And The Avalanche Cascades

With the stroke of my silver tongue wagging "As soon as I walk out this door, I'm nothing, but your neighbor. Borrowed cups of sugar and maybe half and half on a Saturday morning and that's it," I've completely unraveled whatever was raveling with my neighbor. I think it's for the best.

Here's how it started.

I was on the second day of a coolout period that included cooking angel hair pasta with olive oil, hot pepper flakes, cherry tomatoes and basil leaves. It was spicy, yet delicious and cooking it was the fun part. Yesterday was the second day. I worked through lunch and headed to the driving range after work intending to whack some balls and then eat and then enjoy a glass of wine and sleep like a baby. Solitary. Confined. Okay. Three bottles of wine, a myoplex bar and two cups of coffee in 36 hours. That's your 100% RDA of bad idea.

I got home from the range and showered and cracked open a moderately priced bottle of Cabernet. Dropped the tuning on my guitar to a D and ran through a Minus the Bear song on my acoustic. Finger tapping on an acoustic is an acquired taste. I was completely into what I was doing and completely alone. Happy.

My phone rang and it was the neighbor. She had lost her keys at work and was a bit frantic. I told her to just come by when she gets home and I had a half a bottle of wine and some smokerretes for us to share while she waited for maintenance. Happiness was officially threatened.

She had had a rough day. We shared some personal/very personal thoughts. We killed the bottle of wine. We opened a bottle of Mick Fleetwood (yeah, that one) Merlot. It was a gift from a neighbor for Christmas. It tasted like Tusk.

She got tired of waiting for maintenance and thought she could pick her lock with allen wrenches that I loaned her. I watched attentively at her lock picking techniques and then pulled her screen out and popped her window off the hinges and asked her if she would like me to let her in. I let her in and then got a screw lock for her window so no one could do what I did again.

We hung out for a bit at her apartment and listened to music from my iTunes library. That part was kinda awesome. She's on my network. Another bottle got opened and we sat and listened to Jeff Buckley's version of Hallelujah in a dark room. Everyone should do that once or a hundred times.

We then got to some touchy subjects about us which culminated in an ultimatum. I left a neighbor while she played Hallelujah on a loop that I could hear in my apartment. I texted her to turn it off and it persisted. I then shut down the network to turn it off. Brilliant. Don't fuck with your IT guy.

So, this morning I read our text exchange where she referred to me as drunk and mean and left her a voicemail with a neighborly apology. Three bottles of wine and eleven days of acquaintance equals one apology. Not bad.

I'm letting it go, but still have a soft spot for her. How does one do that in such a short amount of time? I'm emotionally easy. That's really the reason that I questioned the whole thing. I fall too fast.

In other news, I went to the doctor today and got my ankle checked out. It's healing. While I was there I got my annual STD screening to the question of "Have you been exposed to any STDs in the last year?" with a response of "Statistically? Probably." While there I asked him about my back. I've got a beat up L5 vertebrae from soccer and it hurts persistently. I asked him whether I should just get surgery to fix it while I still have health coverage. He recommended I go to physical therapy and I started laughing. He asked what was funny and I told him about how I dated the therapist twice. He laughed right in my fuckin' face and said "That was stupid." I'm about to send her an email and warn her. I'm sure she'll bump me to another therapist so that I can feel rejection again.

Cognitive therapy this evening. Thank god. I managed to get some material pulled together for it. Just a man with a shovel at the bottom of a hole looking at everyone else asking how he got there and how to get out.