Hi, Folks...

To answer your question, John, I am doing pretty well, thank you. I've got a fairly severe case of end-of-summer burnout, but that should pass. Labor Day is upon us, we'll get our asses kicked for the next three and a half days, and then things should be a little more manageable. We've been working seriously short-handed for about a month now and we're all ready to blow. Well, I know I am.
Being short has actually been a bit of a blessing the last two weeks, instead of scheduling extra days for coverage, and working 70 hour weeks myself, I've just closed the past couple of Tuesdays and Wednesdays...and it has been glorious. I've been able to mow my yard, to my neighbors' delight, I've cleaned my room (though I'm really not sure how it got messy) and I've been up to the big city to visit the kids and spoil them with Indian food and trips to Hastings.
My love life is still non-existent, but I'm pretty sure that in at least a couple alternate universes I'm having one hell of a smoking hot affair with one of my waitresses (you've seen a picture of her, John). She is waaaaaayyyyyy too young and pretty for an old fat man like me, but as we used to say back in Oklahoma, she makes my chiggers itch. In at least one alternate reality, America is being ran by jack-booted thugs (okay, that's not much of a stretch) and she and I go on a multi-state crime spree to help raise money for the resistance. I die in a hail of gunfire buying time for her to escape an ambush, and she later becomes the leader of those fighting alongside the kangaroo people to overthrow our corporate overlords.
Yes, I know that's Tank Girl, I never said I was original.
Maria, I promise you a rant soon...I probably could have written it today, but I already vocalized it on one of my poor vendors...I'm not sure of the actual count, but I think I said "fuck" seven times in five seconds.

Paper Man...great movie.

The blank page, or screen, truly is one daunting son of a bitch. I've been sitting here for quite a while now trying to think of what to write and nothing really comes to mind. Things continue as before...work, home, work, home, work, and so on with no real distractions, the days and weeks and months just sliding by until I look back and see all that has happened around me while I've been been working, or sleeping, or drunk.

Well, this is in danger of slipping into a rant, and that's not what I want to do. Been doing too much of that lately, but it has helped me to see that maybe I don't need to stay in this little mountain town for the next five years (that's when the cafe is paid off), maybe I can do two more and then sell, make enough to move and start again somewhere else. Then again, I should probably just push through and get the damned thing done. I've already got two could-have-been-retired dates behind me, and another coming up. I think I'll stick this one out and see what happens.

I know that I need to find something outside of work that inspires me, because work no longer does, the restaurant is like an infant that will never learn to wipe its own ass, or an extremely high maintenance spouse, and I'm just fucking tired of it all...the constant repairs, scheduling headaches, financial juggling, employees who don't give a shit, and don't even get me started on the customers. There I go on the rant again.

On the upside, I am sitting in bed typing this stone sober. No, I haven't quit, but this is the first night in quite a while that I'll be falling asleep as opposed to passing out, and that's a start.

Hi, I'm Eric...

I never really understood addiction. Even as a smoker, I felt like I could quit any time, I had done it, several times. I just couldn’t understand how someone could be powerless against a chemical, how they just couldn’t say I’m not going to do that anymore. Until recently.

As a kid, I hardly drank alcohol, I really only remember a couple of times in high school and a handful more times in college. It just wasn’t a priority, and it was always just for “special occasions.” In the army, I drank more, but still pretty much kept it to weekends. After I married, it was even more rare that I would have a drink. I don’t think that it was a conscious thing, it just wasn’t something that I did.

After Y left the kids and I, I still didn’t drink much. I was just too busy. When Z and I started dating, and later married, drinking became more common, socially and at home, but it still seemed under control. We’d go out for a few beers on payday, and on the weekends we’d share a six pack.

When she left, I didn’t even touch a drink for a month, I just didn’t want to get drunk and all that that might bring. It was probably almost a year before I really started drinking a lot, that summer was…stupid. I spent lots of nights sleeping at the café because I was too drunk to drive home. Sometimes, I drove anyway.

Now, I’ve quit a dozen times. The longest time was six weeks, the shortest a couple of days. The thing is, I don’t even want to quit. I like beer, I like to take a shot of tequila, I like to hang out with my friends at the bar. If I could just do that, have a drink or two and then stop, that would be fine, I wouldn’t even think about quitting. The problem is that when I start, I don’t stop until late in the night. On my worse days I start before noon, grabbing a beer from the walk-in at work, and will then drink all day long, and be pretty much sober the whole time. On the way home, I’ll stop and get a six pack to drink while watching TV or a movie. When that six pack is done, I’ll wish that I had gotten a twelve pack.

It’s easier to stop completely than it is to slow down, or to stop once I’ve started.

I quit smoking again a few years ago, but I still smoke one every once in a while, sometimes they taste and feel really good, and sometimes they don’t, but I never really feel like going to buy a pack and starting up again, so I don't beat myself up over it. I sure wish I could do that with alcohol.

I never really considered myself an alcoholic, I always preferred drunkard, until Sam pointed out that only alcoholics keep track of how many days they’ve gone without a drink.

So, Eric, what's been going on? Well...a whole bunch, and not much at all. My kids are all moved out (at least for the time being), with both of the girls attending UNM, and my son living nearby with his girlfriend. He still works at the cafe, so we see each other regularly, and I try to get up to Albuquerque to see the girls at least once a month.
So, I find myself living alone for the very first time in my life. The dirty dishes are my dirty dishes, the laundry piled up is mine, the reason there is no food in the fridge is because I ate it...and I kind of like it.
Work is still the same, a hectic summer, trying to get caught up on back taxes from the previous winter, only to be sliding behind again already. Ah, the life of the small business owner in a tourist town!
I met a woman, actually we'd known each other in high school. She messaged me out of the blue on FB one day in March, and after that we messaged, texted, or emailed back-and-forth nearly every day until July when we finally met and spent a day together. At one point during our correspondence, while we were talking about relationships, she wrote that she believed that she felt that she would KNOW when she met the right man. Apparently, I am not him.
Up until our meeting we had really connected, there was a solid feeling of friendship and the beginning of something more, I think, and I really wanted it to...be. Since then, we talked on the phone a few times, we always laughed a lot, but then we just sort of drifted.
So, still no prospects in that department, but that's alright...you get right down to it I'm a 44 year old, out of shape, twice divorced, struggling business owner, whose credit rating is in the toilet from putting his business's and his kid's needs ahead of the need to pay his bills on time. Oh, and I've got a bit of a drinking problem. Not exactly the types of things nice ladies are looking for. No one that I would be interested in being with is going to look at the above description and say, "Wow, this one's really fucked up, I can have a great time fixing him!"
Am I beating myself up? No, it's an honest assessment, and I'm okay with it, because, on the other hand, I've somehow managed to raise three very good young adults, in spite of their mother leaving when they were young and their step-mother doing the same later, and in spite of some serious miss-steps in my parenting techniques. I also think that I'm a pretty nice guy.
I'm not going to go on patting myself on the back...I just don't want to give an inaccurate sense of how I feel about myself. Could I be better? Of course. I could also be a hell of a lot worse.
I'm thinking that I'll examine a few of these sentences in a bit more depth in some future posts, and I don't think it will be too long of a wait, if you're interested, because I'd forgotten how therapeutic writing can be, how it can help one see things from a new perspective.
I hope everyone is well, I'm slowly getting caught up on your blogs.

Wow, I’ve got some catching up to do…well, with Maria and John anyway. Everyone else that I came to look forward to reading over the years has either stopped, or considerably slowed their writing, but you two continue to pump out the posts.

I’ve scrolled back and think I know where to pick everyone up again; now that we are entering one of the slowest times of the year at work, I hope to be able to get some reading done again, blogs and books. I’ve got a whole stack of books I’ve been buying and setting aside for just this time of the year.

Hopefully, I’ll also get some writing done. Lots of things have happened, though they really don’t seem that interesting in hindsight…really just more of the same that I’ve commented on over the last few years, but there are some cool things in the works for next year. I’ll try to get some thoughts on “paper” soon.