St. Bernardus Tripel

(bottle) Hazy gold. Large white head that was kind of a pain in the ass. A very nice aroma of citrus and spices and flowers. Mouthfeel was very fizzy. Flavor of apples and Belgian hops, but very well-balanced. The large yeast flakes at the bottom of the bottle really grossed me out. Still a damn fine beer.

Damn, I really thought I might write about something. But I forgot what that something was.

And so now I've got nothing to say. My stupid fingers are just tapping away at my keyboard, saying nothing at all. Stringing letters into words, words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs.

Maybe it will still count as an entry, when I'm done here. When this nervous energy flowing down my arms into my hands finally dissipates, maybe there'll be something. Anything.

Remember that line from that movie, in that place with those people?

Dave's not here, man.

Whatever, the point is that it's a fitting line. Because I'm most certainly not here at the moment. I kinda wish I knew where I was. I think I owe myself money. And a good ass-kicking.

Just got a fucking spam email. My computer did its little ding-dong thing, my heart did its little thumpthumpthumpthump thing. I was excited for a second there.

But no. It's just some dick spam. I get a lot of that.

Anyway, does this count as an entry?

Paragraphs strung together into an entry, perhaps?

Gasp gasp gurgle gurgle glub glub.

Lost Coast 8 Ball Stout

(bottle) Pours black, with a thin whitish head. Aroma and flavor of roasted malts and coffee. The coffee was very understated, so it didn't bother me at all. This is a very good malty stout. Extremely drinkable.

It's such a nice day outside. I need to go somewhere, anywhere that's not here. So I'm going. Probably to Dina's for a bit, at least.

I seem to have developed this annoying (to me) habit of just reposting old entries when I don't feel like writing anything new.

Well, here I go again. From last November:

I was talking to this girl tonight, about various topics ranging from my ass to how good I smelled, and eventually she asked me what it was that I wanted. As in, what did I want in a relationship?

I became a little tongue-tied. Which was strange because I've certainly thought about this subject a lot. Probably more than is healthy.

But, despite all of my thinking, I couldn't really come up with a definitive answer. All I could think of were examples from several diferent relationships. An amalgam of sorts.

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Driving late at night, with her and the kids else asleep in the car. She counted on me to get us to our destination safely. She trusted me.

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We'd watch a movie, and she'd lie on the couch with her head in my lap. She'd invariably fall asleep, and I'd be unable to move for hours. I could never bring myself to wake her, she was so pretty and peaceful.

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She'd be feeling sad, and she'd lean her head against my shoulder and sigh.

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She'd come into the bar and look around for anyone she knew, and she'd see me and she'd smile.

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She came to me crying, and she hugged me, and she kissed me, and we made love. We didn't say a word to each other for hours, because we didn't need to.

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She'd call me or text me whenever she wanted someone to talk to. I was always there for her.

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That way she'd blush every single time I gave her even the slightest compliment.

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Sparkles.

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I talked to her, and it was like we were the only people on Earth. I had her complete attention, just as she had mine.

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She was tired. I didn't even know her. But she slept leaning against me on the plane.

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We talked for what seemed like hours, and our faces were so close that our lips were almost touching. Eventually, our lips did touch.

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I grabbed her hand, finally, and she squeezed my hand soooo hard.

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I'd look at her in a certain way, and her nipples would harden.

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She could never simply touch me. There always had to be something more. Little circles she'd make with her fingers - they'd drive me insane.

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She simply understood me.

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She forgave me.

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She loved me.

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I'd watch her sleep, and all of the stress in my life would wash away like it was never even there.

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That's what I want. More stuff like that, please.

I wake up underwater. I'm asleep one second, then the next second I'm disoriented and drowning. Struggling to survive, wondering if I have the strength, wondering if it's worth it.

So, that's not a lot of fun.

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I've mentioned before how I can't stand to be away from my phone, for fear that I might miss a call or an email or a text from someone important. As this past week has been especially dramatic, I've taken to having my phone shoved up my ass when I shower, just so I'm sure that I won't miss anything.

Then, yesterday afternoon, I went to get my empty trash can from the end of my driveway. I'd been sitting in my garage, contemplating shit, and I left my phone where it was. I even remember telling myself, "Self, you idiot. Now just watch you'll get a call while you're getting your precious trash can."

So then I walked to the end of my driveway and back, and looked at my phone, and the fucking thing was blinking.

I only dropped it twice, fumbling to enter the password, so I'm getting better at that.

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I did get another call later on. MixedSignalGirl called to check on me and say hello. We talked for an hour or so. I really screwed up with her, but she's happy now, and that's all that matters.

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Then I got to go on a Super Top Secret Mission of Mystery, fraught with peril. It was fun, and there were no hitches. It was all very sneaky and clandestine. I wish we'd have worn ninja costumes, though. That would have been cool.

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When I got back home, I sat on my swing and had about a bottle and a half of Left Hand Goosinator (115) and thought about the past and the future.

Not the present, though.

Fuck the present.

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Friday night I rated my 496th beer. I've been thinking a lot about my 500th rating, which will probably happen this week. I want it to be something crappy, just because I think it would be funnier that way.

Because LaptopGirl is my official swill consultant, I have charged her with selecting the beer that will be my 500th. She suggested Lone Star. That's a good choice, though I'm not sure if I can get it around here. Her backup suggestion is Sapporo.

(Update: Her emergency fallback selection is MGD.)

(Update again: Or Mad Dog. I see her evil plan now. She's trying to drown me in swill. One way to get rid of me, I suppose, but there are more humane methods. I bet the Geneva Convention strictly prohibits drowning-by-swill.)

Anyway, I guess that's it.

I suppose that last night was one of those damn average nights at Rich O's. Better than I expected it to be, worse than I wanted it to be, the whole night just pretty much existed, and that was it.

I actually went there twice last night. I went after work, for about 30 seconds. Then I went back at 9:00 or so.

It's wasn't too crowded. I was able to grab a seat at the kiddie table fairly quickly. I had a Delirium Tremens (1394), and I talked to PlantDude, and I watched the door.

Fast-forward an hour or so, and the only thing that had changed was that I was having a new beer.

Grado Plato Strada San Felice

(draft) Not at all what I was expecting, as it was listed as "chestnut amber" on the beer board at Rich O's. Clear reddish amber in color. A pretty decent head that lasted throughout the glass. A faint fruity aroma - maybe cherries. Mouthfeel was medium-thick and clean. Flavor was very well-balanced. Malts and dark fruits and a tinge of hoppy bitterness. The finish was surprisingly fruity. A damn good beer.

After I got home at 11:30, I sat on my swing for several hours. I began composing a journal entry in my head. It was a good entry, I thought, but it was also a familiar entry. Too familiar.

Turns out I'd already written the damn thing, back in early 2007. The original version of this entry was much more rambling than the version I wrote in my head last night, but this last part was exactly the same.

The question was Why is it better to love and lose, than to never love at all?

Because sometimes, like maybe once in a lifetime if you're lucky, you don't lose.

Because sometimes, you get to love and you get to win.

To love is to open yourself to that possibility. To surrender yourself to that possibility of happiness. To allow yourself to have hopes, and dreams, and to imagine just how incredibly wonderful life could be.

If only.

This time.

I could be loved back.

Then I would win.

That hope, that trumps everything else. All of the pain. All of the heartache. All of the disappointment and the depression and the suicidal thoughts.

Hope is what separates us from the animals. Hope is what makes us human. So we keep looking. Even after failure after dismal failure, we keep looking for hope.

And, when we find ourselves in love, we also find the hope that's been buried so deeply within us that we almost forgot it existed. Love unearths it, and breathes new live into it, and resurrects it.

It takes over.

Nothing else matters.

Nothing else exists.

We become hope.

And I can't think of a loftier goal.

Someday, I hope to love and win.

So last night I reposted an old entry about blindness. Then, this morning, I awoke to find myself blind in my left eye.

Pretty crappy coincidence, right?

Right.

I guess a few days ago, maybe Sunday or Monday, I either got something in my eye or I scratched my eye. Something happened, because it started to feel a little uncomfortable when I'd blink or whatever.

Over the past couple of days, It's gotten a little worse, as I'd poke and prod and just generally fuck with it. I checked it out thoroughly. I also washed it out under the kitchen faucet. I neither saw nor obviously dislodged any debris, so I figured I must have scratched it.

Anyway, last night I reposted that stuff about blindness, then this morning my left eye was almost completely swollen shut.

I looked like I'd just gone ten rounds in the boxing ring. Or I guess I looked like Will Smith did in that Hitch movie.

I couldn't see out of my left eye, because of the swelling and the mucous and whatnot, so I did the next best thing. I poked and prodded and fucked with it all morning. As RockGirl pointed out, I have a spare eye for when I ruin one.

Then today at lunch, I was having AlliGirl check out my eye. She said it looked "a little bad." Since this morning it had looked "really fucking bad," I went to the restroom, braced myself, and looked in the mirror.

It's a lot better now. I'm not nearly as hideous as I was this morning. Hideousness being totally relative, of course.

And it doesn't hurt as much when I fuck with it.

So I've cancelled my appointment to have my glass eye fitted. At least for now, I'm binocular again.

Update: I had the nurse at work flush it out with some battery acid. That hurt a lot, but now my eye is almost back to normal. Yay!

Please don't do it.

I wish I had some magic words, but I've already said too much. Way too much, and it still wasn't enough.

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Got a nice black leather sofa from BadPickleGirl today. It's in my basement, where it will displace this one ugly chair, after I move the shelves away from that wall.

My cat Nugget is scared of the new sofa, of course. I'm hopeful that his fear will keep him from shredding it to bits. At least for a couple of weeks, until he figures out that it's leather and therefore edible.

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Dammit, this is supposed to be my fucking journal. My fucking outlet. It's not supposed to be some stage where I perform for my audience's amusement. And there's definitely no fucking script.

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One of the ways that I know I'm in a very weird mood is when I start thinking in metaphors. Like tonight, I started thinking about how I jumped out of a perfectly good lifeboat because I thought I saw the glimmer of a lighthouse on the horizon.

The lifeboat moved away, and the glimmer proved false, and now my lungs fill with water.

Sometimes metaphors are fun. And sometimes they're useful.

And sometimes they're nothing but stupid.

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I pretty much have to accept that people lied to me for years. I wonder why they did that. Was it to make me feel better? Was it to get me to shut the fuck up?

Or maybe, just maybe, they didn't know they were lying at all.

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I've been on-call all week. It blows.

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Speaking of glimmers, I like this entry, from 2005:

When you live your life in total darkness, it doesn't take much.

The smallest spark, the slightest flash of light, can capture your full attention. Even after it's gone, the memory of that flash lives on.

Sometimes that flash is welcomed, but most times, most times it's only reminding you of what's missing.

A man gone blind does not always wish for sight, for there can be comfort in the dark.

Acceptance. Tranquility. Peace. All erased by a spark, a glimmer, a splash of light that does nothing but burn the retinas and leave ghost images floating and intruding.

A flash is nothing by itself. It's over in an instant. But the memory of it lingers, and the blind man sometimes wishes he could forget.

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I should try to sleep now. I hope I don't dream.