I am the baker’s man.

Walt and William, my flower smells stronger. These days, you know…too much and very carb’d.

The doctor’s dead.

Morning found me lyin’ on a floor in New Orleans
Looking like the Apache was about to eat my jeans
Feeling like my belly was a warehouse for the blues
And I sure miss my sweet Cocaine Carolina
Better on an oceanliner call the Cocaine Carolina
She was quite a lady then and I was twenty two
God knows how much I adored her I just never could afford her
Cocaine Carolina how did I get hooked on you
So goodbye Cocaine Carolina you and I are through
I’m going back to Sandy Scuggs she knows just what to do
She don’t love me for my money she just wants my body honey
Cocaine Carolina how did I get hooked on you

Oh someone said if I was lucky I could go back to Kentucky
Lexington was famous for its bluegrass and its hills
Carolina we should get up don’t you know we’ll have to sped up
Baby I should go to California
Goodbye Cocaine Carolina…
Oh goodbye Cocaine Carolina…
Oh goodbye Cocaine Carolina…

That guy came to my bloggy blog.

I think it means something.

|| See what else lies telling hidden in those logs, if only they were yanked like a molar. ||

Try, cry, again and again.

Here’s the one reponding to a very successful writer friend’s mass mailing ensubjected “Re: writing quote of the day.” Being ensubjected myself, I wrote the following:

Oh, that Auden! He’s some character, isn’t he? I’d really love to believe that, his latest self-evasion action, but I can’t.

Hoping You’re Humilia-Free,
ds

— FK wrote:

> Art is born of humiliation.
>
> W.H. Auden

And now a longer thing, more artily humiliating, sent to a tight group of friends after news of an adoption effort turning out to be successful (in so far as its going-through):

A lot of congrat-like things to those who merit.

For years I’ve heard talk and seen type regarding Alisa’s santeria; I guess you have to have a temple recommend to be let in on it.

The fact that I can count on Sean to stick up for West Jordon and Fountain Valley as circumstances demand gives me a sense of security and stability in this fickle world.

I like dry ribs a whole lot. I also like ribs that haven’t been broken on the whim of a 35-year-old who thinks he can drop-in on a redneck halfpipe in front of a live(ly) and high(ly) illegal female audience (”The Age,” here in the more Southern of the Carolinas, is 17) just minutes after slapping some griptape, a pair of Independent trucks, and a quartet of Spitfire wheels (just like the olden days) on a 7-ply, 7.7″ deck factory-signed by the latest young, non-competing soul skater with two kids, a mobilehome in Australia, and a real bad need to un-Hawkt-ivision the sport of those anarchist kings who kickflip by day and flip shortorders by night. After all, it wasn’t all that long ago that I did the same.

When my thumbless girlfriend was an MFA Badboy–I had already spent good time following the BID (balding in denial) around the surgical center as if he were the Pied Piper of Provo (but before he converted me to Darrellism my interest was no more than to discover how such a disfigured person could win a Betty Brunetta with cheeks composed in a ratio either representing or replicating), but I get distracted–as I did then–and, well, as I do now todavia.

What I’m trying to say now is that, after all the Hellcat Crazy Toura and annual birthing classes hasta la completion, I’m somewhere between scared and sure that I am no longer a keeper-upper with Senior Skat-Eh Swa-Veh. But it occurs to me that such a thing may not be problematic; besides easily side-stepping the pain of breathing against a bone-dry and laterally cracked rib, I find, in these barren childless days, that I’m just about as happy passing half an afternoon lazily (as if there where another way! )taxonomizing the personality-revealing [macro-levelly, of course] naps comprising the “normal” tactile experience offered by the furniture generally favored in this part of the country.

At about that point I lost steam and fell asleep despite my wild gesticulations, causing me to bite my tongue fairly severely. Such a thing can be done quite severely; take it from me.

I plan to make this the last. (Famous not-last words.)

I’ve been rooting down with los Mexicanos.

I think mostly in Spanish now. At least when I’m aware of my thinking, which is mostly when I’m brain spins donuts in the empty dirty lot after gear-grinding on la coca, aka la cosa, la medicina, la quimica, etc.

There are some come behavior traits in the Latino culture surrounding the drunken state. They are:

• Those who love you will tell you that over and over and over in a floody flowering-over.
• After a certain blood-alcohol content, arrived at through hours
  of Spanish conversation at a lower-fluent level, it is not at all
  uncommon for them to interrupt themselves every 7.6 words to ask if you
  understand the most basic of those 7.6 words.
• They have stayminga power.
• They like to accuse others of homosexuality.

Now for specifics. Things have po-po-pol-arized. Long story short, most/many of the Garden City Connector Contingent have cut me off after tanto because a gringo that doesn’t know me but came over to my tio Enrique’s when I was there and stayed 4-5 minutes maybe and was so shocked to see a gringo speaking Spanish and hanging out with Mexicans as, dear me!, amigos! that he arrived at the obvious conclusion that I’m police and since went a-campaigning against me. Despite how illogical it is, and how I’ve acted…everything! some have fallen victim and begun to desconfiarme. (The highlight here was Mirinda microwaving my Amex Blue, and taking the odd burn/melt pattern–the chip undamaged–as proof of my policianess.) Me molesta mucho. Others have risen, unrelatedly, to prove themselves some of the best people and friends a pinche guero or chato or beaner could have. Amazing loyalty, generosity, care, hospitality, on and on an…. I could go off/on here but will leave it at that. I have sites to prolgrim.

Another kind. Very special.
 

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.]]]

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:

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.
 

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

• 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.

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.

• 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.

#

I brought the condom home with me for chrissakes.

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.

“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.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.]

…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…

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.

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.]

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.’

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.

I’m sorry everybody, I’m sorry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Certainly applies to my climbing plans.

…and loving plans…

And this applies to my writing plans:

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

From an email to a friend:

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

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

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

It just hit me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whoopeehooray.

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

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

ds

— KD wrote:

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

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

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

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

Thinking About Doing Tomorrow:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I just got hit by a car.*

No lie. I did.

I didn’t hurt, though.

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

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

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

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

And thusly I forced myself in.

And I loved it.

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

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

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

“No, no funny stuff,” she said.

“You don’t like the funny stuff.”

“I do,” she said, “but John…”

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

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

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

“Oh, that’s too many. About five.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I got hit by a car.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SPPS

SPPS

SPPS

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

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

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

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

grumble grum

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

mutter mut…

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

leprauchan & charles’ ‘bama, iLeft sighTING disstion

firscale, am.park

home doll fina

punt o saca dos

“niggerville”

“si, si, salsa…”

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

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

[Email to Prayery 21 Sep 05]:
Funny you should think of me as having gotten bonked on the head. As a matter of fact, I did. And I was going to mention how fortuitous and prescient it was of you to send me a book on amnesia, because I remember nothing of the “simple assault” (as my police receipt put it) that caused my concussion that caused my amnesia. I remember stepping out of a taxi in Myrtle Beach (on a darkened side street 10:30ish at night, of course), and kind of remember a man in the distance walking towards me. Then I remember sitting up on a stretcher as it was wheeled collapsibly into the back of the ambulance, my shirt soaked in blood. Then I remember the doctor in the ER asking me where I was. “Man, I honestly don’t know.” What month is it? “June,” I said.

The four or five stitches in my lip I recall vaguely as a fishing experiment or Pinochio playing at The Theater of the Absurd.

Then the CAT scan–no memory of it.

Then it’s 6:30AM and I’m handing over my Amex Blue (all pretty translucentness) to the money nurse to charge like $1600.

It wasn’t the forget-your-name kind of amnesia, but the book says that hardly exists outside of fiction, and I’ve never not been able to remember something before. It’s unnerving. Weird. I went back to the hospital for my medical records for clues, which is what brought back the summertime dialog I had with the doctor. Should do the same with the police but suspect it’ll be too fruitless a hassle for my lazy, busy, paranoid life. So, I have the book to process it with–one of the few books I brought down here with me. Thanks.

A “tall order” the taxi driver says when I ask him to take me to a hotel. Heh…

Heheh…

Heheheh…