The Weekend Report

It would have been easier to stay home and mix my own drink.

I went out to a local bar last night to hear some music
.
My marriage was happier than this bar, I said to the friend I was with.

Ice, we need ice, the bartender yelled every fifteen minutes or so and it was lugged from somewhere in a yellow bucket that may or may not have been exclusively meant to haul ice.

Every other minute a member of the wait staff slipped behind the bar to fill water glasses for a table.
Get out, the bartender would hiss, you know the rules. You don't belong back here.  It happened over and over again, and the bartender went nuts every time. One waiter was particularly adamant with his rebuttal. Apparently there was no water for the wait staff to access wherever it was that they were supposed to get it, and the bartender could just fuck himself.

Kitchen staff came out of the kitchen, hot and desperate to quench their thirst. Get out, the bartender told them too. They weaseled by him and stuffed the bar water nozzle into a glass.

It took forever to get a drink.
The place ran out of the beer it shared it shared its name with.
The bathroom needed toilet paper.

The bartender laid out his tickets from the tables as the waiters put them in. We're out of ice. I don't have a martini glass. We're out of lemons. We're out of limes. You don't belong back here. Get out. I'm really busy he told any patrons at the bar that dared to usurp his attention to order a drink. He made two guys who wanted only a Bud Light and Corona wait until he'd filled the tickets laid out in front of him.

Waiters begged for their drink orders. I'm busy, the bartender would snarl. If people can wait an hour for a cheese sandwich, they can wait 15 minutes for a pina colada.

A guy I guessed to be the owner appeared. He reprimanded the bartender, sliced lemons and limes, hauled in another keg of the eponymous beer, all while looking slightly suicidal.

I finally got the fries I ordered after asking for them a second time an hour later. They were delicious.

The music was fantastic. Everybody in the bar was grooving there in the Kingdom of the Cranky Bartender. It was all of us against him. We won.

How was your weekend?

Have you read THIS yet? George Saunders writing about Trump. Left Land vs. Right Land. I recommend it.

Les Portes de Bordeaux and Wild Night in Margaritaville

It's old news by now. But let me tell you how wild it was.

Last Thursday my mom had more work done on her root canal. Which meant that on Friday she tried out a new pain pill since the Vicodin did not work out the last time. Tramadol. Who names these things, and how can I get a job like that?-- because I love to name things. Tramadol is not a fabulous name for a pain pill, in my opinion. Trauma Dolls, however, might be a great name for a band. If you want great names for meds, read George Saunders's short story, "Escape from Spiderhead." It is a mind-blowingly great story. The names he invented for the medications induced in me serious naming envy. After reading that story, I damn near had to take some Nocovette, I was so sick with jealousy.

But back to the wild night. On Friday evening, we had dinner on a boat. Except that we were in our dining room. So not really on a boat.

Stay with me.

As my mom gingerly chewed her way through her dinner of soft foods, her head nodding, her eyes closing from time to time, M and I took turns waking her. I'm not sleeping, she'd say. Which is what she always says on these narcoleptic journeys. This, however, was a narcoleptic journey on Tramadol, and there was some serious tilting. More serious than usual. Starboard. Port. Starboard. Port. M and I shuffled our chairs closer and closer, at the ready to keep her from going overboard.

Which reminds me of a hysterical story one of my kids told me ages ago about a class of middle-schoolers who freaked out their teacher by quietly inching their desks forward every time the teacher turned to write on the blackboard.

So every time my mom opened her eyes, M and I were closer. Finally, we were all in a row. "All right," she said to M., "you do the dishes. I'm going to bed." And she did. And the next day, she was much better.

And somewhere during one our wild Margaritaville nights this past weekend, we tried cheap wine #2, Les Portes de Bordeaux 2009. Nice. Very nice. Did you know that portes in French means door. I love beautiful doors. The doors pictured in this post are on the Greek island of Naxos, not Bordeaux. But for some reason, I've been thinking of these doors.

And just to sail onwards on this random sea, if there were, as daughter C. would like, an entire channel devoted to footage from Russian dash cams, here is my list of show names:

Anna Kamerina

Brothers Kameras On or Off

Idiots

Crime and Punishment: Live!