A SORT OF HOMECOMING!

I had to sleep for 24 hours from Saturday and into an hour ago -- ah, sweet chronic fatigue syndrome -- so I haven't posted in a bit.

Yesterday I would sleep for five to six hours, until my pain would come back as my OxyContin wore off, then I would take a pill at the predetermined time. (Every day I make a med schedule as soon as I wake up so my OxyContin and Klonopin doses are as spaced out as they should be to make it possible for me to suffer the least amount possible.) And when the pills(s) would kick in I would go back to sleep.

Sleeping all day Sunday was preceded by my hanging out in downtown Lummox Saturday night. I dressed well -- a habit from living in DC and being taught what to wear and why by my best friend, a gay guy with impeccable taste -- which was suitable for where I had dinner... Which consisted of crispy duck with a spicy-sweet plum sauce that had been injected beneath a crispy, fried skin, paired with an IPA. With a few notable exceptions, the best thing to pass between my lips since I left DC -- by far.

But the place closed at 11, and I wanted to see if I could run into anyone I knew at the sports bar a parking lot away in the block-in-any-direction downtown. I succeeded, and hoisted a few with people I hadn't seen since high school, buying Jager shots for anyone who wanted them.

The good thing about offering Jager shots: not many takers. Especially good when one has absolutely no income...

So I walked around the bar, which was having karaoke night. Some people sang songs from the '80s that weren't even cool then. The rest sung country songs, which was what I expected.

I mingled with the local girls, and was pegged as gay, most likely, by a large number of them because I wasn't wearing jeans, sneakers and a flannel shirt. Otherwise I was written off as an outsider most likely conducting some kind of sociological experiment. Which they did not flatter themselves with -- it would make me "in the mist," and them gorillas.

The girls were stuffed into their tacky clothes like sausage into most-unnatural casing. The most attractive woman there would be considered hideously overweight in DC. (Just as I would be... While I lived in DC I committed the following crime against humanity: I didn't have a personal trainer.) The funniest thing, I thought, was that saying "hi" apparently counts as a pick-up line in Lummox, and not a conversation starter. I even thought, once or twice, that I was going to get a light beer tossed in my face for my having the temerity to simply greet women in the customary, two-letter, manner.

I hung about for an hour or so, appreciating (unironically) the differences between the scene in Lummox and the scene(s) in DC.

I especially appreciated the fact there's a place I can go to for perhaps the best duck in the United States -- a place where dressing well is expected... And blighted only by the fact that to pick up a woman there you have to be able to work magic on a married forty-year-old, which is beyond me.

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STEALING GOLF!

Let me preface this story by saying my parents' house is on a golf course, and we can see holes three and four from windows at the back of the home:

At seven this morning I was golfing hole four on the course, using nothing but a five iron, because I really need to figure out how that damn thing works. I've never been able to hit well with irons that aren't eight or nine.

I was out while the sun was rising and the dew was forming, knocking around about ten balls I had carried with me in my hoodie's pouch. On the fairway I watched all the neighbors' houses light up one by one as the people inside awoke and got ready for work and school. Personally, I was still awake from the previous night, going through one of my bouts of insomnia, which hit me about every other day. (I used to be on a ton of sleep meds to regulate my sleeping, but stopped taking them months ago because who wants to miss out on four a.m. infomercials and, especially, golfing practice at sunrise?)

By hitting the ten-or-so balls I had brought I was able to determine that, if I'm lucky enough to have a ball that lies on completely flat ground, I can hit a five iron reasonably straight, and about 150 yards. (...I should note that my distance is awful compared to any five year old who picks up a club for his/her first time.)

If the ball is on a downhill or uphill lie, I pop the ball up and slice the living hell out of it in the latter case; in the former case I succeed in excavating the fairway almost down to clay and zipping the ball about ten feet along the ground.

...Which looks cool at dawn. The ball whizzes along the ground, throwing the early-morning moisture off the blades of grass about ten feet high.

When I was done I walked down our road back home in my jeans and black hoodie, quite aware that if I do shit like this on a semi-regular basis the parents in my cloistered neighborhood are going to start thinking an insane person has invaded their sacred community to steal golf and bugger their children.

"All I can tell you, officer, is that if he thinks that weird Quaker-beard-thing on his face looks good, he must be nutty as an acorn."

Mixx it!