No shopping and pizza for lunch

Doc says he will spring for lunch from Pizza Hut across the street. I only have a limited amount of Christmas shopping I do at Barnes and Noble, so I didn't see any sense of fighting the crowds in November. I will wait until December and I get into the Christmas spirit and then I will go shopping.
My relatives in Utah however all seem to have gone shopping as absolutely no one is posting on the family site, not since yesterday morning early. I am having a tough time thinking of how to entertain myself after my daughter had to cancel an annual family dinner due to illness. I am sure they have not recovered yet.
I went down to Doc's this morning and he was watching the Black Widows network, meaning the women who murder. I told him I did not want to watch any more of that so as to ruin my day, and left.
He and I tried to watch a movie together yesterday since he gets free movies with cable. We chose a movie starring Robert deNiro, but his character was so wholesome, I couldn't stand it. Here Robert neNiro was playing violent killers all his early career and now they have got him playing an unbelievably wholesome elderly man in this movie. I said I don't know any wholesome older men. (Doc is certainly not wholesome) This is so unrealistic I am leaving, Hollywood's idea of what to watch on a family day. Let's not get carried away here with harmless movies on Thanksgiving.
So this morning Doc is watching Women Who Murder. Going to the other extreme.
I have left off watching sports events in my old age. I used to watch football, basketball, and even golf to talk sports with my sons. I decided I did not need to do that anymore. And I am sorry to say I just don't miss sports on TV, but that now makes me so radically different from anyone else. I have a little trouble finding people to do what I want to do, talk about books, life, death, anything with a little depth to it. I am driven to writing to perfect strangers who seem like they might be interested in thinking about those things.
I am reading a blogger now who says he is going to read a lot more this year. He seems to be in his right mind, not an alcoholic or anything. Doc used to read until alcoholism interfered. He can get through the newspaper but he can't concentrate well enough now to get through a book. He believes he is highly intellectual just watching documentaries on the history channel, more so than the rest of the people who live in this complex.
I would make movies with Doc if he weren't so lacking in ideas. If he is the least bit sloppy drunk, I can't make movies with him. He just does not realize what all this drinking for so many years has done to his once fine mind. I am pretty much persuaded that he started drinking too much in his twenties when his first marriage went bad. I think he drank throughout the next three marriages. He was homeless for ten years before I met him, during which time lack of funds probably kept him from drinking. Those were probably his finest years, thinking wise I mean. I did not meet him until his social security had kicked in at 65, and he was pretty much able to stay inebriated all his waking hours again.
He is 74 now, so he has had about nine years of really steady drinking from sun up until bed time. That would take a toll of the highest I.Q. in the world. I have tried to sever this relationship several times, but lack of better BFs drove me back to talking to him again, at least in the morning. He is a pleasant companion at his most sober, for a few hours after he gets up.
I just tried to dump him a while back, but the man I was considering as a possible BF soon proved to be so moody and unreliable I had to forget him. Long distance BFs just don't work. I need one here.
Doc was still a very good looking guy when I first met him. He is looking pretty seedy now days, but he is a tall, slim well built guy you are going to notice if you see him. He talks like a college graduate all right. He is considered smart by anyone who gets very well acquainted with him. But all agree he is an awful drunk. What can I say?
He can play the piano but never does. He has a fine jazz collection and listens to the jazz station practically all the time on cable. He can sing. He used to draw and paint, but doesn't do that any more either.
I can't talk about books with him, because he never reads. I set up a blog for him, but he can't keyboard. When he was working in sales, he used secretaries when he had a job and was making enough money to require one. He has this big computer, but I have to be his secretary or he would never use it. I use it for editing and uploading my videos, and his and mine if we make some.
He acted in all my plays I filmed, but could not memorize so I had to let him improvise the parts which meant he changed the characters considerably from how I conceived them, sometimes even for the better I thought, but mostly for the worse. I had him try to read some scripts, but if he was too drunk he would keep losing his place and would not be able to find it. Sometimes he balked at having to read just my lines, when I forbid him to improvise. He always improvised some. It was impossible to keep him from doing that, but he was the best actor I could find to work with me, with the most capacity to read lines and act.
There is no ideal situation for playwrights my age. Besides that, I don't write plays anymore. I am trying to write my memoirs instead. I have to write about a horrendous childhood and keep convincing myself that this story needs to be told. I was the child of an alcoholic, a pretty smart guy who was a fright to drink. Can I stand to write about all the terrible scenes I witnessed when he would come home drunk and he and my mother would fight all night? I have witnessed him holding a butcher knife to my mother's throat, and so have my younger sisters seen him do that. That's a sight you don't forget real soon. But this would not happen unless my mother got so beside herself she would try to beat him up. It was then that he might grab the nearest weapon to threaten her with. He once grabbed up his rifle with a hair trigger on it and threatened to kill her with it, she said for thirty minutes. I was petrified he was going to end up killing her at last. Before she finally left him after 35 years of battling married life, she said she had to leave because he was trying to lure her out in the desert to kill her. If I could talk to them now I would ask them both, "What were you thinking of?"
There has got to be a hereafter so people like my mother and dad can repent of putting their children through such horrific scenes of violence and do some kind of penance. I would just like to see my dad humble for once and willing to admit to his part in it. When we would try to tell him in his old age, after she left, how he had acted he would shout, "You are a bunch of god damn liars." He did not have any repentance in him!
I would have settled for just what they ask people in AA to do, take responsibility for their past actions and try to make amends for causing so much pain. Some alcoholics, fortunately, sober up enough in this life to express some regrets. My ex husband never admitted to anything he did, either, when he was drunk and trying to kill me. I took that violence for over 10 years just trying to get us to a place where I thought I could take care of the kids and could get away safely. He came so close to killing me a couple of times that my soul started to leave my body. He seemed to sense when I was just about dead, so he could stop just before rigor mortis set in.
You ask me why I married a guy who drank. Well, he was the only one who asked me, and I wanted kids. I figured I would leave him long before my mother ever left my father if I had to. I knew I could never take 35 years of living with a violent alcoholic. Let us face it, folks, if you drink, you are apt to become violent in the heat of arguments. That goes with the territory. Do you know how common drinking is? I at least had taken a vow never to drink. I never saw my mother drunk either. I never drank more than 2 drinks in my life, so as not to become the least bit impaired. When we were out dancing and partying I was sober. He was the one who thought he had to drink to have a good time. I was the one who drove us home afterward. If there is anything I hate it is being imprisoned in a car with a drunk man at the wheel. After a few 100 miles an hour rides of terror with his drinking friends driving us home, I never got in any body else's car either, who might be impaired before the night was over.
At 8 years old, after a harrowing trip home from the dentist with my father at the wheel, I told my mother I was never going anywhere again with the possibility of my dad driving me home drunk. She agreed that was the best policy as she always drove us everywhere once my dad got drunk, when she was along. She just didn't happen to make that 150 mile trip to the dentist. He was supposed to be looking after me. When Mother was driving after he got drunk, he would content himself with passing out in the front seat and then raising up and turning off the lights just to hear us scream I suppose. Guess that was his idea of fun. I never knew. Drunk guys do such horrendous things!
Is it any wonder that I imagine scenarios in the hereafter where I get to confront both my father and my ex husband about their drinking days when I was with them, hoping for more humility on their parts?
And here Doc is just as knot headed as they were, refusing even to consider quitting. He says he got all the religion he could stand going to church all the time in the German Lutheran community in St. Louis where he was raised. He says he hates AA. Well, a lot of drunks won't go to AA. They won't do whatever is necessary to help them quit. Raymond, my second son, thank goodness, is a big believer in AA. He is not resistant to the idea of a higher power, if it will help him stay sober.
I pray my oldest son will try such a program before alcohol kills him. I can just see him actually liking it, as Raymond does, once he got used to it. One of my cousins, who had been a Lt. Colonel in the air force and flew in 300 bombing missions over Germany finally tried AA to quit drinking, and he liked it so well he became one of their top motivational speakers in northern Utah. Unfortunately there are not many AA outreach programs in southern Utah, but my dad was like Doc, he did not like anything that sounded like church. Neither did my ex husband, but after I divorced him, he married his girlfriend in high school and did quit drinking and went to church he said every Sunday for 20 years, until he started drinking again and she had to divorce him.
He drank for quite a long time, and then my son Raymond was instrumental in getting him to sober up, even though he would not go to AA. He would try going to church and finally got so when he quit going to church he didn't start drinking again. But he might not have taken a long walk into the desert had he been part of a program where he had other guys not only helping him to stay sober, but keeping him from falling into a depression. Dean would do these disappearing acts when he got mad and depressed. He was never seen again after that last walk into the desert when he left home mad. That's been five years.
It's too bad that so many wait until is too late to do any reforming in this life. It would be nice if they had a few years of sobriety so the people who put up with their drinking could enjoy them in a different way. Doc just called to say he had to go to Circle K (for a beer run) so to come and get his credit card to go get Pizza. He would buy some diet coke for me to drink.
No thought of reform in his head! Dreary dreary. Well, ta ta, until tomorrow. In the meantime it's the same old same old. I will try to remain philosophical no matter what. I take comfort in writing in my blog and venting at least.