The Lost Weekend

ADDENDA:
From Friday to Sunday I was in Ann Arbor, Michigan and the surrounding areas visiting Betsy's father in the hospital and assisted living facility he lives in, along with Betsy's brother and of course, Betsy. Visiting a hospital to visit an ailing parent was a bit of an unexpected stressor, bringing up a lot of emotions and sense memories of what it was like to visit my own parents in the hospital, and all the drama surrounding the many entrances and exits to hospitalization and home life. The old poets had it right - the end is very much a twilight.

I'm not going to recount here blow-for-blow what I ate over the weekend, other than to say that two factors lead me to eat the crappiest I have eaten since starting this blog: 1 is the stress I just mentioned, 2 is the over-abundance of crap and poor quality food available in this region of the midwest. The first night there, on the way to the hotel from the airport, we stopped off the high way to a place called Stivers, a real burgers-n-shit kind of place, which very much reminded me of a lot of the honky-tonk kinds of bar/diners I lived off while biking cross country.

At the hospital, I went down to the cafeteria for breaks and ate foods out of the vending machine with literally hundreds of ingredients. I must admit, unlike before thinking about food, I really tasted what I was eating. The microwave 'deep dish' pizza out of the vending machine was both really really delicious and really really disgusting - it wasn't so much pizza as it was "pizza", an amazing cartoon simulation of what you'd hope pizza to be if you never really had a good one. There was a certain something in it's taste and texture that was really appealing for the first few bites, but as you get to the end you feel a little bit ill. How can they offer this in a hospital?

On Saturday I was so out of my mind from lack of sleep and overpowering emotions, I found myself badly needing to focus so I drank 2/3 of a 20oz bottle of diet coke, my first diet coke in who knows how long. The first couple of swigs very much had a lot of memories attached to it - I drank many of them at meals with my dad, who also drank it often. But after that, it just tasted acidy and medicinal - which was why I was drinking it, to get that caffiene.

Towards leaving time on Sunday, we sat down to some delivered pizzas and diet coke at the assisted living facility - it was B's dad's birthday, and like myself, find no food more worthy of celebrating with than pizza. The home even provided a vanilla-vanilla sheet cake. The pizza was ok, a bit doughy and generic, and I had a small cup of diet coke - the sweet bubbliness of it went well with the pizza - I think I should maybe make a homemade organic-cane sugar soda that will be specifically designed to compliment pizza!

Sunday night, finally home, at some yogurt and nuts because dinner never happened and my whole system felt jacked, needed something real to just chill on. Had a splitting headache at 2 in the morning, pretty sure from dehydration. Quite glad I know that I have a regimen of good foods that I can eat the next week to be able to get my head back on straight.