Double Flee A

My wife is playing a game called diner dash, in which the main character is a waitress. When I suggested that maybe she should cure cancer instead of playing a game where she's a waitress, she replied "Well, I like this game." I guess I relate this anecdote to give you an idea where is the point past which I consider bothering her would be more trouble than it's worth.

If I could go back in time a few years and tell myself I'd be in this location doing what I'm doing, and married at that, the other me would be pretty shocked, if I could convince him I wasn't some delirium-induced phantasm, which is probably what he would think given his penchant for booze and already tenuous grasp of reality. (Maybe I'd give him take him out and get him laid. That would be pretty easy. This wedding ring is a skank magnet. It's never been easier to say no thank you.)

But if I were to appear to myself from the future from a similar temporal interval and with as dramatic a shift in lifestyle, I'd be more bothered than I would have back then. Maybe because I like what is happening now more. A good deal of effort has gone into my current situation and then there's the emotional investment with my wife that I dryly refer to here as significant. If things changed now by the same factor as the previous change, I'd be justified in expecting there was a hell of a surprise coming up soon.

I suspect there's a theme developing; it may be more rewarding for me to create a situation whereby the future becomes more contingent upon the terms I've created in my daily life than to reduce my causality field to a cosmic blur, which is by and large what it was when I was bartending. A Johnny Walker-flavored cosmic blur. I knew a lot of waitresses then, and looking at their lives each day is part of why I'm so baffled that anyone would want to play a game where they are one. But hey, she likes it, so what are you gonna do?

One of the waitresses where I worked fucked the bassist of Hooverphonic. So you know. I'm somebody, dammit. One of my friends made out with Robyn Robinson. True story.

At the same time it seems like I've never given up so little to gain so much, I have to look back and if I can, try to think of things not to take for granted and so on. That was supposed to be the subtext of a couple of sentences in there but I don't think it came across effectively. It may not be rewarding to lock myself into a routine that resembles itself more each day, until I can't tell one day from the next and ultimately have to buy a corvette in order to cope.

Either of these scenarios may be the one that exists, but there won't be any way to know until after the foreseeable future. Fucked up, ain't it?

posted by dale @ 8:18 PM