November 22, 2001, 7:57 p.m.

I might like you better if we slept together ...

back & forth

Ugh. I ought to have rented movies and done my shopping yesterday. It was apparently "Thanksgiving" today, which means I can't get any ice cream, which is what I'm craving right now, and the video and (worse yet) liquor shops are closed.

Yesterday was a turning point in the Alastair Chronicles, since I got my first envelope of tips (oh, miraculous: cash which can be harvested spontaneously at my place of work, as opposed to cash that grows nascostamente in banks like fungus and has to be coaxed out of dishonest machines with buttons). Also a cheque from my previous employer. So I took CC out for a drink at Ch*rl**'s, which seemed the meetest place to celebrate my return to my routines (actually using my pourboire pour boire). Like Apollo, I have been voyaging in the strange, interior realms of the unemployable Hyperboreans; also like the Far-Shooter, my return is cause for general revelry. If that just don't beat all.

Because there is a balance to all things, however, my parents appear to have wexen sore wroth with me, probably because I did not get my act together enough to attend LL's wedding this weekend in P*ttsb*rgh. They were looking forward to seeing me (and I them), but it seems they took my protestations that I would see what I could do about it rather more seriously than I. Worse still, they discovered, whilst I was on the phone with them the other day, that my financial difficulties have strayed from mere insolvency boldly across the fence into debt. Not debt such as ruins people, mind you, but debt all the same. My parents are less apt to love the lovable rake than I; they do not wish to have a dissolute scion. How am I to pay for the coach and four? How for the suits of Milanese cut velvet and Shantung shirts?

* * *

It's now later. I have talked to the parents on the phone. They are offering to help me pay off my debts, so that shame will not be brought onto the family. I am advised not to tell anybody that my friend and her husband-soon-to-be are presently Shacking It Up. It appears even the father of the bride doesn't know that his daughter is living in sin, just as he didn't know that she was also doing the horizontal nastay with a woman twice her age. I have forgotten what a tiny world my parents and their friends live in. Every time I reproach myself for not being sufficiently hip, I must remember whence I came and smile inly.

Off now to CC's to watch the Fisher King.