I Am Getting Too Old For This…….

I visited my daughter this weekend, and realized that I am getting too old for some things…

Like getting drunk and dancing all night at a local bar in a university town. I had a riot, but  I was kind of a pain in the ass at times. For example, when we got back to my daughters apartment at 2:30 a.m. early Saturday morning, I was too wired and inebriated to immediately fall asleep….so, when a ridiculous kind of strutting mock wrestling match started at the party house across the street, I went out to the porch to have a smoke and watch the show for a bit. I started talking with some biology teaching assistant, who was likewise lured by the inane nature of the kind of fight that occurs when some guys get drunk, take off their shirts, and start making Wrestlemania type threats to one another without actually engaging in any actual punching. So I’m talking with this stranger, in that sort of familiar way you have when you drink like a fish and the whole world is suddenly your ocean of newly discovered friends, when some guy strolls in off the sidewalk, runs up the stairs to the apartment where my daughter lives with 3 other girls, and enters, shutting the door.

I was so at peace with the world by this time that I just thought, “Well isn’t that nice….somebody got a booty call”.

The TA and I chatted some more, about how fights end in Fredrickton ( where he was from) or in Solsville ( where I live within parking lot view of 2 bars, so I get to see beer fueled wrestling every few weeks from the vantage of my porch when I get home from work), and then we parted ways, with me urging him on in his endeavours to bring the Krebs cycle to a new generation and for his many efforts to keep bacterium alive in a warm and moist environment ( yeah, we’re talking stupid drunk here, lol).

Then I tried to get back into my daughters apartment, and realized  that Mr. Booty Call had locked the door. By now it’s about 3:30 a.m., and I wasn’t sure what to do. My daughter’s room is on the 3rd floor of the house, and she’s worn ear plugs to bed in prophylaxis against the inevitable drunken snoring I’m bound to engage in if I ever get back in the apartment and lay down to go to sleep. Oh, what to do?!?

I did what anyone in their pyjama pants, t-shirt and sock feet would do on a 10 celsius night , and went back outside to have another cigarette and weigh my options.

Scaling the side of the building was out of the question….I didn’t have the motor skills for that sort of high wire act, and all my ‘super powers’ were subdued by the drinks I had earlier that evening.

I contemplated curling up on the steep, dirty, carpetted stairs to the apartment, so that my daughter could live with the mystique of a boozy mother who sleeps in a foyer after getting locked out at 3:30 a.m., but then I decided to give waiting a chance. I figured I’d give everybody 30 minutes to come to each others emotional rescue, and then I’d try the door bell.

Which is what I did. Someone let me in, and I stumbled up the stairs to bed.

As I said, I was a pain in the ass.

But otherwise, it was a fun weekend. My daughter and I went to Toronto when we woke up at 10 a.m., and shopped a bit on Queen Street, and went out to dinner. I was too tired after my late night as the dancing fool at the Tir na nOg the night before, so we didn’t go hear any live music or treat any Torontonians to our karaoke renditions of ‘Feelings’. Instead, we went to a movie ( we saw Monster… a very horrifying film in lots of ways), and then returned to the hotel.

Then I came back home today via train, so that my daughter could have the use of my car for a few days while her boyfriend is visiting from Norway ( I can’t wait to meet him…they’re coming down here in a couple of days. She met him at Christmas when she went to see her best friend who now lives outside of Oslo).

Now I’m exhausted, but I guess that what happens when you circumnavigate Lake Ontario, in various modes of transport and under the influence of substances at intervals, in a 56 hour period.

So maybe I’m not that old yet…but I sure feel like it now.