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(One of my play nieces told me that it would be cool if I put up a video for each post. Sounded cool. Go support an artist.)
So. We all should know by now that I'm not a champion drinker. I am actually the cheapest date on the planet. After a few mixed drinks, I am a fun gal. But if I go just one drink over... That's with mixed drinks - or shots of something I can handle the taste of, like Crown Apple. By the way, that stuff is like Kool-Aid for fools. It's tricky-good. Tasty but dangerous. I've discovered I have a 3 shot minimum on Crown.
Wine, though, turns me into a different kind of fun. Wine generally just makes me feel very mellow. After a moderate glass of sweet wine, I am great company. Not too chatty or hyper, but sober enough to be good company. That's if the wine is not too strong. One decent glass of anything stronger than church wine is better than any sleeping pill my docs know about. As a matter of fact, for a long time, I kept a bottle of wine around just to use as a nightly tonic. Then I worried that maybe I was getting a little too habitual about that.
Once some years back when I was staying with my best friend, her sister treated us to a holiday outing to spend an evening at a ranch turned winery. It was during the Christmas season. The plan was to take a tour of the winery, have some casual eats, then participate in a wine tasting before finishing the evening off with a hayride on horse-drawn wagons. I was excited about the hayride and super-excited to do my first wine tasting.
So.
What had happened was... (and please don't laugh too hard at me) is that I made a rookie mistake. I was swallowing more of the wine than I was spitting out. And, yes, I knew to spit because that was part of the little lesson we were given beforehand. The problem is, I liked some of the wine too much to spit it out. Listen, we tasted a lot of wine. Yes, we did.
I never did make it to the hayride but I made really good friends with some guy at our table who was as drunk as I was and who kept squinting at me while we talked. I think he was trying to figure out which one of me he was talking to. Every now and then, he'd throw back his head and make this crazy cackle-laugh sound. And I wasn't saying anything especially funny. My girlfriend was as drunk as I was but she tends to stay classy and get quiet when she drinks. She only spoke long enough to whisper to me that I was talking with a guy who was probably a retired serial killer. Her poor sister could only shake her head and tell us to try to eat more food while she went on the hayride.
The best thing about having gotten drunk that night was it made the ride home fun. We'd driven probably two and a half hours to get to the ranch in the first place and we'd gotten lost twice on the way there. We didn't realize until someone mentioned it to my friend's sister that we would be driving right through one of those sundown towns on our way back home. There we were, sometime after one in the morning, driving super carefully. My friend's sister was stone-cold sober but worried about her two drunk passengers. She kept giving us instructions on what to do if we got pulled over. Let her do the talking; maybe just pretend to be asleep; and, please try holding our breath because we were damn near making her drunk from the fumes coming off of us. Thankfully, we didn't get stopped but my best friend almost popped her bladder trying to hold her pee the whole way home. That was the one time wine didn't put me to sleep.
Still, I'm not as bad a wine drunk as I am a Mother's Day drunk. Like I said, the most I do with wine is just fall asleep or - only occasionally - think I can sing and want to prove it. There were times during my sister's and my clubbing days when everyone made me stick to wine only. Because they knew what I was like on mixed drinks. A predator wouldn't have to slip me anything stronger than an extra shot of liquor. During those wine nights, I fell asleep at inappropriate times. Once, I fell asleep in a booth at a club. My friends just made a pillow and blanket with their coats for me and partied on. Back in my twenties, I fell asleep in places like Denny's and IHop. It took me a long time to learn my fun-but-not-narcoleptic limit of wine. By then, was pretty much over it. For the most part.
I'm not proud of my drinking past and I never drank as much as it might sound like. I guess because I never even flirted with drugs, I made up for it with my drinking, such as it was. The only experience I have with drugs is the time I got a contact high and laughed uncontrollably for half an hour straight and the time I ate some weed brownies. Made with Alaskan grown weed. No thank you. Have you ever been to Alaska? This is what an Alaskan grown cabbage looks like.
Yeah, so Anchorage was like stoner heaven. For years, we had friends visit us just because the city was ahead of the game with personal use legalities. And some of the best weed ever. Or so I've been told.
I do think that drinking can be as dangerous as drugs. I'm lucky that I was young and stupid and living in Alaska when it was still a relatively safe place. Very, very lucky. I only went out with family or people I knew really well. It was my sister who left me sleeping in the backseat of the car once. I had apparently passed out into a drunk snooze on the way home and she and my sister-in-law couldn't wake me. They had the nerve to say later that I had been snotty about them trying to wake me. So, they left me in the car, in front of my brother's house, in the middle of winter. I wasn't cold because they had covered me up but I was still a little freaked out when I woke up a few hours later. I got out of the car because I thought I was sober. I wasn't. I got back in the car and went back to sleep. Good times.
Those days are so far behind me now. Thank everything in the heavens.
I was talking to my best friend just recently and she asked if I had plans to do anything special for my upcoming birthday. Other than thanking God that I've made it this far? I told her that I plan to maybe get a mani-pedi and probably just spend a few hours with the family. That's enough excitement for me. I had been kicking around the idea of going out for a drink with my sister-in-law but decided to keep any celebrations on the thankful and adult side. Once alcohol gets involved, who knows, I might have to move to a new town or change my identity.
Peace
--Free
NOTE: I'm going to have to schedule this post for another day along with some other backup posts so... ignore the mention of dates.
Sing it, Melody. Making me want a cigarette and some bourbon...
So. We all should know by now that I'm not a champion drinker. I am actually the cheapest date on the planet. After a few mixed drinks, I am a fun gal. But if I go just one drink over... That's with mixed drinks - or shots of something I can handle the taste of, like Crown Apple. By the way, that stuff is like Kool-Aid for fools. It's tricky-good. Tasty but dangerous. I've discovered I have a 3 shot minimum on Crown.
Wine, though, turns me into a different kind of fun. Wine generally just makes me feel very mellow. After a moderate glass of sweet wine, I am great company. Not too chatty or hyper, but sober enough to be good company. That's if the wine is not too strong. One decent glass of anything stronger than church wine is better than any sleeping pill my docs know about. As a matter of fact, for a long time, I kept a bottle of wine around just to use as a nightly tonic. Then I worried that maybe I was getting a little too habitual about that.
Once some years back when I was staying with my best friend, her sister treated us to a holiday outing to spend an evening at a ranch turned winery. It was during the Christmas season. The plan was to take a tour of the winery, have some casual eats, then participate in a wine tasting before finishing the evening off with a hayride on horse-drawn wagons. I was excited about the hayride and super-excited to do my first wine tasting.
So.
What had happened was... (and please don't laugh too hard at me) is that I made a rookie mistake. I was swallowing more of the wine than I was spitting out. And, yes, I knew to spit because that was part of the little lesson we were given beforehand. The problem is, I liked some of the wine too much to spit it out. Listen, we tasted a lot of wine. Yes, we did.
I never did make it to the hayride but I made really good friends with some guy at our table who was as drunk as I was and who kept squinting at me while we talked. I think he was trying to figure out which one of me he was talking to. Every now and then, he'd throw back his head and make this crazy cackle-laugh sound. And I wasn't saying anything especially funny. My girlfriend was as drunk as I was but she tends to stay classy and get quiet when she drinks. She only spoke long enough to whisper to me that I was talking with a guy who was probably a retired serial killer. Her poor sister could only shake her head and tell us to try to eat more food while she went on the hayride.
The best thing about having gotten drunk that night was it made the ride home fun. We'd driven probably two and a half hours to get to the ranch in the first place and we'd gotten lost twice on the way there. We didn't realize until someone mentioned it to my friend's sister that we would be driving right through one of those sundown towns on our way back home. There we were, sometime after one in the morning, driving super carefully. My friend's sister was stone-cold sober but worried about her two drunk passengers. She kept giving us instructions on what to do if we got pulled over. Let her do the talking; maybe just pretend to be asleep; and, please try holding our breath because we were damn near making her drunk from the fumes coming off of us. Thankfully, we didn't get stopped but my best friend almost popped her bladder trying to hold her pee the whole way home. That was the one time wine didn't put me to sleep.
Still, I'm not as bad a wine drunk as I am a Mother's Day drunk. Like I said, the most I do with wine is just fall asleep or - only occasionally - think I can sing and want to prove it. There were times during my sister's and my clubbing days when everyone made me stick to wine only. Because they knew what I was like on mixed drinks. A predator wouldn't have to slip me anything stronger than an extra shot of liquor. During those wine nights, I fell asleep at inappropriate times. Once, I fell asleep in a booth at a club. My friends just made a pillow and blanket with their coats for me and partied on. Back in my twenties, I fell asleep in places like Denny's and IHop. It took me a long time to learn my fun-but-not-narcoleptic limit of wine. By then, was pretty much over it. For the most part.
I'm not proud of my drinking past and I never drank as much as it might sound like. I guess because I never even flirted with drugs, I made up for it with my drinking, such as it was. The only experience I have with drugs is the time I got a contact high and laughed uncontrollably for half an hour straight and the time I ate some weed brownies. Made with Alaskan grown weed. No thank you. Have you ever been to Alaska? This is what an Alaskan grown cabbage looks like.
Yeah, so Anchorage was like stoner heaven. For years, we had friends visit us just because the city was ahead of the game with personal use legalities. And some of the best weed ever. Or so I've been told.
I do think that drinking can be as dangerous as drugs. I'm lucky that I was young and stupid and living in Alaska when it was still a relatively safe place. Very, very lucky. I only went out with family or people I knew really well. It was my sister who left me sleeping in the backseat of the car once. I had apparently passed out into a drunk snooze on the way home and she and my sister-in-law couldn't wake me. They had the nerve to say later that I had been snotty about them trying to wake me. So, they left me in the car, in front of my brother's house, in the middle of winter. I wasn't cold because they had covered me up but I was still a little freaked out when I woke up a few hours later. I got out of the car because I thought I was sober. I wasn't. I got back in the car and went back to sleep. Good times.
Those days are so far behind me now. Thank everything in the heavens.
I was talking to my best friend just recently and she asked if I had plans to do anything special for my upcoming birthday. Other than thanking God that I've made it this far? I told her that I plan to maybe get a mani-pedi and probably just spend a few hours with the family. That's enough excitement for me. I had been kicking around the idea of going out for a drink with my sister-in-law but decided to keep any celebrations on the thankful and adult side. Once alcohol gets involved, who knows, I might have to move to a new town or change my identity.
Peace
--Free
NOTE: I'm going to have to schedule this post for another day along with some other backup posts so... ignore the mention of dates.
