humor

How to avoid being alone on Valentine’s Day—let’s see if it works

My Fellow Inebriates,

Everything around me is pink and red! It’s a rose-petal blizzard of romance! Get the sense that everyone is partnering up? It’s like a terribly contrived race-to-the-airport movie-sequence, with 13 days to go until that amorous Day of All Days arrives. It’s like the New Year’s countdown, people, but the road to the coveted Romantic Kiss is more drawn-out and more lined with merchandise. OMG, it makes me feel so lonely! I’m going to be alone for Valentine’s Day.

After rattling this thought around my head awhile I decided to sign up with the dating service Plenty of Fish.

And Plenty of Fish said:

For some reason they were cool when I amended my name to Liquorstore Bearr.

And then the hard part started. OMG, it was like taking a test!

And then I had to actually take a test!! A chemistry test!!

Here’s some of the feedback Plenty of Fish gave me:

“As someone who exerts little control over your actions, you may find that you commit social blunders that might offend other people and get yourself in trouble.”

“…when it comes to romantic relationships, your openness might make it difficult for you to tolerate people that cannot appreciate diversity as much as you.”

Wow! Pretty spot-on! I think this might be a good thing. Maybe I will make a connection in time for Valentine’s Day after all!

Just one more step…

This is so awesome. No more loneliness for me 😉

Singing the mangy blues

My Fellow Inebriates,

Unless some bad shit has happened to you in the dating-and-mating department, Valentine’s Day signifies romance (or if you’re married like my mum, an excuse to gorge on chocolate). It’s hard not to catch the love bug, wafting as it does on social media, advertising, and television. Which means I’ve been looking around for Dolly.

I like Dolly; she’s a sweetheart, and she has a convenient bear fetish. Unfortunately there is a constant influx of new bears at this house, and she’s taken a liking to the newest.

We call him Fluffy, betraying not just a lack of imagination but a hint at the term “fluffer.” Yes, this comes from jealousy, but Fluffy is really, really fluffy. And Dolly likes that in a bear.

I found this out when I started sniffing around about her Valentine’s Day plans. Dolly came up with this chestnut: “I’m washing my hair.” I said her hair was perfect without washing, which it is. It is clown-red with just a few bald patches from the kids’ rug rethinks, to quote Martin Amis, and it’s never been barfed on. She said very pointedly, “I like the way my hair smells when it’s washed. Clean things smell good, LB.”

And then she indicated Fluffy, over in the corner, nonverbal as he has been since he arrived from my granny’s estate. She took a deep breath and smiled.

Because Fluffy smells like fabric softener. He used to live in Granny’s room where she chain-smoked until her last days. When relatives removed her belongings after she passed, they must have soaked him in Tide and Fleecy to remove the cigarette smell. I think these chemicals must have damaged his brain too, because he doesn’t communicate. He just watches TV or stares at the wall, his floral essence wafting throughout the room.

What a dangerous thing it was to suggest Fluffy smells a little feminine.

“At least he doesn’t smell like rancid sourdough starter, Cutty Sark and persecution,” she said.

We don’t even have any Cutty Sark. The cupboard is bare.

Got no liquor, got no company, got no girlfriend.

Oh wait—there is a bit of Malibu left.

My typing: giving my mother’s life meaning

My Fellow Inebriates,

My mum was doing storytime with the kids tonight and ducked out to fill up their water cups. When she came back, they were in bed together eldest reading to youngest, all by themselves.

This is a breakthrough for my mother, who likes to conserve her parenting energy. With a literate six-year-old so much is possible…Miss P can read her own stories, choose her own videos on YouTube, determine her own cold medicine dosages, find wine bottles for yours truly—the list goes on and on.

Not that my mother dislikes reading. She loves reading (just not out loud, or kids’ books, or when she could be on Facebook).

She didn’t say she was sad they were becoming independent. But I think she was a little. And perhaps a little regretful about not having read quite enough to the kids.

I urged her to have a drink—to celebrate P’s reading, and to dampen that still distant but fast-approaching feeling of not being needed.

She said of course she felt needed. “Who the hell is going to do your bloody typing, LB?”