**** Chapter Four – Interlude ****

I recall my first morning, laying in that strange bed alone and realizing I didn’t immediately know where I was. It was my first sober night’s sleep in almost a month. It was a tormented sleep with dreams to curl your hair at the beginning and thankfully slowly fading into pleasant, peaceful dreams of meadows, brooks and breezes before the dawn came. Lying about in bed and getting my head straight didn’t last long as my awakening was once again ruled by my bladder leading me to a quick hot shower and a very thorough scrubbing of my teeth.

Clean and dressed I decided I needed to take stock of my situation starting with coffee and food. A quick inventory of the cupboard and the small fridge convinced me that David’s wife Lisa had taken good care of me but she had definitely chosen sides in this relationship breakup that didn’t have sides. Everything was in stock and every item was an item she positively knew I didn’t like. It reached the point of absurdity including “Turkey Bacon”, “Soy Cheese” and even “Bamboo Toilet Paper”; Lisa knew I abhorred these things but they were all brand new and fresh so I got the message. I don’t even want to mention the absurd coffee substitute she bought me. I wasn’t really welcome there and she was only putting up with me for David’s sake – it was apparent I needed to get out of there fast.

The first order of business was getting some food into me, I didn’t want to cause any havoc with David so I made coffee and cooked up some of the strange stuff Lisa had left me. Half of the pot of the pretend coffee went down the sink and the bacon, milk and strange cheese went out the door with me in a plastic bag. When I reached the nearest diner the weird food went straight into their dumpster. Grabbing a booth inside I ordered up my favorite breakfast and savored a fine cup of strong actual coffee.

After sating my base desires with coffee and good food I sat back to consider my situation. Thoughts flooded my head and I knew I need to put them into some sort of order. I decided to try to make a list of priorities, oddly enough I decided to do that because that is what Trish would have told me to do. I remember that clearly only because I still have that list with me to this day, it’s faded and hard to read now but just looking at that delicate and worn piece of paper reminds me of how things have changed.

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The list I wrote went something like this, it’s not complete but some of it was personal and there is really no benefit to this story or to you for me to rehash a personal detail which turned out to be pointless before the summer started. First priority I decided was to inventory my finances, I knew I wasn’t broke but I wasn’t flush either. Second was to inventory my possessions and make the appropriate decisions regarding those, I suspected there would be some serious discard after my three and a half-week splurge. Thirdly I need to plan some real next steps, obviously I would need new living quarters and a new job and I would need those soon.

Now there were a lot of sub-bullet points on that list but they aren’t really pertinent to this story and there were some very personal items that just don’t need to be re-hashed. The basic point was I needed to get my waterfowl aligned and start moving forward again. I ordered a large coffee to go and settled up my tab.

I went back to David’s Guest House and fired up my computer, sadly it didn’t take too long for me to realize that I’d had too much fun on my binge of excessiveness and that I only had a short window before I need a steady income again. I had reserves I could plunder but that was an expensive move to make and it would only provide a short period of relief. A year at most if I intended to stay in SoCal. After the depression of dealing with the finances (aren’t they always depressing) I decided to distract myself by taking inventory of the detritus of my binge life. I had two large tote bags of what I assumed was drunken purchased crap and I was correct. I had Beanie Babies (really?) and coffee mugs mixed in with spice packets and absurd cooking tools. Apparently I had a very good time splurging with my female companions in my drunken splendor on those spring evenings during my binge life. Apparently in my drunken splurges that I usually went out without a jacket that the springtime weather usually called for so I had almost a dozen new sweatshirts, hoodies and fleece jackets bearing the trademarks of various establishments in the area. At the end of my sort through the trash of my weeks in an alcoholic haze I had some clothing, some coffee mugs, a strange automatic corkscrew and a pile of trash.

However in that pile of trash I noticed that there were several lottery tickets and I picked them back out on a “just because” basis. The Lottery was only a tool I used to amuse myself on my long daily commutes, something to daydream about while I sat in traffic. I would buy one on occasion simply to keep that daydream valid. On a whim I decided to check the numbers versus the lottery website and suddenly my world spun into change again.