Intervention From Within

 What A Difference A Day Makes

Late yesterday afternoon, I left the building in the middle of the tropical storm type thing that the weather lady gave us.

When I lived in Phoenix, we had a very nice weather lady who only gave us rain a handful of times a year. She was a bit bi-polar and liked to roast us in the middle of the summer, with her 111 degree days, but, nothing like the local lady here, who seems to be somewhat of a drama queen.

I wish they would swap her with that lady, and send her out to Arizona, where they would probably enjoy her floods and hurricanes, to break up the monotony.

It was raining very heavily, and my umbrella, I could only crack open half way, or it would have been turned inside out in short order.

So, I got to the store, soaked pretty much from the shoulders down. I hadn't even tried to avoid puddles up to my ankles along the way.

One guy at the register, behind the Covid plexiglass immediately pleaded with me to leave the umbrella at the front door and not drip all over the floor.

I went and got a bottle of Yellow Tail Cabernet/Shiraz that had a date of 2015 on it. For some reason that store has some old bottles of wine with labels faded to a lighter hue than the newer ones.

I had tried one of the same kind that was from 2014 and found it to be "corked."

Corked is a state that comes from one tiny bubble, maybe just one molecule, of air having gotten into the bottle, making it so that instead of aging and becoming better "like fine wine," it turns into something that tastes like what I imagine the water that gathers in the bottom of a dumpster after a rainstorm would taste, mixed with fine wine.

I decided to gamble on the 2015 one, because its label wasn't faded, meaning it hadn't been in direct sunlight like the '14 one. The corking occurs when a bottle is heated up so much that it forces some wine out through the not totally impregnable cork, which is what they used to use to stop wine bottles, before the rubber cork was invented. Another case where a natural thing is inferior to a man made thing.

Then, when the bottle is cooled back down, the vacuum, over time; 7 years in this case; is able to draw maybe a single molecule of oxygen into the bottle, which is enough to kick off a lot of undesirable chemical reactions in the bottle.

There was a flash of lightning outside which knocked the card reading satellite machine offline, as soon as I had stepped to the register. This was similar to the crack of thunder/bolt of lightning that had occurred the last time I rode the bike, as soon as I had sat on it, on my way to get weed from Bobby. This is also something that a religious person might think was God, trying to tell them something. (I'm starting to wonder if "God" is just a conspiracy theory).

So, with the machine down, it was cash only. I dug into my pocket, expecting to be something like a quarter short of what I needed -there's that conspiracy, again. But, I wasn't going to be dealt that hand, and have to return empty handed and dripping water -so wet that I would even have to change my underwear- to Sacred Heart. What happened was an even better zap by "God."

The wine was indeed corked, even though it was a year newer than the 2014 one.

It was nasty tasting, and I wasn't up to going back out in the tropical storm, because by then the power might have been out and the whole store closed, plus it had taken almost all the cash I had to get the wine and a can of beer to drink along the walk home. I wasn't even holding the umbrella up anymore at that point; it would have been pointless.

So, I fried up some mahi mahi fillets that I had gotten the night that I messed up and got a flat tire and then got high, neglecting the bags of groceries on the handlebars of my bike with the newly flattened tire, until all the frozen stuff had thawed out.

The combination of this improperly thawed fish (there is always a caution of: remove the fish from bag before thawing) and the corked wine, became the perfect storm for me to feel as bad as I have in probably years, like I had poisoned myself.

This was enough to give me pause to appreciate just how good I have felt in general for most of my life; having never had to go to a doctor from the age of say, 22 until the age of 52.

"If this is how I felt all the time I would commit suicide" was how I felt. I got up, thirsty as hell at about 4 in the morning and drank a good portion of a 32 ounce bottle of prune juice and then waited for it to have its effect upon me, then flushed all the e-coli and the corked wine down the toilet.

I took the Slime tube out of the bike just now and found a pinhole leak by submerging it and squeezing it. The Slime then seemed to do the job that it hadn't done when the tube was in the bike and I was soon unable to get a bubble to escape through the hole. I figure the Slime tube was in the same condition as the corked wine, probably having sat on the shelf too long in some warehouse so that the Slime dried up some inside of it.

Now I am going to put the second tube of the 2 pack I bought in the tire and push the bike to the Shell and continue my effort to get a tire to stay inflated for more than a few days. I won't grab another one of the old bottles of wine, but, maybe some beer to go with a hockey game that will hopefully be on TV tonight.

I'm not ready to quit drinking yet, so this blog will continue to suck for a while longer. I was very angry yesterday; my mind playing a non stop reel of every person I have ever been pissed off at in my life, replaying scenes as I occasionally got up and punched an imaginary figure that could have been any one of several people from the past. Just typical alcoholic stuff...