B365V4.14 - Whose life is it anyway?

Two things about me and alcohol; when sufficiently lubricated I am much more sexually inadequate than my normal state of inadequacy and truth starts spilling from my mouth like a fountain.  With that being said, allow me to tell a story.

About a week before I ventured off on vacation I had the fortune of commenting on a friend's blog post, mind you this is a friend whom I been interested in pursuing something more with for quite some time.  It dealt with how to get over breakups so I regaled the audience of this particular thread with some stories from the Crazy Canadian Incident.  Long time readers know what I am talking about, short time readers need to keep up.  Not rehashing that story here.

Anyway I hear back about how I am such a nice guy who deserves better, which is all well and good but a pre vacation trip for some libations and Facebook made for an interesting commentary from me, as I sent her a personal message saying how I was previously interested in her, but then things got in the way and I had accepted how that was how things were going to be now.  Then I ventured forth on my Vancouver vacation.

Vancouver is awesome for me, it is like the girl that can't take a bad selfie in it's beauty.  Nature and civilization intersect there in such a manner that I have taken to calling it my Pittsburgh detox.  Anyway, I wake up in my hotel in Vancouver one morning, put on my hotel slippers and robe and grab a shower, when I come out I fire up the laptop and I see a personal message from this person, so I check it out and it says "Can we talk?"  I replied perhaps when I am not 4000 miles away that could be arranged and I continued with my vacationing, but that message was stuck in the back of my mind.  Did my drunken scribblings offend?  I read them and reread them, until I had convinced myself that they might have or they might not have.  It was a mental tug of war with neither side winning, so I contented myself with the fact that at least what I wrote was honest.  The truth will set you free and all that jazz.

I went back to my vacationing, dreading coming home, not because of the potential outcome of the talk, but because I was so happy in Vancouver.  I feel like a better person each time I come back, as if their kindness and hospitality rubs off on me somewhat.  It hurts to leave,   Plus the flight back is not that much fun either, leaving Vancouver at 6:30 am their time (9:30 am Pittsburgh Standard Time) and not being back on home soil until 10:30 pm, but make it back I did and set about the business of finding out how much work would be left for me after not being in the office for a week.  Surprises abound, everything was done and the office was cleaned in my absence.  It made me wonder why I evere came back in the first place, I had become obsolete during my vacation.  Nonetheless, I fell back into my routine, as opposed to some poutine had I stayed in Vancouver.

I went ahead and notified my friend I was back, and we set up our meeting for what for how will be called "The Talk" for a week later on Monday, as she had errands downtown anyway.  So we picked up some food and headed to Point State Park (which has nothing on Stanley Park, for the record) on an almost picnic like excursion.  "The Talk" was one of those nice, heartfelt one on one things, where we did not so much talk about us as a unit, but us as people and what we wanted.  And maybe that is where things started to gel between us, a mutual understanding if how much more we wanted out if life than what we have gotten thus far.  Or maybe it was my remaining Canadian charm rubbing off on her.  I know better than to chalk it up to good looks, I see myself in the mirror every morning and you dont get to be 48 and single while being typically handsome.

But perhaps there was magic in that old silk hat they found, as what started as a message about what I had hoped for previously and a sit down heart to heart chat seems to be turning into something more. Then I started thinking about the last month, a month that kicked off with a killer show at Stage AE (Coheed & Cambria, holla), a nice birthday sendoff for vacation at work, complete with Prantl's cake, landing in Vancouver on my birthday and doing things that I could never do here, like going to the tops of mountains (Mount Washington doesn't count), catching a sunset on the beach, riding a seaplane over the city, and then coming home to being involved in something that I had considered off of the table for me just a few months ago.

It sounds sad, but I was resigned to geing alone as a permanent sort of thing, I even had math to back me up, figuring if I were to meet someone on say, my birthday, we were to get married and have a kid that very same day, I am 64 teaching that kid to drive, probably 67 when that kid starts college, 71 if they graduate on time and for me the numbers didn't add up.  Now I am not thinking about numbers as much, I am thinking about what tomorrow brings.  Pinch me, because this isn't the life I had when I left here on vacation a couple of weeks ago.  It is something new and different and dare I say hopeful, which coming from a person who often says "Expect nothing and you will never be disappointed." is quite a change in temperment.