Beating the Night

I slept on the couch last night. Which is not as bad as it might sound: I'm single, it wasn't that I'd had a fight with the frau or whatever.

No, I just made a really dumb mistake. A few of them actually. The first mistake was to have another drink. I'd had plenty, knew I should go to bed but I was all of a sudden hungry and I'd put some leftover pasta in the 'wave to fix that. I knew I shouldn't be eating at that point, but that penultimate drink had put my impulse control on the ropes. If my will power had been Freddie Mac, the Treasury Department would be taking over my office.

Of course, in that case, I guess I'd get more money than an honest person can normally earn in a lifetime as a going away present. God, that pisses me off. I don't care that it's all negotiated up front, it shouldn't be. You run a company into the ground like that, especially a company that's bigger than most governments, you should count yourself lucky you don't go to prison or the gallows. I got shit-canned five days before Christmas with no severance or unemployment and I wasn't even guilty of what I was accused of. And what I was accused of was small beer compared to the abject and total mismanagement of $5 trillion.

Did I just digress or what? I guess I'm tired.

So anyway, I fixed that ill-advised drink and compounded it with cable television. I changed channels two or three times and blinked and it was 6:00 a.m. An infomercial was on, my drink sat warm and uninviting, unsipped from. The microwave beeped softly every minute or so to tell me that yes, there was something in there that was done cooking. It was cold, of course, and I wasn't hungry anymore.

So I hadn't been up all night, I just felt like it. Was I hung over? Maybe, but I think it was more the lack of a CPAP and a reclined position that did me wrong. I'm not saying the booze helped, mind you. I'm certain it didn't.

So anyway, I get to work and there's Lamar's donuts. And that did look like just the thing. And I got to thinking about when it was Lamar's Space Age Donuts, and we'd go there when we'd managed to beat the night (they opened at 5:00 a.m.). But then someone told me I was wrong, it was John's Space Age Donuts. No doubt John's Put Out of Business By Chains Like Lamar's Donuts these days.

But when you're 17 and you haven't been to bed come 6:00 a.m., it's a freakin' victory. Some how a few days shy of 39 it doesn't seem that way.