When I stopped at Nijiya yesterday for a "few things" among those "few things" were a 4-pack of tall cans of beer, nothing fancy, just Asahi "Super Dry" which is 5% alcohol. And a bottle of "Takara Shochu". It's basically vodka that's 35% alcohol. I think Nijiya downgraded their liquor license because they no longer have any alcohol that's stronger than 35%. So it's probably a beer and wine license rather than one that allows hard liquor, which is 40% alcohol and up.
I also got a very expensive little jar of Maxim instant coffee and some half and half. And some salmon sashimi and a tonkatsu don which turned out to be real garbage. But at least I ate.
But not before making and having a thing I'd been thinking about that I used to make, that I call "atomic coffee". Poured some of the shochu in a cup, put in a teaspoon of the coffee which mixed instantly, then filled it up with half and half and mixed again. The result is a creamy, coffee-y, very alcoholic thing.
It's a good thing I packed this guy's box of wire before doing this, because after drinking this, on a pretty empty stomach, I wasn't going anywhere. In the end I drank 1/4 of the bottle of shochu and 3-1/2 of the 4 tall beers.
As an interesting aside, David Bowie did a TV commercial for Takara Shochu in the early 80s. It had been a favorite drink among middle-aged men and the Takara company wanted to popularize among young people, who were discovering vodka martinis and various spritzers. Writing now I only feel sorry for the middle-aged men.
Why did I do this very questionable thing? Since I went to bed around 10 I had plenty of time this morning to think about this. The root cause is deprivation.
I remember one time when I was literally starving as a kid, finding something edible but not recognized by the competition (siblings, mother, various hippie moochers around the place) as food: A partial box of those pie crust dough sticks. I remember like it was yesterday, taking that box of stuff to a favorite hideout under a Brazilian pepper tree and eating my find. Once in a great while I'll still buy pie crust mix and eat all I can stand.
Booze was this grown-up thing and to someone who was held back by sheer deprivation, it was one of those adult things I was being deprived of. When you've for 1 "good" T-shirt and you're sharing a single pair of shoes with two siblings, these things mean a lot. I remember sitting in my little rented room and eating a cold hot dog from a package I'd bought, and then eating *another*. That was a big deal, being able to eat that 2nd hot dog.
It was why I spent stupid money on motorcycles and at one point had 3 sets of "leathers", one of them custom made and track legal. I had to have the coolest bike and admittedly, my SRX-6 was pretty cool. I could pretend I came from an upper-middle-class background like the other guys with sport bikes who hung out at the Newport Pier.
It was why I put serious effort into getting to like beer and to like the feeling of alcohol. I didn't want to feel that I was missing out. That feeling that I was missing out was part of why I got drunk last night.
Ken had just come back from a vacation, and how come I never get to take a vacation? At least I'd have a short one, somehow my back would stop hurting and I'd be in some kind of pleasant la-la land for a few hours yet be able to bounce back and get a bunch of work done. The logic makes no sense unless I factor in that some of my thinking and actions have been influenced by deprivation.
I'd grown up in an environment where if I got any money, I had to spend it immediately or it would be taken from me. I was so scared of being poor that I dropped art like a hot potato and went into electronics - if I'd grown up safe and secure and well-fed, I'd probably have found that art's a fine career and generally well paid. Meanwhile electronics has proven to be lower-paying than anything I can think of. My fear of poverty actually drove me into worse poverty than I'd have experienced doing anything else.
My fear of poverty's getting triggered pretty badly lately as I've realized that Ken has his Ebay account set up so Ebay takes their fees out and the nightly payouts are what's left over. And there's no way those are covering things like the rent and utilities for this place. Just the rent works out to $100 a day. Since it's high tech surplus, this does not surprise me as there's no money in this stuff. But it's a real sock to my gut to realize Ken's running this place at a loss. Ken said he'd never let me be homeless and I guess that's what it amounts to. He's employing me to work a job I don't really like, as a charity.
Now my back is worse for some reason, I feel like crap, and there's work to be done. I could kind of justify not going back out last night, because people on Reddit were saying there's a lot of craziness out there and sure enough, there were a lot of zombies around; screamin' zombies, staggerin' zombies, and plain ol' brain-eatin' zombies.
I managed to get about half - the easier half - of the things in an order pulled out of their hiding places in the warehouse area and finally told the customer I'm sending the power supply - the one big heavy thing - in its own box and will send a second box with the other things.
I headed over to FedEx and dropped the two boxes off (one was another customer's 6 rolls of wire) and rode around to California Pizza Kitchen. A slice of pizza might be decent get-well food, but they didn't have slices. I ended up getting some very mediocre cheese sticks from the Korean chicken place and 8 of those and a bottle of water cost me $12. I'd have bought some ranch to dip them in, but ranch was 50c on the menu and about $2 when you actually try to buy it. I declined.
I got out of there (kinda peeved about their nickel-and-diming on the ranch dressing, plus a white family in there had a kid, maybe a well-fed 10 years old, with a cough which was why they were in the restaurant; to share whatever their kid has with as many others as possible. And I wanted no part of it.) I just sat on one of the little curbs in front of H Mart and watched the Odd People Show while eating half of the cheese sticks. I actually saw quite an assortment of interesting T-shirt logos and some Korean girls were being silly and cute hanging out by the bike rack.
I found some packing stuff on my way back, and got back in here. I made some dipping sauce from some Tapatio hot sauce and some Kewpie mayo and ate the rest of the cheese sticks. I started slowly finding the other things in that one order - 26 of them - and as the hours went by I started to feel more normal even though my back is quite painful.
No comments:
Post a Comment