Still Mourning

Like everyone else in Washington State I stopped by the grocery store on my way home from work on Friday and bought hard alcohol. You can buy whatever you want at the grocery store now instead of going to a state run liquor store. Just like Hawai'i. Sigh.

After I got home Mark and I were making martinis and listening to Donna Summer sing Love To Love You Baby, really loud, as the neighborhood children ran around outside frolicking in the sun. The windows were open and I thought to myself, “What is the horrible noise? Oh, children playing. Screw that! Where is the vermouth?”

As you can imagine I am not well liked in my neighborhood. Grownups with children that will need to be put through collage tend to dislike those of us with disposable income that drink on week nights and go to Hawaii a lot. I am the only person in my neighborhood without children.

I have this one sad neighbor who really hates me. I’ll call him Biff. Biff is blond, fit, a nice looking guy. I think he is like the boys’ soccer coach at a catholic high school or something horrible like that. He drives this big ancient school bus home from work and has 4 or 5 of those little blond children of the corn types. I always wave and smile and tell him about my last vacation and the one I have coming up. Once in a while I’ll pretend that I don’t know what he does for a living and make snide comments about how soccer is un-American and needs to go away like the metric system.

Actually I have no idea what a soccer ball looks like. I think it’s not the orange one. That one moved to Tulsa, right? It’s not the long brown one, they are still here I think. Is it the little white one that they play at Safeco Field? That is the one that Tiger Woods is good at, right? So many balls. So stupid, the balls.

Was there some point to this blog post other than to celebrate the sale of booze at grocery stores? Perhaps it really was to discuss my inability to get over the death of Donna Summer. 

I am not handling this well. I am not moving on. I am in morning and I am staying that way. As such I have been trying to introduce the kittens to the larger Donna Summer oeuvre. At night I plug those little white iPod head phones into their tiny hairy ears. We listen, discuss, analyze, comment. Well, they just listen. And meow.

The first double album, Once Upon A Time, has been the primary source of inspiration, grief, celebration, and loud blasting out the windows and the horrible neighbor children. This masterwork of non-stop disco genius lasts 70 minutes and I am able to relive most of my junior high life in a single listen while I gaze at the album cover and wonder how anyone could possibly be so beautiful. The kittens are also finding You Tube as a source of comfort and knowledge about this enormous loss.

Every gay man over the age of 40 who has a blog has been doing this same thing. How can this be? How can Donna Summer be dead? Am I going to be dead soon too? Sigh.

I need to plan a vacation.




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