Diane, I’ve found a glass full of scotch

Oh, god, please tell me I’m not really going to be working seven days a week from now till the fall…

It’s about this time, each year, that I get really weird. Since 2001, I’ve taken about five weeks off every summer to go screw around abroad. But then, last summer, I had brain surgery and, this summer, the money is (mysteriously – I swear!) gone.

So I now find myself at a point where I’m working more than when I put myself through college. Mainly to pay for the various extravagancies I’ve picked up here in my third decade. Or is it my fourth decade? That sounds even worse. I’m certainly far too exhausted to maintain this pace, yet there’s no clear break on the horizon.

All for the great god Money. Of course, my weekend job will have fully paid off the car I bought in March by the end of October. Can’t beat that, and it’s the main reason for this summer of sacrifice. Goddamned cars. I went 15 months without owning one and I loved every minute of it.

All this work is also about recovery – slowly climbing out of the hole I dug. A combined hole of misplaced dreams (starting an indie publishing house) and things against my will (missing months of work thanks to the brain surgery).

I made up for it with a brief two weeks in London last Christmas, but am otherwise pining for some sort of gonzo trip. Not that my month long trips are particularly wild. My idea of a gonzo trip is to tool around a Scottish island and drink whisky and eat the type of breakfasts that make my heart scream like it’s in a high school stage version of Amadeus. But my tummy says yummy!

I’ll end up taking the equivalent of a month off, in both finances and time, in little spits and spurts throughout this summer. It’s the only way I can possibly stay somewhat passably sane. But these will be fully paid leave days with friends around the country. And by “friends,” I mean people who know what the last couple of years have done to my wallet and psyche. They buy me booze and sit around watching me for signs of spontaneous combustion. I’m fairly convinced, in fact, that there’s a pool going on as to which friend will get to witness my final collapse.

Little do they know that I have $500 riding on a sort of Chris McCandless collapse – vanish into the wilderness all brave and high minded, then die because I’m an idiot. I don’t know how I’ll collect on that…but I’ll find a way, believe you me.

Besides paying off cars and, when not doing that, providing a cushion of extra cash that I can then send to Amazon as I peck away at my 20 page wish list, the weekend job also keeps me in booze. It’s a rare day when I’m forced to buy alcohol. The house is stocked, especially during the summer, with vodka, rum, scotch, and whatever else the little suckers on the ends of my unnatural, mutant fingers can lift from the dark folds of cardboard and cloth in the supply room. This way I can meet the pain of a seven day work week with heavy drinking. But it’s guilt free alcohol, because I haven’t paid for it. No hiding it from guests, no saving the last few drops, no eking out as much life from the bottle as possible. Just dump it in, throw it out if you don’t finish it, stick a lit rag in the top and throw it at the Comcast truck…whatever. No loss.

Which is why I take these short trips to bedevil my little group of friends. Hi, buddy, what’s shaking? Nevermind, give me that bottle and make your wife dance for me.

If she doesn’t dance for me, then I put my hand to the back of my head and say, “The old brain surgery is acting up again!” Works every time.

I intend to return to my long vacation habit next summer. I had the recent surreal day where I was interviewed by the Washington Post, and the interviewer asked me what my goals were. Why’d I get into publishing, and where did I see myself? I hemmed and hawed, answered with the usual I lubs me some books stuff, and I think she picked up that there was something deeper. She pressed the point – why not a career? Why am I working a day job that’s full of retards and a weekend job that hasn’t advanced in responsibilities since high school? What do I want to do?

I couldn’t put up the front anymore. I blurted out my Life Plan: Become a night watchman at some place like a museum, or some lonely industrial park. Travel for three months out of each year, mainly palling around and drinking. Retire at 65 into a used Airstream on a desolate hillside somewhere on my friend’s wife’s entirely useless 30 acre mountaintop inheritance deep in West Virginia.

Easy!

She asked if I would get lonely. I looked blankly at her and said that I had Netflix. Then she scribbled madly in her little pad, making a sort of breathy giggling noise. I’m starting to dread the article…

Right now, though, it’s Thursday before Memorial Day. This three day weekend coming up is nothing because it’ll be wall-to-wall ten hour shifts. My next break isn’t scheduled until mid June, where I’ll go lie on my back somewhere on the floor of a luxury cabin in West Virginia and moan about my life to anyone who’ll listen. Or, more likely, I’ll break out the Hurricane mix and the cheap rum and go insane with that and the first season of Twin Peaks on a gigantic television screen. The poor souls joining me on this cabin adventure will then have to spend three days watching me pretend to be Dale Cooper.

Diane, I appear to have drunk all the rum and am now standing naked out on SR 89.