Well I can say one thing is improving, namely my ability to survive my little runs in the park, which is good considering the first one two weeks ago put my legs almost completely out of action for the rest of the week. Seriously, haven't known muscle to tear like that since the first time I had sex. No, wait, the second time. No, wait; you don't want to hear about it. Sorry.
As if that wasn't strenuous enough, Luca announced his need for a squash racquet and suggested we cycle over to Argos and pick one up that he'd seen online. Not a bad idea, with the sun shining and a brisk breeze. We went the back route, avoiding my buddy's posh gallery opening because, well, I went to the Wednesday one and there's only so much rhubarb champagne you can drink in one week. Wait, maybe that should be the next challenge; I'll give up not drinking champagne every day. Ugh. We rolled down through fields and down towpaths, over the motorway and towards town. I felt positively sprightly but Luca was sweating freely behind me.
"Shit, man; this is the long road."
"No dude, you'll see; we'll come to the industrial estate just now."
"What about Argos on the high street?"
"..there's an Argos on the high street too?"
Balls. I'd dragged the poor guy about five miles out of his way for nothing. Not only that, when we finally arrived Argos was out of stock and even the sports shop next door had sold out of squash racquets. It wasn't all bad though; I was doing surprisingly well considering my earlier exertions and had even begun to feel hungry after all this exercise. We stopped in at McDonalds for a large Coke and planned our next move. Luca made to light up but, not knowing whether the 'No Smoking' sign on the door applied to the garden or not, and being surrounded by kids, decided against it. I felt curiously liberated from worrying about permission to slurp my drink and waved it belligerently at a small child.
The one thing I didn't really think through about starting this experiment on a Saturday morning was of course that Saturday night would be the first thing to happen next. In a literary sense this is probably foolish because what you guys want to read about is all the dull minutiae of me getting through the week and then the grand challenge - can Carl go out in town without the social lubricant of beer to keep him afloat? Well, shit. Too late now; I've already been out.
To be honest, it was disappointingly similar to how I expected, which is again a bit of a downer given that the entire point of this blog was to expose the truth about how my dependence on stupid unnecessary crap was further out of control than I had feared and subsequently perhaps to morph into a diary about some drying-out clinic for social bookmarking sheep. Christ, I actually had to delete the 'le' there. Maybe the real challenge is ahead, on Monday.
But it's Saturday, or rather it was, and you want to hear about it. I was out with my long-suffering flatmate who, in between being honked at with a vintage klaxon and beaten mercilessly at ping-pong, manages to quell his murderous rage long enough for me to get him aimable-drunk. He was in the mood for a pizza so we took in dinner at Zizzi's. It was remarkable, I'll be honest, how pleasant my large bottle of Spellegrino was. Out with the vino, in with the.. no, wait, too early for that nonsense. Oh no wait, it will always be too early if I never get drunk! Holy cow, here's an unanticipated pitfall; without the chemical excuse my sense of humour is laid bare, honest and uncoloured for others to endure neat and undiluted. Is the world ready for such torment? Evidently, Luca was well ahead as he ordered a bottle of Peroni so large it might actually have held more beer than I had mineral water. He kindly wafted it under my nose and I stabbed him in the eye with a breadstick.
The salad was excellent. I can't face having anything more substantial in this weather, especially not at Zizzi's which manages to be stiflingly hot in February, never mind June, because it's underground on the high street. Does mean you're below eye level while ogling the girls on the high street though which gives you the vital half second edge if you realise you need to look away before being caught by her muscular chaperone. Dismemberment might well have encroached on my enjoyment of the delicate parmesan dusted leaves in my bowl. Anyway, it was excellent but not filling and as I reached the end I felt an entirely unfamiliar and yet irritating sensation of dissatisfaction.
I was definitely no longer hungry - the portions at chain Italian restaurants around here are rarely stingy unless you go for a steak - but somehow I didn't feel like I'd eaten. It was rather like reading a SomethingAwful forum thread of a story in progress - I'd wasted half my evening as expected but I didn't know how whether the Zerg had dished out his ass-kicking to the aggressive customer or not. I'd parked the meat van in the tradesmen's alley but not unloaded my lard. It was the beer, I was sure of it. All the cues were there - evening, restaurant meal, good conversation, hot Italian man.. erm, no wait, scratch that, let's say.. okay, the prospect of a night out, and yet there was no velvety hand stroking the back of my neck and telling me to relax, that I was full, that the meal had been excellent and, most importantly, that I was funny. Alcohol aids digestion, I have often opined, but I had been unaware that might only be because my body had forgotten how to digest a meal that wasn't swimming in a half gallon of local ale. Fiddlesticks, I thought. Nothing like realising your digestive system is broken for ruining your night.
We walked into town from the restaurant and Luca smoked, taking special care to moan with pleasure so that I might share in his enjoyment, the rat bastard. I bought him a beer, nontheless, and partook of a lemonade and soda. It's a good one because it looks like a pint of gin and tonic so people think you just got back from safari. In Victorian times. Actually, it's just that it's more bearable than the sickly over-sweet diabetic's piss they normally pass off as lemonade. I took a sip and, amazingly, it was sweeter than a baby tapir in a tutu. In fact, there was so much sugar in it I immediately began to hallucinate baby tapirs in tutus. No wait, sorry; that's normal. I think a full pint of their neat lemonade would stop even the most hardened candy-addicted, sweet-toothed eight year-old dead in her tracks. Perhaps literally, if any got on her shoes.
It wasn't very early so most people were fairly well oiled by this point and, as we stood on the terrace, I could take in a number of scenes. Over Luca's shoulder I spotted a very attractive girl being dragged almost against her will over the watershed of amusement by two guys in short sleeved shirts. Her not unattractive friend was completely sidelined and, without the benefit of
sobriety, her face was a window to her utter despair as she stared mournfully into the middle distance while her companion fielded quips and comebacks from the pitchers to one side. John Nash wouldn't have come up with any theses around this group, I can tell you. I was distracted by whatever Luca was talking about but as I sensed a lull coming up I considered asking her if she was alright but when I looked at her again she was talking animatedly with one of the blokes, flashing a lovely smile and pointing animatedly at the garden below as he leaned in, fingertips in the small of her back. Blimey, that was quick.
Even quicker than that, her friend decided it was time to go and they left, much to the guys' disappointment. It was fascinating to me to be able to see this rollercoaster of intimacy unencumbered by the blurry goggles of my own inebriation and I would have grilled the boys a bit but they were already too busy hitting on two overly made-up fortysomethings at the next table. "No, no, it's not like that," one was saying as he struggled to punch numbers into his mobile. "I just don't want to go to Indiana Jones tomorrow on my own.."
I did feel a certain obligation to chat to somebody I didn't know, to see how shallow the waters of my social interaction truly were without a layer of booze laid on top but for some reason I just couldn't find anyone I wanted to talk to. Girls walked by that I'm sure would have been gorgeous if it weren't for the makeup, applied from an Early Learning Centre range of colours, seemingly with brushes better suited to recolouring a ballroom than a twenty year-old's face. There were actual crumbs of.. something, cracking off the creases outside their eyes and balancing on the ends of weird, freakishly long lashes. Lips were lurid and looked like they were sealed in car lacquer, edged so harshly it could even have been done with masking tape. It was weird; with booze or without this farce of gilded lilly insanity these girls could well have been real stunners but I'd entered a forbidden twilight zone where I coasted, alone, bewildered by the array of familiar yet terrifyingly strange and unpleasant sights.
The worst part was that I had begun to develop a headache. That might have been the sugar of course.
On the way to our local we passed the hippest bar in town in the old station. I say 'hippest' in the sense of 'most full of people who can't make up their own minds and just go wherever the most people are'. It seemed, even for Saturday night, to be weirdly over-full both inside and out. It looked more like the front row at Glastonbury on a sunny day than a classy drinking establishment. Normally, this is a good sign. If a set proportion of girls are attractive then it's simple maths that a greater number of people increases the chances of hot women being present, unless there's a drinks promotion on for people who don't wash, or a quiz where all the questions are about Hollyoaks and Britain's got braindead twerps but those would hardly make good business sense so I can safely assume that's not the case. I'm sure I'd seen this exact sight many times before but on this occasion I didn't see my normal increased crumpet availability but rather a mildly frightening throng of rowdy drunkards, all pressed up against one another and spilling drinks. I could not actually see myself getting in through the door, much less to the bar, without serious elbowing and frankly I didn't fancy my chances. This, I must stress, is not normal in the slightest.
As we descended from the station, I noticed that the Italian restaurant by the steps was hosting some sort of traditional feast. Animatedly, I read the board aloud and it sounded pretty good (although that may just have been my voice, I'll admit) in fact so good that I was saying how lucky we were to have seen the sign and that we should book until I got to the price, £65 a head. At that precise moment a vague memory bubbled up in my brain. I'd been through this exact sequence before; I was sure of it. I wondered for a moment how many times but couldn't put a fix on even one precise occasion.
"Perhaps," I said, "it's just deja vu." We kept walking. "I can't remember anything else, which might well be a si.." It was like somebody had pressed pause; over to the right, by a fire escape and out of the sight of the hordes in the station were two of the longest legs I'd seen since I got back from photographing giraffes on safari. Not only that, they were utterly beautiful and by some kind of wizardry they appeared to be getting longer. Oh no, wait a minute, they weren't. The pissed-up owner of said legs was hiking up her skirt to show her rear to a snorting friend with a camera. Marvellous. There were four of them in total (girls, not legs) and at this range they could have been anyone - well, anyone under the age of 20. All at once the visual hook was swamped by feelings of pity, concern, irritation both with them and myself. Balls to it. I kept walking.
"Hey, man; have you seen?" Luca was still stood, gawping. "I've never seen this things."
"Dude, I'm walking. Stay if you like."
"With men, sure, but not with women." Or girls, I thought. "This one, the skirt is right up, hey?" He caught up with me. "Never this things."
The strangest part was that afterwards I thought maybe I should have gone back. I've often thought that shying away from any experience or social situation is a wasted opportunity but when I think about it now I can't really see where that would have gone. A flash of an arse may look good - in a purely aesthetic sense - but once you've seen that are you going to make the effort to buy drinks and talk your way into seeing it again? Had I been merry, might I have attempted to do so, become impatient and tried it on a little too strongly while under the impression that they were right up for it, subsequently ending up in custody? Most importantly, would I have forgiven myself such an indescretion while drunk when, sober, I passed it up entirely? Should I feel bad about that?
Christ, no wonder I slept badly.
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