … with bulldog) and Amanda don’t all go to the same therapist at Whackjob County Center for Mental Repair (multicounty government agency). Amanda’s anecdote comes from a few years ago, when she was trying to make her husband sicken and die by scrubbing his toilet with his toothbrush. She complained to Dr. Dingwad that this clever parlor trick wasn’t even making her husband sick. He (Dingwad) replied that her husband’s own waste residue would probably not kill him, and advised her to scrub someone else’s toilet with her husband’s toothbrush if she really wanted to kill him.
Let’s see, that takes us through noon, Saturday ...
