Take a Little for your Stomach’s Sake

(Our medieval correspondent has gone to the country to work at the order’s vineyard, which prompted this rumination.)

I’m not prone to take the advice of Paul on a regular basis but I make an exception to his admonition (1 Timothy 5:23) to take a little wine for my stomach’s sake. In fact, to make up for the other instructions he gives that I ignore, I go full bore on this one, much to the chagrin of my doctors.

I recently sought medical advice for some unusual fatigue and a few related symptoms. After a battery of blood tests indicated that everything was “operating within normal parameters,” the resident examining me was baffled until I told him how vigorously I follow Paul’s edict (and have for nearly 50 years). His ears pricked up and he immediately sent me for more blood work and an ultrasound of my liver. Surely, he thought, wine must be the source of all my troubles.

Sadly, he was disappointed. More blood tests, more normal results. As for my liver, a little fat around the edges but no more than you would expect from a man of my age and build. I apparently am unkillable—at least by wine. Once again, the efficacy of winning the genetic lottery is proven.

Before you roll your eyes at that, you should try to get a hamster drunk. Seriously! Apparently, the little guys can drink us all under the table. As we know, rodents store large quantities of seeds, nuts and fruit in their burrows for the winter. It frequently ferments and over generations they have evolved to metabolize vast quantities of alcohol, beating out humans by a long shot (except maybe Czechs). Elephants on the other hand seldom encounter booze, but when they do, in the form of fermented silage or rotting marula fruit, they make pretty mean drunks. Jumbo, it seems, can’t hold his liquor, not even in his trunk.

Humans, having been exposed to alcohol for thousands (likely millions) of years, fall somewhere in between and of course, your mileage may vary depending on the particular genes you randomly acquired at conception. You should know your limits and stick to them unless you want to wind up joining your own search party.

In any case (ha ha!), I enjoy my evening tipple, usually in the form of red wine. I have on occasion had a beer for breakfast (it was an early morning staple in the Middle Ages) or a drink at lunch, but I generally find that is a recipe for lost productivity and a lot of naps. But when the day’s work is done, the bell goes off and, like Pavlov’s famous dog (was it a St. Bernard?), I pop a cork and settle in for music, conversation, good food, reading and, occasionally, TV viewing.

In the event you ever feel compelled to buy me a drink, my favorite varietal is Zinfandel, though any hearty red will do.

Tomorrow I’ll try to tackle a less serious topic, like the Canadian Constitution.

By the way if you are looking for a wine-compatible novel to read, try this one.

Photo by Jonathan Farber on Unsplash

No End in Sight

I talk a lot these days about retiring. What I’m really talking about is moving from one occupation to another. Frankly I’m tired of working in a regular job – getting up every day to someone else’s schedule and trundling off to an office where my activities are constrained by those around me and the systems in place to manage the work.

I’ve never been keen on systems. I didn’t mind school but found plenty of ways to circumvent or at least ameliorate the rules. It was not a case of rebelling – I was a radical but not much of a revolutionary – but of co-opting them to my own interests. Being smart and working hard can buy you a lot of freedom. It helped that the high school I went to had 2000 students and my university only 1300. You could choose to be invisible if you liked – or you could stand out in ways that seemed to buy into the system while secretly subverting it.

Good times.

Real life was never so easy. Governments and corporations have had a lot of practice shackling their employees, locking us into the iron cage of bureaucracy. Small businesses – unless you happen to be the owner – are nothing but arbitrary fiefdoms where employees are treated like family – in the worst sense of the word – and expected to work like slaves.

Work – the curse of the drinking class.

But, having been smart enough and lucky enough to work in a place that offers a defined benefit pension plan (indexed to inflation) means that soon I will celebrate, not freedom 55 but freedom 61 or 62 (the timing remains uncertain). I will have an income free from any obligation.

It’s as if I was suddenly a member of the gentry in a Jane Austin novel!

But as they say a man with an income is soon in need of, well not a wife – I have one of those – but an occupation. Something useful – at least to them – to fill the hours until happy hour. Without it, happy hour may start to come at 10 in the morning.

But what to do? Fortunately I’ve been planning for these days for a very long time and have plenty that will fill my hours with interesting tasks while still leaving me free to pursue my real hobbies of traveling and sampling all the various foods and drinks the world has to offer.

I have my publishing company and my writing. I don’t see giving up the latter – ever – and as for the former, well, that depends upon other people, those who choose to buy or not buy the books I publish. But for now it continues to beckon me. After all, writing and publishing have their own benefits and not merely in terms of being engaged in a creative process but in being engaged with creative people.

That’s what keeps your mind young even as the rest of you ages into decrepitude. Even after my body stops moving my mind can journey to far shores.

I’ve seen the alternative and it isn’t pretty. Wasting away in body AND mind. No, I’d rather go out like Robertson Davies, starting a short story on the morning of my death at age 90.

But that’s ten minutes.

I’ll Add a Title Later

This is a blog I’ve been meaning to write for some time but I never seemed to get around to it. It’s just one of those things, you know. It sits there on the list but there always seems to be something more important to write about. Like many things that languish on the list of life, it sometimes seems to be important but never really important enough to get started. There is always some other task that takes priority – like cleaning the bathroom, reading a book, washing my hair, or, you know, sitting and staring out the window.

I’m talking, of course, about procrastination. There. I’ve said it. I suffer from procrastination – well, I do when I get around to thinking about it and the consequences it has for my life.

This is nothing new. I’ve always been very good at putting things off. Well, no, that’s not exactly true. Some things I get done right away – happy hour, for example. If it weren’t for happy hour, I probably would never get anything done. When I was in University, I would always get my homework finished early in order to be able to have happy hour right on time. It has been the one saving grace in a lifetime of putting things off.

Okay, to be honest, I only put off things that I don’t like – such as starting a new short story or a novel, sorting through my possessions in order to whittle them down, getting out of bed, going to work. Stuff like that.

But once I get started – you can watch my dust. Took me forever to get started on my first novel but then I wrote it in 3 days. Okay so that was a contest and I actually couldn’t start until the contest period did but still… 3 days.

I’ve been putting off a lot of things lately. But no more. I’m turning over a new leaf. Starting Wednesday. Well, one can’t rush into these things. But on Wednesday (Thursday latest) you will see a whole new man. Nothing will appear on the horizon that I will not immediately tackle and defeat it. This proactive approach will thankfully allow me to ignore all the backlog of things I already need to do. By several weeks at least. Maybe months.

Still, one wouldn’t want to die with nothing left on the list of things to do. It would be embarrassing. Not only that, it would imply that for a period of time, however brief, your life was bereft of meaning and purpose. Without a full list of things to do, you would, of course, be listless.

So, my advice to you is to make your list as long as possible. In fact, make it impossibly long – add to it every day and chip away at it regularly. Start now. I mean, start making your list now. That’s what I’m going to do. It’s better than actually accomplishing something.

But that’s ten minutes.

Positive Thinking

Relentless optimism is a pain in the ass. The idea that we should always face the world with a smile on our face — no matter how dismal the day might be — is advice that will occasionally illicit murderous responses.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m mostly a glass is half full kind of guy. In fact I’d even say that the glass was designed only to be half full in any case. Maybe that’s because I’m usually talking about red wine glasses. Whatever — they aren’t whine glasses.

Still, telling people to think positively when they are dealing with real problems is seldom helpful. There were times in my own life and in the lives of my closest intimates when things really weren’t going well — struggles with health, money, feelings that the world was out to get us (which as it turned out wasn’t true though some individuals in that world were). My ex-wife and I would take turns saying to each other: “Buck up, buckaroo!” as a sort of sarcastic acknowledgment that sometimes all you really can do is smile through the tears. But the smile doesn’t make the pain go away.

Still, for myself, as bad as things go, I usually bounce back. Or else I walk away. There have been times when my situation was simply so grim, with so little likelihood of improvement, that walking away, leaving behind everything was the easiest or at least less painful option. But I’ve talked about that before.

There are, in fact, some things you can’t walk away from. Ill health has this nasty habit of following you wherever you go. In those cases all you can do is try to get better or, if it is chronic, adapt to the condition, as I’ve tried to adapt to asthma and arthritis. I’ve known lots of people who have arrived at a place where their life is simply their life. They make the best of it and, often, they do amazing things. But they don’t get there by having their able-bodied or mentally healthy friends telling them to put on a happy face.

Some have argued that our way of dealing with cancer is plagued with a disease of optimism. People are told that the best way to tackle illness is to fight it, to have a positive attitude, to not give in to feelings of despair. Like paranoia, despair is sometimes just clear thinking. I happen to think that proper treatment — surgery, radiation, chemo — plus efforts at ‘wellness’ such as good food, exercise and the unconditional (that is unpreachy) love of others is more helpful. It doesn’t always work.

Then relentless optimism is a form of blaming — if you don’t get well, it must be a problem with your attitude. And when you have to face the fact you might be dying, who really needs that extra burden of guilt and shame?

And that’s ten dyspeptic minutes.

Drink

I don’t do extreme sports. Or, for the last 15 years, sports of any kind. It’s not that I couldn’t. I could. Though I’d resent every minute I spent training, let alone doing them. I’d almost certainly hurt myself. I would probably kill myself. Sports, especially extreme sports, are not for everyone.

It’s the same way with drinking. I took my first drink when I was seventeen. In fact, I took 9 of them that night – all different. I was at a political convention but I missed most of the debates on the final day because I was too damn sick. You might think I would have learned from that experience. I did. I didn’t take another drink for 10 days. By then I was in university.

I drank a lot in university, usually starting on Thursday. Sunday through Wednesday I seldom took a sip. Well, a beer or two now and then but it hardly counts as drinking. But I never missed a class and I got three degrees. I’d like to tell you that I quit drinking after that but it would be a lie. Not the quitting part but the idea I would have liked to quit. That would be the lying part.

I like drinking. I’ve learned to do it well. Some people might say I have achieved Olympic level competence. But they would be wrong. I never push myself that hard. I don’t get hangovers; I never get sick.

I love the taste of bourbon on my tongue, the bouquet of wine in my nose, the tingle of beer, the sweetness of port. I love the sensation of putting the glass to my lips, letting the flavours and aromas and feelings linger. I like the softness drink gives to my vision, to my thoughts. When I drink I am more myself. I like myself when I drink. I am more jovial, more loquacious, more romantic. I am not a mean drunk.

I am, of course, not an alcoholic – I simply refuse to go to all those meetings.

In all my years, I’ve never missed a day’s work or a deadline. Some might say I could have done more, reached higher. Pshaw! I’ve done everything I wanted. Had a decent career, published four novels and a raft of stories, thought deep thoughts, travelled and loved and made great friends. Drinking was and is a part of that. Soon I’ll lie back and take it easy. Sit on beaches or in palazzos, drink beer and red wine, write more novels, enjoy life and love and friendship.

But it’s not for everyone. Some people hurt themselves with drink. Some are hurt and think drink will make them better. You have to know yourself. You have to know when the mountain is too high or the slope too steep.

Know yourself, control yourself and everything else will take care of itself.

And that’s ten minutes.