Come Fly With Me

I am quite a proponent of the sauce. The drink. A little nip 'o something. Booze. Hooch. I do think it can be used as a gateway for what we are *really* feeling. There are bad drunks, sure, but I think they're this way because in their daily lives they don't feel the power they really want to. Aggression seeps forth once imbibing. Sometimes it is a necessary evil. And aggression can take many forms and it's not always bad.

My friend Death is quite loving and demonstrative when not teetotalling. Okay, she turns into a whore! My friend Kissy is quite amorous to anyone or anything with a pulse. She can be seen trying to make out with some poor, unsuspecting cocker spaniel tied up to a tree. Poor beast has no chance of escape. When the owner comes and tries to pull her off the dog, she'd more than likely jump the owner. She's done it to me. And I don't even have a dog. Hence the moniker. Then there are the ones normally quiet that just can't seem to shut up. Ack's like this, the ex-husband/current best friend. Blah, blah, blah *epiphany*. Blah, blah, blah *we're all aliens from Mars and we need to go home*. Sometimes there really is something that hits home to the drunk person speaking, like it did to this one Blonde Chick, who looks like she went to school with me in North Toronto. I like to note where a person hails from because it does sort of create the driveway for life to come. Paved asphalt, lined with dogwood bushes, in this case. When you have gone to Lawrence Park Collegiate, chances are you end up either on Bay Street, practicing law, or you're a 2D Chartered Accountant. The name of the game is "Let's Make Money and Lots of It".

So the Blonde Chick had just come back from Italy, no doubt on one of those pre-packaged tours, perfectly sterile with a 100% money back guarantee if you didn't have at least one good moment there. She says to my boss and his wife, both of whom hail from the Abruzzo area, "I love 'those' people." At the moment she said it, she reminded me of this one woman I encountered on the bus, in Costa Rica, that both natives and tourists travelled on to get to the public beach. This woman, in her 60's was from Oregon, travelling with her husband of 35 years. She was sitting next to a local fisherman, tired from a very long stint on the oceans looking for Mahi Mahi. They were having, to her, a fruitful, to him, fruitless and annoying conversation. He was very bright and quite educated. She, like the typical xenophobic, nationalistic American, was asking whether he knew or had been to Oregon. He hadn't, but was expressing how close it was to British Columbia and how he loved Vancouver and Canadians in general. It was a dig. She was non-plussed. She took a sip of water out of her plastic bottle, turned the label towards herself and said, "Akwah... Akwah!... We say... WAAA-TER". Now, my Spanish isn't that hot, but I expressly heard "stupid" and "American" muttered under his breath.

The Blonde Chick did end up redeeming herself when she said *they*, meaning them *Eyetalians*, really know how to live. And it's true. They eat, they drink, they hang out with family. Here, we don't eat because it creates a poor body image. We're retiscent about drinking too much because we don't want to be labelled alcoholics, and we can't do it and drive home in that car we sweat our, whether we have them or not, bags off just to get. Of course we're all in therapy because of the cruel and unusual torture our parents and siblings put us through, so that pretty much strikes out Family Fun Day on a regular basis.

She said we don't know how to live and on the most part she is right.

I still fought with her over the issue. To me the idea of European values, the values of family and time are all within us. It's our choice who we want to be and how we want to live. We have to make choices pretty much every moment we're alive. So I asked her, "Do you need all that stuff? You know what I'm talking about." What I was talking about was the all the stuff that everyone else has, that one feels one must have too. The giant plasma screen TV, the Nintendo, the car(s), the honkin' house or cool loft, the clothes, the spa days, the wine collection, the art collection, the shit that accumulates dust.

Time and family and eating and all the wonderful things we do when we're travelling like wandering around aimlessly, letting our hearts and guts lead us down alleys, through courtyards, throughs forests that we can truly imagine being the first ones to explore, though we know we weren't. The illusion's there. While travelling we can be whoever we want. We tend to try things we never had before, talk to people we probably never would because there was no occasion. We wander into churches, museums, galleries, concerts. We have espresso... for the 8th time that day. We work our way up to 6 courses during an evening's meal.

We are happy.

So I gave this Drunken Blonde Chick a suggestion. I asked her to remember who she was while she was travelling. I asked her to remember all the things that she did and all the secret plans and promises that she made to herself. It's her decision if she wants to live or to be slave to this strange, speedy world we live in where one often has to make *appointments* with friends 3 weeks in advance, just to have dinner with them. And when I was suggesting this to her, I was mostly reminding myself. As is the case most often...