Month: December 2012

A rainy day

Yesterday was a bit of a wash, really. I watched the disappointing James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only and just hung around the house, still kind of recovering from Friday afternoon. Today, though, my weekly writing group started back up again, at least for a little while, and I cobbled together this:

When the hurricane came through, the dead wizard came back to life and the ghost hunter was finally released from prison.

You probably have already heard this story, or at least a part of it. The governors of Eld were quick to classify what they could, to quarrantine the northern hills where the storm did its worst, but the basic facts escaped their net. There are few across the great expanse of worlds who have not heard about the wizard, Dead Man Jack, or about the woman, Maribel, the would-be hunter who was forced to kill her father twice.

And yet it’s a story that deserves to be re-told, I think, and this time told beyond the basic facts. I can’t pretend to any special knowledge; I wasn’t on the hills that day, and I wouldn’t even make planetfall on Eld for another week, by which point Maribel and Jack both would be long gone. I was not called here to investigate their crimes, nor to root out the cause of the still as yet unexplained storm. I was just another constable, young and naive and fresh from basic on Eld’s sister moon, Brahms — and yet, as a constable, I did have access to reports I might never have seen otherwise. Reports the governors have long kept secret. I know Jack’s real name, for instance, or at least the one that supposedly brought him back to life, and I think, after all these years, I know where he and his daughter disappeared to. The answers have been there all along on the page. It’s just that so few of us have been encouraged to look at those pages.

Dead Man Jack. He was called that long before the first time he died, long before he had even registered himself as a wizard. The official term, of course, is “technomage,” but I’ll be damned if that doesn’t sound even sillier than “wizard,” which is what everyone on Eld knew Jack to be. He wasn’t much of one, from all accounts, either not given to show or incapable of it. If it wasn’t for his daughter, and the strange circumstances of her birth, it’s almost certain no one would have remembered Jack before the year of the hurricane.

Then I came home and watched The Stuff, which was interesting but also pretty disappointing.

And that, plus the crossword puzzle and some dreary rain, was my Sunday.

Hard at work, or…

I’m going to make a bold statement here and suggest that excess consumption of alcohol, particularly in the middle of the afternoon and on an empty stomach, is not good for you.

I had fun at yesterday’s office holiday party, but, if I’m being honest, I also had a little too much to drink. There was food, much better and more plentiful than at last year’s party, but I almost certainly had more whiskey in me than anything else. I remember everything that happened, the content of the conversations I had, et cetera. It’s not as if I embarrassed myself — although there was a moment, at the bar afterward, when a co-worker (who I genuinely would have like to have talked to) tried to ask me a question, and I simply could not make my brain and ears understand what she was asking me. (This was all the more disappointing because I think it’s the first time we’ve ever really talked, and I couldn’t muster more than “What? I’m sorry, I can’t — what?” I didn’t even see her again on my way out.)

I didn’t join the group at the second of the two after-parties, probably recognizing that four mixed drinks and a beer in as many hours was probably already pushing things for me, but rather stumbled out and got the subway back to Penn Station. I’d like to view this as a victory of good judgment over pickled brain cells…except that, at Penn Station, I decided to have KFC for dinner. So, clearly, I was still not thinking clearly.

I got home sometime after 8 o’clock, and spent most of the next twelve hours asleep. I don’t know that I’m fully recovered, but rest and re-hydration have seriously helped.

I am not, as I have probably mentioned here before, much of a drinker, and only ever drink socially, rarely, usually much more sensibly. I’m keenly aware of the dangers of overdoing it, and of alcoholism, above and beyond the hangover I’m still dealing with today. I mean, let’s be honest here: KFC is pretty darn terrible.

Well, I don’t plan on drinking again anytime soon. (This morning, even the thought of whiskey puts my stomach into knots.) I’m off from work for the next almost three weeks, a nice extended holiday vacation, and I managed to get everything and more than I expected to done before I left to become inebriated at noon on Friday. I have a lot of work waiting for me when I get back — or, I’m hoping not, lots of e-mailing instructors to ask why they haven’t sent me their reviews so I can work on them when I get back — but for now it’s just movies and TV and hangover recovery and, eventually, when my brain’s a little better, reading and writing.