Chapter 2: Life in a Bottle

How you see things from the inside of a bottle is altered by the curve of the glass and the potency of the inebriant, I’ve had a lifelong love of good bourbon so my memory of that time is hazy to say the least, that potent elixir is a joy and a curse. What I can tell you is that the extent of my achievements that first weekend was to burn through most of my remaining cash down at the pub while offending some ladies and bedding a couple of others. Monday morning was a hung-over but busy blur. I managed to politely evict my latest barroom conquest after a quick shower and a perfunctory shared cup of morning coffee, and then off to work I went.

I managed to make it to my desk before the start of the trading day, 6:30am on the west coast, the early morning proceeding as expected when hungover from a 48hour bottle binge.

The 9am meeting with my team leaders and managers was tense to say the least, several of them were close friends with my now-ex Trish and they and Trish loved social media. Escaping with my skin intact from that meeting was nothing short of miraculous. My next order of business was to drop in on one of my real friends in the office, David, who was our firms Chief Legal Officer. Again, he had already heard the score from social media via his wife however he was a bit more forgiving as he was my buddy and that I was owning up to my role in what had happened. I managed to secure rental of his guest/pool house for a month so my accommodations problem was temporarily solved. David was tense during our brief discussion but I wrote it off to my current situation, I couldn’t have been more wrong.