Skinny Drippin'

S'up doggs?  Snoop wine.  I can't believe my New Old Friend hasn't tried it.  She loves everything Snoop. Old sloe-eyed, dope-smokin' Snoopy.  The Children's Album. 

Oh. . . she's gonna kill me for that.  Ha!

I grilled a NY Strip with asparagus and chopped small yellow potatoes after a Campari and soda and a fresh spring salad with garlic and avocado.  All that after I got the "Skinny Drip" infusion.  I went to one of those hydration and wellness stations where you can get a Myer's Cocktail, the thing I have been touting for so long.  It was invented in the '60s by a doctor at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester to treat the onset of old age dementia, but once the drug companies developed pills for that, the cocktail fell out of fashion.  It is a combo of magnesium, B vitamins, and whatever else you want to put into it.  In the '90s, however, the drip made its way back into rotation for people with Epstein-Barr, chronic fatigue, and fibromyalgia.  It seemed to help.  It took a long time, however, for someone like me to be able to get one.  

Brando introduced me to a man in the wayback who sold a computer company for millions of dollars. 

"He doesn't even know how to turn on a computer!" Brando blustered in his usual fashion.  The man told me he was getting the Myer's Cocktail once a month.  A nurse would come to his house and hook him up. 

"I've never felt better in my life," he exclaimed.  He was an older fellow, or at least he seemed so to me at the time.  I got intrigued and did some research.  Then I went in search of a place.  There weren't any around me until the twenty-teens when a doctor started one of those life extension clinics in my own hometown.  But you had to get a complete physical, bloodwork, etc, before you could eve begin.  Insurance wouldn't cover it and it cost WAY too much money for me.  I wouldn't be able to afford to extend my life for awhile.  

The lady hooking me up kept jabbing around my arm missing the vein.  "Is your other arm better?" she asked.  "Sometimes it is difficult when the vein is deep."  

What?  I used to have great veins, envious veins.  Now I'm so fat they can't find one?

"This Skinny Drip better work fast," I told her.  

Once I she finally, painfully, had the IV going, I sat and listened to two ladies talk.  And talk and talk.  They irritated me.  Actually only one of the ladies talked.  The other simply commented.  The talky one was a pretty, dark women of Indian descent with a Paris Hilton speech pattern.  The IV lady was of Indian descent, too, but with that pleasant British tv Indian accent.  They were talking about somebody's divorce. They couldn't believe she had stayed married to her husband as long as she had.  The woman's family had never accepted him.  

"Why?"

"Because he was white." 

Ha!  There I was, a minority Whitey among racist, far left Indians.  Wealthy ones.  Society ones.  Subltle bling, flashy manicured, white Mercedes ones.  

My art/travel buddy texted me while they rattled on.  

"26th wedding anniversary today. Heading out to ___________ for fried oysters, bread, and martinis in the piano bar."

Wow.  26th!  I still think of him as a new friend, but I've known him for decades.  I met him through Brando after his first divorce.  I've known him through two marriages and two children since, both grown, one in college and one in law school.  I texted back a congratulations and told him I had an IV in my arm. 

"What happened to you?"

"Nothing.  I just got old." 

I was no thinner when I left the hydration place.  Pity, that.  

I was just getting ready to plate my grilled steak when the phone rang.  It was my Tennessee buddy.  He'd asked me at the gym what I was doing that day.  I said I was heading out to rent a pressure washer to do my deck.  He said he'd leave his out for me and I could pick it up.  He was leaving for a month to finish up the 12 houses he was building in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.  He was calling to tell me where he was leaving it.  But he had other things to say, too, gossip about the "boy's club." I plated while he was on the phone and drank my wine 'til he was finished.  Then I sat back and ate a most delicious meal in the cool evening air.  

Sky texted me, and once again I was embarrassed that I was always on my deck eating alone.  Why, I wondered?  There I was, a life-extension man with a beautiful meal for one as the neighborhood parade of walkers passed by.  It seemed atrocious.  I made a note to self: "I began life too late."

I've begun to have Siri take notes on my phone, using it as a recorder.  It works, but now well. She doesn't punctuate, and if I pause for a moment, she quits and I have to start over.  I once used a small cassette recorder, then I bought a digital recorder that I still have in the car, but I have my phone with me more often, so. . . . 

"A beautiful woman walks by with three stair-step children, probably aged 4,6 and 9.  She wears running shorts and a crop top, and she is slender and incredibly beautiful.  As she passes,  I think maybe she's their older sister but I know that's not true, and just as she turns the corner she looks back at me over her shoulder and smiles.  She is not smiling at me, of course, but the image of herself that I am seeing at that very moment.  Like everyone else she just wants to check the rearview mirror."

That was one of my phone notes.  I'd never remember that moment if I didn't record it.  I'd never seen her before and I probably will never see her again, but as soon as I read it, I remember her and the children, and I am extremely proud of those last two lines.  

The one who writes it, keeps it.  

She, of course, will never remember me.  

I need to name some of the recurring characters here.  They are all fictional, of course as is the incredibly unreliable narrator C.S.  Q and C.C. are nom de plumes.  Brando and Ili and Sky are experiential inventions as is Tennessee.  But I need a name for my travel/art buddy.  I'll need to work on that.  It has to be right.  

I rise late these DST days, and the day recedes too quickly.  I must get to the gym and use my Skinny Drip.  I want visible veins the next time I go to the clinic.