BB Grey–musings

 

“If you’re going to give me something, make it a damn good bottle of whiskey and let’s not talk about it.”

-Charles Bukowski

It begins with an idea. The idea festers, grows. The perfect gift, the one that will make them see you differently, better, deeper. You research. You wander through stores, click through pages, weigh prices, colors, sizes. You try to recall some offhand comment they made in August about liking that one thing, but was it that thing or something adjacent? You second-guess yourself. You third-guess yourself. You purchase.

Then comes the waiting. The gift sits in a drawer, wrapped in paper that is too much or too little. The ribbon curls, the card is forgotten. You always forget the card. The anticipation mounts—they will love this, they must love this. And then the moment arrives. The unwrapping. The pause. The half-smile.

“Oh… wow… thanks… What is it?”

That’s the best-case scenario.

Some years, it’s worse. “How could you?” “What is this supposed to mean?” Some years, the gift disappears. No mention of it after the unwrapping. Did they like it? Did they hate it? Then one day, you find it still in the box, stashed in the back of a closet like evidence from a crime scene. Or worse—it’s gone, returned, re-gifted, passed along like a cursed object.

You learn. You adapt. You stop trying to read minds. You go for the safe bet: cash. Cash is clean. Cash is king. It’s a white flag of surrender in the war of gift-giving. Here, take this and buy what you actually want. I don’t want to play this game anymore.

Gift cards are a slight improvement—cash with the illusion of effort. I know you like bookstores, so here’s money you can only use in one. It says: I care, but I will not risk my sanity on getting it wrong.

And now, Valentine’s Day approaches. Restaurants are booked, prices are inflated, expectations are high. You should have planned ahead, but who really does? Now you scramble. You check for last-minute reservations, but unless you have divine intervention, you’re out of luck. You consider cooking, but that’s a risk, too.

So you adjust the strategy. Send a handwritten card—one with actual postage, because no one sees that coming anymore. Maybe shift the celebration a day early, dodge the chaos. As for the gift? That remains uncertain. But you’ve learned one thing over the years: no matter what you do, the outcome is never quite what you imagined.

Some years, you win. Some years, you lose. Some years, you just pour another drink and call it a night.