Just Off Center

Yesterday Nina left on a four-day trip to Laughlin with her mother and her mother’s girlfriend, Janie. She’ll be home Friday sometime barring any great wins or losses. So now it’s just me and Sam hanging out at home. Without any wife to supervise us dumb ol’ boys things could turn disastrous. But so far things have been pretty normal around the house. After work I went to the grocery for fresh veggies and some shrimp, came home and made baked chicken and broccoli. I did a load of darks. I cleaned up dinner and sorted through the coupons from the mail and Sunday paper. Most of the rest of my night was spent on the computer. No, I wasn’t downloading porn. Ok, so maybe I was downloading a little porn. But most of the time was spent trying to add, remove, and correct the tags on all my mp3 files for my Ipod.

My main concern is Sam. He doesn’t exactly have a stellar track record for properly utilizing alone time. The first time Sam went unsupervised was for just a few hours. Nina and I went to a movie and dinner with a friend. We came home to find him passed out drunk. He admitted his mistake and said that it had nothing to do with us being gone. I believed him. The next time was when we went to go visit Grace and Steve in Irvine. We were gone for three days. We came home and Sam hadn’t done a single chore he’d promised to do and there were two half gallons of the cheapest rotgut whiskey available in plain view in his car. One of them was empty. I set the bottles out that night with a note telling him how pissed off I was and that I couldn’t trust him anymore.

I tore into him really good that evening. He had already been “talked to” by Nina. But it’s me he fears. I’m not sure why, but he just gets so terrified when he has to own up to fucking up to me. I’m not even mean to him. Anyway, I basically had to put him on restriction. Now I’m monitoring all his movements outside the house, tracking his spending so that I can develop a budget for him, and giving him weekly room inspections. So far he’s doing well with it. I know it’s embarrassing for him, but who the fuck cares? He brought it on himself. How fucked up is it that my friend has put me in a position where I have to be his fucking daddy? Anyway that next weekend we left for my mom’s wedding. We came home and found that he had indeed done some chores and had appeared to stay off the sauce.

So when Nina decided to go with her mother to Laughlin I became concerned about the example I would set. The last time Nina left for any extended period of time was about two years ago when she spent a few days in L.A. with some friends. Pretty much every night I got drunk on beer and passed out. “When the cat’s away…” I guess. Well I didn’t have all the responsibilities of a house then, nor an alcoholic friend who needs an example to follow. So when I went to the grocery store yesterday I was very tempted to stop by the liquor isle and pick up a pint or maybe a six-pack. Oddly enough, it wasn’t the ethical dilemma that led me to choosing sobriety. It was just that I didn’t want to have to write down in my food journal that I had consumed an extra 700 calories for the day.

Just the same, I want to make sure that Sam doesn’t see any hypocrisy between what I preach and what I practice. Nina being gone shouldn’t have any impact on my daily routine and behavior apart from loosening up to do some things that I normally wouldn’t feel right about doing around her like spending three hours on the computer or watching a movie she hates. Sam just sat there in the living room all night. He watched Revenge of the Nerds. God, why does he waste his life watching retarded fucking films he’s seen a hundred times before? He even watched about twenty minutes of The Terminator in Spanish.

Oh my God, I forgot. Nina left us with a few simple requests. One of them was to make sure that we saved this week’s Crossing Jordan and Gilmore Girls from being deleted. Gilmore Girls was on yesterday. When TiVo is recording a show you can’t change the channel. Well you can, I just haven’t bothered to explain how to Sam. Anyway it came on and was recording while I was on the computer. I figured Sam was just reading his book on electrical code or something. I came into the kitchen to find him completely engrossed with the show. Getting hooked on Lost is understandable. Watching every rerun of King of the Hill is annoying. But to see Sam absolutely wrapped up in the trite little cutesy plots of this show geared toward mother/daughter couples left me speechless. I can tell you everything that’s going on in the show, but that’s just because Nina wants me to watch it with her. She considers it payback for all the Star Trek: TNG I made her watch. I had no problems not watching it in Nina’s absence. But it seems Sam was deeply concerned as to how Rory’s new boyfriend would handle having dinner with her cold and manipulative grandparents.

So after Sam went to bed I started getting myself ready for the next day. I prepped my coffee maker and looked through my wardrobe for today’s apparel. Then I went to bed. This morning went down like any other. Later today I have an interview at Starbucks. Yes… Starbucks. I know I’m the guy who called it yuppie crack, but it looks like a fun part time job. So Sam will be all alone from the time he gets home until I get back around 7:00 tonight. Not to worry though. There’s not much that he can do that I can’t find out about. I’ve spent a lot more time than he has in the development of my skills in surreption. Who knows? Maybe I’ll come home to find him sitting, legs crossed, in front of the TV gorging himself on the WB’s Wednesday lineup.

Nina won’t have computer access while she’s gone, so if you have any messages you want me to pass on add them here. I’ll see to it she gets them.

# posted by Mike @ 8:24 AM