WordPress daily prompt: What relationships have a negative impact on you?

My fellow inebriates,

I’ve been absent for longer than intended, preoccupied with a variety of things (in addition to the usual ongoing pursuit of alcoholic beverages).

When you’ve gone dark for this long, you need a kick in the furry ass to get started again. And that’s why I’m leveraging the WordPress daily prompt to re-establish my good habits (providing you with randoms) and reinforce my bad ones (drinking and falling down).

Today’s prompt is about relationships. I do have some of these, and my older readers have heard about them at length. So instead of grossing you out with another Dolly story, I’m going to wax on about another type of relationship—our relationship with reality.

Okay, so if you are reading a blog written by a bear, your relationship with reality is already tenuous, and that’s okay. We’ve all had our relationship with reality stretched in the past few years. Remember donning your covid mask to enter a restaurant, wait in the lobby and walk to your table—only to then take it off for a couple of hours as people spittle-shouted across the table to outcompete the crappy restaurant sound system and servers came and went with plates that dozens of kitchen staff had handled? Our health authorities asserted that at your table, you were in a magical zone, impermeable to airborne viruses. As long as you remained seated. If you stood, of course you had to put the mask on again. If you suggested that everyone was involved in an elaborate and stupid fiction, people became visibly upset.

“A fool can throw a stone in a pond that 100 wise men cannot get out. ”
—Saul Bellow

The upshot of all this has been a blossoming of all-or-nothing thinking about masks—a complete polarization. You have dumbasses double-masking to walk their dogs outside. Conversely, you have dumbasses going mask-free on a crowded SkyTrain full of coughing riders. The ability to make a situational judgment has vanished. All because the original health authority mask mandates came across as so ridiculously illogical that people ended up either digging in their heels and masking everywhere, or denying the utility of masks at all.

My relationship with reality is SO negative

As you know, I am not a fan of reality. I avoid having any sort of relationship with it. But my two brain cells had a come-to-Jesus moment during covid when they realized that they could not parse Bonnie Henry’s mandates as amplified by the CBC (which has also had a break with reality). We decided to redouble our drinking.

Months of alcohol consumption ensued, with two many products imbibed to ever review for you, my fellow inebriates. So I will just tell you about one of the latest, a Christmassy beverage called Bailey’s Deliciously Light.

What the hell is Bailey’s Deliciously Light?

According to its purveyors, Bailey’s Deliciously Light contains the gamut of regular Bailey’s flavours (i.e., cocoa, vanilla, whiskey, cream from Ireland), but it’s 40% less caloric and has 40% less sugar.

I do appreciate that Bailey’s chose to cut sugar rather than alcohol in concocting this light version of its Irish Cream. (I didn’t even consider that I could rejig the ingredients when I attempted my own version, which ultimately coagulated in a milk jug at the back of the fridge.)

Ours was crappy too.

Unfortunately, Bailey’s Deliciously Light didn’t stop at the sugar mod; it also swapped in some reduced-fat cream for the original’s whole cream, which detracts from the mouthfeel and compounds the impression that you’re drinking something meaner and stingier than befits the holiday season.

Why did my mother buy Bailey’s Deliciously Light?

My mother bought it because, although she gets a LOT of her calories from alcohol, she didn’t want to be getting 75% of her calories from alcohol, if you know what I mean. Still, she was wrong to buy this crap. It is an inferior species of Irish Cream that warrants a big reality check. I’m gonna drink it anyway, though.