Weather Report

Whatever it is, I'm under it.

I came down with a case of Self-Inflicted Transient Positional Vertigo, or White Russian flu, early Sunday morning. The hell of it was that I didn't really drink much, five or six drinks over five hours, depending on whether the coffee our hostess passed around along about 11:30 had liquor in it (reports vary). We were playing their favorite game, Name That 60s or 70s Tune, aka "How the fuck does Riley know all that shit?" (In my defense, knowing that, say, Billy "I Can Help" Swan had only one eye seems like such a simple thing I don't even bother putting it on my resumé.)

Anyhoo, at some point I realized that the strobe effects in my head were warning lights at the edge of Losing Consciousness Lane, and I got up, told the assembled guests I was going home "by rail", * and left. (The party was next door.) My Poor Wife came home fifteen minutes later and found me on the couch, unlaced my boots, told me I was whiter than Andy Warhol (always with the art metaphors, that woman), and covered me with a blanket. I woke up an hour and a half later with a near-perfect buzz going, and--swear to God--went into the office and posted the Groucho birthday card. If this was a hand-written blog you'd have noticed something funny.

I slept Sunday away, except for reading the papers and watching football. I was up early this morning to do the Eddie Cochran thing, but Blogger was sick too. So today I'm playing hooky, though I am still a little shaky. And I'm hoping it's a bug of some sort, because if my capacity is dropping off I'm gonna have to go into training.

* traveling by rail: "So tipsy that one has to hang onto things." ca 1930. Partridge's Concise Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, London: Routledge, 1989.