Crazy is Relative

Tonight, Miss L. and I brainstormed a photo project. I won't go into details, but it is quite an undertaking, involving 78 images that require planning, staging, models and props, and possibly a lot of post-processing. She is really good at that. I suck, and lack the proper resources anyway. I didn't intend to hang out with her all day, but she got out of work early and I had to pick up some pics from her, so we started hanging out, drinking beer and got into planning a project, something I'd been thinking about for a while, but I needed someone else on board with me and she seems game.

Miss B. came over later, agreed to be one of our models, and helped us brainstorm the images. We talked until about midnight and I drove the relatively short distance home. Perhaps I'm getting old, or more sensible, but driving home on a Saturday night is like taking your life into your hands. I stopped at a light to turn onto Briley Parkway, and whilst there, nearly got hit by not one, but two cars. One truck did a noisy and seemingly last minute u-turn right behind me and another car swerved to miss me and went barrelling through a red light. What the hell? It was like that all the way home. I was minding my own business, driving between the lines and below the speed limit, and all around me, the crazies were out to get me. Where were the cops? Oh, they were probably busy racial-profiling on Charlotte Pike or pulling over people for driving while being Mexican. I was just relieved to get back through my front door in one piece. I had been drinking beer, but not a lot, and over a long period of time, and I felt stone cold sober on the way home. If I hadn't, I'm sure the many near-death experiences I encountered would have sobered me right up.

Wine (Whine)

Claire has nothing to say really, other than she has drank an entire bottle of wine, by herself. She thinks that some would raise red flags at this, but she (to quote Shakespeare) bites her thumb at them. Claire's great excursion of the week has been to Aldi, where, in a frenzy of not having gone out anywhere, she spent rather too much money and bought way too much meat and charcoal. Well, she will be well fed for the next couple of weeks.

There's an amazing deal going on in Nashville right now, and it's not Groupon related. Main Street Liquors on Gallatin Road (code name: Ghetto Liquors) has acclimated to its clientele, which is homeless people and East Nashville broke pseudo-yuppies (kind of like myself, but I am not even pseudo-yuppie enough to live in the ENash). My old roommate, who has been mentioned before on this blog, Miss C., introduced me to this place a few years ago. There's an amazing deal there: three bottles of wine for 10.99. It works out at $12 exactly with tax. Back in the day, when we first started going there, you had to pick through the rubbish and the expired stuff to find something semi-decent. I'll admit (and this is a shameless window into my shady personality) to going there before a party to stock up on cheap stuff for people to drink who were too cheap to bring enough booze to satiate themselves at my parties. That was Ghetto Liquor's main function.

However, lately, they have begun to really evaluate their clientele. Now they still have the 3 for 10.99 deal, but they also have more upmarket three-fors. There's a 3 for 13.99 and a 3 for 21.99, and all are wines sold elsewhere in Nashville for much higher prices. The more expensive deals tempt me every time I go in, and I darken their door often these days.

However, as mentioned earlier, this girl works a temp job, for crappy money, but there are still needs that have to be met, and wine is one of them. I require (because I have champagne taste on a Nat Light budget) decent wine and lots of it at a good price. Friends introduced me to Gato Negro, which is a lovely Chilean Sav Blanc for 3 for 10.99. Even my budget and drinking habits can handle that. I love Montez, which is a reminder of past relationship blah de blah de blah, but it's $10 a bottle, and to me, and one of my snobbier friends, Gato Negro tastes just like it.  I hope no one is really reading this blog, because I'm giving away great secrets, which I'm sure will end up on a certain Tennessean's columnist's page (no names mentioned on purpose) and ruin everything. Not having a car is screwing up my plans because tonight I paid the same amount for one bottle of wine here in Old Hickory.

So I started this blog in the third person, which is always a sign that Claire is tipsy. Time to take Claire to bed because she has to get up in the morning and work a totally pointless job. Seriously, Claire has worked out a way to make her job completely obsolete, but shush, don't tell anyone...

Stranded!

I'm stranded between work and home for the next few days and the thought is depressing the hell out of me. I do not want to be home, alone, bored. I'm sure there's plenty I could be doing with my time like cleaning out the sock drawer, or rearranging my CD's into alphabetical order. Or perhaps I could mow my grass or finish some laundry, or remember what the vacuum cleaner looks like.

My parents are borrowing my car. My mother is taking me to work and picking me up again, and at all other times, I am stranded here. I also have hurt my back somehow, so heavy housework and lawn-mowing is not in my immediate future. So tonight, life pretty much sucks. I was hoping to go out and distract myself from my life, if I can't actually divorce it right now, but that plan is pretty much shot. So, I'm in a funk.

What's the funk about, you ask, or maybe you didn't, but I'll tell you anyway. Radio Silence was interrupted by a transmission last week, and it has me funked out. AMWUDM sent a message asking if I was o.k. I replied. He answered "Yup." Two months of not speaking and "Yup." I think my former theory that he's gone completely off his rocker might actually be the most on target. I don't even get a real word? I'm not worthy of a REAL WORD? I guess not, I am just the good time girl after all. That's what he said when we broke up (he really does have a way with words), after months of professing love for me, that "we had a good time." I honestly could have smacked him across the face for that one. Perhaps I should have, maybe it would have knocked some sense into him. Was that supposed to make me feel better? "I broke your heart, but damn, we had a really great time doing it. See ya around kiddo!"

We did have a flood, and it's conceivable, possibly, that I could have drowned, but still, he doesn't care that he broke my heart into a million completely unrecognizable pieces, but he cares that I'm not drowned, or dead, or my house isn't washed away?

I have a nibbling doubt from that, one that creeps forward from the back of my head at inconvenient times, that maybe I am the Good Time Girl. Maybe I'm not the girl men marry or have kids with or hang out with at barbecues with their parents with. Maybe I'm just the Good Time. I drink, I swear, I have a good time. I like to talk about sex and politics and get feisty about both. Perhaps that's not what men want in the girls they marry or settle down with. I should be the demure virgin (whether real or just in demeanor), the Angel of the Household, as the Victorians would have it. It does no good to ponder though, because I'm just not that kind of girl and will never be.

I promise to interrupt my self-indulgent and whiny posts with picture postings soon. I'm working on the 150 or so photographs I uploaded a few days ago and I'm finding the sheer volume a little overwhelming, but I'm getting there, I promise. They are divided into albums, so that's a step in the right direction. Well, me and my very sore back are going to bed with a heavy dose of painkiller.