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SpecialCry!

Another kind. Very special.
 

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So, yeah, I’m pretty much just going crazy goofing off on my cute little rambley, outofcontrol web projects. It’s been a hell of a productive streak, boy, I’ll tell ya’ though. Not necessarily real efficient but I’ve plowed and plodded right on through my loud and stabbing hunger pangs, headache, general delirium, weird mouth mouth movements, crampy camping, et al. Slow and steady wins the race my ex-mother-in-law used to say (and likely still does, and just realizing that I’m not quite sure one way or the other is a little bright spot in my pixelated drogada day. 

But all that’s preamble, because as nonsensical as it may seem, I’ve been sitting here wanting to tack on a P.S. to that last wrap-up comprised of a real weirdness. And it goes like this:
…They’re using my Amex Blue. They heat the plate they chop lines on. Softens the rockettes. Somebody left the card on the plate when they put it in the microwave. The melted where it had a blue-metallic square in the middle. The little chip wasn’t as burnt. This unexplainable phenomenon was pretty strong proof to Mirinda that what that dumbass said the other day about me being a cop was true.

High ho silver, away.

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skippy dot net » the wrath of nations

I’m down with all this and I’ve always thought along these lines and thought I was a lonely genius pariah.

A couple choice select selections that I chose:

Nationalism, of course, is intrinsically absurd. Why should the accident - fortune or misfortune - of birth as an American, Albanian, Scot or Fiji Islander impose loyalties that dominate an individual life and structure a society so as to place it in formal conflict with others?

The Jewish and Christian Bible begins with God’s commission to Adam, in Genesis, to rule over the earth adn its creatures; and wesyern civilization has since been distinguished by an exploratory and exploitative approach to the animal kingdom and the material universe. The western belief that the world and history itself are to be mastered to man’s advantage has its origin here.

The notion of the moral superiority of the West was finished in Asia after that, survivng only with respect to the United States, which between the wars and for a brief period after World War II continued to enjoy the reputation of a liberating powe, and itself continued, until its defeat in Vietnam, to believe that it was capable of conveying political enlightenment to backwards people.

The West’s Christian missionaries went to Asia determined to demonstrate that Asian philosophies were wrong, that Asian religions were blasphemous, and that Asian must worship the unique and omnipotent God known to the Europeans. These missionaries’ twentieth-century secular conterparts, whether agents of the World Bank or the Internation Monetary Fund, or American soldiers fighting to impose an Amercian political solution upon Vietnam (or Cambodia), have been equally convinced of the superiority of western political and economic ideas, and equally determined that they be adoped by Asians.

The American nation is not like the others. Its nationalism is that of an ideological nation. Its history is seperate. It accepts no comparison with others, and so it has been the most nationalistic of all the major nations. Not only politicians and public men but the people themselves constantly assert its superiority over all the others, as if the virtue of its Constitution were proof of permanent national success.

Woodrow Wilson’s liberal internationalism provided an expression of that form of American nationalism more exactly described as national exceptionalism. This holds that American virtues are unparalleled elsewhere and represent a form of more perfect society which the rest of the world strives to attain.

During the Reagan and Bush administrations it was commonly argued that the wish of all the rest of the world to emulate the United States was demonstrated by the fact that there was a vast demand to emigrate to the United States. This did not acknowledge that the principal motive for emigration is poverty and political oppression in the country of emigration, and that the choice of where to go is usually decided by where people can get to, and who will take them in.

There had always been a streak of straightforward nativism and exclusionism in the United States, on the part of those who were already Americans against those who were the latest to come.

A metaphysical challenge suited Americans of the 1940s and afterwards right down to the ground. It was Freedom against Evil. The metaphysical language lasted in presidential speeches certainly through the terms of Ronald Reagan and George Bush.

Chews ‘em out!

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Standing around talking to my Mexican friends. My only real friends here, interestingly. I see a little smear of blood on my hand, then on the other, too, and the woman points to a little flea bite. I didn’t believe it. Then she pointed to my shirt. Bright yellow with green John Deere appropriation by Inlet Skate. First time I ever wore it. And now it has a drip-streak of blood. It was falling from my nose. Que ugly. They said I was having my period. I smoked it in a cigarette, the next line–great taste, but less filling. Home by 9am, just now. The ugly gringita came by looking desperate and putey. I’m close behind in disgust and loathing. But then, how productive the 24+ before, and how great the Spanish practice, and the friendship and fun, and to put any fears aside, they pitched in a lot more than I and insisted I not pay the last ditch round/run for beer and bolsas. Y que boxes, y bichos. There was a little cuca in el cuello el bajo.

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{to Ricky James’s timeless melody}
“Super stink, super stink,
I’m super stinky.”

Furthermore, no, I’m not above eating my own congealed snot off a pen provided it has a decent coke content.

Turns out I have an uncanny ability to sit on a couch for over 24 hours straight, no food or drink, two quick piss breaks, and nothing more while I tech out.

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Calls from Hector and Victoriano today!

The so-beautiful yapper yapping beyond forgiveness.

Andres called Daniel behind Enrique’s back. They cut me shares.

A Mirinda le da asco Corona. Prefieran Bud Light y no por el precio.

Las putas latinas no acceptan clientes “americanos”; tienen miedo.

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Fri:

La gringita, fea, crack, back w/ En. for chupa y coca.

warm plate technique

Ice ice baby. Michelle. Younin’ & pony-tailed oldin’. Taking turns. Over sink. Blood. Kicked out.

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the co is tan - "chocolate"

the nose - raw on outside edges of nostrils, clogged, running, throbbing, stinging

the tooter - the exoskeleton of a Days Inn pen, pink gummied like the drinking straw of an overly made-up woman (residue consisting, I’m guessing, of a muddy mixture of blood, snot, and coke)

want to finish it so it’s gone but too painful + constant sniff driving me nuts, but won’t dump or save

eddie calls this morning. twice.

last night at his house with mexigang. keeps telling me same story about trust, his house, friends, etc., gives coat

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[date approximated]

Tired of people thinking I’m a cop. Again tonight.

Baffles me far more than offends me.

And, the generalized pandemia of elevated paranoia here is impressive.

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[date approximated]

Bought a song right out of the blue middle of last night.

It was "I Want To Touch You" off Ferment by Catherine Wheel.

Reminds me now that my skin was black and glistening earlier.

[Such unusal discoloration, when found in the human species, indicates that I have fallen so far off and away from the wagon and its environs that it’s as if Toto and I found ourselves in a wagon-dry county (but no shortage of character(s)).]

[[That, and the earlier post.]]

[[[That also, plus my cranking out a new and beautiful website over the course of a night and a morning, and a smidgen of the lunchy area of the day–a site preoccupied with language and frenetic, productive, aesthetic activity, no less. And a lot of buzz.]]]

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[date approximated]

Wrote this to a dear old friend from high school, confident she would get the music reference without much untoward difficulty or cranial rackage. And that right there–the getting it, on its own, without the str ornament luster buster–would have been quite very well enough for me, right there, without the surrounding us liked :. the content it was tood enough for me; afterall, it was my generation that really did the heavy lifting of concepting, fundational solidifyinn, and raising the fly high over the stoge patrol and reference, all the way up to General Electric headquarters in heaven-sent civic engineers stamp the prioritizing of the reference and general supporting materials over the meant and contan of a hundred three near heaven word b made sorry for the 1.2 global the brought-in the

story was reduced to mere
by using it as a structural ornament

fucking hippies…thanks…

we were in for a 60% Dacron detox

Just got in from a go-hard afternoon with my Mexican friends. I have "Silent" but am short on "Lucidity".

From there, it occured to me that I had just been presented with an opportunity–quite golden, in fact–to finally ask about the one ’80s thing I never succeeded in understanding.* Vertically stacked, gracefully well-rounded, popular, the erect eight is always ready and with you standing as testament to it’s indespensibility a

finally an infinity with while firi, appropriately charge wiand specialized nn retrospect, I don’t think I was just y and had then since that really had me stumped.
So I went a head:

What was that band about? Zen-nazi trannies?

But almost immediately, I says to myself, "Hey, there must be a website dealing with the very topic I was looking for in my life. "I think there’s a website for that now." I blurted smuggly, learning in that moment that such a thing was humanly possible.

Goopoo time: sure, as incomprehensible as such animal would mean in the annals of American’s medical journals as well as the Larry Flynt chuckling empire–a frightened as I was that I might be right about all this. Horribiably so. And yet still I found myself growing ever more disappointed as I mazed my mouse down through the blocks of text scanning for the godhead: a whispy, zesty, ghostbeard zenaton; the thighmaster, your cross-and-double-cross-dressing father; and the olive-complected, facially groomed hell raiser son.

What I found were every possible combination of two:
zen-nazis (iNazens, the version out of Cupertino California?)

nazi- trannies

zen-trannies

Of course that should have been overwhelmingly sufficient, nay incredible and glorious, once I got past the inherent sadness of the demographics. But I had an innnocent trust and faith in the internet’s omniscience of humunkind’s true nature, its omnipotence to bring it out of the fucked up huddled masses and tight ends, and its omniprense: in every bedroom, warroom, changing lives. And also delivering on it’s promise from the very beginning that if I only asked (Jeeves), I would receive an answer, the whole wourld would be mine for the taking.

Google the almighty alpha and omega threw me a page of Johny unitas quotes. I left even more greaterly saddened, too dishearted to even stay and see what he had to say on the three-pronged approach. Or would that be three fold way?

So, imagine my relief tofinally have my suspicions (the first ones) confirmed with this:

www.nsxfiles.com/Pyramid_of_speed.htm
even some crack thrown in for good measure. and lots of racing.

and another!
www.barbelith.com/topic/7601/from/70

with the shrewd addition of zombies,this one ups it a notch, maybe even takes it to a whole new level, your call
www.sfgoth.com/~sherilyn/diary/

me, I like the more thoughtful, academic approach
www.formsofthingsunknown.com/news.html

this one though has a conversation in which, basically, it is surmised that jesus’s resurrection was the the first last and always best zombie flick.
www.tombridge.com/rta/incoherent_ramblings/

does this clip from www.radiodailynews.com/lalaland.htm come close enough?
*****The NAZI flap with
Prince Henry reminds many of what they didn’t know or had forgotten, namely,
the British Royal family is German. It changed it’s name from
Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor because of the embarrassment of warring with their relatives.
Beyond that , King Edward VIII who resigned to marry Wallace Simpson was a
pro-Nazi and Hitler planned to put him back on the throne if the Nazis invaded
England***** Also, Prince Philip’s family has Nazi connections*****whew*****!
The only smart one in that bunch is the Queen who realizes, if she turns
throne over to her ditsy son or grandsons, all is lost.

This might be better
A trannie-piloted airplane strikes the skyscraper you are in;
either on purpose or on accident
(from www2.cddc.vt.edu/spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2004/heidegger.0410)

* Clarification:

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[date approximated]

So so so so so want to edit the Best of Craigslist book that’m certain will eventually come to a coffetable hear you. Some of them thengs are the make-me-want-to-despair-into the curtain-drawn reality of my scriberly, merited mediocrity. And then I burst air with a laughter technique that I sometimes feel comes quick naturally to me. So I’d have such good fun. And then in the afternoon I might shuffle together a themey organization–pith-pitted but not too intrusive–sprinkle through and top with dumbfoundedly and wildely stretched ‘torializen, and could throw a committed sprawl down on that chaise’s ajust ss in time to catch Tuesday’s last act act of its nightly, all-star sunset show, and by mid-morning be yawning my way out of the enveloping showeroom steam in a personal and very hotly contested bid to get to the front door before my publisher honch shrugs off without having finally lived that one moment he got into "the lit biz" looking for: the seemingly spontaneous and certainly unannounced house call to personally hand (not foot or genitalially) deliver the first numerically-modest-but-overladen with the significance of a youthful virginity in its very death throes royalty check, and be the first to personally congratulate me, re rigeurly as he might self-consciously joke as the tension of pending wealth goes 0-60 from obsurely hanging to feeding frenzily in the nitro-spiked air between us, thanks to a few Japanese hipsters who happened to take notice of its non-standard packaging and pushed it into a global mid-market best-seller-bound buy spree. IE: easy money.
 

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So tuned into little things of late. Not denying the bigger picture; it’s just not grabbing my attention.

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Turns out I like to hear myself ramble on.

I also like singing the Bryan Adams song about loving a woman and adding an extra 3 or 4 ‘really’s.

On the other hand, I’m just tired of having to clean up after a software install.

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Learned the word ‘columbarium’ today, thankfully without the pain that I imagine the majority suffer when they learn it. In my investigations, I came also upon this gloriously unlikely string of words: “raise the standard of cremation.”

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My response to stuff:

Hope y’all don’t mind my joining the discussion but I just have to say that I agree with Shannon, crack is a nasty drug, and I’m glad I kicked the addiction so that I no longer come off as a “no talent fucker” who “thinks its all terribly arty and cool.” Yeah, that was my site, and I might be a fucker lacking talent but, more than anything, I was trying to document for myself how goofy, shitty, and ridiculous I was being so that I could get the guts to give it up for good. And I figured the accountability and shame from the public exposure could only help the process and keep me from sweeping it under the carpet the next day. Guess it worked ’cause I’ve got a crackfree month behind me now. Wish me luck. And try not to be so cynical about tech-enabled fuckers, friends, because those were some hard hard times.

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I woke up dreaming of a business venture called “Sandwiches of Eastwick.” Not sure what that means, but I do plan to get a turkey sandwich on wheat at Care pharmacy today. Check in with my friends there. But for breakfast I had my first whey protein shake. Mixed the mix with milk, ice, and two figs from our sliver of lakefront backyard.

Return Of The Paraphernalia
or
The Paraphernalia Returns, Part II
Rearranging a couple items in my backpack, I zippered opened the little removable pouch and there was a paperclip unfolded and rebent and coated with the dark tar of crack resin at one end. If I’ve learned one thing in these past few weeks its that an addiction of any kind can resurface at any time, rearing its ugly head, and that an addiction of any kind can shapeshift, morphing into an addiction of any other kind. I take the paperclip as a kind of ironic token of something.

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It’s just weird to me to think back like 13 years ago to when Jon Spencer came out with his Blues Explosion and we all thought that was bad ass and were big fans, and then today notice that he and I are two people apart on a friend’s email list. My friend’s husband is tight with him, which I knew, but after they lost their house in New Orleans, they started emailing updates to about a dozen friends and it’s almost enough be make me feel part of the gang. The only logical progression has us in the same Austin, Texas living room within the next 18 months and when that happens I’m going to be like, “Yo, ‘member when you played Salt Lake City back in the day and the Swimpigs opened up? That kicked ass, huh! Yeah, I managed them.”

I saw Elizabethtown at the Regal 12, matinee style. Did a little daddy death processing and a little sweet, cool pretty girl like Kirsten Dunst pining.

I borrowed a scale from Rose and John this evening. Gearing up to get serious about shedding some poundage–you know that nouveu riche weight…no class at all…

The thing read 197 my first time on it…

Sent songs to Carrie, including “This Mess We’re In” by PJ Harvey with Thom Yorke, two of my all-time favorite people in the world together…

Everything ends in ellipses…

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Last night I rented Million Dollar Baby, looking for a triumph-of-the-will, have-a-dream, work-your-ass-off kind of movie. Instead, I was rewarded with (and gratified to see) a Hollywood production without a predictable happy ending.

Must’ve been tired because I didn’t wake up until 12:30 today. I am not a sleeper-iner. Not like that. Must’ve been all that bike riding, gun shooting, boardwalk strolling, rib eating, and 17 year old dating I was involved in. (The smiley black boxoffice girl. She had gotten off and was going to see The Greatest Game Every Played. I had bought a ticket to Elizabethtown and was teasing her in the company of other theater employees in the lobby. And then she says, “Well, are you going to join me?” Can’t remember for sure if there was an ‘or not’ at the end of that, but I shrugged my shoulders and went. That’s A. She left before it ended because her daddy was coming to pick her up. B) supposedly 17 is legal in South Carolina. Not that it matters….)

Today I went back to Coastal Sports and bought a year membership. If I go 15 times in the six weeks before I leave, it’ll pay for itself. I intend to do that.

Then I stopped back by the skate shop and took advantage of the $105 set up special. A Rick McCrank deck from the 45 series in Girl’s spring 2005 line-up, Indy trucks (classic), and Spitfire wheels (proven). I pumped around the wide mini-ramp. Wobbly at first. Wobbly still, but improved in the little time I stayed. Made sure I got a drop-in or two out of the way. The thing is tin coated and slippery. Took a couple spills and one of them may have given me a slight bruising on the ribs already. Not like the little kids flying around out there but I met another 35 year old and saw a guy with a Powell Peralta board.

All of this smacks of midlife. Quitting drugs, buying a skateboard, fucking 21 year olds…it’s like one big cliche burrito. But that’s not what it is. I don’t believe it.

There’s another, scarier way to look at it. Crack addict moves down south, is a social loner, preys on younger women, suddenly becomes avid gun enthusiast. Seriously, I was in the gun shop and saw the Timothy McVeigh in myself. Wondered if the owners did too. A 35 year old on a bicycle. But I’m not a psycho. I refuse to believe it.

I’m actually anti-gun. Not sure I have the energy or clarity to explain that contradiction, but on the whole–fitness, younger women, skating, scuba diving, learning new skills–these are things I’ve always been interested in. Time, guts, money, social situation, and other things can conspire against one’s interests.

But also–and here’s the thing I realized today–for whatever reason, be it biological, psychological, bad childhood, insecurity, whatever (those last two I don’t believe are factors at all, by the way), I need excitement in my life. I’m a little less fearful and a little more needy. I don’t know whether drugs supply that excitement or numb me to its absence or both, but certainly without drugs, it’s no wonder scuba diving, guns, skating, and even food come rushing in to take its place. Food is not an acceptable substitute, and I’m working on that one. (Read the Abs Diet book now and working and ramping up on it. We’re in the early stages.) But diving and skating are healthy. Guns, used correctly, are healthy too.

The realization was not only the naturalness of their role here but how that role could and should be more deliberate, calculated, and fostered with pride. The thought hit me and I shook my head: oh dear, I now have an excuse to indulge (time, money, etc.), my every exciting whim. Oh no.

All of this and I finished my 10mg Prednisone anti-inflammatories today. Seems a little better but my ring finger is definitely still numb. I’m no doctor, but I’d say that means it wasn’t a swollen tendon pinching the nerve but actual nerve damage instead. That means a long slow regenerative recovery. Ah, well, could be worse.

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Add

• TGI Friday’s

to the chain ribs list. It was supposed to be my last blow out, so to speak. Anytime you need a last big blowout, you’re probably not ready, and I’m not feeling that ready. But it’s time.

From this morning’s email to my mother:

Thanks for keeping the prayer fires stoked for me, Mom. I even tried it myself yesterday. I’m trying to make changes on a lot of levels in my life right now and they all seem interconnected and dependent to some degree. The income and kudos that come from publishing are nothing compared to living healthy and happily, but it’s hard to live healthy and happy when your attempts to do something that’s meaningful to you are met with frustration. That’s why I’ve gone back and forth with this writing business for so many years. It’s hard, and at times it has felt like the right decision was to find another challenging but less stressful and frustrating way to make money, and then with that money, do other things, like traveling or skydiving, that I found fulfilling. But then I’ll get an idea for a book or an article and I get sucked back up into it, as if I can’t escape it. If writing is the thing I should be devoting my time, energy and talents to, I want to be successful at it. If writing is not what I should be devoting my time, energy and talents to, I want to know so that I can quit wasting my time. If God knows the answer to that question and could tip me off one way or the other, I could move forward with confidence rather than the uncertainty that I’ve enjoyed for ten years or so, but as far as I can tell, he hasn’t yet weighed in on the issue on way or the other.

From an email to my sister:

For me, neither rainy days nor the ocean–as one woman here suggested–are particularly inspirational. They can be nicely moody, though, and since I don’t have a car, a rainy day can keep me from being distracted by anything that’s outside the house, but when it comes time to actually sit down and do the work, everything that shouldn’t be on the page has to go away.

From an email to FK:

I love that your father is living for the computer. I guess he’s in his digital age. The old man downstairs wants to learn eBay, too. What is it with old folks and online autioning? Suddenly, the church rummage sale is always available. It’s a wonderful life.

From a different email to FK:

Finally sent that thing off yesterday, but only with the line edits. Wednesday after we talked I went to see a movie. Maybe because I was frustrated or irritated by the floor fiasco or things in general. Or maybe because I’m lazy. Who can tell? I didn’t ride my bike though because it was a little chilly. When I came out I called a taxi driver I like. He was busy but said he’d send somebody. After twenty minutes I called a different taxi company and they couldn’t send anybody for 25 minutes so I said nevermind. The between-fares taxis congregate in the parking lot between one of the bigger bars and the titty bar, so I figured I’d start walking, wait for one there. I got there and waited a while but the taxis were out. I went in the bar to see if I knew anybody. No. I milled. Eventually I broke down, of course, and got myself a beer. Then bummed a smoke from the pardner next to me. Pretty soon I was ready to buy coke too, but luckily it wasn’t convenient enough. (That slippery slope fallacy is no fallacy in my case.) I managed to keep the drink number to 3 or 4, which isn’t too bad, but some people dragged me off to Denny’s, I didn’t get home until well into daylight, and, of course, slept most of Thursday away, feeling sad and guilty and depressed and sore, oddly, when I was conscious. I thought about how you said you saw your last episode coming 1.3 miles away and how the same was true for me and I wondered if there was some weird sick need for me to be like you. Yesterday I got back on track. I couldn’t see any way to really bring the owlies back into the last half of the piece any more than they were. There were Hootin’ references in each paragraph. I don’t know if I’d done the best I could or was giving up, sick of futzing with it. I sent it off. I’ve already thought of tweaks I should have made to improve it but they’re mostly in the first part. Streamlining the anecdote a little. Minor stuff. I guess that’s normal.

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Peter Rock says to Daniel Robert Epstein on Suicide Girls:

I write a lot of novels that don’t get published but I feel like I’ve realized the end result of what they were supposed to be in my mind.

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Slept most of the day yesterday. Got a medium black olive and pepperoni pan from Pizza Hut (yes, on the bike) and ate it while watching

• Garden State,
• Lords of Dogtown, and
• The Aquatic Life of Steve Zissou (Wes, yo!),

which I finished up this morning.

This afternoon I made final edits to the Hoot ‘n’ Toot and sent it off to Esquire.

This evening I finished the book proposal book.

The 1112 Words of Were Eye for the Fry Guy (as it currently stands):

Alone in the Redneck Riviera of the South Carolina coast last Saturday, I was ready for a night out on the town. Flying into Myrtle Beach from New York City, I couldn’t help but notice all the Hooters airplanes like so many banana boats on the tarmac. There’s no Hooters on the Lower East Side so I decided to see what that scene is all about, try some of that rare meat they specialize in, maybe go on to catch a movie.

Hooters isn’t known for its owl chops, it’s known for its never-ending basket of glandular sweetbreads (the milky-white meat), so I was taken aback to find the girls so adulteratedly bad. And I don’t mean spank-me-down-and-sprain-my-back naughty. I’m talking about Bad with the same capital B used to spell Bimbo. Pure, Grade A, 100%.

Who finds panty hose under shorts attractive? In the slightest? Or, for that matter, orange shorts? Do even high school cheerleaders wear white high-top Reeboks anymore? With leg warmers bunched down around their ankles? With owls like that, they should really focus on getting some decent baby back ribs in the place.

Inevitably, one of those little satin-assed gorillas came up to get my drink order and began with an obligatorily flirty “what’s your name?” When I told her, she wrote it down on a napkin, and said, “I’m Tiffany!” I had to restrain myself from saying, “Of course you are!” She wrote her name down on another napkin. “Very good!” I would have squealed if it hadn’t of been so clearly part of the shtick.

I ordered the New Orleans peel ‘n’ eat shrimp in roux sauce, whose suggestive name, incredibly, appeared unintentional. Perhaps it was beyond the reach of the executive management team also responsible for the motto I saw printed on the back of the T-shirts all of the she-apes were wearing: “Delightfully tacky yet unrefined.” Yet? That should be ‘and’ I shouted inside my head.

Sitting at the bar facing the kitchen, I sipped my lemonade while watching the action, which, yes, did get a little exciting when the archetypally zitty young fry cook rubbed his nose along the entire length of his latex glove, leaving me to consider a post-order door dash.

Like it or not, my food eventually came, and I found a tiny mollusk mixed among the shrimp. I baited Tiffany with it next time she came by to swoon over the smell of my sauce.

“Look, I got a little clammy,” I said, trying to join her hey-dear game. “I bet you do that to all the boys.”

“Just the ones I like,” she said. Oh, she was in the zone! I’d like to say she delivered that line without batting an eyelash, except batting her eyelashes was pretty much all she was doing. Animatronics have come a long way, baby!

When I finished my lemonade, another of the orange-u-tans came by get me a refill. I’m not sure if I caught her stirring my drink with her finger, or if I just imagined it after she said with giggled punctuation, “Don’t worry, it’s just rufies.” Hey, could you throw in a side of fear with that distaste?

I had two peel ‘n’ eaters left when I told Tiffany she’d better bring me the check. I had business to take care of. Something bulimicky. And then there it was, printed on the check next to the word server: “Tiffameeee.”

Tiff-a-oh-myyyy-God!

From there I headed over to the movie theater and had a friendly debate with the wholesome girls in the box office over whether it would be more interesting to see a ghost or an alien. We agreed on aliens due to the possibility of abduction and onboard reproductive experiments.

I guess that gave them license to give me attitude when I bought my ticket to see the latest Wallace & Gromit vehicle The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

“Have you even seen it?” I snarled.

“No!” they said, sucking their teeth and cocking their heads to look back at me slantwise. “It’s rated G!”

“What, are you too cool for G?” I countered–I was like a knife!–but seeing that a family had gathered up behind me, I had nothing left to do but scoop up my ticket and change, and sulk on in. Otherwise I would have added, “Well, I’m OG on that Wallace & G-romit tip, little G-irls!”

Had I become suddenly soft in my 35th year, turning on the basic needs and assumptions of my gender in premature male menopause?

No. If anything, it was a queer-eye-for-the-fry-guy moment, not a moral midlife crisis over family values and my own loudly ticking biological clock in the race to find a suitable mother for my pure and beautiful children. It was an epiphany of aesthetics.

I’m all about T&A, orange is one of my favorite colors (especially with a little slate-gray accent), and the thought of being kidnapped by an alien still, um, titillates. But there’s something to be said for portion control, even proportion control, and the subtle blending of just the right ingredients. Too much cream filling and the Hostess Cupcake fails to satisfy.

Taste doesn’t have to be refined; it just has to exist. I like Flavor Flav but not FlavorAid. Kraft, nuh-uh. Kraftwerk, maybe on a good day. Craftsman, now there’s a quality tool, but that doesn’t mean I should buy my clothes at Sears as well.

They may not be Grand Theft Auto: Vice City material, but Wallace and Gromit are some cool, well-crafted cats. That franchise, instead of delightfully tacky, is delightfully clever, and laughing at a dog that knits when he’s nervous does not make me less of a man. I’ll take the clay over the silicone any day, thanks. Even with the 27 TV screens factored in to the over-lit Hooters equation, the darkened theater offered more eye candy.

I could have opted for Flightplan and gotten a formulaic thrill, or I could have seen the gambling gangbanging macho-fest Two For The Money and gotten a brain-brawn ratio similar to the brain-broad ratio I got from Stiff-A-Mee, but I needed a sure bet.

The next night, still riding solo, I went to Lone Star Saloon & Steakhouse (the one thing Soho doesn’t have) for a full and meaty rack of ribs (and a wink at the belles in blue jeans). Afterwards, full of bravado, I caught Two For The Money. It was good. Romantic, too, in the end. I got a little choked up. And there’s no question about it, Al Pacino is bad ass!

Until I see him in tight orange shorts. That would really be some bad ass.

#

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I truly hope to be able to one day look back on today as the day bad sex really changed my life.

I brought the condom home with me for chrissakes.

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The thought of a penitentiary called Felony Gardens struck me today.

Perhaps something people could buy into ahead of time. Like an insurance policy or a cemetary plot. And then work to cash out. Or earn. Deserve.

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Excerpting along, from Harper’s to Men’s Health…

“My motto is, you have to get in a sport a day,” says [actor Paul] Walker, who just turned 32. “Playing a little basketball, volleyball, going out surfing, skating, whatever it is. It’s the best way to live.”

That’s a motto for me. I totally buy into that as an exercise regimen and rule to live by.

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With all the catastrophic natural disasters we’re seeing–the quake in Pakistan, the floods and mudslides in Mexico and Central America, hurricanes in the Gulf states, and so on–Rebecca Solnit’s “The Uses Of Disaster: Notes on bad weather and good government” essay in this month’s Harper’s seems uncannily well-timed for such a beleagured world stage and also for my own personal drama. Let me pull a line that strikes me as perhaps the next phase of my get-it-together transfo:

[People affected by disaster] enjoy the disruption…of their own grinding self-absorption.

If there’s one thing that hippies and Christians agree on, it is–and I’m paraphrasing–that there is a time for everything and everything in its time. So, it would be foolishly hasty to think that ignoring myself for a headlong interest in others (and others’ problems, by implication) would magically solve my own problems. Quitting drugs, alcohol, and tobacco, moving to a new state, and starting a new career all at once–that might be a good time to indulge some self-absorption.

But, and here’s the catch, let that go on too long, and you’ve set yourself a trap that will bring you back down again only harder the second time around. I think that a key trick to pull-off in making these changes–so far so good–lasting and natural, is to transition at the right time and pace into a less narcissistic mode. Narcissism, after all, is not an insignificant component in the Quikcrete upon which self-destructive behaviors are founded. Not now, not yet, but I think I need to be on the lookout so that I can spot that day on the horizon.

…disaster can be understood as a crash course in consciousness.

Solnit goes on to make the case that carnival is the human-induced equivalent to disaster, the harmless (or more harmless) version of the effector of presence in time, space, and relationships. I’d like to take it a step further and equate drugs as the portable inducer of both personal and public, both large- and small-scale, episodic-but-consistent carnival, bringing us full-circle, back around again to the notion that drugs are a disaster EXCEPT this time with a greater understanding of disaster as a silver-lined (we’re stopping short at necessary notice) evil, i.e. ultimately lamentable but doing some unique and too-rare good along the way. This is one of my major drug theses! Let me substitute ‘drugs’ for ‘carnival’ in an extended passage and see how it plays out:

[Drugs], to paraphrase William James, [are] the moral equivalent of disaster. No one dies, but [drugs] [beget] the same sense of release from the conventions and categories that bind and isolate us. There is spectacle, noise, chaos. You dress up or don a mask so that you are no longer yourself, confined to your everyday role. You go out in the street, you dance, you talk to strangers. Covert new erotic unions are a staple of old stories about [masked] [drug-usage], but the public union of each to each is its point. Everyone is welcome to join in one way or another; eveyone becomes a participant rather than just a member of the audience. The status quo is inverted, particularly in traditional festivals from medieval Europe to contemporary Latin America, where kings go begging and beggars rule.

Mikhail Bakhtin’s famous definition of [drug-usage] fits disaster as well: “[Drug-usage] celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions. [Drug-usage] [is] the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed. …People were, so to speak, reborn for new, purely human relations.”

Considering a disaster as a carnival [as drug-usage] of sorts answers another questions: Why is the paradise generated so temporary? It’s a labor and a rite, an occasion when society produces itself, something that should be renewed regularly but could not be practiced at all times. It’s a peak moment, and you don’t spend all your time balanced on the peaks, but what you see from the peaks stays with you while you traverse the plateau of everyday life. [Drug-use] punctuates routine, relieves the ongoing low-grade crises of isolation, indifference, and obliviousness; it mixes things up and connects them back together. The lack of real carnival in most parts of our society may be why its contents surge forth in unexpected places.

[Drugs’] message that anything can happen is not so different from revolution’s exhortation that everything is possible. And the outbreak of revolution or insurrection begets a similar moment when the very air you breathe seems to pour out of a luminous future, when the people all around you are brothers and sisters, when you feel an extraordinary strength. Then the revolutionary moment of utter openness to the future turns into one future or another. Things get better or they get worse, but you are no longer transfigured, the people around you are no longer quite so beloved, and the private life calls with its small, insistent whisper.

Louis Barron, a minor functionary in the 1871 Paris commune, mused afterward in words like those of many veterans of revolution: “In these solemn ceremonies, these festivities, these battles joyously fought, are born the reat and sublime movements that cause people to break out of their habits and set their sights on a new ideal. The educated and positive-thinking, the skeptical and the spirtually inclined, all find themselves involved in spite of themseles, carried along with the common multitude. One returns from such exalted experiences as one would awake from a dream, but the memory remains of a brief moment of ecstasy, an illusion of fraternity.”

More than a century later, Ariel Dorfman reported something similar from the dawn of the Allende administration in Chile. He spoke of people told they were powerless all their lives grasping this moment of victory and said that he himself “felt life quicken and accelerate, I felt the giddiness of thsoe few great moments in your existence when you know that everything is possible, that anything is possible. I felt as if I were the first man on Earth and this was the first day in history….” The poet and former Sandinista Gioconda Beli says something similar about the outbreak of revolution in nicaragua in 1979: it was “two days that felt as if a magical, age-old spell had been cast over us, taking us back to Genesis, to the very site of the creation of the world.”

In some sense all revolutions[/drugs] fail, although the brief interval of true revolution, like carnival and disaster, can lead to substantial change.

Of course there are small stretches where it doesn’t hang, but there are those others where it sticks! It becomes a question of degree, finding that sweet spot where it all comes together, and holding it, before it all falls apart. This is the drama that is played out on the whole–at the macro level–and also with every high within every recreational user and addict–that precarious, momentary suspension between two vertical wafers of perfection.

One other quick note: Gioconda Beli is one of my all-time top favorite heroes, thinkers, and sex symbols. God bless her.

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I was riding my bike back home along the beach yesterday and stopped to watch the surfers for a minute. Four or five out of the six or seven had wetsuits on. I swam last week without feeling cold (once I got in there, anyway). I totally wanted to get into surfing once I stopped drinking and smoking and I’ve lurked around the shops a little but I just have too much to do and too little money and with it getting cooler it just seems like not the right decision right now, but it’s agonizing to be so close to the beach and not learning to surf. I guess learning to live my life responsibly should be enough for now.

Also, I’m really getting into ribs lately. “It’s just a phase I’m going through,” I say in my sighing parental voice. Ribs have been had in the following chain locations:

• Applebees
• Outback
• Texas Roadhouse
• Lone Star

Ribs have not been had at the following chain locations:

• Hooters

I ate a box of frozen asparagus today. That shit was good. Only, my urine has stunk something fierce all day. Hoo-boy!

I saw Two For The Money tonight. Gambling relapse after 18 years. Hoo-boy!

Now a couple thoughts on the validity of dental flossing as an improved life model
I had some dental work done a few years ago by a bad dentist. I wanted to like him, wanted to find reasons why his dental work sucked–it was me, I blamed myself; it was a tough job; that’s just how these things go–but I guess, in the end, he was just a bad dentist, one whose legacy I feel most especially when I eat meat, in the gap he left after he put that crown in. Ever since he put that crown in, there’s been a food-magnetized space between the crowned king molar and it’s bitter neighbor. They’ve grown distant by the operation. Something snooty implied in the procedure’s nomenclature, I guess, something provoking envy and bitterness, a turning away and a growing apart. It was a good thing in away because it’s what really made the flossing habit stick for me. Before that little slot canyon in my mouth existed, I might floss the day after a dentist appointment and the day before a hot date and maybe as part of a new health and exercise regimen every six months, but never on a regular basis. PC [post-crown], however, I almost started carrying a boxed roll of floss with me in my pocket everywhere I went, so uncomfortable was I with an impaction of dead stuff in my mouth. Suddenly, my mouth had the same post meal distension as my stomach. And one was enough. I had to get that shit out of there. A little plaque, whatever. You can ignore that for a day or two. Roadkill between your tooth and gum, no. So, I’d get in there with a piece of string and root around a couple times until the crap was all over the bathroom mirror, in double vision, instead of well hidden inside my mouth. And while I was at it, I might as well have run through the other teeth, too. And so I became a flosser. A bit of a self-righteous one, too. A portable flossing gadget falls out of my backpack while I’m fishing around for change and if anybody makes a remark, I’m all like, “Of course, I’ve got my floss with me! What, you don’t floss? I’ve got to floss, or I’d die. I’m like a flossing maniac.” But everytime I go in there to do the dirty work, I get in touch with my flossing roots, and remember what brought me there in the first place; I go right for the gap. And since I’m in there anyway, I might as well get the other teeth too while I’m at it. This is very unlike the way I live the rest of my life and I was thinking it might make a better strategy in my pursuit of success in this world. See, with virtually everything else, the most important thing gets saved for last, meaning it often doesn’t get done at all. I’m a low-lying fruit picker (not a low-lying picker of fruit or a low-lying, fruity picker or a low picking lying fruit); get the little things out of the way first. That way you score some easy, confidence boosting wins leaving no worries or distractions while you concentrate the rest of your time to The Big Item. This makes sense to me. But as I’ve already alluded, doesn’t always work. In my mouth, things go swimmingly, however. I get The Big Item taken care of, and then it doesn’t even matter if I slag off. But I never do. And I never get so bogged down in the other teething spaces that I don’t get The Big Item. Thus my epiphany that flossing might be the better model, my life metaphor. But like all metaphors, it’s a nice idea broadly–on the surface it shimmers and shines–but take a closer look and it begins to break down. I mean, all you’ve got to do is realize that with teeth spaces, The Big Item takes no more planning, effort, practice, time, energy or expertise than anything else in there, but you can’t make that claim for life. The Big Item is the big item for a reason. Usually. And so, damn, I couldn’t make it easy. No quick fixes to my procrastination tonight. Think I’ll sleep on it and take it up again in the morning.

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Where’ve I been, what’ve I been doing? I’ve been eating ribs and revising my last entry into this entry. Behold Version II (sent just now, like a ringing shot in the dark of my publishing world, to the NY Times Op-Ed editor Mr. David Shipley):

Surviving Guatemala

Mudslides in Guatemala have caused nearly 1400 deaths in another natural disaster, but it’s not just hard rain that’s to blame. Erosion control is a luxury lost when people living on steep slopes are forced to slash and burn every available acre for farming hardly categorizable as subsistence.

If any dim consolation is to be had in the coverage, it’s that these victims were identified as Mayan—the umbrella ethnicity for a population that speaks 23 languages and makes up more than half the citizens in a country the size of Tennessee. According to the reality television series Survivor: Guatemala—#7 in the Nielsen ratings last week with 17.3 million viewers—the Maya were an ancient civilization of stargazers, long since disappeared. And so they are in the world—invisible—except to the stars from the States who shoot on down to make a game of surviving in their ecosystem for a million-dollar cash prize incommensurate with the minutes they manage to tan in the limelight.

Despite its visitor status, the Survivor cast had home-field advantage in Guatemala. While peasants continue to divide and subdivide depleted soil, the Survivor: Guatemala crew enjoyed exclusive-use privileges to pristine national park land.

Another high-rolling North American concern, The United Fruit Company, enjoyed similar status through the first half of the last century until Guatemala’s first democratically elected government bought back a small percentage of its unused land in 1954 to distribute to Mayan campesinos to cultivate. The government paid what the company claimed the land was worth in its tax statements, which was below actual value. Eisenhower was to United Fruit what Cheney is to Halliburton, and suddenly the CIA had orchestrated the government’s overthrow.

The coup and 36-year civil war it triggered continues to seep instability into Guatemalan groundwater while we’re busy cleaning up our most recent overthrow. Mayans aren’t the only people with longstanding traditions. How long before Survivor: Iraq becomes real enough to move from CNN day parts to CBS primetime?

The piling up of insult to injury lies stinking like the layers of bodies and splintered homes in the mud. One village shunned the rescue efforts of the Guatemalan military; last time they showed up, it was to massacre their men, women, and children as part of a US-backed counter-insurgency strategy.

That Guatemala is in the news this week is news itself. Reagan cover-ups in the early ‘80s left some 200,000 Guatemalan cold war casualties unnoticed in mass unmarked graves. If fashions come around again every twenty years, as it is said, the Guatemalan mayors now declaring entire towns mass graves are right on cue.

Ten years after the war’s end, the country’s economy remains ravaged. With no jobs to feed their young families, sons pick up their fathers’ machetes, and strike-out on their own, hacking away at whatever scarcity of land they have left. The government, mired in red ink, couldn’t subsidize its farmers even were it so inclined. And Guatemalan’s corn and coffee growers are staring down CAFTA’s double-barreled shotgun in a marriage between US trade interests and their own country’s neoliberal oligarchy that will make profitable small-scale agriculture in Guatemala an even greater oxymoron.

The fruits of that unholy union will be reaped on US soil as Guatemala sends ever greater numbers across the desert to compete in what Guatemalans view as Survivor: US. For these, the game won’t end once they’ve slipped past the vigilante militias patrolling the already militarized borders to stem the invasion. Can they get jobs or driver’s licenses? Can they avoid deportation?

Unlike television’s reality where staying in the public eye is the point, Guatemalans here have to literally stay below the radar, getting paid under the table in restaurants and hotels with bottomless cost-cutting mandates. If they do, the ranchera music will continue into the night long after the Survivor: Guatemala wrap party. Somehow, after conquest and genocide, mudslides and sweeps week, the Maya survive.

DS worked as a human rights monitor living with indigenous populations in Guatemala in 2004. His writing and photos have appeared this year in Report On Guatemala, Solidarity Update, and El Latino Expreso.

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Attn: David Shipley
NY Times Op-Ed Editor
658 words

Surviving Guatemala

Guatemala is in the news this week and that—defying the no-news maxim—can only be good news.

Torrential rains have caused mudslides and hundreds of deaths there in another tough-luck natural disaster du jour. Except, when people living on steep lakeside slopes are forced to slash and burn every available acre to carryout farming that could scarcely be categorized as subsistence, leaving no cover for erosion control, it’s not just a hard rain that’s to blame.

The piling up of insult to injury on injury lies stinking like the layers of bodies and splintered homes in the mud. One village shunned the rescue efforts of the Guatemalan military; last time they showed up, it was to massacre their men, women, and children as part of the dictators’ strategy to win Guatemala’s 36-year civil war. While engaged US citizens take grassroots action against Darfur’s plight in the face of fair and balanced reporting, Reagan cover-ups in the early ‘80s—unless they occurred in Nicaragua and involved Iran—were taken at face value, leaving some 200,000 Guatemalan cold war casualties in mass unmarked graves. Fashions come around again every twenty years, and the Guatemalan mayors now declaring entire towns mass graves are right on cue.

If any dim consolation is to be had in recent coverage it’s that these victims were identified as Mayan. According to the hit reality television series Survivor, the Maya were an ancient civilization of stargazers now lost. And so they are in the world—invisible, despite the 23 separate languages they still speak in a country the size of Tennessee—while hale new comets-to-be bop on down to make a game of surviving in their ecosystem for cash prizes commensurate with the minutes they manage to tan in the limelight.

Also in the news this week comes a 60% US farm subsidy cut. It’s a potato chip US farmers, looking for greater export opportunities with Europe, are bargaining against Brussels sprouts. Guatemala’s corn and coffee growers have no government subsidies or fair trade laws on their side. Instead they stare down CAFTA’s double-barreled shotgun in a marriage between el Norte and their beloved oligarchy. The reception will be held on US soil, hosted by US service industries with Wall street’s cost-cutting blessing, and the ranchera music will continue into the night long after the Survivor wrap party.

For the even greater number of Spanish speakers that will cross the desert as a result—their backs wet with sweat and polluted river water—the big game of survival won’t end once they’ve slipped past the vigilante militias patrolling the already militarized borders to stem the invasion. Can they get jobs or driver’s licenses? Can they avoid deportation? Unlike television’s reality where staying in the public eye is an advantage, here they have to literally stay below the radar, in kitchens, in fields, in the vacancies of hotel rooms checked-out of.

If we can see the human hand in our own New Orleans disaster we can surely begin to own up to our responsibility in Guatemala. Watershed violence in the post-Columbus Americas was levied when we tampered with Guatemala’s ability to direct its own path with the CIA-led coup to overthrow Guatemala’s first democratically elected government whose 51st anniversary we did not just honor, too busy cleaning up our most recent overthrow effort. Mayans aren’t the only people with longstanding and rich traditions. How long before Survivor Iraq becomes real enough to move from CNN to NBC primetime?

Whether it’s an entertainment or environmental episode, a political or personal problem, national or natural, one thing is certain: Guatemala is in the news this week and that’s good news. Because the bad news is old news and that, say Funk and Wagnall, is not news. The good news is that after conquest and genocide, mud slides and sweeps week, there are still Mayans, and that for once their sufferings are not being ignored on the world stage.

DS worked as a human rights monitor living with indigenous populations in Guatemala in 2004. He has published articles this year in Report On Guatemala and Solidarity Update and photos in El Latino Expreso.

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It’s late morning on a Sunday and I’m sitting cross-legged on the short, stiff almost industrial carpet of the sun room add-on. I’ve got my shirt off. I’m taking notes on a how-to book I’m reading. Death Cab For Cutie’s painfully articulate indie pop jangles in the perimeter. And then I cough, too suddenly to put down the pen and notebook in my hand to cover my mouth, and just as suddenly, I have a wormy chunk of sputum on my wrist. I look closely at it and see the black speckles suspended in the clear viscosity. And I grin real big. “My lungs are getting clean!” I say outloud to myself, feeling a comensurate happiness come over me.

If we jump in and change an action without changing the beliefs that have produced it, the performance of the new action will diminish over time because it has no foundation to support it.

– Jill H. Podjasek, M.S., R.N. with Jennifer Carney (from their sample book proposal contained in Write the Perfect Book Proposal by Jeff Herman and Deborah Levine Herman.

This is what my self-imposed South Carolinian bootcamp is all about, making the shift from telling myself that I shouldn’t smoke crack to telling myself how fun it is to have lungs colored right.

Now it’s Mos Def’s The New Danger album that’s squeejin’ out my laptop. Danger has been a longtime nickname of mine. This is the new danger you’re looking at. Most definitely.

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Woke up this morning to an army of ants with marching orders taking them from a wall portal below my lakeview window across the teepee’d ridge of the buckled parquet (butter!), into the kitched where the line of troops took a sharp left turn, up ninety degrees along the edge of the cabinets, up, and down into the garbage bag I’d hung between two knobs. I think it was the globs of guac leftover in there fromo my chicken quesadilla dinner last night.

I whipped out the sprayer of “ant killer” (labeled as such and subsequently proved itself as such)– yes, the very same one I’d used as glass cleaner just a couple days ago–and unloaded that thing all over this goddamn apartment. Then I grabbed my stuff, went downstairs and told Rose it wouldn’t be a good day to pack China upstairs owing to its fumigated state, and I hit the beachhead like D-Day in Normandy.

I laughed in the sand to Sedaris. I got in the Surfside surf with the surfers and swam. I walked down through high tide to the Garden City pier and ordered a fried bologna sandwich and a V-8 Spanish. Yes, fried boloney and vegetable juice. That’s one thing I love about myself. That right there.

Then I got five bucks in tokens and unloaded it the video screens. Plastic pistols can be surprisingly cathartic. Gunz yo! Plus a vintage mechanical baseball game. Kind of a woody, proto-pinball with tin players. Then a Moose Tracks milkshake. And then a wide-stanced chaffed-thighs fatboy’s waddle home wear Rose had the friendly pest control man on his knees. He was friendly. They talked about old times, Rose and the bug man.

After spraying up the place uzi-uzi style, I thought the business was taken care of, but Rose knew it wasn’t. The ants had made new alternate trails. And so we’re fumigated again. But the pro-man’s juice isn’t so noxious. Odorless, in fact. But I still may get out here in a run for Hooters. I’m about to start a diet and I can’t leave the south without an ironic–ironic, damn it!–visit to Hooters.

My self-imposed rule, however, is that I can’t go to Hooters until I finish my Sedaris’s smart and hilarious book. I’m getting close. And then I will have my smart and hilarious reward at Hooters. It’s a bit of a reprise, but I’ve got to pull another quote before I finish up.

By the time I reached my thirties, my brain had been strip-mined by a combination of drugs, alcohol, and the chemical solvents used at the refinishing company where I worked. Still, there were moments when, against all reason, I thought I might be a genius. These moments were provoked not by any particular accomplishment but by cocain and crystal methamphetamine–drugs that allow you to lean over a miror with a straw up your nose, suck up an entire week’s paycheck, and think, “God, I’m smart.”

It’s good to examine both sides of the coin, however.

As a perverse and incredibly boring experiment, I am now rying to prove that I can get by without the drugs and the drinking. It was hard for the first few months, but then I discovered that I can live without these things. It’s a pretty miserable excuse for a life, but technically it still qualifies. My heart continues to pump. I can put socks on my feet and make ice; I just can’t sleep.

I am having similar successes and failures.

There. I’m through.

*

[As previously mentioned…]
I’m down here alone in the Redneck Riviera for an extended stay–health reasons, you know–and being Saturday night and all, I decided to have a little night out on the town. Flying in not long ago I couldn’t help but notice all the Hooters airplanes like so many banana boats on the tarmac. Myrtle Beach is what they call a hub in airline parlance. Me, I’m from New York. The word hub doesn’t mean anything to me. My town’s a hub. So what. And Hooters. Is it in Nolita? Then forget it. So I got on my bicycle and started with a little ironic reconnaissance. See what that scene is all about, get me some of that rare owl meat they specialize in. Then maybe catch myself a flick.

Report Back: The Ironic Ending of an Ironic Outing, or
A Thirty-five Year-Old Male’s First Plea for Moral Reform and New Ongoing Rectitude

Did I really expect to find an owl chop on the menu? No. Did I even expect good food? I guess not, in retrospect–Hooters isn’t known for food, it’s known for its never-ending basket of glandular sweetbreads and white meat–but neither did I expect the girls to be so adulteratedly bad! And I don’t mean spank-me-down naughty. I’m talking about Bad with the same capital B used to spell Bimbo. Pure, Grade A, 100%. Who finds panty-hose under shorts attractive? In the slightest? Or, for that matter, orange shorts? Do even high school cheerleaders wear white hightop Reeboks anymore? With leg warmers bunched down around their ankles? With hooters like that, they should really focus on getting some decent baby back ribs in the place.

Inevitably, one of those little satin-assed gorillas came up to get my drink order and began with a manditorily flirty “what’s your name?” When I told her, she wrote it down on a napkin, then said, “I’m Tiffany.” I had to restrain myself from saying, “Of course you are!” She wrote her name down on another napkin. “Very good!” I would have squealed if it hadn’t of been so clearly part of the schtick.

I ordered the New Orleans peel ‘n’ eat shrimp in roux (reddish-brown) sauce, whose suggestive name, incredibly, appeared unintentional. Perhaps it was beyond the reach of the executive management team also responsible for the motto I saw printed on the back of the T-shirts all of the she-apes were wearing. It read “Delightfully tacky yet unrefined.” Yet? Yet? That should be ‘and’ I shouted inside my head. It still pisses me off to think of it.

I had sat myself at the bar facing the kitchen and sipped my lemonade while watching the action, which, yes, did get a little exciting when the archetypally zitty and chunky young fry cook rubbed his nose along the entire length of his latex glove, leaving me to consider a post-order door dash.

Like it or not, my food eventually came, and I found a special tiny mollusk mixed among the shrimp. I baited Tiffany with it next time she came by to swoon over the smell of my sauce.
“Look, I got a little clammy,” I said, trying to join her hey-dear game. “I bet you give one to all the boys.”
“Just the ones I like,” she said.
Oh, she was in the zone! I’d like to say she delivered that line without batting an eyelash, except that was pretty much all she was doing: batting her eyelashes. I was impressed; animatronics have really come a long way.

When I finished my lemonade, another of the orange-u-tans came by get me a refill. As she came back, I’m not sure if I’d caught something out of the corner of my eye, like maybe she’d put something in her mouth. Or maybe I just imagined it after she said with giggled punctuation, “Don’t worry, it’s just roofies.” Wow, the establishment managed to add offense to my distaste and fear.

I had two peel ‘n’ eaters left when I told Tiffany she’d better bring me the check. I had business to take care of. Something bulmicky. And then there it was, printed on the check next to the word server: “Tiffameeee.”
Tiff-a-oh-myyyy-God!

From there I headed over to the Regal movie house tucked into the corner of the mall there and had a friendly spat with the much more wholesome girls of the box office. They remembered me because last time I was there we debated whether it would be more interesting to see a ghost or an alien. We had agreed alien due to the possibility of onboard abduction and anal sex. So I guess that gave them license to give me attitude about seeing the latest Wallace & Gromit vehicle “The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.”
“Have you even seen it?” I snarled.
“No!” they said with a suck of their teeth and a cock of their heads to look back at me slantwise. “It’s rated G!”
“What, are you too cool for G?” I countered–I was like a knife!–but seeing that a family had gathered up behind me, I had nothing left to do but gather up my ticket and change, and sulk on in. Otherwise I would have shouted back, “Oh yeah? Well, my friend Jon is like O. G. on that Wallace & G. Romit tip, yo! And he’s got G. Ood taste, little G. Irls. So you two can G. O. to H. E. double toothpicks.”

*

I just realized, now at 12:25 AM Sunday morn, that I am a product of my grandmothers:
- a hopeful, naive writer on my father’s side,
- a music-loving drug addict with bad knees on my mother’s.

[That sounds more negative than I’d like it to. I love them. I’ll try to afford myself the same respect.]

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I just read this passage from David Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day. Dave and I share a first name and two initials, and beyond the recommendations from friends and the book-buying public, I’ve been attracted to this bestseller by the notion contained in its title–perhaps another thing Davey Boy and I share. Whenever I’m called upon to explain my predilection toward writing, I explain that, “well, I don’t talk so good.” And now, once inside his covers, D.S. is on top of another major phenomenon in my life. One that–like many things I seem to accidentally enounter in these days of deliberate self-remaking–is uncannily well timed and appropriate. From “Twelve Moments in the Life of the Artist”:

…I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of these things is dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilazations. The moment I took my first burning snootful, I understood that this was the drug for me. Speed eliminates all doubt. Am I smart enough? Will people like me? Do I really look all right in this plastic jumpsuit? These are questions for insecure potheads. A speed enthusiast knows that everything he says or does is brilliant. The upswing is that, havingeliminated the need for both eating and sleeping, you have a full twenty-four hours a day to spread your charm and talent.

Boom, bang, bam, nailed!

It’s rainy today and, though I just started it, I hope to delve in and devour the entire book before tomorrow officially or unofficially begins. It’s a lazy reading day. Yesterday was a lazy reading day. The lazy reading days started the day before that. Who knows when they will end.

Tuesday night, God knows what I was doing, but I got restless and hopped on the bike late-ish, winding up at Applebee’s sometime during the nine o’clock hour. (I would have opted for the Hooters next door if they’re three-story sign hadn’t been tucked back from the road and obscured from my tunnel-like night vision.)

I wasn’t all that hungry. I’d eated or snacked and had food in the house. Maybe it was that I’d worked and there was a reward factor–a need–at play. Or, I’ve wondered, a more social than psychological need, perhaps. (The isolation, independence, and lack of distraction have been crucial and blessed components of this redress, but I wonder sometimes–especially as I jump on the bike off to some just slightly cooked up errand–if it might be just a little much, the loneliness and lack of support network and human interaction and those nice things. Or maybe it’s just the sex. I’m horny and went from Guatemalan prohibition, to a New York sexless drug cocoon, to a South Carolinian Me Monastary.) In any case, it was clear that my up and offing to the restaurant had a compulsive quality. A little scary. There’s always something only too eager to come rushing in to fill the void.

I’ll tell you, though, I ordered a small basket of riblets (good protein based, smaller portion choice), asked for baked beans instead of fries (fiber!), and opted, as I usually do, for non-caffienated, non-carbonated lemonade. For dessert, a hot blondie (shut-up!) under a scoop of vanilla (a perfect metaphor for my food as sex-substitute paticulars). Good damn, it was a perfect package for my paunch. Just fucking delicioso. And then idea!

If it’s not too late–if Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride had a 10pm or closethereto showing–I’ll extend the fun into the movie theater. And what do you know, there was a 10pm showing of Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride. There was also a girl–young, and uncannily resemblant of my oldest niece, but possessing persuasive powers nonetheless–in that powerful ticket selling place with a club card to offer, a free one at that, which required only my name and birthday and gave points in return and a free popcorn on Tuesdays. And, hell, it was Tuesday night. I went for it. I also took a minute to explain, when she complimented me on my little old coin purse, how I’d stolen it from a dead lady whose apartment I had no legal business being in.

Of course, I was full, but I’d started the indulgence. And the indulgence was tipping into binge when I reasoned that you can’t get the salty without the sweet, and added a theater-sized bag of Peanut M&M’s to my free order and my nearly painfully bulging stomach. I hate to say the word. ‘Binge.’ It’s ugly. It doesn’t feel like it applies to me. I’m not like that nor am I one of those. Never thought I’d hear myself say in regards to myself. But here we are being honest, right? Here we are leaving no stone unturned. Here we are going for the fundamentals, not just abstinence. Because abstinence without a foundation is doomed to crumble. Or so my now-under-cobblement theory goes.

By the time I got home, it was midnight and my pace that day had been high-octane. I decided tomorrow, Wednesday, would be a rest and reading day. I was thinking about how self-reconstruction was a stressful job and about the pressures I was putting on myself to produce and perform in a broad range of areas, and how on top of that or part of that I was obsessed with things like checking my email every twenty minutes. Or even being at the computer at all with this minutia. Maybe I needed a breather, a step back. A re-exam of all my compulsions. I decided I would fast all day as well, allowing myself only water (and my anti-flamer meds), nothing more. I wanted to feel what it’s like to be hungry. Force myself to do that in the face of my eating when I wasn’t hungry. I wanted to feel what hunger feels like. Read and rest only; no food, no computer. My life lines! I was fearing that I might replace one addiction with another: an electronic one, a red meat one, an exercise one, a social one, anything. I needed to factor in my feelings about these things.

Wednesday the rain came to compliment perfectly my pensive abstinence. The day had a rainy day’s ambiance–lucky for a stay-at-home lazy day. And more insurance against my running out to Hamburger Joe’s for nutritive distraction and fleeting conversation with a too-old or too-young server. I worked on finished Passing For Thin, a coincidence due to my friendliness with its author, but it did lucky delivery, too. On page 141, FK writes “I knew how to be hungry.” That’s what I needed to do. Need to do.

I wrapped that one up and embarked on a new adventure: whitening strips! I’m cleaning up my act, focusing on myself inside and out. Six months of serious crackology was six months of poor performances in the personal hygience department. Time to erase the stains (metaphor anyone?). It felt a little prissy, pampery, but gotta keep up with the times! Everybody’s doing it. And I want to be sparkley white, too!

Waiting the half hour into the late night, I started in on my next book, an impulse buy at Books-A-Million, but one of which I am not ashamed at all: Why Do Men Have Nipples? It took on the answering of those medical questions people ask doctors at cocktail parties after they’ve downed their third martini. A lovely premise. And one which left me with a question of my own: so what exactly is spanish fly anyway. I talked about it in sixth grade like I was an expert, but when you press me (and you don’t), I’d be hard pressed (fortunately) to tell you (or anyone) just whether it was, is or will be a pill or an elixir, a vegetable or a mineral. I mean, I figured it was/is/will be an urban (and rural!) legend with no substance, but just what kind of no-substance would this potionpill be, what form had it taken in the medicine cabinet of quack backers? Praise-be the internet:

The “drug” Spanish fly is actually the dried, crushed body of the green blister beetle known as Cantharis Vesicatoria, or the Spanish fly. The drug has been used medically since antiquity as an irritant and diuretic; it was also considered an aphrodisiac. Spanish fly (or Cantharidin) doe not work as an aphrodisiac; research done in 1996 by the FDA shows that the drug has no so-called sexual effects.

– from Feminista! (who, in the same blurticle refer to a male adolescent fear of female sexuality veering out of control if not kept in check! Honey, that’s not fear, that’s hope. My Women’s Studies minor notwithstanding, I had to break the news. Honesty is the best poli…)

Here’s something I learned from the little medicali book of oddities: among the several kinds of amnesia identified, described and named by the community of doctors (that nice one up there on the hill, with all the Mansford mansions), the particular variety that I now have after my purported “simple assault” (always so easy) is called “Lacunar Amnesia.” For your reference.

Speaking of medicine and it’s issues, I got good news yesterday in the form of an email from my mother who said her biopsy and whatever other tests she had to determine the status of her recently self-discovered breast lump came back negative. (Hard for me to view negative results in a positive light, though I understand the science behind it.) I called…oh, wait, I entered this one yesterday. See yesterday, then. And just let me say that today I wonder if we really had that conversation. Hard to believe. And I wonder what effect it’s had on my poor dear mother. I worry about her and don’t want her to worry. And damn, we’re not used to this anymore. We haven’t had the drug conversation for 20 years! Have I shattered any son-conceptions? Hopes, dreams, or delusions? I love that lady. No hurt, no hurt, please.

Here’s the other weird drug conversation I had yesterday: Rich called! At 1:17pm. Said he was calling to, what?, see what’s up, how I’m doing, something along those lines. Maybe it was just to see if I was still out of town and if not whether I needed something. Maybe. But I’ll fall for it anyway. I like that he called. Anyway. He asked me what was new and what it was like down here. I told him I was getting my shit together, that at the end there things were getting out of control, here too, and that I ended up in a bad neighborhood one night and next thing I know I’m in the hospital getting my lip sewn shut, didn’t even know what happened. “Drugs?” he said. “Yeah,” I said, thinking that was clear. I asked him what was new over there, whether it was the same ol’. He said, “Drugs and police.”

Drugs and police. They go hand in hand, I s’pose.

Thursday it rained again. I took another day off. Or, was it? Reading is part of my program, but I’m struggling with my priorities. Hard to tell whether I’m demanding too much of myself too soon or not. In the bigger picture too, especially in the diet and exercise domain; I feel like I’m losing ground and improving at the same time. Maybe losing ground to gain ground. A loss leader. A shuffling off in order to get deep enough, the right place to start. Bringing me, for the first time, to actually consider buying a diet book. I paused in front of the magazine rack yesterday on a whim and happened to do so right in front of the latest issue of Men’s Health magazine. Again, that crazy serendipitous timing, of things being placed before me, in my path, for me to stumble over. If I’d had more success in my spiritual stabbings earlier in life, I might be inclined to believe all this is being divinely orchestrated. I won’t rule it out, but neither do I want to rely too much on that and lose my footing. What I’m getting at is that not only did I discover Men’s Health to be in general a quick compendium of latest scientific studies providing sound nutritional and mental and exericse (and sex, etc) advice and not bunk faddy (pun!) sensationalism, but that this particular issue’s feature was on addiction, and why some men can dabble and go while others dive headfirst and hard. It had a main biological and psychiatric break-down with side articles guest written on particulars including eating addiction (the new kid!) and a gambling ditty, which isn’t a personal vice but was written by a personal favorite, Frederick Barthelme. They know how to speak to me. The main thread was interspersed with quotes (presented like pull quotes) on drinking by characters from books written by the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, et al. Smart kids!

So I’m surprised to be wooed and enchanted by such a popular mainstream gender-based magazine with numbered sex tips and abs exercises and the shockingly short time it takes to do their full body workout advertised on the cover. But thusly smitten, I was primed to consider the “Abs diet” the mag is unscrupulously pushing. See, the book was co-written by the Editor-In-Chief. Conveneint, eh? And I’m skeptical about diet systems anyway, believing more in sound-principles. The no-gimmick way. The no shortcuts rule. But this one spoke to my need to snack during the day, appropriately made fun of the Atkins diet for its heart-stopping laissez-faireity on fat and then gave South Beach (a fad I know nothing about) some fair props with a caveat (turns me off when competitors mindlessly sling mud, so this counted as points also) , and allowed one eat-what-ever-you-want, dangling-carrot indulgence meal per week (could I really have a chocolate peanut butter milkshake again? Do I really want to live the rest of my life without a riblets, beans, and blondies night once in a while?). The diet was also in line with the upping protein and minimizing carbs angle that Atkins does seem to have right. And it includes exercises! Novel concept! And specific exercises! Guidance! Direction! That’s what I need right now–something to follow–and this one seems sensible. Sensible. Not a grapefruit diet. Think I’ll head back to Books-A-Million at some point and investigate further. It’s still hard to see myself as the kind of person who buys a diet book. But humble is good, even if humble pie isn’t. And, hey, if it doesn’t work out, having personally put the genre on trial, I’ll be better positioned to scoff at the lemmings and drones, the preachers and failures. (I don’t expect this to be the case. I’m not that cynical.)

Along with the magazine thumbing-through, I finished Coyotes Thursday. Here’s the timeline of my relationship to that book, which has dumped me back out at confused, at best, and prone to despondence at worst:
- enthralled at my original idea, sellable, perfectly suited to my temperament and abilities
- jacked at having found out the book is already written
- at halfway through the book: oh, but his crossing is only a chapter or two, the bulk being about the migrant workers experience in the US. My book would be just the cross. And getting to the crossing. From other countries. In a Department of Homeland Security era.
- at halfway through a drug addiction: forgot all about it
- at partway (half, fourth, eighth, seven-eighths?) a recovery, rememory of the possibility. Excited all over again!
- at end of book, Oh, we come full circle; he begins and ends the book with a crossing, the last one more harrowing and detailed. Is there room for my book. It still has an increased militarized context but is it different enough?

Today it’s Friday. Still raining, though not as hard and I think the moisture has loosened the tarheeling in my lungs. It’s still coming up. I coughed a couple teaspoons of that poppy seed dressing up this morning in the shower. Glad to get that cleaned out and I’m wondering how long it will take and if my loby pair will ever get back to their natural glistening pink or near pink. Maybe if it rains enough. And I shower enough. It’s raining enough to make it look like another read-focused day is slipping in. David Sedaris. Me Talk Pretty One Day. I hope it works out for me like it has for him. He talks pretty on paper. That’d be good enough for me.

But I’m at the computer today too, obviously. And I had a nice and long phone conversation with the FK this morning. I called to ask about her mammoth proposal, originally due to day but the agent is off to Paris and behind on manuscripts. Give her two weeks.

Toward the end of the convo, FK let loose a “baby” flipped as a subsitute personal pronoun in reference to me. Uh..

But she also had this goodness in response to the problem outlined in a leap-frog above. She suggested starting an exercise and proposal referencing our view of the event as shaped by that good book, but…cadavers instead of gum wrappers along the way. Etc. Good idea. I’ll do it. And then I have the hurdles of legalities, fines, and jailtime, trust with the coyotes, trust from the rest of the group, money to pay the ransom, fear of being captured for ransom, or just being robbed, or being left to die, and the hurdle of desert survival, not to mention selling the book and fucking writing it! Good lord. Is this why I will learn to fire an arm, Mr. Anti-Firearm?

Then I received this email from her. I like it.

I was just thinking what a strange word “ruthless” is.

I think I will be ruthful today.

Rice, ricotta cheese, almond extract.

And here’s a thought I had: with the tide of illegal Latino immigrants and the reproduction patterns of those already here as well as the legal and legitimate–hefty and hearty they are!–Latino population and so forth, the color and sound of this country is poised to change radically over the next decade in a decidedly spicey, darker direction–not so Wonderbready–and that country will inherit the global precary that Bush’s dalliance with Iraq will leave them as legacy. So ironic, given their largely non-involvment in the issue. A thought. Maybe overblown in its assumptions or forecasts of demographics or global issues down the road. Who knows?

Exies:
- 20 p’s
- 20 l-l’s

Food Footnotes:
- a 6-quesadilla kit
- light Haagen Dazs cherry fudge truffle

There. Now, let’s get back to little DS:

Speed heats the brain to a full boil, leaving the mouth to function as a fulminating exhaust pipe. I talked until my tongue bled, my jaw gave out, and my throat swelled up in protest.

There, there.

I’d been up for close to three days and had taken so much speed that I cold practically see the individual atoms pitching in to make up every folding chair.

The mind on meth does have a sharp and speedy Photoshop-like DPI extrapolation ability.

I cashed in a savings bond left to me by my grandmother and used the money to buy what I hoped would be enough speed to get me through the month. It was gone in ten days, and with it went my ability to do anything but roll on the floor and cry. … Speed’s breathtaking high is followed by a crushing, suicidal depression. You’re forced to pay tenfold for all the fun you thought you were having. It’s torturous and demeaning, yet all you can think is that you want more. … Thinking I must have dropped a grain or two, I vacuumed the entire apartment with a straw up my nose, sucking up dead skin cells, comet residue, and pulverized cat litter.

All so true. And that cat litter part, quite very literally in my case.

The shame was nothing I ever could have conveyed with thimbles or squirt guns filled with mayonnaise. A fistful of burning hair could not beginto represent the mess I had made of my life.

…Perhaps this was something that with hard work and determination I could overcome. Maybe I could sober up, get my personal life in order, and reevaluate my priorities. Chances were that I had no artistic talent whatsoever. If I were to face that fact, possibly I could move on with my life…

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On the Drug Tip:
My mom found a lump in her breast. I got an email from her this morning saying all the tests came back negative. So I called to talk to her about that and tell her I was happy for her. Then she called me out. She was like, “When are you going to tell me what’s going on with you.” So I was like, “Huh? What do you mean?” And she was like, “Whenever I ask you about how you’re feeling and what’s wrong, you’re kind of evasive.” And I was like, “Hmm, I’m not sure what to say about that.” So she backed off and said we didn’t have to talk about it. I said something about doing better, not wanting to worry her, did she really want to know, etc. And she said she got the feeling I was trying to protect her and since she didn’t know from what, she ran the gamut in her mind: hepatitus C, AIDS, tropical parasite, drugs. So I fessed up: “I was a drug addict, Mom.” She was cool about it. Said she’d been praying for me and that she was glad I had had the courage to pull myself out of that and to keep going. So I guess it was good. Honesty is good, and I wouldn’t want her to find out some other way, and it’s good to get it off my chest and not have to hide something or make excuses or lie, but she’s a worrier, of course, and I don’t want her to worry any more. She’s sensed, though, that I’m on the upswing so it shouldn’t be too bad, but, still, she doesn’t like me being naughty.

On the Food/Drug Tip:

Intelligence, sugar and the car-lot hustle headline WPA meeting
Psychologists discussed sugar addiction, intelligence and culture, and the psychology of used car sales–among other topics–at this year’s Western Psychological Association meeting.
BY LEA WINERMAN
Monitor Staff

West coast psychologists and psychology students gathered at the annual Western Psychological Association convention in Portland, Ore., April 14–17, to discuss topics as varied as how culture affects intelligence testing, whether sugar might be addictive and what psychologists can learn from used car salesmen. Highlights of the meeting included the following.
Sugar addiction
Bartley Hoebel, PhD, one of APA’s 2005 Distinguished Scientist Lecturers, presented his research on sugar addiction. Hoebel, a psychology professor at Princeton University, has shown that in rats, sugar can affect the brain in some of the same ways as drugs like cocaine and heroin–increasing levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine and decreasing levels of acetylcholine–and can cause some of the same chemical withdrawal symptoms as addictive drugs.
“Many people say anecdotally that sugar is addictive, but no one had done the research before this,” Hoebel said. Addiction, he explained, has three parts: bingeing and increasing intake of a substance over time; withdrawal when the substance is taken away or its effects are blocked; and craving, or a recurring and sometimes increasing urge for the substance during abstinence. Sugar, he says, can cause all three of these behaviors under appropriate conditions.
In one experiment, he and his colleagues made rats binge on sugar by withholding food for 12 hours each day and then providing unlimited rat chow and sugar water for the other 12 hours. They found that the rats increased the amount of sugar they took over the course of 10 days, and that they tended to take the most sugar in the first hour it was available.
After 10 days, the researchers gave the rats naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of opiates such as heroin and also the brain’s own opiate-like neurotransmitters. The rats showed some of the same withdrawal symptoms, such as teeth chattering and forepaw tremors, that mark withdrawal from an addictive drug. The naloxone-treated rats also showed decreased levels of dopamine and increased levels of acetylcholine in the brain–another sign of withdrawal.
In another experiment, Hoebel and his colleagues inserted tubes in the rats’ stomachs so that the rats could ingest the sugar water, but then have it drain out before being digested. The researchers found that even with this sham-feeding technique, sugar still raised the dopamine levels in the rats’ brains.

A Real Sugar High?

By: Angela Pirisi – Psychology Today
Sugar addiction is more than a trite expression people use to describe their sweet tooth. A pattern of fasting and overloading on sugary foods may foster dependence, according to a study published in Obesity Research. Summary: When does a sweet toothbecome a real addiction? People with a genetic predisposition for addiction can become overly dependent on sugar, particularly if they periodically stop eating and then binge,” warns Bart Hoebel, Ph.D., a psychologist at Princeton University who led the study. “Laboratory experiments with rats showed that signs of sugar dependence developed over the course of 10 days. This suggests that it does not take long before the starve-binge behavior catches up with animals, making them dependent.”
Earlier research found that this pattern sensitizes both dopamine and opioid receptors in rats. A cycle of deprivation and excessive sugar intake reinforces bingeing.
Abstinence also triggers withdrawal symptoms that resemble those of drug addiction, such as anxiety, chattering teeth and tremors. The taste of sugar makes the brain release natural opioids, and the bingeing causes dopamine release.
“There is something about this combination of heightened opioid and dopamine responses in the brain that leads to dependency,” explains Hoebel. “Without these neurotransmitters, the animal begins to feel anxious and wants to eat sweet food again.”
The rats exhibited behavioral changes even when sugar was replaced with the artificial sweetener saccharin. “It appears to be the sweetness, more than the calories, that fuels sugar dependence,” says Hoebel.
Although researchers still don’t understand how people can curb their sugar cravings, they do know that withdrawal symptoms and dips in dopamine levels aren’t evident when meals are moderate and regularly scheduled.

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I just streamed the Queen Bee Lil’ Kim’s latest video “Lighers Up.” I love her, but her tits are getting too big. Did I mention that I love her. Those lyrics and pictures made me yearn. See, I recognize a lot of the things she’s saying and things she’s showing. I’m right there with her on Fulton street in BedStuy. I get a gut reaction to her line about cops being on us like tattoos. I know the quality of the air that goes along with that shot of the droopy drawer’d nigger in the project hall. I never met any 12 year old prostitutes, though. Maybe I was hanging with the wrong crowd. Except I never hung with a crowd. Maybe I just didn’t ask the right questions. No, what I’m trying to say is that those words and images make me cringe but they make me nostalgic, too. It’s a contradiction like that contained in the her line that goes something like “I don’t think I’ma gon’ smoke no mo’, I don’t think I’ma gon’ drink no mo’. Well, fuck it, bartender you can give me one mo’.” I’m going to try my damnedest not to ask that question, despite all these…

Things I Miss About Being a Crack Addict:

[*It is my strong belief–one that is being and will continue to be tested rigorously–that effect drug abstinence depends on full-disclosure honesty. That means owning up about missing the drugs even when deciding you are through with that and never want to go back. It’s a little like the way I feel about my ex-wife. I would never want to be in a relationship with that woman again, maybe not even in the same room! But that doesn’t mean–how ever contradictory it may sound or seem–that it doesn’t sting a little that she’s not in my life and that I don’t get a little nostalgic thinking about the good times. Because one doesn’t get that involved or go that deep with someone or something if there isn’t something good about it. In the name of Holy Abstinence, Amen.]
• I miss Brooklyn.
• I miss that feeling right after copping.
• I miss more that feeling right after pulling.
• I miss breaking into the scene, the culture, the ‘hoods, knowing the dealers and being known.
• I miss the mechanics, the technicals, and techniques.
• I miss the focus I had on my personal work when I was high.
• I miss the heightened interest it lent me in all things.
• I miss the carefreedom.
• I miss witnessing the crazy things.
• I miss doing the crazy things.
• I miss being high.

Things I Don’t Miss About Being a Crack Addict:
• I don’t miss lying.
• I don’t miss lying about my lying.
• I don’t miss forgetting about my lies and looking stupid.
• I don’t miss the come down.
• I don’t miss dissing my friends.
• I don’t miss the hang-over.
• I don’t miss the money drain.
• I don’t miss being feeling like crap or having a chronic cough, sore thumbs, and furry teeth.
• I don’t miss missing beautiful spring days holed-up in my apartment.
• I don’t miss being unable to talk to a girl.
• I don’t miss doing things I’m ashamed of while high.
• I don’t miss paying a re-instatement fee because I just never felt like paying my phone bill.
• I don’t miss ignoring my mother’s call on mother’s day because I didn’t think I could talk to her and sound natural.
• I don’t miss terrifyingly unsafe sex.
• I don’t miss having to pass on good opportunities.

Apropos, looking back and looking forward.

Well, I’ve learned from my mistakes
This time I will escape
I’m too young to die!

– “Too Young To Die,” Living in Darkness, Agent Orange

and

I am a new day rising
I’m a brand new sky
To hang the stars upon tonight
I am a little divided
Do I stay or run away
And leave it all behind?

It’s times like these you learn to live again
It’s times like these you give and give again
It’s times like these you learn to love again
It’s times like these time and time again

– “Times Like These,” One, Foo Fighters

I’ve posted the lyrics of Curtis Mayfield’s “Move On Up” elsewhere, but I had to re-download it today as part of my ongoing and–given severe capacity limitations on my laptop–destined-to-fail efforts to replace the 20GB of music lost to the packing of my iPod next to the shortwave whose cover is held on by magnets. Anyway. I DL’ed it and then updated the ID3 tags, noticing that it came out in 1970. My birthyear. I love that song–ambition with soul. Ambition with soul! Plus, I love that the album is called simply “Curtis.” Not ground-breakingly original, but lovely.

Yesterday I was thinking about the cheeseball rhyming title
Crack To Crack: How I Found My Way Back
but this morning I was thinking I liked
Rock To Rock
better.

Today I pulled an old spray bottle out from under the sink. It’s label read “A Touch of Glass.” Perfect. I wanted to clean the odd cloudy streaky smears on one of the two glass squares on the coffee table. Only one of them needed it because the other I shattered into a million pieces last time I was cleaning that area. I was pretty damn drunk then. It was morning and I was finishing the bottle of Vodka that I luckily had on hand when the coke and/or crack was wearing off into desperation and a need to clean. My damnation for that act, besides having to replace it for Rose before I go (yes, she saw it), is forever cleaning out little microscopic sharp nuggets of glass. They’re in the joints of the wood. They’re in the cushions of the couch. And in the palms of my hands when I do push-ups on the floor in the vicinity. And in my cheeks when I fall asleep while reading a book. You can’t just wipe them up. You can, however–provided you’re not smashed–clean smeary streaks off the glass that isn’t already smashed itself. So I sprayed that spray, foggily registering in the back of my head its pungent acridity. I wiped and wiped again, and with some elbow greaselightning removed the handprints and smudgecicles. And as I turned with the sprayer to return its old hiding place under the sink, I noticed ti was labeled–feebily, I maintain–”Ant Killer” in black Magic Marker.

Foodies:
• b - oats in milk. I love plain old fashioned (not quick or instant) uncooked oats in milk. Delish. But then I chomped ’til my jaw ached on beef jerky. Doesn’t take much. That stuff is tough. And sweet. Forget health consids, it tastes like shit. Like sugar-coated shit. Okay, better than shit, but shittier than it should taste. ‘twould be so much better without the sugar. None. Take it out of the spaghetti sauce, too. You can see this is a pet peeve of mine. Why do these companies think they’ve got to load sugar into things where sugar has no business being? I didn’t order a beef jerky sundae. That’s not what I wanted.
• Turkey sandwich with provolone on wheat. Proud! Told Bryan at Care pharmacy I’d be back today for lunch. He owned up to his losing a bet on that. Said to “one of the girls” after I left, “he won’t be back.” The kid is so sweet; he had the woman charge me $2.50 for the $3.50 sandwich. And we bantered. And while he filled ’scrips, I read an interview in Spanish with a Colombian-South Carolinian community leader that I plan to contact for jelp on my mojado prawject. All good, so good. But then I went for “Better Than Sex” cake at the Crystallite Cafe. For such a hippy named place, it sure is full of friendly cool cute people. I kept the puns on the cake name rolling but not to the point of weirdness. I’m gonna be going back there too, even without the Romanians.

• 2 (or has it been 3) sets of 20 p-ups
• 50 lappers (speaking of laps, wouldn’t mind somebody doing something in mine)
• (does the bike riding to go fax things and eat lunch still count at this point?)

[By the way, those little nitty-gritty kind of to-do’s like the ones I had in yesterday’s post about who I needed to email and what not and others I’ve had in previous posts, I’m not sure if they belong here, but they’re easier to manage in Backpack and that’s where I’m going with them. Yesterday’s will be carried over there instead of here. It’s probably worth noting, however, that one of the items from yesterday, coming up with a daily schedule, got done this morning and will be implemented starting tomorrow. It is also maintained under Backpack (using the versioned “Writeboards” they have, which I think might add a small but interesting aspect to it, showing how and when it changes over time). So, if there are any marked differences to my posts or life starting tomorrow, we’ll know how that happened.]

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Note on Maria Full of Grace:
It did what I (and the writer/directorJoshua Marston) hoped it would do: clarify in undeniable terms a drug user’s complicity in the misery and suffering of others involved in the chain of supply. As a US citizen that cares about the effect US has on third world countries especially, in our foreign policy, in our trade agreements, in our modes of tourism and our habits as unofficial ambassadors, in our consumerism, et al, this is a sort of universally relevant and personally tailored reinforcement in my desire to break my addiction and put a forever end to my abuse and even so called harmless recreational abuse of crack and cocaine. I have an argument about drugs that a little can be harmless, and I still believe that as far as the user is concerned, but I can no longer ignore the way that even a little affects other people, even if only a little. I’m not alone in this.

The film also but a bigger fire under my butt about doing the mojado book, a fire I rekindled when I was reminded of the whole thing in, of all fucking unfortunate places, Blockbuster video! It was always a great idea and then it got derailed by my being told it was already done–though Coyotes is a different tale of a different time–and then it got further derailed by my crack addiction. Now don’t know which one I want to do first. Going Crack To Crack or Going Mojado [my new code names for the projects]. I need to move forward with preparations for both perhaps. Things to start with:

• see if I can contact Joshua Marston to ask how he worked with customs for Maria; I’ll need to do something similar with immigration for Mojado
• begin to further bone-up on the ins and outs of book proposals, actually beginning work on those proposals, and getting an agent. This brings up a side personal-professional note: I don’t want a romantic relationship with FK but I think she’d like one with me. I would like to be her friend because there is plenty I enjoy about her. She can be useful as someone who is knowledgable about good writing, the writing process, and the selling and publishing process. She’s already been immensely helpful in those areas but I think I have also been helpful to her in one or two of them. Friends help each other. And they understand each other, and I think we have a lot in common that way. I don’t think that’s using somebody. But I need to make sure I don’t do that, and that she doesn’t think I’m doing that, and so it’s even more imperative that I clarify with her now my feelings and intentions about us. I don’t want to hurt her feelings, or mislead her or be accused of something that isn’t true. That’s one of the things I need to do today or tomorrow. On top of that, educating myself and seeing how much I can do on my own as far as helping myself get published with help remove that element, that risk, to the extent that it can be at this point. FK is a person who is susceptible to being hurt, I think, and to thinking the worse about people and their actions toward her. The AS example, the KC example, to name two.

Things I Need to Get Done/Start Today:
• go to library for book proposal book(s)(ordered-in from other branches the two they have)
• go to the doctor’s office and see if I can sweet-talk my way into finding out whether I need another prescription and if so, getting it without paying for the office visit. I can’t afford that right now. No job. No insurance. Big hopes.
• get healthy happy and weight wise groceries
• email certain folk: Greiner, Shara Dee, Prayery, Carrie, Durbin, and Deal
• start the notebook entering for god sakes; it’s time!(I’m counting set-up time here because it needs to be done first, of course!)
• come up with a daily schedule! oh man, that seems key and I’ve been lazy (couldn’t; writeboards in backpack–where I want to maintain it–were busted)
• step up. It’s time to step up, brother. Time to do it. Time to be it. My version of Nike marketing: Just Be It!

To Do Later on in the Week:
• consider/start on big mag review of Johnny’s record?
• call the Mexican boys about getting in on the soccer game.
  Objectives:
  - renew & improve a friendship in this lonely place
  - practice Spanish
  - get info on and contacts for the mojado project
  - exercise! getting in shape! losing weight! meeting las mexicanas!

Pros To Doing Mojado First:
• it’s timely politically right now
• people more interested in a memoir of somebody after that somebody has done something successful and is sort of somewhat known

Cons To Doing Mojado First:
• publishing other memoir first will give legitimacy (legally and with coyotes) to this one

Pros For Doing Crackt First:
• easier
• two birds one stone
• can prepare for other while working on this one
• the younger the better
• part of the extended process of quitting and staying quit; the process of processing

Cons For Doing Crackt First:
• a premature coming-out
• a little premature as far as looking back and understanding, having something to say about it, knowing what to say about it

**Okay, here’s maybe the deciding thing, at least as far as planning the timeline of the major events that these two books will be based on:

There is no crack-to-crack book if I don’t go crack to crack, i.e. go from being an addict straight to climbing, which, putting the professional considerations away, is what I want to do on a personal level. Make that climb the crowning achievment (and reward and proof and motivation) in my recovery process. So, possible scenario: do El Cap, then either bust that book out or go straight to mojado-ing. I’m inclined to do first book first, then focus on second.

***Oh, and another major, as in make-or-break, consideration: Book One is no book at all if I can’t get my hand healthy for it. I still have numbness and weakness in my left hand. I went to the clinic today and did what was in my to-do list–except in a non-charming, more matter-of-fact style–and got a 12-day prescription this time. And the lady said that if I’m still having trouble after the twelve days, to come in so that they can test for nerve damage. There’s been slight improvement so I’m hopeful it’ll just take some time. I don’t know what nerve damage would mean, if it’s treatable or not. I know nothing. But neither will I worry until I have something to worry about.

In the meantime…

Note to Self:
Don’t bother friends, don’t bother family, until you’ve got your work done and it’s time.

Note on Sleep:
Roughly 1-8a, with the usual ghost moment halfway through. 1-8’s been a pretty consistent pattern. Is that a tautological pattern or a self-fulfilling one, i.e. because I slept that way the previous days, that’s the pattern my body is used to and expecting and that’s the time I get tired? Or is that my natural rhythm? The thread continues…

Note on Smoking:
People always talk about gaining weight when you quit smoking tobacco but it’s so much more a factor when you quit smoking crack because A) you have the same oral fixation to replace that you do with cigarettes, B) you’re metabolism is fucked from not eating previously, C) you subconsciously crave a mind-numbing sense of pleasure and food provides that legally, readily, and in socially and personally acceptable ways, D) ever heard the term ‘comfort food’?

I quit crack and cigarettes at the same time, motherfucker. This blabber on about food and exercise is so much more central and critical to the Quitting My Addiction saga than you or I would have ever previously imagined.

Note on Exercise:
- 2 sets of 20 push-ups
- didn’t get to my laps before it got dark but I did do a lot of biking around
(Why do I write stupid, worthless shit like that down? To give me that much more reason to do my exercise. That’s why, fucko.)

Note on Love:
This is something I haven’t touched on much if at all here but is definitely a big factor–or non-factor–in my life right now. I just wrote to my friend Cindy about it though, so I’ll transfer that blurb here and make my chronicle whole haha.

How are things on the love front? I’m a little lonely that way and am sort of isolated socially here in the Carolinas–after being lonely and socially isolated in Guatemala, too–but I couldn’t sit around New York waiting for true love to land. Got to get on with my stuff. So, I’m broke and alone but trying to make something of myself, and I feel good about that.

I did go to the Conch Cafe for lunch partly in hopes that Miss Faith with matching shoes would be there. She wasn’t. I almost asked, but it seemed geeky pathetic and not so nice to be asking one or more women about another woman. I ordered healthy: seafood salad. So at least there’s that.

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Sleep thread:
I saw or heard something somewhere recently (rough when ‘recently’ is the most specific word in a sentence) about finding a natural rhythm in your sleep patterns. This is a lovely notion except for two things: if you want a conventional, salaried worklife, a natural rhythm of 3am to 11am isn’t helpful, and how do you distinguish a natural rhythm from one determined by habit, late-night TV, sloth, personal preference, etc? Seems a nebulous field. Still, I’ve got to wonder when I find myself, as I have over the past few days, tending to go to bed at 1am and getting up at 8am day after day.

Celebrity Lessons thread:
Yesterday I finally cancelled my SG membership. It was an expense and distraction I was better off without right now as I streamline my life and try to get some big things done. But I was determined to iterate through their archive of 600 something interviews–generally of film and music types–and read the ones that interest me. I’m not sure what lay behind my compulsion to do that. Might’ve been as simple as wanting to take advantage of them while I have them, or getting my money’s worth from my subscription, or a way to justify my laziness in putting off the work I really should be doing. Probably all of those are factors but I felt, kind of romantically, like maybe I was gleaning something from the celebrities, that there were important things for me to learn. Certainly there is evidence here in these posts of my looking for and finding nuggets of wisdom regarding drugs and writing–my two big main concerns right now. But I wonder and suspect that I was also conducting a mini-examination of how successful people (in the arts) think, talk, and act, maybe as part of some ego fantasy, I don’t know. But I finally wrapped that up–and there was something interesting about reading that many (wish I had the number) interviews back to back over the course of several days. Something does accrue. And it led to my wanting to expand the classroom a little, involving the Blockbuster down the street. It’s dangerous because I have tons of reading that I want to do, and I’d really much rather do that than fall into a movie-watching traphabit. But I wanted to get Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator. Gator is the skate god in jail for murder. Gator was from back in the day–my day. So there was the nostalgia factor. But there was also the what-brings-a-big-guy-down factor. Part of my prep school. And I wanted to get the Metallica documentary. It got great reviews. And though they’re still around, they’re part of my day, too. And hella successful. And I wanted to see how they act. So, I rode Lil’ Purple down to the BB and filled out an application and got my card, which they tell me is good in Puerto Rico, too. That makes me happy. I pick up Stoked but they don’t carry the Metallica one. For some reason Maria Full of Grace hits me–a film that shows a little usually-unseen and definitely-badass facet of the drug trade. While that’s always been interesting to me I’ve also been a little shy about it due to my complicity in the horror, the tragedy, the drama, the sadness (I suspect one or more of those apply to how the situation gets played out in this movie, but we’ll see). Now that I’m not using drugs and am trying to solidify–make permanent and hurricane-proof–that lifestyle with whatever mortar I can, it suddenly seems to behoove me to watch the tale so that my desire to not be complicitous in the ugliness will be reinforced. Anyway, that one I’ve got planned for later on today/tonight. Last night I watched Gator. What did I learn? He got a little big for his britches. That’s no good. He failed to adapt with changing times, demands, and environments. That’s no good. He didn’t deal with his anger. That’s no good. (Makes me wonder–and I was already wondering for other reasons–whether I might could use a touch of counselling/therapy. This is probably a subject for another time, but in a nutsack, I’ve always been annoyed by that stuff, and I try to think about and dealing with my shit in a conscientious, honest but personal way. So, it’s beautiful that now that I have no insurance or job that I want to do everything I can, cover all my bases, make sure there’s not some root of my drug and alcohol use–or over-eating–still under there waiting to sabotage me–something to do with my ex-wife, perhaps, or my deep religious confliction, or…? I don’t know.) But probably the most direct, tangible and relevant tidbits was they said the guy Gator had a drinking problem. That’s no good.

Eat thread:
This evening close to 9:30 I went through the BiLo checkout with two items: a 32-ounce container of Dannon’s Light ‘n’ Fit Vanilla-flavored yogurt and “a thing” of ready-to-bake Nestle Toll House cookies (what the fuck is a toll house, where can one be found, and what did it have to do with the most obvious of bakables, huh? Tell me. I’m sure there’s some marketing collateral somewhere in a Nestle filing cabinet in Switzerland somewhere. They need to dust that thing off and get it into the hands of the public now because I’m fucking losing my patience on this one. Get the word out, guys, c’mon. Make fliers, staple ‘em to telephone poles, take ‘em up to bulletin boards, do whatever you have to do. Buy a Superbowl commercial. Program a viral marketing campaign. Spare no expense, because we, as Americans, just can’t keep living like this, under the shadow of ignorance, of nothing about something which so central to our lives. For the love of God…). It wasn’t until I was about 5/8ths of the way home that I realized how incongruous, i.e. funny, that looked to the pimply cashier. One the one hand I had the most delicious fattening sugar filled indulgence known to Western cardiac patients and surgeons alike. On the other hand, I had a fat and sugar-free product, pumped full of apartame instead, like formaldehyde for blood. But, see, it’s all perfectly sensible and rational. It’s Sunday night. That means tomorrow is Monday. That means the new “diet” (for lack of a better word, hush, hush) starts in the morning. That means that it hasn’t started yet, and further more that it’s my last night before I crawl submissively under the tyranny of restriction. That means I can and should do (i.e. eat) whatever I damn well please tonight while I still can. I have an obligation. For the future success of my diet. To get it out of my system now. Like a bachelor party before the wedding. See? Cookies tonight? All of them. With milk. (Make sure none are left to tempt at a later date, now.) And no fat, no fun yogurt tomorrow. Vanilla. Might have just as well have bought plain. And given myself an enema with it.

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I don’t think I move my lips, at least not always or even often, but this is definitely how I write–for the sounds it makes:

I’m always trying to make my stuff sound like what it means. I move my lips when I write; I think I write more for the ear than for the eye, and that’s where there’s plenty to learn from poetry.

That’s Kevin Canty to Barry Yorgrau for Su. Gs.

And, so, now, this is the other way that I need to be like my fellow Gator:

I have a lovely office in a converted garage behind my house. I get up every weekday morning, read the paper, have a cup of coffee and report to work by eight o’clock. I work on a computer and I try to write a thousand words a day. The only reason I have a writing life at all is because I have these habits and I keep to them. If I sat around waiting for inspiration to strike, I would still be waiting.

Report to work by eight o’clock a.m., son! WWW stands for Work, Work, Work!

This may seem obvious but it took me a long time to get it: the people who succeed as writers are the ones who work at it, who can find the time and place in their lives to do the daily work of getting better. I mean, nobody would think that you could learn to play piano just by wanting to play piano really strongly, or by listening to a lot of piano records — you would learn to play the piano by studying under an experienced teacher and then by practicing a lot. But somehow people expect to sit down and crank out a finished novel in the first sitting with no serious experience. Once in a while, it’s true, somebody will get lucky. But mostly it’s just romanticism.

So my one piece of advice would just be to work, to make a habit of working. The rest of it will take care of itself. And i think it’s a mistake to think in terms of decisive moments. Everybody wants the Writing Fairy to come down and put the crown on your head and announce to the world that you are A Writer but it doesn’t happen. You work every day, your work gets better, at some point it gets to a place where a stranger can read your work for pleasure — the only finish line there is.

And look at this, it comes right back around again to drugs:

I came to writing slowly. I spent a long time out in what is jokingly called the “real world,” making a living and generally enjoying myself, before I went to graduate school at the University of Florida, which was my first step. I had written a fair amount in college but I never had the discipline to get my work done, to really finish a story. Some of this I attribute to the malign influence of marijuana. I mean, if you’re in a racket where the difference between the right word and the almost-right word is life and death (it’s the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug, as Twain said), you don’t want a drug in your system telling you that everything’s all right.

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[Today’s crop of notable quotes will be the last. I’m on the last page of SG interviews. Done with those and I’ll cancel that damn (good) membership that distracts and haunts me with my own lack of fame, talent, and nubile punk chicks. It’s a great site; don’t get me wrong. I love it. I just need to prioritize my time, and same money, jobless and ADD/ADHD as I am.]

DanTheMan int’ing Poison Ivy of The Cramps:

DRE: Still doing drugs?

PI: Not much. I don’t understand that just say no attitude. There are so many ways for people to hurt and kill themselves with too much TV and mind numbing jobs or relationships. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with chemical triggers to change the scenery of your consciousness.

And now D-kid with Paul Barker of Ministry:

DRE: I was reading some stuff about you guys and some fans and even some critics say Ministry was better when you guys were doing drugs. How do you respond to something like that?

PB: Fuck you [laughs], everybody is a critic. If you don’t like what we are doing then do it yourself. What do you say to that? We have lives now. Go listen to Korn. Not Korn, what’s the lamest? Linkin Park. Go listen to them.

DRE: How is it playing the music sober?

PB: It’s hard to be objective about it. It is what it is. This is where we are now that’s where we were then. It’s important to us to get it together and have fun with it. I suppose in a word it’s great. We’re different people now than we were five years ago.

DRE: So you’re having more fun now?

PB: Fuck yeah.

Clearly I’m thinking a lot these days about life and art without drugs. I’ll miss drugs in some ways. In other ways good riddance. In more ways, good riddance. Sober is better, is what I’ll tell myself out of the blue as I’m walking around somewhere and have energy and the sun feels good rather than painful. Yeah, sober is better, but not everything about drugs is bad (there’s that damn thread again), and I’m scared a little about how true or not true it is about the drugs fueling the creativity or giving me something to write about. It’s a cliche. But I’m willing to give up the notion that drugs make a better artist. The harder one–and it is a little or very different–is the one that drugs make things a touch crazier (i.e. out of the ordinary) and crazy is interesting reading and writing. Overall, on the whole, in general, I think I have nothing to worry about, but I won’t go in with blinders on. I will consider my position now and again in five minutes and again tomorrow, always re-evaluating, always being honest, never shying away. And I’m proud of that. Believe that’s the right and only way. So there.

[D-Kid with Steven Perkins of Jane’s Addiction, appropriately enough:]

DRE: I spoke to Paul Barker from Ministry recently and asked him what he thought of the people who thinks their band was better when they were doing drugs. I want to ask you the same thing.

SP: Well there is no better or worse. Obviously our live performances weren’t better. There’s no chance in hell I was there. I was really the fly on the wall because coke and heroin were never my thing. I liked to smoke one. To be honest with friendships if you know anyone who’s been on coke or heroin you can’t get along with them or even talk with them. You can’t really get it going. Now we’re real whole people with real lives and some of us have kids. Most of us are married. Not only is Jane’s Addiction our music but its something we can go to but we don’t have to stay there. Back in the day all it was, was Jane’s Addiction. That’s why we were infused with drugs and sleeping with each other’s friends. Now we are more focused because we have better home lives.

DRE: I did read that you said that all three of you are better suited to being with one another.

SP: I think so. I’ve known Dave since I was 15 and I met Perry when I was 17. Those friendships are so deep and it was terrible to see them fucked up on drugs. But it is awesome to see them survive. With Porno for Pyros and Jane’s Addiction I’ve seen some fucking shit and I’m so happy none of them passed away. Fuck the music I’m just glad they’re alive. The music is better now but back then I was enjoying the ride but I don’t want to see anyone destroy themselves. My best friend Dave Navarro at 15 jacked out on drugs I was not happy. Its fun to free your brain but you got to perform. I think it’s great that the drugs are there to experiment with and some people get addicted and others don’t, Jane’s Addiction wasn’t too hidden. Strays is the new one because we’re a bunch of strays that survived, different ways different drugs.

…

Feels like we finally did something right. My job as a human being is to be good to the earth, maybe plant some trees and play drums.

Making fun of those beliefs that we drug users have, K’s Choice with “Not An Addict”:

Breathe it in and breathe it out
And pass it on, it’s almost out
We’re so creative, so much more
We’re high above but on the floor

It’s not a habit, it’s cool, I feel alive
If you don’t have it you’re on the other side

The deeper you stick it in your vein
The deeper the thoughts, there’s no more pain
I’m in heaven, I’m a god
I’m everywhere, I feel so hot

It’s not a habit, it’s cool, I feel alive
If you don’t have it you’re on the other side
I’m not an addict (maybe that’s a lie)

It’s over now, I’m cold, alone
I’m just a person on my own
Nothing means a thing to me
(Nothing means a thing to me)

It’s not a habit, it’s cool, I feel alive
If you don’t have it you’re on the other side
I’m not an addict (maybe that’s a lie)

Free me, leave me
Watch me as I’m going down
Free me, see me
Look at me, I’m falling and I’m falling.

It is not a habit, it is cool I feel alive I feel…
It is not a habit, it is cool I feel alive

It’s not a habit, it’s cool, I feel alive
If you don’t have it you’re on the other side
I’m not an addict (maybe that’s a lie)
I’m not an addict…

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My birth-control anti-inflammatories, I think they might be helping a little, but if progress has been made it hasn’t been major. I was just cutting my nails and had to grip the clippers like a bicycle handlebar, ironically enough, instead of between my thumb and forefinger when I went to cut the nails on my right hand. And when I swim I’m still a little gimpy. My thumb and first to finger stay pretty tight together when I pull them through the water, but the numb ring and pinky fingers flail about as if tethered on a short leash.

Exies II:
• 20 p’s
• 20 l’s

I’ve been posting here about wanting to get in shape. So, how much am I trying to lose? What’s my target weight? I don’t know. How much should I lose? I’m not about playing the numbers. I think it’s healthier–physically and mentally–to take a more rational wholistic approach. How do I look, how do I feel? That should be the measure, I’ve always believed. But doing those twenty leg-lifts there, I came up with a new criterion, and how it happened went like this:

The floor is a parquet. For some time before my arrival, the apartment had only been occupied itinerantly by visiting/vacationing family and friends. By the looks of it, nobody was invested enough to sweep or mop the floor. And neither have I. I wanted music–my recent Agent Orange downloads, incidentally–to accompany my lifting of the legs. This ruled out my doing them on the bed at the opposite end of the trailerhousethingonstilts, and left only the pube-confettied, dust bunnied (Playboy bunnies judging by the amount and color-variety of the pubes) floor as a surface upon which to march my abs along the road to six-packdom. Well, I was wearing a white shirt at the time–this was about 20 minutes ago–the white shirt Care Pharmacy generously and marketingously gave me. I look good in white T-shirts. It was new. No pubes on T-shirt backs for me, no siree! So I took it off, lied down on the buckling parquet (butter! margarine!) and commenced the lifting. Thing about that, though, is that rotating your hips along that axis recurves your spinal column, flipping up your tailbone and pushing the small of your back and–this is the unfortunate key–the love handles which flank it down into the the surface on which they floppily rest. Continuing up and on, bring your knees toward your chest, seals the deal–hermetically–and the lowering reverses the process, sucking your vacuum-packed flesh back up off the floor creating a grotesque farting noise more perfect than the fart noises you made as a child, cupping beneath your underarm, creating The Wind Beneath Your Wings. In this–the Still Life on Parquet–version, you get a whoopee cushion worthy effect both ways: going up and going down, which makes it also cost-effective, and embarrassing as you consider the 80-year-olds through the floor below you until you remember that he’s got a colostomy and hikes his shorts–cut-off polyester slacks from his earning days–up so high that his nutsack hangs out and onto the wheelchair he sits on, probably making its own pneumatic noises on a hot South Carolinian day. That thought makes me feel better and nauseated simultaneously. But the point I’m getting to is this: wholisic-shmistic, my new goal is to get to the point that leg-lifts in a crowded room, without a dog to blame it on, do not require an ‘excuse-me.’

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Steve-O int’vu’d by Oh Dannyboy on SG

DRE: What’s going up your nose next?

SO: I don’t know. I do have to stop putting cocaine up my nose though. I haven’t done that for over two months now.

DRE: You’re on the wagon because of this 19 year old?

SO: I don’t know man. I was just starting to act like a real but nut. Maybe I’ll do coke if I want but I don’t want to right now.

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