Happy Birthday Alicia! The week-old incident, why I am sore today and why alcohol is "off" for a little while.

(19:57:02 CDT)

Happy Birthday Alicia! The week-old incident, why I am sore today and why alcohol is "off" for a little while.

Before I get around to saying why I am sore today, and before I get around to describing why there is going to be at least a mild moratorium on drinking here at l'appartement Bolden, I first want to turn to better and brighter news. My sister-in-law, Alicia, one of the lights of my life (at least, as 'twere, not one of the darks), has turned into an old maid and unmarriable spinster at the bone shattering age of nineteen years. HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO HER. Since I am physically unable to administer nineteen licks, and due to the downright Victorian dirtiness of such a thing (insert proper Monty Python cartoon here), I instead wrote a limerick for her:

Happy birthday to that young beauty, Alicia, Whose body is filled with many sorts of fleshy tissue, Except her ceramic head, With air and cobwebs instead, In one corner, a yellowed stack of magazine issues.

Wah-bam! Take that, you old codger. As I told my wife to tell her, nineteen is kind of a boring age to be. She can now legally sign a state level contract and buy cigarettes. Maybe she should take up pipe-smoking with her new found freedoms (all signs point to yes!)? She can now play pool at 19+ clubs, though, which I imagine is a freedom she will relish. For real, happy birthday, and sorry there was no we could spend it with you.

For those wondering "what the hell?" on the limerick, Alicia is not an easy word to rhyme with outside of medical conditions. "He once had a sweetheart named Alicia, who was struck down with alopecia. As shiny as the sun, her hairless white dome, and those sweet red checks infected with rosacea." Or, well, I could have went for a classic "Alicia once stood on an old metal bucket..." and just worked that out to its inevitable conclusion.

Ok, now as to why I am sore and the "incident". Someone came to stay with Sarah and I the other day, after an fight he had with his roommate. Some know who I am talking about, but to protect the guilty, let's just call him "Hey! Damn bum spews!". Anyhow, I was woken up because of said fight and so I said he could crash. He did. The next day (or the day after), Sarah complained of a smell in our guest bedroom. I was worried that some lingering after-effect of Toasty's final days were still with us (he urinated in a lot of places) and maybe Cindy had picked up the aromatic cues. We cracked the window for a couple of days, and burned incense. Today, we thought it would be awesome and literally cool to play tennis before it got too hot, and so went to grab our rackets. They are (were) stored in a green garbage can converted into a tennis equipment storage device, placed near our guestbedroom closet. I went "What the hell is this on my racket" and then we found the rest. The sad thing is, we have no idea which rancid body fluid he had filled our trashcan, and therefore our tennis rackets, with; but it smelled of some vibrant combination, a collusion, if you will, of things not meant to be in polite society (see Victorian era spankings, above). Long story short, Sarah got a new racket (my back-up racket was blessedly in the living room, though my more expensive one was right with the rest).

Steamed, and a bit queasy, by the incident (not to mention throwing out near something like a hundred dollars worth of tennis rackets, including our guest rackets for when company wants to play) we went on to Target to buy Sarah a cheap replacement. We ended up finding her a nice one, but we made more of a day out of it so as to relax and not let the little things get us down (little things being said unknown liquid with its unknown bits). We went to get lunch from Jason's Deli (a full turkey muffuletta) and then from there walked up to Michael's where I got an old style, external-well ink pen (think quills, not the kind that has the little ink tube inside). From there we then walked around to Target (after looking at the awesome Halloween things in Michael's) and relaxed by taking it easy. By the time we got back to the car, we had mostly taken to joking about "the incident".

We came back, played some tennis for an hour (now about three in the afternoon, much hotter than intended, but still really good) and then crashed into an hour or two nap. Now we are up, about to cook something to eat, and possibly go swimming (but definitely going to watch movies, I have to at least show Sarah Robocop if not Seven). Then we are going to pretend like the rest of the world doesn't exist for a few more hours, and it will be swell.

Anyhow, boys and girls, that's why I am sore (too much heat and running pretty hard, but it is a good sore) and that's why drinking is going to be sort of "off" here for a while. Right now, alcohol is going to trigger the memory. That horrid, horrid memory. Of what was in that bucket. "There once was tepid fetidness in a garbage can, and unknown gift from a well-known man, it contained many bits, and smelled quite like shit. My nose dies from the terror of smelling it again..."

Si Vales, Valeo

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