Nothing

It is seven o'clock, and I have already had too much to drink.  Rough week at the factory, laying off or firing too many people as the business demands.  Orders are down, and that is, among other things, what I am paid to do.  It is brutal.  All week I've felt my waistline expand as the cortisol increases--the stress hormone.  There is nothing I can do about it but quit, and I am not going to do that.  And so, after a brutal week of cutbacks, I was not for the gym.  I was for a drink.  I went to my favorite bar, but even that was no succor.  Big loud men dominated the place.  I wanted to fight, but I had no fight left in me.  And so I drank, first one thing and then the other.  After two, I had had enough and came home to my clean and beautiful house.  I turned on more lights than I normally do so that I could read.  It was early, but I was tired and had the beginnings of a buzz, and I poured myself a scotch.  Sitting in one of my new leather chairs, jazz playing in the background, I pulled out books to see what I had read and what I hadn't.  There, marked twenty pages in, was the National Book Award winner from 2010.  I remembered what made me buy it.  I remember not being enamored by the first part.  This time, here and now, I skipped ahead and read.  It seemed no better.  We have our tastes in reading.  And so I turned to some design books I had bought oh-so-long-ago when I was in Stanford, CA.  I remembered why I bought them, but now all that was wrong, and I determined that I would throw them all away.  The music and the night. 

It is beautiful in my house just now, and it deserves a small crowd sitting around the living room enjoying cocktails.  But I have not lived that way for a very long time.  It  deserves a woman, at the least, who wants to drink and decide whether to go out or stay in.  I almost had that for a minute but otherwise that has been awhile, too.  I have all the tools, and I don't imagine myself to be a bad sort, so. . . where oh where is this woman, this mate? 

It is clear I want too much. 

But you should be here.  The shutters and the vases full of flowers and the 19th century rugs and the textured fabrics and pillows and the oh so wonderful music wafting through the air and the not so bad scotch, too. 

I am in for the night now except for a liquor run in a bit that I know is inevitable.  I must find a book to read as wonderful as Osborne or a Salter.  I need mood and atmosphere.  I need phrases and antiheroes worth a damn.  I need something that speaks to grace. 

No one comes to this site any more I'm afraid, so I am free to write what I want--to myself.  It is a journal with a small audience signifying. . . oh, my friends know how that line ends.