Tonight on my way home from work I realized that I was having a major craving for low-rent seafood. The kind you can really only get at Red Lobster.

Growing up primarily in land-locked parts of the country, Red Lobster was considered fine dining and pretty much as good as it got during the 1980s. If you wanted exotic things like shrimp and crab that weren’t in a Gorton’s box then RL was the place for you. When my friends and family wanted to go out for a special occasion, Red Lobster, Olive Garden or El Chicos were THE nice places to go.

Funny how the world changes.

When I went to college in Florida I learned to be slightly ashamed of loving Red Lobster. But some things just don’t go away. I began to make a mental distinction between seafood and Red Lobster. They were not the same thing and therefore, it was okay to still love Red Lobster, as long as I didn’t talk about it or better still, openly derided it while sucking on crab legs fished out of the bay about an hour before they landed on my table at “real seafood restaurants.”

Now I’m back in Ohio and am free to love the Red Lobster once again. And since it was recently my birthday, I really shouldn’t have been surprised when the need to get a Shrimp Lover’s Feast came over me. More surprising is that it didn’t happen sooner.

So I hopped into the truck and drove to the suburbs. I read a dime store mystery novel, added a 1/2 pound of snow crab legs to my dinner and drank a Corona with lime.

On my way home it suddenly hit me that not only did I forget to go to Red Lobster on my birthday, but I completely forgot to get my tags renewed. Forgot, as in didn’t even ever think about it. In 13 years I’ve never done that. If I ever didn’t renew them on time it wasn’t because I forgot. It was because I was waiting for payday or something.

If I hadn’t started thinking about Red Lobsters and birthdays, who knows when I might have realized I’d done that. Probably about the time the Po-po pulled me over.

Admittedly, I’ve been a tad distracted lately. Between work and Tyler and attempting to catch up on three seasons of The Wire, I have been pretty well occupied.

But honestly. Things like that bug me. Needing a calendar and notes and lists more and more. Getting so dependent on technology that I can’t even begin to memorize a phone number or address. I work in tech. I spend 12+ hours of a day on a computer or phone or digital cable box. And either I’m actually getting older or this stuff really does make us stupider. I don’t like either option so I’m looking for a third.

Maybe it’s a vitamin deficiency. In which case, I don’t suppose my dinner helped much.