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Oh hell, I ate a 4 oz. sirloin tip steak and a whole batch of those ready to back turtle cookies with chocolate chips, walnuts, and caramel in the middle.

I’m sorry everybody, I’m sorry.

So, you can imagine I had a lot of stuff in my teeth necessitating a good flossing to remove said things, the things you can imagine being stuck in my teeth (actually, between my teeth). I’m trying to say that I was flossing with dental floss. You do that when you’re sober. When you’re addicted to crack cocaine you don’t. So, yeah, I flossed, and I had a pretty good, productive, bits-on-the-mirror session really. And I went to drop my flosstring in the waste basket (a square, molded plastic bucket lined with a crinkley white plastic grocery bag) and then follow-up with a good, vigorous brushing (you do these things when you’re on the wagon, I’m telling you) and I noticed that the flosstring had stuck to the bottom of my palm and the flosstring had fallen like jetsam onto the bathroom counter. I imagined my obliviosity as I pulled my had back up from over the trashcan, a spent flosstring stuck to it–kind of like a piece of terlet tissue to the bottom of a shoe walking out of a public bathroom–and I thought to myself, “That must have been really funny for God to watch.”

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Encouraging and depressing simulateously. What a trick:

But I basically have been trying to be sober for years now. I totally advocate being sober because I can’t do any writing during and after drinking.

–from Daniel Robert Epstein’s interview of Jonathan Ames for Suicide Girls

and now Liz Phair on writing, same site, Keith Daniels conducting:

Writers need a good story to write about, and sometimes there’s not that much out there. “Let’s jump on and weigh in!” I was reviewed three and four times in the same publications! They’d be arguing with each other. At first I was like, “Holy crap! What’s this? This is scary,” and then I started to realize it wasn’t about me as much as it was everyone writing to each other, and weighing in their opinions in the eyes of their peers.

and Chuck Palahniuk on work ethic, same sitemag, same interviewer:

I really committed that if I’m going to be a writer I’m going to work as hard as I would any day job. So if I do that I could do at least one book a year and if I can’t do that then I’m not working at it hard enough.

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Bed at 1a up at 9, with ups in between staring at things in my room looking for the ghost(s) in them. This, I surmise, is due to my talking about and beginning to plan a trip to (a) haunted inn(s) with the FKer last night. She wanted me to call so that we could talk through sticking points in her book proposal, which we did also.

Exers. 2 De:
• 20 p-ups
• 20 l-lifts
• 50 laps

Speaking of laps, in this southern culture on the skids I could be viewed as sort of a sissyboy. Especially when I’m on a 24″ purple bicycle riding along the frontage road as swarming pods of Harley’s and custom chop jobs rumble decibly up and down Highway 17 for bike week. The woman that yelled something from the back of one of those over-accessorized cruiser bikes for old men–the dragqueen equivalent in the motorcycle world: big, beefy, muscley, with a curvy, rounded front, aerodynamic sidelines, and some junk in the trunk back there, but ultimately unwieldly and ungainly, with too many add-ons, too much glitter, and with funny names like Goldwing–I think she was insuating something to disparaging effect about my manhood while I was walking the little bike to the repair shop yesterday. And she can do that. I mean she’s allowed, because she can make herself heard over the sub-boom of double-digit overbored two-stroke motors. That’s the kind of women that sit on the back of these things. Or at least one of the kinds. Her man can sneeze while riding, and still be heard by a pedestrian–even a sissy one–over on the other side of the median. It happened. I wanted to yell back “gezundheit” but couldn’t muster the requisite lung power.

One of my best buddies (and you know who you are!) is gay and as beautiful as one of these beautiful Canadian geese that fly in from up north, smoke the grass, and get into fights with each other over the women. (I just saw this on the baseball diamond walking back from the pool.) Here and now, for the most part, it’s a little fishy claiming you’re straight and hanging with a gay boy. I don’t care what they think. I’m reading FK’s book about loosing weight and not skimming over the parts where she swoons and fawns over clothes because she can for the first time. As it turns out, I am a man that loves pussy and hates prescribed gender roles. Okay, now we got that straight, no pun…

Let’s talk a little more about this maypole dance that is bike week here in the redneck riviera. The bikes go up the road, the bikes go down the road. Now, let’s talk about the dancers–the rookies, the understudies, the vets, and the artistes. They are bearded, leathered rough rider stereotypes, they are bearded, leathery skinned anti-stereotype retirees. They are, some of them, lesbians. They are, others of them, hangers-oners with half-rusted bikes with too many spokes salvaged from the weeds down around old Uncle Monty’s clapboard homestead. (He’s too old to ride it anymore so we got us some bungee cords and strapped on a bedroll; where’s the beer?) How are their little ad-hoc highway herds form? Do they choose their little possee group or does their little possee group choose them? Where are they going? They have no place to go. No place, that is, except for the next bar, and up to Barefoot Landing to wander down among the vendors tents. Some folks have trailered their bikes down here to do that. Some have driven–to bike week!–to do that. And to chase each other around, going in circles up and down the highway, a high horsepowered duck duck goose.

Speaking of bikes, I picked up the repaired little purple thing. $50-something for a little purple thing that doesn’t even fit me. I feel like a woman in June with an ambitious April bikini purchase. The kind of clothing purchase that’s meant to motivate one’s self into shedding that extra five or dime. It never works.

(”He feels like a woman?” they say, baubling their heads with a sigh. “He’s so in denial.”

“It ain’t just a river in Egypt,” they answer themselves, and baubble head some more.)

Ate brunchy at Crystallite Cafe, I think it’s called. I’m sure of it, in fact, but I’m not sure I believe that’s really the name. I flirted with a Roumanian girl working there for the summer before going back to finish her senior year studying languages. Her English is perfect. Perfect perfect. And she says she knows Italian and French, too. Maybe she said German, too. I might have been concentrating too hard on being suave and T-bone-air to get it all. She was cute and sweet and articulate and confident. I like those last two a lot. So I tried to have little conversation bursts when she came to check if I needed any more dressing for my jerk chicken salad. (That, finally, I felt good about. I simply wanted salad. And it was simply delish!). I mention this because it’s another part of getting back into the game of life. When I was smoking crack all the time, I didn’t have anything to do with anything on the outside. I didn’t feel part of the world, but more like a ghost, floating around in it. Wow, it’s just hitting me now. I always felt weird and separate, not in, but only now see it as so much ghostly. I’ve always liked ghosts and ghost stories–that’s nothing new–but it’s peaking post crack and I wonder if there’s a connection. The fascination has led me to learn that it’s often some displeasure with life lived that keeps ghosts appearing. And that was it. I appeared at work. I appeared at the store when smokes ran out. I appeared to cop. Nobody saw me and I didn’t see people too much. I wanted to smoke more than I wanted to kiss most of the time, but then when I got lonely–and my smoking style is very solitary normally, which is how I like it, but after so much time, it builds and the lonely sets in like a thirsty gangreen (sp?)–I wasn’t hardly capable of even speech let alone smooth-delivered sweet talk. So I upped the dose instead and went back into the clamshell and/or looked at porn and lurked over the NSA ads on Craigs. So a lunchtime chat with a cute server might be less frivolous than it seems. Normalcy in its better/best sense.

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From an interview with Neve Campbell by Daniel Robert Epstein on Suicide Girls:

NC: …in the end, it’s the work. I trained for eight and a half hours a day for six months to do this, and you can’t cheat.

DRE: Was it hard to get back up to speed?

NC: Yeah I had 10 years off [laughs] and had to get up to par with the Joffrey Ballet. So, it was definitely a lot of work. I was injured a lot

Certainly applies to my climbing plans.

…and loving plans…

And this applies to my writing plans:

What I’m happy about is that we stuck to our guns and didn’t go for the clichés and didn’t go for the typical A/B/C plotline; beginning, middle and end. Had we tried to do that, we would’ve lost a lot of the aspects that we wanted to show about this world.

And I could learn something from her persistence and that other purring word, ‘perserverance,’ as illustrated by her efforts to get Bob Altmann to work on her pet project:

We spent a couple of months just coming out and nagging him basically.

(I would have asked nicely, maybe even pleaded my case, and then left him alone to decide, respecting whatever first response/decision he gave. If the meek shall inherit the Earth, it won’t be in their natural lifetime.)

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Why all this mundane shit about when I go to bed and when I wake up? It’s trivial, right? Well, it’s mundane for you and not so trivial to a guy who six weeks ago went to sleep about once a week, sometimes just before he was supposed to disembark a train. When you’re trying to get your life on track, these little things matter. They’re the little building blocks, the foundation–whatever figure of speech works best for you–on which every other fundamental of ones life rests. I haven’t really been trying that hard lately to be regimented about it but have instead pretty much given myself over to whatever happens naturally. And so I nodded finally off last night–this morning actually–’round 3am and woke up ’round 10. When my goal is almost the mirror opposite of that, I wonder. And I realized just now that the later it gets, the fewer things are calling for my attention. Stores and restaurants are closed, errands cannot be done. People aren’t calling. People aren’t emailing. I can’t fuss with music or exercising–too much noise. That leave’s writing and reading, the real important things to/for me, but which, unfortunately and ironically, get pushed and pushed forward. But I still want to reverse this habit and trend based on this theory: that quiet undisturbed time can be had in the wee hours with two advantages:: you then go through the rest of the day happy, satisfied and less stressed because all day long, no matter what you do or what choices you make, you’ve already accomplished your most important things. The big items are checked off, so mistakes, distractions, emergencies, friends needs, etc. won’t bother you. You did your stuff, you took care of you. And you will have more time in the day–more daylight–to get those other things done, so that you don’t, like I did today, end up getting to the bicycle shop 15 minutes before closing and having to leave the bike–which needs only a couple new tubes and tireds slapped on–overnight, necessitating another mile walk home, and another mile walk back to pick it up, which it otherwise would have been a quick wait. Those are two big advants, but there are two caveats, too: you’re sleepy first thing, and may be mentally groggy and physically energy-low, making you less productive and giving diminished resources over to those most important things. That’s why I frequently launch into more mindless but necessary things in the morning. Things like doing the dishes. And that leads me to the other caveat, which is that with everything you have to do that day still hanging over your head–nothing’s been done yet–it can be hard it can be hard to focus 100% on the task at hand.

Here’s another boring, mundanity that’s been a recurrent theme here, a thread that runs through this b- b- b- I can’t say it…, like a river runs through Montana, and that’s because, as much as sleep and scheduling (precisely what the preceeding paragraph was all about), my fuel intake habits ripple through every other ambition and activity. If I’m too chubby, no climbing for me and out the window goes the writing I have planned around that, too. And I don’t get the girl. And I don’t have the energy I should have. And I live a shorter life and have less money and so on and on and on. This is what I’m doing right now, or trying to do. A life spring cleaning (in late summer, early fall), a stripping down to the bedrock, releveling the foundation, rewiring, resizing the plumbing, et motherfucking al. The details count when you’re starting from scratch. I don’t want to overemphasize it, but it can be a game of dominoes. And it’s a tough game. Goddamn bicycle shop is next to the Taco Bell, and those lovely cookies ‘n’ cream shakes with whipped cream on top are made by a quiet older lady who likes to read Stephen King when she’s not working at the Hardee’s on my way home! I hardlees resist! And then I tell myself, shit, I’ve given up coke and coke products (from Columbia, not Georgia), tobacco (North Carolina), and alcohol (Bourbon county, Kentucky), a man ought be able to have one meal a day containing cholesterol. And so far he has, if you don’t count those heading halcyon days when I first decided to eat healthy and did, to the detriment of my toilet bowl.

Anyway.

The thing I’m getting to is this: and it comes from FK’s book:: and tracing it all the way back, to her friend Katie:::

Katie always said, “If youwant to know why you’re eating, stop eating.”

I’m not sure what it means or how exactly it works but I like the idea that my eating is not merely a biological imperative driven by the excretion of a chemical at quantities and qualities predetermined by the DNA my genetic inheritance has given me, but that there’s some psycho’ing behind it and that if I delve into it by (a very Christian move here) denying myself of it, all will be revealed: my larger picture issues identified and the food obsession and subsequent weight irregularities and imperfections deal-with-able, perhaps not easily, but do-ably. The notion is both daunting and exhilerating as I realize that although I’ve never been way obese, I have always weighed more than I should and would like to and more than the ladies would like to bear, too, and that food has been way too important a recreation, distraction, and comfort in all times, places, and phases of my life. We’re stoning birds here, folks. Or, at least, for the first time picking up pebbles and aiming for the flock in the bush. Am I mixing metaphors here? Well, it’s as good a place as any, isn’t it?

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From the email files today:

I wrote this to Frances today. Her father was just found to be on the cusp of a fatal aortic anuerism. He’s 88 years old. They don’t know when it’ll happen but she’s facing her father’s possibly imminent death for the first time and we’ve been emailing about that. She said a couple of things that prompted this, my longer response. One of those things was her preemptive, “…and don’t tell me he’s had a good run of it.” It was a little prickly, which I understand. Sometimes people’s pat oh-wells, their look-on-the-brightsides–however logical–overlook the fact that losing a loved one is really hard and really sucky no matter what the circumstances. I don’t know if all of this will make sense out of the context of the emails which preceded it, and I may be off on a detail or two (for some reason I don’t remember just how old Dad was when he died or how long, exactly, he was pumping his own morphine–those things, while not unimportant, are much less meaningful than other aspects of that process for me, as I hope you’ll see below), but I think you might appreciate a part or two of it, even if it is difficult to read. Here it is:

I didn’t imagine that anybody could predict when, but doctors often give you a probable range which, as unreliable as it is, can also be helpful when suddenly you feel disoriented and needing something to wrap your head around as you figure out where to step next. I don’t know what kind of “run” your father has had or is currently having. I don’t know whether it was any good or not. But so far it’s been 32 years longer than the one my father had. And a 20-second death throe is horrific–about the worse 20 seconds a man can wade through–but it does beat needing a morphine pump attached directly to the spinal cord for months. I know it’s not fair to compare; no matter when or how it happens, it’s sad and worth a heavy dose of tears. But there’s something in your tone or vocabulary that makes me wonder what your expectations have been regarding his longevity, and to what degree you’ve allowed yourself to consider the inevitibility of your parents’ deaths. I’m sure it’s totally uncouth for me to talk like this when it’s still this raw for you and you may resent the hell out of me for not providing a good old fashioned sympathy card, but I think I’ll be a better friend by sharing my own experience and feelings now when they might, maybe, be of use somehow. I’ve always told people that I’m very grateful my father didn’t die unexpectedly from a heart attack or in a car accident. It might ring like bullshit to talk about luck in the same breath as death (unless it’s precededed by the word ‘bad’), but I really do feel lucky that I had a period to prepare and adjust, to tell my father how much I love him, to say so long and to have him look me in the eye and tell me goodbye and pull me near for a big, weighty hug. We didn’t know when it would happen but I went to visit for what might have been the last time, and the cool thing is, you can do that, too. No reason to wait until the last minute. And if you have something to get off your chest or something to make right, by God, do that too. You have the opportunity. Take advantage of it. Too often people are left with what’s unsaid rather than what’s said. I so cherish that moment I had standing in the doorway of the laundry room. It wasn’t picturesque, no view of the sun setting on the lake, tarry pines in the distance and daffodils in the foreground. I was about to walk into the garage with my mom so she could drive me to the airport so that I could return to Florida where I was in graduate school. Just the same, I feel so blessed that that’s the memory I have. I had a friend who I lived across from in Williamsburg. He collapsed of a heart attack in the shower. His daughter–also a friend–found him there the next day. I was in my apartment and heard loud wailing, the gnashing of teeth kind, and I looked out my window to see her draped over the stairs of the front stoop. Last time she’d seen him they’d gotten in a big argument. That’s heart breaking. But everybody dies. So go and take advantage of this gift of life, of early warning, of time. Share a memory with him. Bitch him out for playing golf instead of being at Applebee’s with the rest of your family at your homecoming if that ever mattered to you, and then tell him thank you for making you the kind of person who won’t shy away from talking poopie the first time you’re hanging out with a guy. Or, maybe you’ve had all those conversations. Maybe your deposits in the love account you two co-sign are up-to-date. There might still be work to do and it might be as simple as a minor mental shift–but a crucial one, however big or small. Last January I was on a beach in Guatemala with a couple friends from work. Stars were out in the sky and our toes were down in the sand. One of the girls, my partner for much of my time down there, had just had her parents come down for a visit. (Actually, like you, her father is a doctor and she’s from Montana.) In a quite moment she turned to us and said, “Guys, I’ve been thinking about my parents lately. We have such a great relationship. I’m scared they’ll die.” Friend, I thought, it’s going to happen. You don’t have to like it but you need to face it. And if it scares you that much, it might mean it’s time to change your relationship with them. I wouldn’t want her to be any less close to her parents–of course not–but maybe a little less emotionally dependent. It’s part of that becoming an adult thing, as trite as it sounds, of becoming a strong, independent, well-adjusted individual. Yeah, it’s all pretty obvious stuff, and you’re smart enough to know it, and you’re probably already doing all of it–you have more experience and savvy in life than I have. I’d just hate to see the celebration get mired in the mourning. I’m not the Wiseguy of Parental Passing, but I do have the blessed curse (or cursed blessing) of bluntitude, and sometimes I go ahead and focus on my strenghths because perhaps there’s an elephant in the room whose presence nobody else will acknowledge. For whatever it’s worth, I felt I had to say something. I hope it didn’t feel like a lecture. I hope it didn’t feel uncaring (on the contrary!). I hope I didn’t offend you. Please take it in the spirit it was offered. And if somebody says to you, “He had a good run,” try to realize that they’re not trying to rob you of your hurt. You own that. You should feel it or the wound may never heal. But we care about you, and don’t like to see you hurt or suffer one whit, so we want to point out whatever silver lining we may see that you do not. “He had a good run” is another way–maybe part selfless and part selfish–of saying, “I love you, I hate to see you so sad, please feel better soon. For both of us.”

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See, I’m the kind of guy that likes funny things. For example, Joe calls and we recall the night we left Freddie’s drunk and went to the BP next door and tried to find actual food in that goddamned gas station. He’s Italian with a Sicilian Staten Islander’s accent so I trusted him when be bought a box of Creamette elbow macaroni and a can of Dinty Moore beef stew. Or, it might have been Dinty Moore Beef Stew(tm), capital ‘b’, capital ’s’. Either way, we were remember the stink it made in our house, that combo, for two days after we’d eaten it that early weekday morn. Joe, in his eulogy, said, “They should market that stuff as…as…a sort of…global terrorism!”

Then he told me about a fantasy he had, of me in front of a mirror remarking, “wait ’til they see me in this!”, the ‘this’ being one of those baseball caps with puffy quilted wings on each side (the kind that the fat chick on Facts of Life wore, mine would be pink and have the words “Diamond Dave” apliqued on the front trucker panel part), a half shirt with random lettering reading “dangerous,” tight shorts with stripes running down the sides and a camel toe out front there, tube socks with blue stripes, and white hi-top Pony sneakers.

Truth is, I would like to look good in that. My dream is to rock his dream ensemble.

Now, let’s take a look at the stats that will or will not get me there, to that point of prettitude:

Up Time Today:
• a reasonable hour, I believe, though I can’t remember just what time that was exactly.

Exercise Today:
• 20 push-ups (Oh, big deal, right? But I weigh 191or2 l-b-s, motherfucker.)
• 50 laps in the over-chlorinated (but thankfully so, given its public nature) pool

Picked Today:
• Two ripe figs from the slant tree outside my living room window, foreground to the little lake background, Godmade before humanmade.

Other Food Today:
• fried egg whites and bran flakes for breakfast (reading FK’s book, which has plenty about OA in it, I’m now all down on the sugar and flour filled bran flakes where just last week and the 30 some year proceeding it, I thought bran flakes a very excellent, healthy choice, and a bit of a sacrifice considering I’d rather be eating Peanut Butter Cap’n Crunch. Ruined…)
• uhm…an order of cheese sticks and a burger with mayo and bacon from Hamburger Joe’s and two–not a bad-enough one, but too too too!–KK donuts. Lord, I love those kreme-filled glazeds. There really should be another K initial in that name. It would be appropriate. See, I’ve mentioned to people and maybe mentioned here too, that the food has rushed in to fill-in the gaps left behind by the crackaine. Some synaptical illusion involved, I’m guessing.

Met Today:
• Greg and Linda, in their “50s,” doing laps, too. It’s so good to encounter older rednecks (defined in this case by accent only) who go to Israel to do humanitarian work. Now I know, if you’re savvy at all, that that might sound a little suspect, and I can’t vouch for ‘em, but based on two little bits of info–that they don’t work with a Christian ministry but on their own, and that they “work with new immigrants”–I’ll give them the benie of the doubt (those last four words said with an Elton John Chorus Falsetto).

  She said that they felt like they were supposed to be here. I like that, too, because maybe they’re supposed to be here me. And it will mean something special will happen. My life will change. My life is always changing. They say change is good. Oh, they!

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Up early (7.5), up late (10.5), today.

40 laps in the pool at a higher in-tent-city (no offense to Katrina or Rita evak-you-eees), but that was following a relative throw-down of money at the Taco Bell (aye, it’d been so long!) followed up by the cookies’n'cream hand-dipped shake that thing miss annabella shake at Har-D-Har-Hardee’s. It’s nice when fast food chains can compliment each other like that, but t’would be nicer still some one-stop shopping.

This was after walking like two miles to see the doctor. Man, a lot of doctor and hospital visits for a guy without insurance or a job. When you’re 5′8″ and 191 (I found out today. Whewee! That’s record territory for me.) and not accustomed to bicycling, and then you do it for 10 hours out of the blue, leaning over and supporting your weight through your palms on the handlebars. Your hands get sore and numb. And when the ring finger on your left hand doesn’t stop being numb the third day later and, in fact, your motor functions are weak and inexact and a tad unstable in that hand, especially as they involve your normally opposable thumb, it gets scary. I said to myself, “Self, this will quite likely wear off and go-away gradually with no residual effect.” And my self said back, “You’re probably right, son, but it’d be a damn shame to be told five years down the road that if you had only coughted [yes, cofted!] up the price of admission at the local Doctor(’)s Care [not apositive how they’re playing that punny euphemism, whether with the apos or no], you wouldn’t be dealing with this chronicky chronic now.” Pop Self convinced me and I went.

The doctor’s eyes widened and he breathed out a rush of rumbled laughter as he said, “You’re a crazy guy!” I’d like to believe him but I don’t think it’s true. He diagnosed–and this I believe–a tendon inflamed to the point of pinching the ulnar nerve. He said we could get aggressive, take the X’es, and stick a needle in with ass-kicking anti-inflammatory if I wasn’t afraid of the needle. Sheet, doc, I may be crazy but I ain’t that crazy. No, I actually told him I warn’t afraid of no pussyneedle but I was of the bill, not having any insurance papers, etc. etc. So he sent me for anti-inflammation pills and one a’ them OTC braces you can buy at the CVS/Eckard/Walgreen’s/whatever-chain-is-in-your-region.

I opted against the brace right off because there’s nothing worse than an old used brace lying around the house, even if it’s your own, and especially if you life light on your feet–and in somebody else’s house–like I do. They’re like crutches. You don’t want to throw it away because what if you might need it again–and you will, knowing you. No use spending good money again buying them all over again. So you stick it/them out in the garage. And everytime you see it/them, it/them’s gross, having injury and illness all over it’s beigey gauzy sickness and pain sponge. And when you go to put it on again–because you are that clumsy–it’s all the more gross for all the dust, spider webs, and mice shit it’s collected. Plus, I don’t wear that shit. I’m lucky–and damn proud!–if I can finish a bottle of amoxycillan. Add that to the budget issue (I did just get back from The Low [and expensive] Country), and I didn’t think I was going to fill my anti-inflammatories. I’d tough it out.

But I wanted at least to see how much it would have cost me. And I told the lady at Care Pharmacy as much.

Sixteen bucks I was quoted. Last I paid for a prescription, it was over a hunnert and I had insurance. I figured I could do a sweet 16 for a quick return to comfortable typing. This right here is feeling like a ham sandwhich right after a couple fillings.

So I was jubilant about the cheap south (especially after just being in the expensive debutante’s South) and told my attendors so, adding how nice it was to have a good old fashioned soda fountain and ice cream in a drug store. How you don’t see those any more but when I was a kid, we’d go get an ice cream soda or a shake. [This was only half true. Ice cream soda? That went out with horehound mollasses candy. Awful. But milkshakes. Hell yes indeed! Though this was in a small town in Utah when I was visiting cousins. I felt old, but really, there was no soda fountain pharmacy in Phoenix where I grew up! There’s nothing old there. And if they want to make it look old they put a dead cow’s head up on the wall, but without the skin, which has a little different effect than the dead head’s–mostly deer–they put up in middle Pennsylvania, and quite different still than the dead head and pharmaceutical combinations you might find in Eugene, Oregon. But I di-…I won’t say it…I hate hippies, and that keeps me forever young. Ah ha!]

Anway, I told the kind man that I’d purposely beelined for Care, skipping the CVS and Eckerd on either side precisely because I’d seen the soda fountain when I’d walked by on an earlier occassion–even though I had no intentions of ordering from said soda fountain. But that was enough for him, he offered me a Care Pharmacy refridgerator magnet. Without thinking, I said that I didn’t have a refridgerator.

“You don’t have a refridgerator?” he said.

“I live a simple life.” I think that’s where it came from, because I think of myself living a very simple life these days with very few worldly (or non worldly) possessions, but I certainly do have a refridgerator. Or, at least, I rent one. But I didn’t want a magnet.

“How ’bout a T-shirt, then? You wear T-shirts,” he said, and looked down at my sweaty T-shirt.

I saw that they were marked $9.95. And he saw that I saw that. And I saw that he… “You can have it. Wear it around town.” I took it.

And I’m taking now 21 4-mg tablets of MethylPREDNISolone from Barr Laboratories, Inc., Pomona, NY 10970. Six the first day. Then 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1 the sixth day. A clean, cute slant that makes me fee, with all the explicit directions (eg. “Take 1 tablet before breakfast, 1 tablet after lunch and after supper, and 2 tablets at bedtime.”) like a woman (voluptous) on birth control. And I like that feeling. The feeling of femininity. The feeling of controlling birth. Also, in a long list of “adverse reactions,” the reading patient finds this: Tendon rupture, particularly of the Achilles tendon. This is the drug that may finally be my undoing. My great fall.

Anyway, after the pool session (during which–I’ll admit–I was performing a little for the mothers seated at the side), I made two on-the-way-home observations. Ready?
1. How fucking ass lazy it is, these people that go walk their pommeranian on the baseball field in their SUV golf carts (okay, sometimes they use the T). Long leash in the left hand, right hand on the wheel. I heard a guy recently call it a “sedimentary” life. Now I believe it.
2. The ducks here resemble the residents (not unlike the way we all know dogs resemble their owners–on who are the owners here and who are the owned I will not comment): a little scruffy, redfaced, and with a definite slow waddle.

I can pass these judgements now because now I’m eating soy sprouts with roasted soy nuts, kidney beans, and sliced canned beets. No dressing, and this shit is good. Who needs a Taco Bell-Hardee’s combo? To Taco Hell with it.

Really funny how this venue, this space (affine as it is–sorry, stupid inside jokish), was supposed to be a forum for my accountability in my process of quitting crack (and coke), and it’s the food that’s giving me the most trouble. I was thinking today “sober is better.” And was going to post that. But the preoccupation has been with diet (not as in “going on” but as in what mine is). I’ve gone a week to 10 without not only crack, or cocaine, but alchohol and tobacco, too, keeping the caffiene to a very minimum to boot (just some unsweet tea last night, I think is all in all that time). So, hmm…

***

From an email to a friend:

Okay, okay, it was more like 85, but I thought that if
I rounded to 90 people might like me better.

Love that cruiser. Not so much the hybrid, bro. At the very least, pick up the Harper’s out now. There’s also a reprint on how to make a killing in poetry. One of the funniest things EVAR. And then the two shorties by Margaret Atwood. And a long review of Zadie’s latest
novel. Oh lord almighty, the greatest woman in the world would be Zadie Smith mixed with PJ Harvey. Turned on by intellectual and creative intimidation. Oh man…

I’ll become David Foster Wallace mixed with Thom Yorke and love PJ Zadie forever.

It just hit me.

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[From an email just now to friends–a little sum-up of my past couple days. More later if I get the time. Heh heh, if I get the time…]

“Now don’t go marginalizing hurricanes that aren’t gulf. Ophelia sat right across the street from us for a couple days. They build all the houses here on stilts for just such occassions, but smart folks like my landlords fill-in the bottom part and then get water damage when hurricanes come by. I’m in the top part, though, and there are no trees around here so the worst thing for me was running out of groceries on day two and having to ride a bike to the store in the gusts and rain.

Speaking of riding bikes, I just got back from Charleston. The landlords have a women’s Roadmaster (I think that’s a step below Huffy) mountain bike with a rusty chain. On a whim, I rode that thing down to Charleston Saturday to have a look around. Charleston is 90 miles from here. I made it down in about 10 hours and stayed Sunday night as well to take the Ghosts of Charleston tour (which was even better than the ghost shows on the Sci-Fi channel, Kent, and had the added benefit of a 1/2 slab of Memphis style dry at Sticky Fingers to fuel-up before the walk) but this afternoon about a third of the way back the sprocket thingie–which was warped to begin with–busted a gut or threw a rod or blew a bearing or something and became the bike became unridable.

So I pulled over to the side of the highway and stuck my thumb out to hitch, and all these tough, mustachioed men in pickups stare at me with these weird looks as they go whizzing by. Turns out it’s illegal to hitchhike in the state of South Carolina.

While my hands are being held behind my back, feet shoulder-length apart, credit cards being handed around among the boys, and my ass is getting a nice little pat-down, I’m asked if I have any narcotics. I say, “That’s the third time you’ve asked me that. No, I don’t have any narcotics. I’ve got Neutrogena sunblock, I’ve got a toothbrush and mini toothpaste for my stay in Charleston, and I’ve got a Harper’s magazine,” with a great article by Ben Marcus trashing Jonathan Franzen, I add in my mind. “And I wouldn’t be hitchhiking if I knew it was illegal.”

Apparently, there are no warrants out for my arrest or anything because after they called in my driver’s license, they suggested I call a cab. In the middle of nowhere. To go another hour and a half one way.”

—
[What I didn’t mention in the email is that the way to get around SC state law in this case is to walk to the nearest gas station, buy a cold drink, and sit outside and ask kids as they walk out from paying for their swill. Ask ‘em if they’re going north. And if you can pay them to take you, too. I will do so if required, but are mostly saying that to seem safe and appreciative. Take the money out at the end of the trip. Ask “are you sure?” when your gracious host and driver tells you to put your money away, and when he or she waves you off, put that money back in your pocket and head off into the sunset. My man was Dempsey of restaurants on the redneck riviera fame. Thank you Dempsey. Hire me for your landscape crew. I’ll talk the fuck out of your Mexican ranch hands.]

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From: “FK”
To: [me and a bunch of other people including a lovely soul with “spankmewithaspoon” as a handle]
Subject: new beatitude
Date: Sat, 24 Sep 2005 20:05:01 -0400

Blessed are the cracked:
For it is they who let in the light

Anni Ann!

Today is a week–at least–without drugs, alcohol, or cigarettes.

Whoopeehooray.

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The Dying

Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2005 18:08:20 -0700 (PDT)
From: “DS”
Subject: Re: Digest Number 1465
To: “KD”

Man, I don’t know about cagey. You know all there is to know. I was dying in New York. I had to save myself. I have also been interested in spending more time writing. I’m doing that.

ds

— KD wrote:

> …why are you being so cagey
> about your move to South Carolina? I want
> to hear about this! Why did you decide to move
> there? What are you working on?

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Another night of some fitfullity–though not as bad as the previous one or two–and oversleep. Up at 8:30a. Wonder if there’s something in the supplements I’m taking, three of which are meant for trimmin’ help and are taken in small dosages three times a day. Guess, I’m not worried enough about it to start conducting experiments.

Carry-overs from yesterday:
[These, it turns out, are the same “carry-overs from yesterday” that I had yesterday. Exactly. Just move ‘em on over. I did get the other to-do’s done, but that seems to be the way I live. The priorities just keep getting bumped in favor of the little chores, that favor not necessarily being deliberate or even conscious but, perhaps, what (all?) I’m capable of.]

• discontinue SG subscription (still going through the interviews, which are proving to be numerous and interesting in a I-want-to-be-great-too-and-may-someday-be-as-well kind of egotistical, yearning way)*
• finish On Writing
• read FK’s Coda & respond

* End-of-Day Update: I finished page 10 of the interviews (there are 15 pages listing interviews, sonnyboy) and will pickup again on page 11 tomorrow if I postpone Charleston to a more reasonable day, or on a more reasonable day if I follow my (still sizable) gut and go to Charleston tomorrow. Which brings me to…segue!…

Thinking About Doing Tomorrow:

• Riding the “crappy little bike” to Charleston, 70 or 80 miles south, on highway without shoulders for safe biking. Ironically, I consider this a healthy activity. And though it disrupts (again! further!) my ramping up to the keying in of my material for processing (key component of my recovery strat), I feel inclined because, well, I feel inclined, and when a man (or woman) quits crack, coke, smoking and, at least for the time being, drinking (so that he can quit the former three), denies himself the possibility of sex (due to overzealous shaving which has resulted in funny looking–to me and others–and uncomfortable–to me and others–pubie area, not to mention my lack of nightlife or worklife to get me out and meeting dames), begins an exercise regimine (if it can be called that), and other self-discipliny things (ice cream in cups instead of tubs, Krispy Kreme reduced to a guilty aberration rather than a pre-shopping ritual, etc.)–basically going from a very self-indulgent lifestyle to a pretty restrictive one–I think, the man (or woman) ought to go right eagerly and guiltlessly ahead and indulge whatever healthy indulgences strike him (or her), at least for the time being. How ever long we can justify this recovery, anyway.

  Oh, and I want to see if it can be done (by the likes of me…in a day…). People (the cops, to be exact), didn’t believe it when I walked to Myrtle Beach (12 miles in a late afternoon). Let them not believe it when I ride my bike to Charleston.

Now, from my morning’s reading:
[ed.’s note: I’ve never read a Stephen King novel. Not even a short story. I have seen The Shining and liked it. I’m not aware of any of the other movies I’ve seen being adapted from his work. These things interest me a little more now that I’ve finished his book on writing called On Writing or more fully-completely On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, which I can say with unequivocal snobbery kicked major fucking literary ass all over the fucking place! If I ever teach fiction writing again, this book would be my sole text. Maybe with Strunk & White (which he references mucho and which I kept as bathroom reading in Florida for a couple weeks {my bowel movements are quick, if not necessarily clean}). Anyway, what I’m trying to get to is the fact that my writing here and now is part of a recovery plan (from addiction, from myself vices in general, from ghosts, maybe from my divorice–who knows what all as fucked me up as fucked up as I am?) I have, and that the end of lil’ Stevie’s book details his getting his by a blue van (driven by a man off to get himself one a them “Marsez bars” they have down at the store) and well, you’ll see how it comes together. Here…]

Yet at the same time I felt I’d reached one of those crossroads moments when you’re all out of choices. And I had been in terrible situations before which the writing had helped me get over–had helped me forget myself for at least a little while. Perhaps it would help me again. It seemed ridiculous to think it might be so, given the level of my pain and physical incapacitation, but there was that voice in the back of my mind, both patient and implacable, telling me that, in the words of the Chambers Brothers, time Has Come today. It’s possible for me to disobey that voice, but very difficult to disbelieve it.
(pgs 271-272 in the paperback edition)

Truer words of my situation, now, have not been uttered (or written or vomited or…).

…sometimes it’s the work that bails me out.
(pg 273)

My intention in part. But only in part. I plan to bail my own sorry little ass (and make it little in the process), as we’ll see Stevie rings along to here in a minute… (but not quite just yet)…

There was no inspiration that first afternoon, only a kind of stubborn determination and the hope that things would get better if I kept at it.
(pg 273)

Applicable to righteous living as well as writing. No magic cures, no silver bullets, et al. Or, nyet al. Nope. Nada.

There was no miraculous breakthrough that afternoon, unless it was the ordinary miracle that comes with any attempt to create something. All I know is that the words started coming a little faster after awhile, then a little faster still. … There was no sense of exhilaration, no buzz–not that day–but there was a sense of accomplishment that was almost as good. I’d gotten going, there was that much. The scariest moment is always just before you start.

After that, things can only get better.
(pg 274)

Man-o-man-o-war, how scared I was as I was about to get on that plane leaving New York. That was Fear And Trembling In New York, Hunter boy. Fear. Fuck you, you No Fear T-shirt wearin’ and bumper sticker stickin’ motherfuckers. You ain’t never done nothing but drive your black supercab to the nearest sports bar ‘n’ grill and order the “atomic” wings or the “suicide” wings or the “very, very, very freakin’ hot hot hot wings in hot pants.” If you haven’t felt fear you haven’t gone out of cell phone distance from your crack dealer, in fact, to sit on in the clausterphobia of a four hour plane ride on a come down from literally a week long with a crack pipe never leaving our mouth. I mean literally a week without the crackpipe leaving my mouth. Biting hard to keep it from falling into the toilet during the rare piss (crack dehydrates, and we don’t have time to drink, until finally we breakdown and slam a sports drink in .3 seconds thinking we need the electrolytes but in fact have become glucose intolerant for lack of sleep and puke it right back up. Or fight to keep from doing so…but I’m off on a tangent as crack always makes me seem to do whether on it or writing on it). But what Stevie says about writing slides on over to crack dejaring, too. The plane ride wasn’t all that hard (of course because I slept through every second of it, first sleep I’d had in a week, as you now know). Just had to get on it. I’ve had some slips, fall, back-track-slack-slacks since then, but I get back on the bull. I’m getting there.

On some days that writing is a pretty grim slog. … begins to heal…..buzz of happines…sense of having found the right words and put them in a line. It’s like lifting off in an airplane: you’re on the ground, on the ground, on the ground . . . and then you’re up, riding on a magical cushion of air and prince of all you survey. That makes me happy… Writing did not save my life–Dr. David Brown’s skill and my wife’s loving care did that–but…it makes my life a brighter and more pleasant place.

Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.
(pgs 274-275, emphasis mine)

I’m working on getting well, getting up. Up. Away.

In the meantime, this evening I watched Gotham Fish Tales. The documentary film my old neighbor–the kooky kab driver, the reverend fishing fleet–was in and sold me when I chanced into his cab from Bedford ave on a rainy afternoon, heading up to Crown Heights to buy, bye-bye. Great stuff. Interesting the way it vacilated between highlighting the pollution and how less polluted it it, all kind of symbolized in an epic way with the subway cars being dumped by a crane on a barge into the Hudson. Trash that gives fish a home. Trash Dwelling Fish might well have been the title of the thing.

And now, speaking of titles, a short R-T-Kul I’m writing and entitling
“The Price Is Right”

Sometimes things are worth it. Somethings just aren’t worth it. Smoking crack is fun. No lie. But I decided that for me, right now, it’s not worth it. That’s just me. Just right now. I would rather get hit by a car.

I just got hit by a car.*

No lie. I did.

I didn’t hurt, though.

Which probably goes a long way towards my saying now that it was worth it. It was definitely worth it. I was just coming home from my laps.

Walking to laps was quite a different story. A story which I’ll embed in this story. Hey, two for one. Digression. Sorry. Anyway, the experience was quite opposite.

I was walking along towards the pool in the community center in the center of the community (appropriately enough for me) in my new sandals and I was thinking about how comfortable my new sandals were. And are!

My head’s down but I lift it in time to see the wide green expanse before. As if they’d–those gods, them–rolled out the green carpet for me. (This is what it’s supposed to feel as a person comes out of the purple haze of a drug craze, but I exaggerate. And besides, I’d seen the grass quite a few goddamn times as it constitutes the ball field and chihuahua shitter for the community; it was no surprise to me.) And the thought occurred to me–freshly mown as this verdant carpet unfurled was–and is!–how nice that grass might feel beneath my bare feet and between my toes. Then the adulty kicked in: nah. There’s dog pooh, and ancient sea shells broken into jagged sharpitude, and a thorn to boot and for good measure too. But the kiddie rider was like, Mister, you haven’t had your toes in grass for a long time. And I went the thesis I made earlier today which was some version of If you don’t indulge your good-for-you fancies, you ain’t gonna have no fancy left. You be plain Jane and who wants to be that plain? Stick your goddamn feet in the goddamn grass. If you take every goddamn chance to stick your evermotherlovingfuckin feet in the grass you’re cheating. Cheating yourself out of life and the living thereof.

And thusly I forced myself in.

And I loved it.

And so did my toes, coming out the other side as they did unscathed by turd or thorn, untorn by a jagged little shell.

I was proud of myself for living life to it’s fullest. Stopping to smell the roses, as it were.

Speaking of roses, Rose was pulling in with Walmart in the trunk was I was pulling out. She wanted help getting the bags in the door. Then pulling the wheelchair out and setting it up in the wedge between the car door and passenger seat for John to get out and up on. I held it there and looked over at Rose, “I supposed no funny stuff, like yanking it out at the last second.”

“No, no funny stuff,” she said.

“You don’t like the funny stuff.”

“I do,” she said, “but John…”

I got John safely inside and asked if there was anything else I could do.

“You going to do your laps,” she said. “You could do some for me.”

“How many? I’m doing about 30 for myself.”

“Oh, that’s too many. About five.”

“Okay, I’ll do five for you….but…whew…you’re really pushing me.”

We were making conversation. She wasn’t at the pool with me. Nor did she send any spies. Nobody would’ve know, or cared for that matter. I could’ve done what I wanted. But I’m a man of my word, by dogit. It’s a lot more fun of a game–that conversation about how many and all that–if you mean it, if the chips are for real (even if the stakes aren’t high). And I mean to have fun. Besides, it’s a way–all joking aside–for me (or Rose) to push myself a little harder. So, 35 it would be. And 35 it was.

And so it was, also, that I found myself walking back. A little tired. I’d done the walk in the grass thing. I was walking along the edge of the grass, on the edge of the narrow lane when two cars came toward me, and just as one golf car (no ‘t’) came up along the other side from behind. Sounds like an orgy, but it wasn’t.

It’s a small little lane and the cars weren’t going fast (at least that, thank you, Jessica) but they looked to be trying to give the golf car (no ‘t’, thanks again) all the room they could and crowd me out. Now, I had been warned about riding the crappy little bike around, that in this Southern, non-active, car culture, a bike lane is unheard of, not even an extra smidgen of space is built in for the ped or the pedal-pusher, and Rose, she said that every article she’s read about somebody on a bike getting hit by a car, it’s always the bike pulled out in front of the car or some such malarky exposing a certain prejudice against the non-vehicular. Or, at the very least a bewildered lack of understanding of the non-motorized, if I want to be generous about it. In my own goings about, I’d gotten a whiff of this so perhaps I was prepared with a chip on my shoulder but I was not about to give way. I was as far to the edge as humanly or inhumanly possibly, and I didn’t feel like walking in the grass this time. I did that. And loved it. And now I wanted to do something else.

I wanted to stand my ground. Or walk my edge as the case may have been. I brought it in as far as I could but I wasn’t going to stop, turn sideways, or cower an inch.

So I didn’t. And neither did the cars. The guy in the first one–I could see him through the tinted windows but not, in the split second that I had, if there was anyone with him–appeared to be cursing me out, though soundlessly to me, telling me to get over or asking what kind of idiot didn’t get off the goddamn road when a car was coming at him (surely ‘him’ and only ever a ‘him’). I cocked my head back a touch and let him pass mere centimeters away.

Thing is, even if there wasn’t room for all three of us–me, the car, and the golf car–the vehicular could stop or make way. They’re the ones who, sitting on their asses, only have to press the brake a little (not go out of their way), who with very little of their own effort make phenomenal time (making up in no time at all whatever few precious seconds lost in courtesy), who pollute the atmosphere, who cause the Bushes to invade the Iraqs when really it was some other jackass who had jumbo jets jam into our buildings. Damn them. They can’t let a go by? A man can’t walk anymore. Is it really that short of becoming illegal?

I steeled myself for car #2 following at a distance that would indicate a withingness to car #1, i.e. the one was with, was following, the other. It was that one that hit me. Okay, so it was–of course–the rearview mirror and it was nothing more than, in fact barely, a mere brush. It didn’t even make a sound. But as Jack White of the White Stripes once (or twice) sang, “truth doesn’t make a noise.” And it doesn’t. And that’s the truth.

I got hit by a car.

It was worth it, yes. Of course. But I’m going to change the lesson-learned since I’m all about learning life lessons now. (It’s a healthy mid-life crisis, I like to think. And not a bullshit one. Anyway…) I’m changing it to “It All Depends.” It does. Context, baby. For me it’s not location, location, location (unless, instead of finding the perfect location, you mean discovering another and yet another location), but context, context, context.

Because it always just all depends. And I ain’t talkin’ ’bout no adult undergarment here. Take me seriously now!

^{* Yes, as a matter of fact, I do want to be just like Stevie King. Show me the money, honey (and I quote). Hell, show me the satisfaction! I feel like fucking Mick Jagger over here.}

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Had a hard time getting to bed by around 10 or 10:30p last night. There’s so much to do and sometimes I get caught in that loop of just-one-more-thing. It’s tempting. But then I didn’t get up at 8:30a today. Last night–though getting the recommended eight is part of my New Deal of health, productivity and prosperity–I thought you’d sacrifice some sleep to get a couple more things checked off before the day was through, but since I don’t use an alarm–and I don’t like to when it’s not absolutely–I end up sleeping the same amount anyway and that just means that however much more I got done last night will be that much less I get done today, and I’d rather have A) more sunlight, B) enjoyment of those peaceful, chirpy, dewey, slant-rayed morning hours, and C) a regular schedule so that it’s not a struggle, temptation, or stress when I knock off and there’s no constant renegotiation of bedtime. Early to bed, early to rise. Period. So, I’m going tonight I’m going to go back to the 10pm to 6pm.

But, oh, how hard it is to hit the hay at 10pm! And I’ve been having a little insomnia-ish-y-ness the last couple nights, lying awake, getting up, switch places and positions, and I wonder how much of it has to do with it being early, used as I am to later nights out on the prowl, cigarettes wearing me down by the end, and the flop into the sheets with a bellyful of bourbon. Or, it could be the stress (or headiness, daresay, excitement) of so much to do, so many options and opportunities, the pressure, the promise, the uncertainty, etcs. More maybe something to do with the new eating patterns (doubtful). Or, maybe, I’m just not wearing myself out in the day, but then I am exercising more than I have. I’m leaning toward the things on my mind culprit and the early hours.

Carry-overs from yesterday:
• discontinue SG subscription (this is a carryover because I want to go through the interviews and read those that interest me first, and maybe do a little downloading of special ladies)
• finish On Writing
• read FK’s Coda & respond

New To-Do Today:
• email excerpt to Glenn
• email Clay
• look into climbing season
• ?possibly look into surfing season (stricken not because I did it, but because it doesn’t now see prudent)
• contact bank about wire transfer
• ?plan ghost trip w/FK? [Whenever I’m ready, was the talk of the town.]

I shall now attempt to delete unneeded and unwanted and unsavory phone numbers from my phone. I’ve done it before. It’s not that hard. Nor that effective and staving off bad behavior. But it does git red (Pittsburghese blasting from the past) of the clutter, which will work for now. Who am I deleting?

• D - one of the runner kids On The Block in Crown Height, my ol’ stompin’ grounds, as they say
• [changed Enrique to Miguel, now that I know his real name. Even though it’s a dealer number, those cuates are good kids who’ve talked about getting English lessons in return for good home-cooked comida Mexicana. And maybe some futbol. It stays. Temptation Island, and all. Besides, I need to test myself, no? I have to go there anyway; can’t buy it over the phone. And I’m not going to forget where and which his apartment is, so…]
• Erin - I believe this was a number I got in a Brooklyn bar, but not in a “call me sometimes, baby,” way, or, if it was, I was too crack-oriented to know and/or care. Or wonder and try. I wasn’t oblivious, but I was single-minded. And if the horny built up to overcome, or if I had the drugs enough to get my mind off the drugs, then I wasn’t in any shape to go a courtin’. Erin is deleted. I don’t like the name anyway.
• [’London’ (named for the London style taxi he drives) is getting changed to ‘DK,’ by the way]
• Mackenzie - an oldish, scrappy punk-hippy type woman who I met while swilling wine at Joe’s salon while Stella got her groove back in the chair below the Joseph Scissorhands. I took her number based on my interest in pilates which she teaches, in the purest tradition, of course.
• Max - It pains me to delete him. A loyal kid. A helpful, courteous, trustworthy kid. He delivered (to) me from the evils of crack withdrawal. I miss him. I’m almost tempted to just ring and say ‘hey.’ But that would be awkward. Deleted. Shot to the heart.
• Pool League - Entered off the wall of Murphy’s Law tavern. Now there’s a den of iniquity, far’s I’m concerned. Or for me, I should say. I may start with the idea of improving my game, and that’ll quickly devolve into a pack a night, a gaggle of wild turkies, some coke to pass the time when the other cats are playing, and fuck, I can shoot alright enough but I can’t improve like this, but who cares? Deleted.
• Rich - Oh boy. Man #1. (Like those father’s T-shirts: #1 Dad. I should get him one. Who’s my daddy?) Anoher hardy har to delete. Good kid. Those couple times I got him to bust out into a laugh or a smile that broke and shone through that braided kink-curl big-chin African beard of his…priceless as any Amex commercial. But we don’t need or want drugs anymore, and even if a social call seemed good, it’d be dangerous. Maybe, just maybe, too dangerous. Deleted.
• Ritty - A likeable fella, and he did come through especially the one time late, out to my hood, but not too hard. He was a bit of a dick the last time I ran into him. But that was an early morning daylight kind of situation. Deleted.
• Rock Chauncy 5b - This is of course the entry for Rock, which contains a little memory notation to remind me that the nice, older black gentleman whose apartment we smoked in was named Chauncy, and I was welcome to stop by anytime. The number was 5b. Funny, I stopped by there twice, once in the morning and, forgetting that I had this info, began hitting buzzer buttons of the numbers that seemed right to me. I hit several, and I don’t remember now if one of them was 5b, but a woman came and hit her number and got in and invited me in and hup after her. I declined though–and must have looked a little saintly doing so–knowing that I was in and that I could remember which door it was (much easier than which button in a square of of button rows) but not which floor it was, and while I was willing to disturb people from afar to find the right one, I wasn’t willing to do so up close and personal. Like in their face, at their door. I never made it in, which is just as well I guess. Another hard one to delete because Rock is a sweet old man himself, and one that helped me in my early days of smoking crack (if you want to call it help). He’s the one the throwable metal tube pipe (instead of the standard glass); I think it was a bicycle axle. And he’s the one who said those words I’ll never forget, “Suck it soooftly, like you’re pussy.” Deleted.
• Roots - One of the kids, one of the runners on the block, one of the two that, taking my offered phone to enter his number and seeing the Spanish “llamado” pop up when my phone recognized it as a called number, exclaimed, “Oh, that’s why! You got me in here as Lamato!” Before that day, when I called, I called off the business card he gave me and I kept in my wallet. Deleted.
• Spanky - Well, he was a new, safe way to buy whatever I wanted. A shame to be getting out of the game at such a stage, eh. But the crack is dogshit here. Or is it that I never had a decent pipe to smoke it in. Couldn’t have been just that could it? I got some decent hits. And when I didn’t, I should have still felt something proportional to my intake, no? Deleted.
• Sparks - Oh man, Man #3. One of the pillars of my black community. Another hard one to a hardcore user of hard drugs. I made it this far down this list, to the S’s. What was yesterday’s new mantra? Six-pack Published Siter? P’s & S’s. And neither six-packs nor publishings come easy with Sparks on the savings payroll. Deleted. But did I even tell him I was leaving? Did I say good-bye? Goodbye Sparks, goodbye from afar.
• Wagner - Not a druggie. In fact, politely, nicely warned me away, and asked concernedly the next time he saw me, which was the next time I dragged my up-all-weekend ass to the bar on a Sunday night to ease into the work week again. Said he was help me with anything ever, and I fully believe that, but he’s there and I’m here and bar friends are bar friends until you make them more friends, and I don’t need any more friends. I’m lucky that way. Deleted.

12:07p - Two swans just landed in the lake-pond (one of those person-made, fingers-through-the-community-subdev water features) outside my window. Damn. I’m into that.

Anything else?
Yeah, my pool laps got up to 30 this afternoon. From there they shall not descend, I decree.

P.S. Damn, I went to Hardee’s again today. I hate that. Actually, I went to the Cheesesteak Factory (where the little girl said ‘hun’ and such at the end of every sentence so I added ‘dear’ and ‘darlin’ at the end of all of mine so that we were like “Blee blah blo, hun,” and “Blo blee blah, darlin” all the way to Mexico, and as a woman and her obese son waited behind me, we got to talking about Ohio where I was born and where she lived for 11 years and how where she lived–where the steel mills closed down and the trash moved in–was the car bomb capital of the world for a time, due to the mob and it’s ilky shade dealings…) and got a “long” (for time to read more than for filling qualities, but then I decided that food in general, and especially “treat food” one went out and paid for, should be savored, the mind allowed to wander over and out at will, rather than in one hand, a book in the other) and home fries with bleu cheese sauce (fucking brilliant)–Hardee’s was after, for a cookies-and-cream milkshake dessert. I don’t miss the tobacco–and have even begun to get a little self-righteousity haut’ure around the edges–but I can’t give up the fat ass food! [Well, it’s hard, ain’t it hard, ain’t it hard, the Kingston Trio once and oft –recordedly–intoned.]

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Re-sipes From FK (at my request, the darling):
• breakfast: rice & ricotta cheese with almond flavoring
• lunch: black beans & said rice, tomatoes & an avacado & black olives & pepperoni all stirred up together
• dinner: carrots, onions, zuke boiled a bit, then a half cup of couscous thrown on has been a favorite lately too, BTW. easy peesy. you don’t cook the couscous. just let it join the boil, turn on the heat & put a lid on it for 5 minutes

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In bed by 10:30 last night and up at 6:30. That’s good. Trying to get a routine. Trying to max the daylight (like my own personal daylight savings time system). I tell myself I’m allowed to nap again–at least for now–based on the reasoning that I may still be catching up after six months of not sleeping.

To do today:
• cancel any remaining unnecessary subscriptions (SG for ex.)
• call Stella, Theresa (”Hey David, it’s Theresa. I need some help with Spanish or else I’m gonna fail, and my grades rely on you now so you need to call me back. Okay. Bye.”), Joe (one of clients with boyfriend went to Myrtle Beach and “Freddie’s Hideaway” (”funny coincidence,” “landmark around there”), Jana (bought a house in Mt. Vernon, NY, want to get together, “heard back from you’re Latin America adventure”), Sean (”I’m in New York City and I’m by The Strand but I know there’s some cool little book store somewhere around here. There’s got to be, right? And I thought, ‘Dave would know. Dave would know where that really cool little bookstore is.’ So, call me back on my cell phone if you know of one, if it’s close to The Strand, and if you care about me.”), and anybody else lingering on the voicemail.

  (Not for call back but for keeping: From FK:: “It’s quarter to 11 on wednesday in the evening, and I had a very acidic tomato for dinner, so I’m chewing some antacids and I thought I’d talk to you while they do their dissolving thing but per usual you’re not picking up your phone. Um, and I’m wondering how you are. And stuff. So, there you go. Hope you’re well. Hope you’re not caught in the hurricane. And I hope we speak. Bye.)

• respond to at least two people who’ve been camped out in my email inbox
• finish On Writing
• read FK’s Coda & respond

I’ve been down on myself for not starting the transcription of notebooks. It’s such a big job. But I feel the imperative. Feel I’m wasting my time if I’m not doing it. And doing it like 12 hours a day. I do need to do it. It is a priority. But for now I’m rationalizing my slow ramping up. I’ll give myself a week. If I haven’t started seriously by Monday and adopted a strict schedule for my days and weeks, I’ll have to pull a Kate Chopin and Awake! out there at the shore…

Up until just very recently, and especially during the end of the New York crack days, I didn’t want to be an addict anymore, but nor did I want to be soberer. Boring and foreign the latter seemed. I didn’t know how. There was no appeal in it. Now, just in these last couple days, I’m remembering what responsible, good clean living is like. Literally, what the morning air smells like (when it doesn’t reek of the cigarettes and alcohol I just (or still am) consuming). How it feels to begin a day with an agenda. Really. Sounds like cheesy cliche souffle that needs the wind knocked out, but I had the wind knocked out, and this is the real deal. I still won’t go ’round saying all that before was all bad and fake. Lots of good stuff in that shitslime garbage can (thank you Prefuse 73), and I still maintain that behind its door are some gemmy gems with no other access to them. But the point of this post was to acknowledge that I’m remembering how to live. My god it’s such a cliche. Well, now I know where that one came from.

I also should mention that my cilia have been given half a chance to sweep up some muck and now I have that classic quitters cough. I don’t know if other people get to coughing when they quit smoking–as the body gets a chance finally for once to get some of that crap out–but I always have and what’s coming up isn’t brown or green but that same ashy black speck marble in gelatin that I begin to really get with the cheese and crackers.

Done today:
• Bought my first wrinkle cream today. Eye cream, actually. Eye wrinkle cream. Nivea, I selected.

  Well, that’s what my Exercise & Health magazine said men in their 30s–the age of confidence and go-getting–should begin to do: apply eye cream. Didn’t say ‘wrinkle’ cream, but it turns out that’s what eye cream is. And it didn’t say Nivea. That’s my own high-class touch. While I was in that sissy aisle pondering the choices, an old man came by, stopped alongside me, lifted his ball cap to reveal the shined-up liver spots underneath, and said, “Looks like you and I got the same barber! Th’aint no part in on the left here!

• Bought Maderma to make my new lip scar go away. I’m hoping for at least a fade. Once you start taking care of yourself you get vain in a hurry. In my case, by day three. But Joe had me thinking about this for awhile. That’s a scar on my face. In the kissing zone. Not a place you want to fool around with. It looked bad-ass with the stitches in but now I’m afraid it looks more like a perpetual grimmace. (Not nice, though not as bad a looking like Grimmace, and it seems to me Joe also made that funny comparison laughingly recentlyish.) Or, heavens!, a big young wrinkle!
• Also bought Hardee’s, including the hand-dipped cookies ‘n’ cream shake. Who says I’m taking care of myself? sheez…
• Also bought some trunks, or is that ‘board shorts’?, and some sandals (flip-flops?). Look who’s taking care of me. Can’t afford them (lady asked if I’d found work and I said I wasn’t looking for any) but then my old grey ones are see-thru and requiring of underwear underneath, and my only water-friendly ‘wears (i.e. involving Lycra and not just cotton boxers) are black, making for quite a fashion statement indeed. If I can work to fade a relatively insignificant scar over time at $15 per tube of snakeoil linament, I can correct such a glaring fashion scare in one fell swoop.
• Did 22 laps in the pool.

Thinking of taking surfing lessons. Bad financial decision but that’s how I do, you know. And bad time to start with a month at best of no wet-suit weather. But I have the opportunity now. A fairly unique one. Need to seize it I think. So bad time to start, phooey! No money? Who cares? The only real concern is how much it might distract from my reading and writing, which ARE more important. But I perhaps daily lessons will give structure and inspire/require a schedule which will (maybe more than) offset that time loss. My new mantra: Six-Pack Published Siter. Vain. But healthy. And career minded as going to med school or teaching high school biology, no?

SPPS

SPPS

SPPS

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New Rules:
• Bed by 10p.
• Ocean swim everyday.

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Day #2 of The Blitzchange:

• Up at 7:30. (Must’ve needed the rest.)
• Too lazy to jump right into exercise as imagined. Sore from yesterday. Start whacken at my hair with bad, short scissors. Scissors that don’t even work if I put them in my left hand. And, right-handed though I may be, my left is not that disabled. Getting about time for a hair cut anyway. But then there’s the whole cleaning kick that’s starting-off, rightfully I imagine, this clean-up campaign. And then there’s the ritual of the whole thing. And my realization that it’s going to be hard-if-not-impossible to do a decent haircut with these scissors and the patience I’m left with these years. So I go deep. Down to the trunk. I’m taking it down. All the way. Baldboy. Skinhead after so many mohawks. But not skinhead in any aryan way mindyou, godno. I love the races. And not just the Nascar ones like many-a-the folk down here. A lover of the races I am… Anyway, luckily, I found some left-behind lotion in the cabinet when I was done.

  This whole thing has the added benefit of taking my mind off of finding me a gal for awhile. Concentration help I could use. And keeping me out of the social scene galavant in general, even, indoors for while. Maybe. Until I get hungry.

• Cancelled the Juno account I set up in Sunset Park when I was desparate to get crackin’ on my little projects after sneaking a smoke at Joe’s. Oh, better call Joe today. Up with the local anti-socialism, down with the anti-socialism that’s got me ignoring and worrying and abusing and frustrating and irritating my best family and friends, and making the rest forget about me, though maybe those are okay for now. The ones contacting me, I should contact.
• Swam in the ocean today. Final-fucking-ly.
• More healthy groceries, including bottled water. Then, while taking care of other long-overdue chores I found myself downstairs where Rose told me how to find filters for the tap. Now I have to neither drink that godawfully tasting tap water nor pay all that money for bottled water (saving myself the work of hauling it home, I’m ambi about that. It was good exercise, especially for my hope-to-climb-again-someday-soon fingers).

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Today.
Been here almost a month.
Just getting started, getting serious.

• cut nails
• shaved beard
• flossed
• trimmed the pubes
• unplugged TV from power & cable
• threw away three lighters
• tossed out 5 Claritin (I don’t have allergies)
• trashed the pizza coupon
• put on the MPB (musica popular Brasiliera) station
• stretched
• laundry
• dishes
• did push-ups
• clean & organize
• opened windows, turned on fan
• read to page 100 in On Writing
• finally emailed my worried family (my mother’s last email asked if she’d offended me in some way, poor girl)
• swam 20 laps in the community pool(, mostly because it was a solitary where 20 laps were possible. Otherwise, it’s a shameful thing to do a stone’s throw from the Atlantic waves. Not Atlanta Braves, Atlantic waves!)
• ate sushi (This time, no bones about it; I ordered AND ate the shameful California roll. It had been so long…my bloodsugar was so low…)
• Shit, I added Krispy Kreme on top of the California roll. Binge time! (It does feel like a sour note after an otherwise productive good healthy day but I remind myself that one donut [forget/ive the Cali folly] does not compare to the eat fests I’ve been having in my lie around the TV days recup’ing from the coke and whatnot lately).
• Bought a bunch of healthy stuff like roasted soy nuts, baby spinach, sprouts, kidney beans, bran cereal, etc. $32 worth. That’s a lot for bike groceries.
• finally called my mom (having got most my chores done and realizing she really really really wanted to hear from me. Really. Email was not enough. We had a nice chat.
• To bed at 10:30 with the intention to get up at 6:30. (The ol’ 8-hour plan…)

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yeah, so i’m back in from the storm. i’d snort up the last pile and ran out while rose was off taking john to dialysis. something not quite right about my tending toward the sneakishness round them. anyway, I’d found an old can of those cute little mandarin oranges they’d left in a closet (a closet?) up here. cursory botulism exam checked out, though there was a little shiny, yellow grease spot on the top that I chalked up to a roach emmission and tried not to touch it too much, pea-sized and all, while I actually yes folded out the can opener from my trusty dusty swiss army. I’m going to check their web site (probably chock full of widgetry) to see if I can register as one of the elite group of people who have actually accomplished somethikng useful with a red handled something. oh man, i was sucking out the juice through the jagged little crack (take that alanismorrissey!) when I was not quite half way, and think I knicked my lip. opposite of where I got the stitches removed last week, but not enough to balance out my face. I need lead poisoning and a rim job…but I digress. good they were, but I needed more and a couple hours later i’m riding a bike through a hurricane. I gots no claims on nawlins fames. at the bi-lo (jesus!) I got a creme-filled glazed krispy kreme and paid for it up front so that I could scroll with it, lick it and shop. then an indian river orange juice (yay me!), an organic sippin’ yogurt (whee,whee!), and a thing they call a “kippered beef snack: smoke flavoring added.” salt is the third ingredient and at least five forms of sugar were sprinkled through. I had a joke all made up, prepared, and rehearsed in my head a coupla times for my cashier, should he or she comment or look awry or askew (even askant). it was gonna go like this: “Yeah, I’m really trying to buckle down and not eat so healthy like I was before. I mean, I’m telling you, it was getting out of hand! My liver was vitamin-pickled. I was getting intoxified in my blood from the baby carrots alone!…But, you know, it’s hard…” I never got the chance. the old man said he had “a phantom…or superman…something” then picked up the phone and announced about county-wide that there was a “15 on 9″ or that a “15 on 9″ was needed. one or the other. a lady about 15-20 feet away (maybe 9!) came out from over back there where the important people watch over the three ring binders and the wall of cigarette cartons, and she did that stick the key in, give it a quarter turn, then back, and out. what a trick! I’ve enough sex like that, that I feel qualified to suggest that everybody have their own damn key on a curly mini telephone cord from back when phones had cords (nice to see them recycling), and we could cut down on grandpa’s noise pollution. I did sit down on the concrete outside, wishing i had a swiss army with me–hell, even a solitary leatherman in a leatherpouch (assume the case must also be concatenated with the leather)–to get that vacuum pack kippered snack (nice ring, eh?) (like an old phone…ah…) open. then i ate! and I dreaded going back in it. and i watched that not many, even in cars, were going in it. then I noticed how the clouds were the exact color–that patchy grayish white–and shape as those little cyclone graphics they have on the weather channel. just like it. i swear to you. the clouds were low but looked like they went a mile up! and they moved fast. and they moved in a circular fashion and pattern. and that was counter-clockwise. just like the one on tv. and so i took it to mean i was supposed to notice something about myself. that i was a 35 year old (and still am), smokin’ a camel on the lonely dirt black gum-studded concrete in a hurricane on my fourth day of straight-up goal-oriented coke blowin’. maybe it’s time to grow up. well, of course it is, it has been, and people would like to do just that, but people don’t always do what they want to do, people are the tautology par excellance.

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dern! that one before last got cut in half. reduced by at least 54% or something! I was going. I was rolling. I hate to lose it…

grumble grum

…and you start up in the middle of something god knows what and you don’t the postum in all of it’s beautiful and respledent recursivity, being denied all the stuff that all the stuff at the end comes back to

mutter mut…

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[cont: poast size, reedil iy iggy]

fighting, fighting hard the sleep. silly; it’s what i need most. but what else then are the baggies for? what about my WP ent update, my Drupal template hackamacrack, my falter and bad

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avecito, well done I thing), yes, and I fill in the blanks about me maybe being la policia. hey’re hard to right, even basic, and i’m nicer than i’m making itho changesound. he confesses of course. whynot, he’s caught already ==in my mind he’d done enough. don’t didn’t blame him. par 4: The Course. I prop 120-for three again. he winces and waits, counter props 130. going price for three of a minimum quality and quantity is normal. so money, no problem. i never want to wait. he grumbley bumb back and he suggs (it WAS night, npi) 130. i im. relent. had ben thru it enough enough. then into murph’s. same arseholierthan but diff folks, no vibe for me. get in the london care. had called “london” (in my phone, real name DK–god, I hope I’m not getting anyone in trouble. I’m a lot more lax about these things now, but when I shnould be every more on guard against and for my bedraggoed, war-ened bodyself…) but he was neither dispatching nor driving tonight, neither of which he’d done last night either, but he proffered a decent enough excuse: “Off. Mondays and Tuesday. Hey, I’m just sittin’ her playin’ with my granddaughter.” “Couldn’t be a better thing to do,” I say.; He gives me the office number and promises to be out tomorrow night. So on the way back tonight, me in the back, I’m hawnching up forward elbos wobblied on knees and make up the harmlessest little lie that makes me feel good on all sorts of levels: “Oh, by the way, DK said to tell you hello.” “Yeah?” “Just wanted to pass that on.” “he’s a good guy.” sure is, sure is. All of this was after–occurs to me know–bumbled butt brained as I am what I am–I close down freddie’s, though early. diane is behind the bar drunk as a skunk. like shufflin’ instead of walkin. wants me to split my jagers with her. jager. bad. high shcool. but i’m a very when in rome feller. not to fit in. not to avoid attention. to enjoy. experience. give it up. get over it. feel them love them touch them. or somewher short of that grand loftiness just there. I split. what am I going to do? I depend on her now. but her son, 20, is shaking his head. he seems to be upset by the vision of his mother. v understandably. and she seems to snuggle up and introduce to the world and proclaim his good kidedness to the world and patrons newly arrived and/or saddle sore–one moment=–and then the next get pissy with him, bitch, be meanish, mawlish half heartedly that golden bear. he’s similarly schizo. disapproving of her (and disappointed) but quick and adamant to back her and defend in her unnecessaryness. I’m talking about an old man (most are there) going out to his car to get a cigarette (so he said) and when he comes back she asks him if he wants something to drink, no he has his can of busch still where he left it with a plastic cup from the old old old loud loud loud women ben beside him all night bending his ear about “where i come in west virginia, we either shoot ‘em or hang ‘em. that’s the way it should be. not let ‘em linger around like they do. shoot ‘em’ or hang’em. and I’m telling you, payback’s a bitch.” “Yes it is<” he says. “I hang back like a slow coward hillybilly, and then I come in punchin’” anyway, diane then tells man he needs to buy a drink. can’t just come in and hang out in the bar with out buying. this elevates to his saying fuck. she raisin dander about him “cussin’” her, him calling her an asshole (with pointed finger) and inviting her to kick him out, her grabbing his can, and then canning his can and throwin’ that can out the window. oh the pall. the singer guitarer in the corner stopped, paused, and whistled a long low whooping one up into the microphone. then sang the sweetest version of neil young’s heart of gold you ever did hear. and diane began to sing. so at the end of the night, after an in and out at murph’s, i take the cab, make my phfake pleasantries, and then ask, “Hey, that wasn’t you that got a ten the other night folded up to look like a hundred, was it?” (guy last night me conto) “Yes!” “man, that’s frucked up!” and he tells me the story as we sit parked infront of the gates at the back entrance to oceanside village, the entry for the new and/or coming or merged or marketing gimmikc “bermuda bay”. last night he calls the cops and they get his money back. done deal. tonight he calls in to dispatch. “clear.” and I’m walking over speedbumps through grannies souped up mobile home to my loeft space above the prefab.

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a lo mejor being aprovechandoed by mis guates mexicanos and the nice black boy at the bar, too, the first person and only I asked, the old “are you police” question and me going no but why do people think that means something? he says it does. he’s satisfied, which is what I want and I’m happy, but then, oh!, if it’ll make you feel any better I’ve got three bags in my shoe if you want to see them? bags of what? oh, they’re empty, actually, but you can clearly see the white stuff still on the plastic. no, man. so, who knows what kind of deal I’m getting, it’s so different every where, nicaragua, guatemala, mexico, ny, another guy in ny, sf, the south, qualities, quantities, exchange rates, packaging,…it’s an algorithm for at least a pentium ii…in any case, certitude can be found in the fact of my dropping dough on the drogadroga, and then paying a cover at the stupid ass titty bar pink pony, and drinking at a medically enhanced rate, opting for the dollar more turkey over fucking fake bourbon syrup jack crack daniels, and buying people drinks, and helping the homeless (no, not kidding–bunch of cigarettes [which I’m also chimneying away and replenishing as needed], a beer snuck out to him, a few bucks for food, another beer, and was inviting him into my taxi to drop him off complaining as he had been of broke’d up leg when he snapped something to the effect that it wasn’t nern of my busyness where the back of a truck that some nice folk let him sleep in [this info came before] was, he wadn’t tellin me, so I ha-ha’ed off, and there was the bartender at last call, I asked for a turkey ‘n’ co-cola, he got all up on me about it, what you’re not from around here, what’ve I been serving these past two hours (apparently exists a law against selling the hardyhar after midnight or 2, whatever time it was, the last couple hours), matter of fact, no, I’m not from ’round here pardner, and then–I still like this move despite two signify drawbacks which I will disclose and discuss after delivering the move itself right here right now: he came back with my sierra nevada (a real find here in the land of coors light, busch in cans, natural light, and miller genuine draft same-tasting pissegar) and told me it’s price ($3! a real bargain to boot!), I handed him a twenty and spoke up before he could run off to get change “that’s all for you; i want you to have a better day.” now I’m walking off to synch my watch with my new pissing buddy, a guy who always ended up in the head at the same time as me giving me the opportunity to joke about our similar schedules on more than one occasion already last night, and now I’ve got a cool gait and strong smooth stride along the bar, the tender tracking me on the other side, heads and smoke and mahogony between us, and I point over in an high kind of arc and put the punctuation on “that’s all you” and then tell my piss buddy who gives a ruckus of a laugh for it and says at his recapturing of breath, “I like it! I wouldn’t do it, man! But you did!”, and we sync our watches and plan to meet up again around the urinals in 25 minutes, which gives me time for the last desperate I’ll-buy-whatever-you-got-left finagle with My Man who gives me an extra kick with his anticky method. first time: oh, look man, you dropped something. I bend over and fumble up the little bag unsure if there’s another and evidently evidence that cause he chirps right up: that’s it, you got it! time two: overtime:: and i’m on the bartender’s radar now (disad #1: rather than own up to the facing I saw, the bartender probably just shook his head and said “stupid drunk motherfucker” and possibly added “I’ll take your money any day of the week”, which is disad #2: he took my fucking money on a monday of this week. a downside to my showing him. but things got their prices, right. and I’m in a silent auction for the last bag that i suspect some straight tall nerdy golf guy seemed to want in my imaginative filling in of the gaps his demeanor and bantor with the black fella left me. black fella shakes head, don’t got nothing left but a small little bit, maybe worth 40…I’ll give you 60 for everything you’ve got, I say. and wait for him to move outside of his social network, his sphere of white girls just about to turn 23 (”17 days!” once pipsqueaked to him). “Whenever you’re ready,” I say in passing back from the bathroom. later, monday night football later, he rushes by with a hard snap of a white mostly rocked up bag into my lap. precision dl delivery! long story short up in there I’m approaching a stripper I got a load of drug technicals from one night when she thought it might get an extra dollar in the tucker–this was before she realized I don’t tuck and I don’t sheep back behind noboy into a supposedly vip area with ripped up overstuffed furniture of indiscreet tones to begin with–so she was talking to me so now I’m talking to her tonight and saying the pitiable, “do you remember talking to me?” realizing how pathetic that sounds as it was coming out so as she’s making the feeble lie that why yes she did, I was already contradicting her and moving on to the lets’ go to drugs part! you got some? why yes I do! and how! plenty! enough to share! “of what?”, coke?, certainly of course! nah, I don’t like that. heroin. I slink off and then turn right back around, a little junk might be nice!, “can you get some? I’ve got money”, “No the people I know stop selling this late–he actually goes to another guy.” “yeah, like the mexicans. don’t normally work after 7p. I know most of the mexicans round here. does he live right over here?” “I don’t know” “what kind of car does he drive? I know a bunch of these guys” “what kind of car do THEY drive,” she flips it over on me. “Oh, I know a bunch, there’s a lot, but I don’t know there make and model per se but what kind of car they are…” she seems to want that information. “a snazzy racey silvery kind of car, a white like a economy, a blue older car like from the early 90s maybe…” “no,” with a wave of the hand she was probably just waiting to wave, “that’s not their car.” i start the slink again. oh wait, “do you you sniff or shoot, anyway,” “sniff” she sniffs as she’s walking out with her girlfriend, “Oh.” I say in that way, like that’s no good anyway. I try to start stupid conversations with people as we’re all leaving and some guy I played pool with earlier asked me what stupid thing I was saying and realizing it surely must have been just shrugged and in a cheerful friendly voice said I was just making conversation. he told me to conversate elsewhere. So I pay the london taxi driving guy, who was sleeping at my approach, to take me the $3.75 fair with my bike laid out over the folded down back seat. we pull up and he wants to take it for a spin. and i’m happy to let him, disclaimering though that it’s a piece of shit. then I give him a ten and told him I wanted the trip to be worth his while. oh, and I gave $15 to a guy earlier who did appear to have gotten ditched by his buddy and had no way to get home and had lost his wallet earlier in the evening or day. spanky. he gave me his number to call him. he was appreciative;. so I come home and geek out and snort out making all kinds of noise and feeling pain. I swore a short time ago that I would never ever ever again sniff anything up my right nostril–searing was that pain through the back of my head and the end of a three dayer, now; that cut sure cuts!–but now that the left is clogged and the tide has flowed and ebbed again over there, I’m back at it. It lifts the stuff throughn the pen tube. And now I’m sprawling thicknesses into my shirt, blowing drops over my screen, dripping on the keyboard and touchpad so that it doesn’t work, motrin like crazy, actifed like crazy, forget how many I took when (and more worried about what the pills are doing to my liver than the powder), a 20 at murph’s, another 60 at murphs, 120 from enreek a la una, drank big starting at sundown open 7am, then fred’s, murph’s, a 20 at enreek’s 9am yesterday, 100 day before (sunday? every day is like sunday), after drinking early aft at f’s, I’m startling at my own auditory and visual inventions, I keep saying in my head repeating “yo te llevo, no me meto; yo te llevo, no me meto,” for hours, I felt right off to sleep at the keys right after a big line (which should not be taken as a reflection of the quality of my purch asses) and managed to keep my tongue or it’s fleshy sides in between my molars for the catnap to wake up with pain pain pain and marks and damage and sores and lessions there mirrored, i’ve finally taken to eating but it’s raining from hurricane ophelia off our shores only letting me duck out for a smoke so i cook eggs voraciously and eat them that way too, i have no butter or oil to cook with and no nothing else–wouldn’t have even had that were they not left by my last visitor who dropped them in a can of beef vegetable campbell’s soup on drunk evening and called it american egg drop soup–nothing but reduced sodium salt (can’t you just put less on?) so I put more on, dump it on and still don’t hardly taste nothing but cholesterol and I go back two times to finish the carton: probalby 7 or 8 in all, the only food I’ve had in days, this mess we’re in and uh

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out round 7, sundown 4 rockymtnsprngh00nhicuntrebarleetymstoo, apt complex bi 9, nada, wonew gue medio oonabolsita, venteporelfabor, tomwaitesatfreddees, chucks name sakes w jerry, song to hookyin woman d jerrs, nascarist broom ahs!, enreeks rounoon, murphs, boracho, me encontaron afuera, wego, eyego, here sixapart

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itchgosm noonfish, afternoon dlightsat(f)reds, bici to martine, no inwreak, to other townhouse com wherework, mexrest, charlan, foot, tempran home, fuckere

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mitesta, beaches&beach sat par k (sta parqeo), me hole in throat, hurt hurt sleep allday

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sleep, clean for mymitcheLl

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3bags/150, wheys of a&g

leprauchan & charles’ ‘bama, iLeft sighTING disstion

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ccpuffs w/J. fr. ‘canos

firscale, am.park

home doll fina

punt o saca dos

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labor, stitches out, ripleys, score w/ jojo, big day

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find 24karat rock in bat bag

“niggerville”

“si, si, salsa…”

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cuates from the real cruise, switch to the oh, $200wurf, first in lONg thy (em)

hoopla for hooters (hoped for hosting calcag–whoo heres, “888 sly hoot” ’sted fliflifli–but: no)

decis un: ‘ei’ or ‘y’. agree to lat 4 ‘pinky’

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oTell

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