Cat + No Booze = Vince Chuckin’ Threes

I am cat sitting.  Insert here a bad dad joke about hoping that I’ve lost the Christmas pounds before I plant my ass on it.  To make this experience more interesting, I have also given up drinking both coffee and booze for the month of January strictly to challenge my demons.  When combined, I now feel so close to the height of loserdom that my Vulcan ears are poking through my hat.  It’s almost as if Doc Brown picked me up in my depressingly torn and tattered pajamas this morning and whisked me forward in a Ghost of Christmas Future moment to show me myself, age 40, sitting in the same place with less hair, more fat, many less friends and many more cats in an attempt to stop me from continuing down the path to dweebness that it appears I am currently heading towards.  Thankfully I don’t need Emmett or Marty or Jacob Marley to help me out.  What I really need is a cold beer. (Although I’m very much cognisant of the fact that single men with cats is a close second to single men who live with their mom on the list of very unattractive things, my vacationing friends would be more than slightly peeved if I abandoned my post as cat minder due only to feeling like a dweeb)

I am aware of the evils of alcohol.  In my younger days my body battled with booze to hammer out where we stood and after long bouts in the bathroom, unnecessary conversations and unneeded fried food we figured it out.  I discovered the dark side, came to respect it and have since settled into a nice working relationship with alcohol.  The issue at hand is that this has been a fantastic relationship, the kind that makes your stomach flip, the kind you want to tell your mom all about and the kind it hurts to leave, even if it’s just for a weekend while she’s out of town on business at that international conference for tall blonde women who love listening to indie rock while watching basketball naked.  Forcibly ending this union has of course, been rough.

It could easily be assumed that admitting the leading role booze plays in the Broadway adaptation of one’s life would be on par in embarrassment with discovering your genitalia was secretly photographed for use in Sex Ed textbooks across the country.  In my case, I’m totally okay with it.  My life has been much worse since I put down the bottle and combined with the cat, I am a picture of boredom in an advertisement for social anxiety disorder.

To further explain, I offer an overly complicated basketball analogy:

Much to the chagrin of the bitter like broken hearted teenage girls Toronto fans, Vince Carter is undoubtedly the best dunker the NBA has seen in the post Harold Miner, pre Jamario Moon era.  His ability to finish is the exact opposite to Mike Dunleavy’s ability to grow hair. 

In 2004 Vince told the press that he didn’t need to dunk anymore.  He was through with throw downs.  Although Vince was dealing with some nagging injuries, his motive for consciously moving away from his bread and butter was based more on proving that he could and less on his stupid knee.  The results were as painful as my social life has become.  Why go away from something that makes you happy, you’re good at and have been doing for quite sometime just to prove that you can?

To drop the 4th checker of my point in the secret diagonal stack of explanation I’ve been building in the corner, giving up booze, which is my bread and butter makes me feel like a dork because like Vince without the dunks, I’m not the same and certainly not as exciting.  There is so much stagnation in my life that I’ve come to feel like Vince drifting out near the three point line for quarters at a time with those around him shouting ‘Get to the rim! Do what you do best! You’ve practiced it for long enough and you’re boring us all to tears!’  Sadly, the rim in my case is of a beer bottle and the fans shouting at me are mostly the cat that I’m looking after.  Where Vince failed, I will succeed.  I will listen to my fan,  even if it means taking the unattractiveness one step further and believing in my temporary cat’s transcendental nature.