My younger brother's need to drink himself insensible almost every evening is reaching the point of intolerable. Last evening was the eighth consecutive that he has been here at home and passed out.
If he chooses to ruin his health and his cognition, that is of course up to him. It must be why he worked all of his life so that he could retire a year or so ago and do this for whatever lifespan he has left.
I wonder what his younger self would have thought back in the 1970s when he was in his early 20s? Would he have applied himself so dutifully for all of his working life just to have this as his retirement choice?
I have not had one of my cans of strong (8% alcohol) beer since April 3rd. I normally only drink one in the late evening when I am watching some T.V.; but with my feeble-brained younger brother drinking himself unconscious as he has been doing, I refuse to sit in his unconscious presence in the living room when he passes out.
And consequently, I have been leaving him in the darkened living room with the T.V. as his exclusive company, while I come upstairs here to my computer and have a dry evening of it.
He usually spends the night at his girlfriend Bev's home at the end of his Saturdays, so he likely will not come home this evening. However, I think that I will give him just two more evenings when he is here ─ if he passes out on both of those evenings and brings his consecutive pass-out run to a total of 10 evenings, then I will no longer try to watch T.V. with him in the evening.
We watch our shows via our T9 Android 8.1 TV Box, but he doesn't know how to operate it ─ that is my department. Thus, without me providing that service, he would thenceforth only have the few channels we receive via our basic cable package with which to entertain himself.
Besides, I am getting more than my fill of his too-often malignant personality when he drinks anyway ─ if the dimwit continues with this pattern for just two more evenings, then I will give up on him as a lost cause, and reserve my T.V.-viewing to the late morning and early afternoon.
And of course, when he stays with his girlfriend Bev on Saturday evenings, I will have that particular evening to myself.
I am now unsure, but it may have been something like 10:41 p.m. by the time I was into bed last evening. I had my usual initial block of sleep, and then rose early in the a.m. just to turn on and log back into my computer so that it would be warmed up for later use.
"Later" often means a half-hour at best, but I think that I did manage to lapse back into a little more sleep after my return to bed. Even so, I rose again long, long before 3:00 a.m. to get to work on the day's content assignment for the post I have under construction at one of my six hosted websites.
My youngest stepson was not yet in bed. He did retire, though, well before my task was done.
I believe that it was 3:44 a.m. when I heard some rain falling outside, but I don't know that it had not rained earlier.
My website work kept me occupied until after daybreak, and I think that it was about 7:30 a.m. by the time I finally returned to bed for some further needed sleep.
I do not often manage more than another couple of hours, but this time I remained in bed for just over four hours. Of course, it was not all sleep, and I even rose once to use the bathroom.
But I had a wonderful dream of which I now recall nothing except that I was younger, and it featured two very lovely lasses who were both showing as much interest in me as I was in them. I even enjoyed some tender kissing with one of them.
I hate it when something pulls me from dreams like that, thereby forever losing the uplifting and magical performance that was being acted out.
The morning was on its last legs when I rose and went downstairs to fix my day's second hot caffeinated beverage ─ I had enjoyed one earlier while working on my website's post.
My younger brother was seated at the dining table reading the Saturday morning edition of the Vancouver Sun that I subscribe to, but he had already risen earlier by the time I had gotten up to use the bathroom.
As circumstances worked out, we were never to speak to one another.
I fixed my hot beverage and came back upstairs to my computer, but it was very clear that something was amiss with me ─ while I had been awaiting the boiling of my beverage's water downstairs, I felt myself experience the onset of a migraine aura.
The halo or aura itself never quite manifested, but it brought on a near-headache of the eyestrain variety that only darkness was going to ameliorate.
My younger brother had returned to his bedroom for a rest when I was preparing my hot beverage ─ an aid that was not going to be capable of helping me normalize after my sleep (as is usually the purpose of such drinks).
So I sat here at my computer until I finally drank all of the beverage, and then I resorted again to my own bed. My brother, though, seemed to be finishing up his own retreat and was sprucing up in his room for his departure for the afternoon and maybe even the entirely of what was left of Saturday should he spend tonight at the home of his girlfriend Bev.
I had an ersatz blindfold in place to yield me the darkness I needed, but I never managed to relax into another sleep. In fact, I may not have spent more than 15 minutes laying in my bed.
And when I rose, my brother had already gone.
The morning was characterized by considerable rain, and most of the afternoon looked ugly up above ─ there was also a chill, heavy breeze. Yet sometimes the Sun broke through the dark cloud cover, and occasionally there were great swathes of blue sky.
I had some exercising scheduled for today out in the backyard tool-shed, but my skirt with a migraine didn't make me feel much up to it. And so I decided to seek a little inspiration.
I decided to find an MMA telecast.
The one I ended up selecting was Bellator 213. The programme ran for something like two hours and 20 minutes, but it managed to help. Meantime, my youngest stepson left before mid-afternoon for work ─ he has an afternoon shift; and his older brother was to also head off for somewhere awhile later.
This freed me up to do some limbering exercises.
The fight I was most interested in was the last one ─ a title fight involving flyweight champion Ilima-Lei Macfarlane versus Canadian challenger Valérie Létourneau.
By the time I had gotten through the long MMA programme and gone out to the backyard tool-shed, it was just barely after 4:00 p.m.
I fared rather well with the exercising. I had first weighed myself before going out there so that I would know how much weight this 69-year-old would be hauling up and down during the pull-ups / chin-ups portion ─ dressed as I would be to exercise in that unheated shed, I weighed something like 188 or 189 pounds.
With the exercising done, I was finally able to start preparing myself a yummy first meal of the day. I was to slow-cook a mix of regular ground beef along with the following sliced-up vegetables: three big stalks of broccoli, two medium-sized organic red potatoes, and an organic yam.
I slow-cooked the whole in butter and coconut oil in a covered frying pan for approximately an hour. I had spiced it all with freshly-ground black pepper, a fair amount of paprika, and lots of turmeric. I forgot to use any Himalayan salt.
At the end when I had deemed the mix cooked enough to eat, I added in three sliced up garlic cloves and a good hunk of ginger that I also cut up.
There looked to be enough there that I would have some leftover for my evening supper, but darned if I didn't manage to eat everything!
My meal rather reminded me of a recent interview I read about ─ an Ayurvedic practitioner who probably eats very little meat was interviewing a supposedly renowned proponent of vegetarianism:
LifeSpa.com
I do not believe that humans were ever intended to try to 'thrive' without ample animal protein in the diet. It of course doesn't require people to have to eat meat ─ dairy products and eggs could easily suffice in that regard.
Another article I read also ties in with this stance that people are not meant to be strict vegetarians:
DrMicozzi.com
Obviously that second article was not just about what to cut from one's diet ─ it also concerned itself heavily with what is essential in the diet.
But I don't have the time to weigh into this any further. My evening is already well underway; and although I am not expecting my younger brother to be returning home later, he might anyway.
My late and largish meal is rather dragging me down, even if much of it was vegetable-based and thus comprised of a lot of water. But my eyes are also feeling taxed. And as a result of both of these factors, I wish to lie down for awhile before wrapping up this post.
Also, the Sun is out as it sets, and the curtained window beyond my computer is not blocking the brilliance of that blinding orb ─ this is also exacerbating my poor eyes.
So I shall now take a break at least until the Sun is no longer the threat that it presently is.
oooooooooooooo
Well, I feel much better. I was abed maybe 45 or so minutes, and might even have dozed.
All I want to do to finish up this post is present a few more photos taken early last year when my wife's niece got married in her home country of Thailand.
I think the photos were probably taken in the city of Udon Thani; the date was February 25, 2018.
I will only post two photos. I am unable to say who the two people are at the extreme left and right, but that is the bride and groom standing between those two others:
Okay, I am still home alone. Maybe after that nine-day break without, I will finally have at least one of those cans of strong beer that I keep in supply.
No comments:
Post a Comment