Blue Saturday

no oasis in this thread, sorry

my globe-trotting boy is back in the country, had to circumnavigate the globe for work. apparently he's off to Sweden in a fortnight, so i think we've found patient zero

gee i miss the pub

I walked to school the other day - a weird journey in all sorts of ways, not least because of how close it was, given how fucking long it takes me to drive there each day. I walked past various absences but it was the three pubs on the way I could hardly bear to look at.

fuck knows what happened towards the end of yesterday evening, i woke up in bed with Police Academy on the TV at some point. i think i might've fallen over because there are a bunch of ouch points around my body, lol home drinking.

I’m definitely having a bit of a wobble, I’d been doing pretty well before all this (sober since start of year, starting to get shit together) but plague makes monkeys of us all. I’m basically giving myself a pass for the rest of March and then I have to snap out of it somewhat because i) fancy deliveroo wine is an indulgence I cannot afford and ii) it is a very bad idea to be hungover right now

However my discounted craft beer crate just turned up so today I will be drinking to the memory of cafés and bookshops and trying not to think about how I took in the delivery and immediately touched my face 😄

(Then I will have to ring up and ditch them yet again, I wonder how many times I will do this before I start feeling bad (I always tell the nice young lad at the other end that I am stopping the service because I am an alcoholic with liver disease to forestall their objection-handling retention pitch))

My hangover says ouch but this isn't a time to be avoiding indulgence. I'll worry about finding some balance when there's a world outside to balance, I guess. Tho I do need to do some thinking, my head's been addressing some very long-ingrained shit lately, and that's impossible with a hangover.

This works out a lot cheaper than my pub drinking, which isn't necessarily a good thing 😅

If I were allowed outside it would certainly be cheaper! I spent £35 on wine last night 😵

Does drinking ever become mind-numbingly boring for you? I cut back significantly once I hit that stage.

Lads I wish for the best for both of ye, not least because seeing so much emoji usage from the pair of ye is very unnerving.

yeah i still have the luxury of grabbing a bottle or two with my food shop, apparently i'm more at risk from drunky accidents than the rona at the moment

xp the whole world is a family WhatsApp now, you have to just go with it 🤪

pom usually i'm a pub drinker so it rarely gets boring because it's usually my socializing time. it probably gets boring for other people once i pass a point :D

i'm only gonna drink indoors once every 5 or 6 days i hope, again i don't really get bored, it just makes me ramble more online

Does drinking ever become mind-numbingly boring for you? I cut back significantly once I hit that stage.

Fair enough – I never get bored of fraternizing with fellow lushes either.

🍻

this isn't a time to be avoiding indulgence

indulging avoidance is v much the way to go rn imo

Well played

For the first time in my adult life bar the odd January I am doing absolutely zero midweek drinking. Its partly a practicality thing - I hate physical shopping right now and booze is a precious commodity that shouldn't be frittered away. But mostly because I think the emotional drag of sustained boozing would be very bad right now.

We are it has to be said hitting pretty hard on Fridays and Saturdays. I think the picture might be significantly different if I were here on my own though.

Hopefully mine would be different if I wasn't XD

I've gone from a position of not drinking at all midweek - driven by my job, where even the mildest hangover tends to lead to disaster - to drinking every night. It's not sustainable but I get habituated pretty quickly so need to watch it (while also thinking, fuck it, why not?).

after last weekend, when I kind of cracked and got massively fucked up for 2 days, which wreaked havoc on me physically afterwards, my body clock was fucked, I'd had a cold the week before which was getting better but came back again worse, had earache, vertigo (I think this was probably from being too drunk to take my antidepressants - had vertigo before when I ran out for a few days), I told myself to stay sober for a bit because I'm someone who has let's say a tendency to binge drink at the best of times and this is only gonna get worse while I'm grieving and completely isolated

now my cold has gone again, the 3 day hangover is a memory and I feel OK, I think I'm going to struggle not to drink tonight tbh. I nearly did yesterday. I don't think I'll get trashed because my mood is a lot better than last week, but who knows. I haven't got that much booze left and no plans to get more so maybe just getting that drunk will remove the temptation a bit, and I can try and stay sober next weekend instead. I've been managing to get through the week OK

I’m cutting back after the last couple days. Just too easy to fall into bad habits.

I can’t imagine what you must be going through cp, thinking of you and hoping you cope as well as you can however you can

I’m out of the habit of daytime drinking and already smashed after just a few cans of “session” pale, and I’ve got Baltic Porter and all sorts to get through yet

The hibiscus sour i hope will serve as aversion therapy, either on the way in or (more likely) out

Hmmm, just reaching that "I could manage a drink to take the edges off" point of the day

Actually playing the "Halcyon" video on a loop and what would be really great would be some kind of soft, pillowy narcotic about now.

I’ve been listening to the Spotify playlist “space disco” (ie lindstrøm Todd terje and all that stuff), might be the first time I’ve really craved an mdma Skype sesh

The Beeb have got an hour and three quarter rona show on now and I'm having a rum in protest tbh

I've decided as long as Rona is running rampant I'm not drinking, so no doubt this will be the longest stretch of sobriety in my life. In fact, I haven't had a drink since the middle of the month anyway. If I'm not in a pub I don't drink anyway - only occasionally.

interesting (very) long read on recent chinese social conditions (inc.its post-socialist health structures) as these interact with internal and also global markets, and role of all this in recent and not-so-recent pandemics:
http://chuangcn.org/2020/02/social-contagion/

(this is a weird thread to out it on but at a minimum it's a good counterpoint to the conspiracy theories upthread, also weirdly: if you know a better thread for it, by all means post it there also)

― mark s, Friday, 27 March 2020 bookmarkflaglink

The outbreak thread is the best place (I put all pieces I am going through on there) as is Chiang (kept meaning to read this for the last month)

Link the playlist please wins?

^ cosine

https://open.spotify.com/user/spotify/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX4pbGJDhTXK3?si=-2nED5eqSBeInAwnnF3Evg

It is literally Spotify’s own playlist, I’m sure there are better ones put together by users but I am lazy

Fuck me I want ice cream

I ordered pizza but resisted the urge to publicly harangue the person who brought it in order to show how #relatable I am

Second weekend in isolation... feeding the ducks. pic.twitter.com/uxdoLTCLSv

— Radcliffe Observatory Ducks (@OxQuackademics) March 28, 2020

I've been holding off my Aldi frozen pizza since Tuesday in favour of more perishable stuff but I think tonight's the night

on my stroll with the dog today i ended up walking down a steep hill behind a guy in his tartan pyjamas and a coat over the top, nothing on his feet but flip-flops, pissed out of his head and on his way back from the offy with a bag full off bottles that were clanking about round his knees. he was swerving all over the place and he kept catching the front of his flip-flops on the pavement, but just about saving himself each time as he stumbled forwards. And in my mind I was screaming, please don't fall, please don't fall, cos i know he was going to hurt himself and i would rush in to help him and that would be awkward as i'm sure that neither of us would want to end up with a dose of the old miley cyrus as a result of the encounter. And needless to say he ended up crashing straight into a row of overflowing wheelie bins like it the opening sequence of starsky and hutch and there was a crash of bottles but somehow he regained he feet and staggered onwards and i got out of there after asking if he was okay and just getting a roar of laughter by way of reply

beautiful

One of the most annoying things about WFH is that when you connect you the VPN they disable Spotify, even the web version. But I'll listen to that at evening/weekends.

I don't much drink - I'm literally the "oh yes an average of a pint a week" guy that doctors never believe, but I've been hitting the late night video games pretty hard - I forgot that the clocks were going back, so suddenly it was 2, and what was I doing with my life? And this morning I remembered the clocks and suddenly everything's fine, nothing to investigate further.

I've been listening to a lot of doomy droney stuff because a writer I follow loves that sort of thing and throws up a bandcamp link every day and I find some of it good to work to. Bandcamp put up a feature on one of his favourite labels - it's definitely not for everyone, particularly In This Current Climate.

https://daily.bandcamp.com/label-profile/cryo-chamber-dark-ambient-guide

love that NickB post (also glad you didn't get the Miley off a tumbledown drunk)

it was hard to get up this morning, with the change of clocks, and the feeling of "so what, I'll just be sitting in this room all day anyway, won't even get round to reading a book or doing anything useful/creative", and also I may have trudged to bed in slight disgrace after my trenchant opinions were deemed to be terrible and bringing everyone down *shrug*

thanks AF, the blurb sounds interesting, later I'll see if I like the music as much (I also have friends who are into "dark ambient", which is very adjacent to genres I like, and yet a lot of it leaves me cold - well, that might be what it's supposed to do, I guess, but I usually don't quite share their enthusiasm)

^^ love that. Would you mind sharing who the writer is? Sounds right up my street.

I've been finding solace in classical, drone, ambient and black metal, too these days. But then that's where I found solace way before all this happened :)

xp to Andrew

Its a comics book writer called Warren Ellis: https://warrenellis.ltd/ who has definitely been "I'd like to welcome everyone to my hermitage, no not literally"

Thank you, and this is one for the 'shockingly old' thread: I've always though Warren Ellis the musician and Warren Ellis the comic book writer were one and the same o_O

really wish i could go prop the bar in a quiet daytime pub right now

maybe i'll just walk round to the Harry Pursey and scratch on the door and whine

Last night I dreamt that my old local was having secret free lock-ins to use up stock.

must be someone somewhere currently tunneling in to their local, great escape style

uh fantastic mr fox style, pls

boggis, bunce and shebeen