A toast to the women of then...........

Before I start my post today, I need to tell Safaricom Limited that one message is enough to tell me that I have insufficient funds to send a message or make a call. Sending 10 messages to drive it home is just rubbing it on my face. Since this is the only place that I truly have a voice, I should use this forum to complain and hope that y'all share the same sentiments, otherwise am just a bore. But then again, it wouldn't come as a surprise coz my cousin has a way of letting me know that telling the same story over and over is kind of boring. His exact words about the blog were, roughly translated, “you talk too much. You mean to tell me that you sat somewhere alone, and since you don’t have anyone to talk to, you decide to start a blog?” But I digress.

It's Friday and am preparing for a typical loud weekend of indulgence (my typical loud weekend has evolved from club hopping to coffee and vodka and a couple friends) and reflecting. I just realized I have never really thanked the girls that came before for driving me towards vodka. In between emotions from, "It's not me it's you" through "Please take these feelings away from me, Lord God I pray," to "was I drunk this whole time?", a good bottle of vodka comes in handy. I know, I've being there once or twice, or a whole lot of times, but who cares about the numbers. In between reading advice columns, hanging out with your friends as they pamper your ego, telling you how "that bitch didn't deserve you", and drunk dialing, binge drinking is the only thing that we accept as a healer of broken hearts for real men. I say real men because Abraham Lincoln couldn’t be wrong when in his address to the Washington Temperance Society, Springfield, Illinois, on the 22^nd of February 1842, in his words, “If we take habitual drunkards as a class, their heads and their hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any other class.  There seems ever to have been a proneness in the brilliant and warm-blooded to fall in to this vice.  The demon of intemperance ever seems to have delighted in sucking the blood of genius and generosity.” he could only be addressing real men, who drink. If you’re not a fan of Abraham Lincoln, you’ll accept Winston Churchill (one of the most important leaders in modern British and world history) confession that he has taken more from Alcohol than alcohol has taken from him.

Anyway, after the break ups, we live like gamblers, where we start with a beer at 10:00 in the morn without knowledge of where you’ll wake up tomorrow morn. This is after waking up in disastrous situations in the past but still hoping it will end up like that one night you woke up with a perfect 10, like throwing a dice on a high stakes table. We drink from bottles because glasses are for those who sip not those who drink because people who drink aim for the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it's there, because it can't hurt, and because what difference does it make? If I sleep sober or drunk, she still won’t wake up next to her in the morning but with spontaneous acts after the devil harasses us, we seek the company of women or drink more, or joke and talk nonsense, or do some other merry thing. Sometimes we must drink more, sport, recreate ourselves, and even sin a little to spite the devil, so that we leave him no place for troubling our consciences with trifles. We are conquered if we try too conscientiously not to sin at all. So when the devil says to you: do not drink, answer him: I will drink, and right freely, just because you tell me not to. Again, I digress.

After the beers, three or four down the line, someone always comes up with the idea of keeping the spirits in given the widely accepted our bodies are temples. A bottle of vodka or as we like to call it, bottled poetry comes in hand, mostly after realizing double tots albeit chasing the beer quite well, are getting on the budget upside. This is where football talk kicks in. At this stage of the day, mid-afternoon in most cases, the honesty level is on the lower side because we are still disguised in sobriety.

At around three vodka bottles down, the advice start flowing. Someone will blubber about how drinking doesn’t help as they pour you a glass of vodka and explain how they’ve being there. Someone will tell you that you need to go find that new love and not waste anymore of your time thinking of someone no longer with you.  “Don't go wasting your life on the past, think positive and find that new girlfriend who will love only you, and make you happy. From now no more drinking a lot as it will also ruin your life, and no girl wants a boyfriend who drinks too much. So go find that new love and prove to yourself and others that you can be happy again with someone new. Go out today and if you see someone you like who is also single, go talk to her, but not about what’s happened, unless she asks. It’s okay to say you were cheated on, but to go into every detail can put another girl off. So now its your time to be happy again and love again. So don't sit there, get out and look around for a love who will treat you right”.

I think this is the point where we order the fourth bottle of vodka and laugh at the logic of the drunk who thinks that jumping from one relationship to another one while still sober is a good thing, we all know one needs to get wasted over and over again to heal broken hearts. Depending on where we are physically (drinking den of the day) anything goes from trying to woo a decent woman as you slur sweet nothings incomprehensible to either you or the new girl of your dreams sitting alone on the counter. 

We sip some more vodka and go Irish…..

All: Ohhhh, aye-dee-di-dee-di-dee-di-dee-di-dee-di!

Patrice: Once when I was celebratin'.

Aga: I went to bed.

Serge: I had too much to drink.

Caine: I woke up to an ugly head.

Patrice: She turned over.

Aga: And I saw her face.

Serge: I screamed in surprise.

Caine: And I sprayed her with mace!

All: Ohhhh, aye-dee-di-dee-di-dee-di-dee-di-dee-di!

Aga: I jumped round and ran away.

Serge: And put on all my clothes.

Caine: And then I ran from the house.

Patrice: I hit her, I do suppose.

Aga: But, she jumped right after me.

Serge: She got into her car.

Caine: She didn't get there.

Patrice: She looked like Jamie Farr.

All: Ohhhh, aye-dee-di-dee-di-dee-di-dee-di-dee-di!

Serge: Although she was so ugly.

Caine: I took her anyway.

Patrice: I used her to scare children away.

Aga: What the hey?

Serge: Boy, it really worked good.

Caine: I remember that day.

Patrice: That I took her to the dog park.

Aga: And said, what they hey.

All: Ohhhh, aye-dee-di-dee-di-dee-di-dee-di-dee-di!

Caine: I tried to forget it.

Patrice: I tried to drink a lot.

Aga: Because she was so ugly.

Serge: She needed an ink spot.

Caine: Then that day would come again.

Patrice: That I'd meet her.

Aga: I was so scared.

Serge: It looked like someone had beat her.

All: Ohhhh, aye-dee-di-dee-di-dee-di-dee-di-dee-di! 

  

And in the morning, we’ll wake up and do it all over again…..

"It's well to remember that there are five reasons for drinking: the arrival of a friend, one's present or future thirst, the excellence of the vodka, or any other reason". Break-ups fall under any other reason.

I gotta say that words of Toni Morrison, Martin Luther did me justice when I wrote this piece

Before I forget, y'all should swing by www.facebook.com/LinkArray and say wasup....