Wine around the world

Last night I dreamed I was eating a genial meal at a sushi restaurant with my mom on my right side and my dad on the left.

This scenario wouldn’t be so implausible if my parents hadn’t abandoned all tolerance for each other long ago.  To put their estranged relationship in perspective, Steve talks about Mariann in the same way the bully at the back of the bus talks about the slow kid up front, and she talks about him as if he were Stalin.  Sushi between the two of them would be as pleasurable as squatting between France and Germany during WWII.  (RIP, Belgium.)

That’s why when my alarm went off I didn’t want to end the dream.  Though seemingly counter-intuitive, I really wanted to see if the fantastical milieu were going to fade into a Nosferatu-reminiscent couchemar, where the chopsticks were going to shoot into wooden stakes and the wassabi was going to become the next generation of burning holy water at the hands of whoever went in for the kill, or if nothing was going to happen at all.  I half-suspected, in my groggy 11-am revelry, that the dream was going to go nowhere apart from remaining genial and enjoyable.

My suspicion doesn’t stem from any inherent optimism, but rather from a ponderous notion that my parents were both convalescing from life-threatening illnesses and didn’t have the strength to ward each other off.  I planted this real-life notion into the couchemar and then let a touch of dream take over.  Between them, I became a prop-like Snorlax meant to impede their bridge to each other just as the real Gameboy Snorlax blocks the path to Vermilion or some other color-coded city.

Now, more than anyone I know, I hate twiddling my thumbs through the woebegone, my-parents-locked-me-in-closets stories of others, so don’t think that’s what this account is shaping up to be.   Most the time, I don’t even know how (or if I care enough) to tackle the consolation of another of Freud’s kids-in-grown-ups’-bodies as they still search for a good life’s role model.  What I do know is that on any given day I’d much prefer the company of those who don’t dream about becoming Snorlax in between their parents, like a fake Madame Sosostris spewing impossible time-consuming predictions that bring us closer to the end of our time without any tactile profit.

I try to avoid the people still dreaming, to a hypocritical fault.  And to eradicate any pride I retain, I’ll admit to using a few shallow but pretty telling tests, the most simple of which is the drunk test.

Imbibe → Assess company’s demeanor → Happy drunks → Carry on

Imbibe → Assess company’s demeanor

Imbibe → Assess company’s demeanor → Sad drunks → Flee!

To be continued…

*The rest explores the impact of instant gratification, Mammon and desire on the human ability to lovingly share, and why that has anything to do with the circular flaws of us and our parents.  Nothing too big…