This past weekend, among the brisket and chicken cutlets and distribution of fluffy duckies and a "10 Plagues" playset (yes it is a real thing, and no, my child will not part from his lifelike locust or creepy diseased cow mask for the equivalent of one million baby dollars), there was a spot of Saturday afternoon where some of the men went to play golf and the grandmothers volunteered to be babysitters and I got to spend some time out of my house, doing nothing. Well I was doing something: I wandered about with my sister and her husband and we ended up at a once-upon-a-time favorite dive of mine playing Keno and drinking beer. I didn't actually play Keno because gambling confounds my brain, but it's not like the game took away too much of my companions' attention. Even if it had, it was a truly luxurious thing to be in the world with nobody but me to think about for a couple of hours. All the better that it was such a spontaneous outing.
A word about drinking in the daytime: it's my favorite. Knocking back a few cocktails at night is not without its charms, but there's something about ingesting alcohol when the sun is shining, even if you're not on vacation or in a warm beautiful climate or have a holiday to be observing. A pitcher of Longhammer in an empty, grungy East Cambridge bar on a lazy Saturday afternoon with people I love is pretty much as good as it gets. It's not about getting drunk, for me. Not these days. It's just about what the whole package represents: freedom, celebration and enjoyment of life. Bubbles and sparkles and good squiggly warm feelings deep down. Something we do because we want to, and because we can. It's not for every day, because then it wouldn't be special. And our livers would be decidedly un-psyched. But when the time presents itself, clink clink, y'all.
Off to refill my water bottle with... water. And that's just fine.
Unrelated song I like! Devandra Banhart kind of gives me the willies, but I dig some of his music, like this guy here.
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