Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

I’m contemplating whether to restart my Youtubetv subscription with a Buckeye game squarely in the headlights Saturday. In view of my truncated TV viewing habits, is it really rational to spend $70 per month for 4-6 hours on the couch on Saturdays until January?

Just go to a sports bar, you say, but you’re not smack in the middle of a butt-hurt horde of PAC-(insert dwindling integers here) fans who would feed me to the Orcas if I asked to turn the TV to a game featuring their 2024 Rush big-brothers.

OTOH, I could actually attend the games in person for the weekly cost of:

• airfare
• Uber from lightning-prone midwest airport to hotel featuring a view of soybeans, and video purchase receipts DM’d directly to my home
• purchasing a “game ticket” from tweaky-looking adolescent for probably more than the airfare cost, that turns out to be a Forever stamp affixed to a parking ticket
• Buying a verified game ticket from Stubhub for the price of a first-class upgrade home
• Attending the game, buoyed by $17 beers
• toddling nostalgically over to the former strip of lively and lubricious student bars now dominated by fortune-tellers and payday loan sharks
• probable arrest and incarceration for public urination. released hours later upon agreeing to do volunteer work for Leave No Trace;
• missing my flight home and riding coach.

No, $70 is a cheap game ticket, all in all.

My dad eschewed golf when I lived at home (probably because of the country club socioeconomics; he was raised as a fisherman and hunter). He called golf “the only game where you hit a ball and have to chase it yourself”.

Then when he retired and started to become inextricable from his chair on the porch, my mom goaded him into trying the game with her. (I believe it was more of an ultumatum)

Bam! On visits home after college, golf became an amiable way to enjoy each other with no more drama than “which tree did I hit?” and how the phrase”I’ll take my mulligan now” was never, in recorded history, singular. I called my parents “born-again golfers”.

As for me, I never took up golf, but not for the same reasons as my dad. After a couple tries, I realized that, with its ten ways to hit ( or fail to) each club in the bag, it would drive me bonkers. But I did play with my parents and brothers as above. I would flail piteously and mark my “10″ score each hole after at least 25 shots, and hope I wasn’t depriving someone more worthy from renting my clubs.

But every now and then I’d roll back and let fly, the impact would make an otherworldly sound, and I’d blurt out, “Gawdamn I smacked that fucker.” The euphoria would last until my next drive from the Ladies’ tees.

After a nice weekend of seeing a brother, sister-in-law, son and his especially SO a week ago, sometime around midnight on Monday my head started to resemble a cement mixer, and by Tuesday morning I could hardly raise my head above my pillow.

For the next 72 hours all I could do was grab a gulp of water and sleep again for 4 hours. This is not like me, I haven’t even had a head cold for 4 years.

Friday morning I felt pretty good but thought I should try to test for Covid. We had acquired several free test kits during the pandemic, but by now they were all expired and had taken their place among the other mislabeled and/or unidentified wonder drugs sticking obstinately to the rusting shelves of my medicine cabinet: merthiolate, mercurochrome, paragoric, Cherocol D, Aspergum and, amazingly, still-viable leaches..

In an abundance of caution, I decided that I should trek to CVS for fresh tests. I did one of the new ones and, just out of curiosity about use-by dates, also did an expired test from my brownfield medicine cabinet.

Results: I do/did have Covid, and I will give birth to a lovely daughter next March.