WTF? It's kind of funny. This post was flagged on one of the two sites and not the other. Why it was flagged at all, though, is a complete and (as they say) utter mystery. I might half understand it if it were an "udder mystery," but that is not the case. So, if you were able to see the post, you needed to sell your soul to some angry god, presumably some censor reading the blog in India.
Well. . . at least I have one reader!
I would put the entire blog under a warning if I knew how, but I am not so very tech savvy on this site. I am, however, made aware that the blog's future is not my purview. Enjoy it while you may. . . if you do.
I assume, though, that many (relatively) may have been suspicious of clicking on the link. We have been taught that clicking on links is a good way to get a virus, and the next thing you know, you are being held up by unscrupulous hackers for money unless you want your parents and friends to know you've been whacking to some really weird and possibly illegal shite.
"But I've never done that!"
Are you sure? Next thing you know, you're wracking/racking your memory in panic, and then you remember that one time. . . .
Oh:
The spelling 'rack' is now used in all senses except for the seaweed called wrack. So it's "rack and ruin," … "racking my brains," and so on. Some other usage guides provide a way of dealing with this question that has a certain brutal charm: just stop using the word wrack (Merriam-Webster).
So. . . yesterday I did take my fat and crippled self to the water's edge to frolic with my friends. It was quite something, really, a private island on the spring fed river full of turtles, fish, and alligators that has riverside seating and a huge patio bar. How I'd never been there, I don't know.
"Has this been here long?"
"I moved here in 1989 and it was here."
Then I remembered when I was a teenager my friend's mother and step-father used to come to a place on the river to sit and drink on the weekends. I remember it, in the main, because they bragged that they sat and had drinks with Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.
"They're really nice people. Just down to earth."
Roy Rogers and Dale Evans drinking at a redneck bar? It seemed weird to me even then, mostly because I couldn't imagine the wholesome Roy and Dale ever drinking. What in the world?
I didn't get there until noon. I wasn't sure about going, but I was getting text messages every few minutes.
"Where are you? Where are you now? You're missing all the fun. Text me when you get to the parking lot."
There were pictures.
When I did get to the parking lot, the first thing I saw was two very pretty teenage girls in the smallest thong bathing suits I had ever seen. Heart in mouth, I thought to just start the car and leave. However. . . .
I didn't text when I got to the parking lot, though. I just walked down to the river's edge and looked at the crowd. The river was narrow here, perhaps thirty yards from bank to bank, a sea wall running along the concession side. Paddle boards and floats were tethered to cleats. People were floating all along the river. As I walked toward the bar, I heard someone call my name.
My friends were lying on tethered paddle boards. Two other women I had never met sat on the seawall. I was introduced and struggled to settle next to them. Oy! My knee did not want to bend. My back did not want to, either. I dangled my feet in the seventy degree water. Or was it cooler? I can't remember.
"Get in. Cool off. Do you want a beer?"
I shook my head from side to side in answer.
"I'm good for now."
I sat and listened to the women talk, and I couldn't make out absolutely who was a lesbian and who was just playing. There was a lot of lesbian sexual innuendo.
I had written to the girl who asked me there that I was hung over from the night before.
"The bartender liked me, I guess, because she kept pouring me three finger scotches and I kept drinking them."
"I had to look that up," she said. "I didn't know what you meant by a three finger pour."
And everyone laughed. They knew what three fingers were used for, but not at a bar.
"What is it?"
"It means a double shot."
I put three fingers out to show the visuals of how much whiskey that would be. Whatever. It went like that throughout the day. But I was having fun and the women were nice. I sat next to a very friendly woman who was a hoot as they used to say in my old neighborhood, funny as she could be. She told me about having her tibia broken and re-located at the age of twenty one because of a defect that made it painful to walk. She showed me the scar. She showed me the scar, too, on her neck where they had operated to fuse two of the vertebrae in her neck.
"How'd you injure that," one of the women asked?
"Too many blowjobs," the woman next to me answered to much laughter and dramatic disgust.
"No, I hurt it in a diving accident."
She was a real outdoor girl who preferred animals to people she said. She had been a water polo player.
"I saw water polo on t.v. last night at the bar. That has to be the most boring spectator sport ever."
I've known water polo players and know that the real action is underwater.
"Yea. . . you wear the tightest bathing suit you can get. The girls use their feet to try to hook it and pull you underwater. They are constantly cunt-kicking you. Before a match, they inspect your toe and fingernails and if they don't like the length you have to file them down right there in front of them. People try to scratch you all the time."
Later, when the woman was floating in the water holding onto one of the boards on which my friend was lying, I learned a new term--tongue punching. It was something to do with. . . oh, never mind. But as I said, I couldn't tell who was a lesbian and who was simply curious. I did a lot of grinning and nodding.
It was hot, but I didn't want to get in the water. My back was killing me, though, from sitting on the seawall dangling my feet. I had to get up, but I looked a bit like a wounded walrus doing so. I tried not to cry out in anguish and embarrassment, but it was a hideous thing to watch, I am sure.
"Oh. . . pull one of those chairs up. . . here. . . let me get it for you."
She slithered out of the water and started pulling one of the Adirondacks down to the seawall before I could straighten up.
"Do you want a beer?"
I was ready for one. My friend went up and bought an iced bucket full of beers, and when she got back, she handed me one of the metal bottles. They were wet and sweaty, and when I tried to unscrew the top. . . .
"Do you want me to open that for you," asked the water polo woman?
"Maybe," I laughed. "No. . . I've got this. . . I'm a man!"
She looked at me sideways.
"What?"
"I was kidding," I said. "What the fuck? I worked around you WOKE fuckers my whole life,"
"Oh."
Some humor doesn't translate well with every crowd.
"I was married to a petite woman who I often called Beowulf because she had incredibly strong fingers. She could open anything. At parties, when someone couldn't open something, I'd tell them to give it to her, and sure enough, without seeming effort, she'd pop the thing right open. She'd stick the wine cork back in the bottle so deep that I couldn't get it out and I'd have to ask her to do it."
Whatever.
I sat in the chair and drank the cold beer, but the sun was brutally hot if you weren't at least partially in the water, and in a bit I had to go back down to the seawall. Awkwardly. Painfully.
After a couple hours, I was done. I'd embarrassed myself enough, I thought, rolling around and bellowing like a wounded whale--did I say walrus?--and was ready to say my goodbyes and waddle back to my car.
"You're going to miss the fun."
I reminded my friends of the last time I left and they sent me a photo of them rolling around on the ground kissing.
"I always seem to," I said.
Back home, I took a soak in the tub and looked at my enormous belly thinking I would have to quit eating and drinking. Drinking. But I didn't want to. Maybe I should try Ozempic, I thought, or maybe just start TRT.
After a shower, it was almost time to go to see my mother. I made a Campari and soda. What the hell, I thought. Maybe tomorrow. Probably not.
When I got to my mother's house, she told me her tale. She had gone to her cardiology appointment that day. The day before she told me that the appointment was next week, but she had been confused, she said.
"The doctor asked me, 'Are you really 92?' and I said yes, and he said 'Really?'"
"Well that's nice. So what else did he say."
"He said that all my tests came back good, that there was nothing wrong to be concerned about."
She has been worried, so this was a good thing. God knows how my mother's generation of women have lived so long given all the fat and processed meats they have eaten, but they have.
"Well that's great news," I said. "You must be relieved."
In a bit, the bottom fell out of the sky.
"I don't mind it raining tonight," I said. "I'm beat and happy to stay home."
The day in the sun had done me in.
I made a lazy dinner, a goulash of rice, eggs, and avocado topped with sriracha. I poured a drink. My phone pinged. It was my friend. She sent a photo. It was taken by the water polo player when she was on her chair float in the river shooting over her legs. Two sets of legs and feet and manicured toes. Across my friend's outstretched body as she lay on her board, butt up. And there in the background, on the sea wall, was me looking fat and foolish.
"Thanks for inviting me. I had a fun time," I said.
It was early when I went to bed. It was early when I got up. I want to make some peanut butter toast with sliced banana. I don't feel like starting a diet today. My back and knee hurt. Maybe it is the rain, but I don't really feel like walking.
I think I'll just go back to bed and wait for the hurricane.
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