Distraction

 I remember back when I was in college, some time during the late Stone Age (the early 1980's), I got a job on-campus for the summer between my Junior and Senior years. This wasn't the first time I had been away from home outside of school, but it was the first time I actually lived on my own: rented my own apartment, got myself to work, bought my own groceries … you know, #adulting.

I didn't have a car (or a driver's license), so my apartment was within walking distance of my job on-campus. And whenever I had to go to the grocery store, that meant walking too. Among other things, this limited how much food I could buy at a time. (Now that I think about it, the city had a good bus system. Why didn't I ever use it?) I didn't have a lot of friends who stayed in town over the summer. There was R, and he and I got together once or twice for dinner. There was Marie, but she and I were sort of on the outs at the time: at one point I stopped by her place to discuss political philosophy (yes, it really was as lame as it sounds) and the afternoon was deeply unsatisfactory for both of us. Also this was in the days before mobile phones, or the Internet, or even personal computers. So when I wasn't at work I had a lot of time on my own. 

I read a lot. (That was the summer I read Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy.) 

I wrote a lot of letters home. ("Wrote" by hand. Printed, because my cursive is hard to read. Mailed in an envelope, with a stamp.)

I played a lot of Solitaire. (With, you know, a physical deck of cards that I shuffled and laid out with my hands.)

And I remember thinking, years later, that it was a good thing I was under-age for buying alcohol at the time. Because with that much time alone, if I had been able to buy booze and drink it, I might have had a problem by the end of the summer.

Why am I thinking of this now? Because recently I noticed a couple of things.

These days I have a lot of time on my own. (I live alone, and with COVID-19 I mostly work at home.)

I have a car, which means that my grocery shopping is not limited by what I can carry in my two arms.

It's been a very long time since anybody carded me for buying alcohol. (Do you suppose the grey over most of my beard has anything to do with it?)

My most recent personal computer has Solitaire installed on it … which my last one did not, and which my work computer does not. (The company takes a dim view of computer games. We should be working on company time, dammit! And I guess I can see their point....) 

And all of this means that I weigh more than I have in many years, I'm drinking as much as I have since starting this blog (except for when I've been at one of those riotous parties thrown by my neighbors, but there's been none of that under COVID-19), and I'm playing an awful lot of Solitaire.

Anything to distract myself. 

During the day, this seems like a bad trend. Late at night, after a few drinks, it doesn't worry me so much. Maybe that pattern isn't a consoling one.

There's a story told that Robert Benchley, late in his career, was asked by a young reporter to say something about his career and his life. His answer was, "When I first came to New York I had a full head of hair, I weighed 135 pounds, and I was a member of the Temperance Society." 

There is a moral here, but I'd rather not look for it too closely.