Every Last Time I Come Home

It's three (FAKE) in the morning. {Try that again} 

It's the last watch of the night {Better} and I've got Fall Out Boy on the personal juke and a mid strength ale and I woke up from a dead sleep because I had a verb in my head for a reimagining of the story of Ilium that will never be published.

To think, I left the warm, welcoming bed of my special lady and her cat and the probable location of the dog with whom we will cosplay a Scooby Doo Halloween situation to sit in the cold and weirdly deficient central heating of my house to write the verb (gerund?) brumbling in regards to a smoldering fire. Haha. I'm insane.

Obsessions, man. They're a thing. I've recently gotten into horse racing and college football. Watching those camblet hided beauties, both human and equine, pulse down the green makes one want, makes one desire, makes one crave that atavistic power of thighs, of shoulders. Lucifer only had to glimpse Eve how good things might be if she only partook. She knew what was up. Adam was a dumbass. 

I'm planning to make a slow cooker chili today. Bison, kidney beans, Serrano chili, garlic, onions, diced tomatoes, bacon, dried chilies, bell pepper, chili powder, salt.

We all inhabit the realities that we'd rather not.  

They Said It Would Be Good For You

I recently adventured, katabasis style, back to the wilds of my fostering. The aims and strategic goals of which may come to light later, but suffice to say it was complete and utter garbage. Maybe more on that later, but the cafe here, in Palmer, is slapping with all the muted violence of civilization and the denied and deeply rooted understanding of necessary bloodshed. Then again, maybe I've just read too much and this has informed my poor opinion of my fellow being. Then again, it could just be that I'm trash, like my momma used to say of other folks not to her liking. Who knows?

Mr. Hendrix here on the wall of a Hardy St. brewpub (Keg and Barrel if you're interested and in the vicinity.). This place was legit and by legit I mean it was a thinly veiled attempt at white gentrification in what had, in my memory, been a black neighborhood. Indeed, there were still many black folks going about their lives on the aforementioned street, blasting up and down the lanes, blowing loud dro out of their windows and blasting rap music of a kind unknown to me that rattled trunks and speakers. The brewpub featured many local brews from Gulfport, Hattiesburg, Kiln - the most delicious of which were the sour beers that perfectly matched the perpetual zeitgeist of the failed South in their bitterness, a perfect match to the humid, hot, racist environs of the region. Who knows what it is I'm trying to say here? The pub was nice. They had outdoor seating next to juvenile magnolia trees and yet to flower hydrangeas with beds strewn with pine straw and the hot afternoon sun warded off by giant umbrellas and a light breeze while inside was cool and quiet with close captioned sports channels. A vast oasis among the revving cars and birdnoise and human drama unspooling all around me.

I witnessed a uniquely human event during my travels - the presentation of music and the gathering of the masses on the public green - complete with brews and food provided by mostly black folks for the whites in attendance. The occasion was a Friday and it being hot in the Hub City and the need to congregate to establish that we are goddamn alive and this will all end but in the meantime we need to get in some recreation. I was poncho'd up, owl style, and received no small manner of looks. It would be some time before the train took me to the airport with the ultimate destination of home and I watched the folks behaving in strangely magnanimous ways, only taking the barest necessities from the commons - spreading their chairs and blankets with utmost respect and consideration of the other, even in a place as violent as the South, with a certain deference for their neighbors. I was stricken by the oddness of it.

This trip I spent much time amongst the dead, in their cities and beds, in the bardo of their transition, them still here somehow, yet somehow not. I marveled at their absurd monuments, the gravitational pull of their stones, the stupid desire to persist. My own journey was one of attempted right-making, taking someone where they should be and had not been for some time. A giant waste of time and resources, much like the mausoleums pictured here. And yet one hopes my charge ended up where he was destined to be.

I visited the zoo, usually not my jam because, you know, the unethical nature of housing inmates, but I had time to burn after I had completed my mission. I saw many beasts - tapirs, wild hogs, hyenas, flamingos, giraffes, alligators, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I was baffled more by the patrons, mostly white, mostly barking at their children in a way that seems not to happen elsewhere and would likely be frowned upon in other regions. There, in that place, no one gave a second look, as if that manner of aggression was preferred with regards to urchins. I saw this many places and I marveled at my own upbringing. The peacock and I communed for a good long while, within close proximity, he in his livery and me in mine, and I asked him if he regarded my plumage as a threat. He eyed me close and did not answer.

Back home at the Moosehead, I studied these things - the journey, the people, the muted disapproval of a freak such as myself flying his flag in southern Mississippi, on a mission to put someone somewhere, to close a thing, to finish a chapter, to find the right azimuth, to reconcile an existence, to be. No answers apparated and I was left alone, plunging magically toward oblivion. Perhaps I have not said what I have wanted to convey, perhaps I have been intentionally vague due to personal reasons, perhaps I have opted for obfuscation rather than clarity, yet here this thing is, signifying nothing.

Mind Cafe, Cafe Mind

In the dark (brilliant, dazzling) temple of the cafe where there sits a family of seemingly Nordic stock enjoying the hard-earned labors of the man and woman (man sits with his hood raised) among the children dressed as ragged scamps (one, a boy possibly, doffing a red and feathered felt fedora prior to repast). They are curious. Recently I read the story of a prehistoric mass grave unearthed and examined in Europe somewhere (the Baltic states? the Balkans?).  A collection of skeletons unceremoniously dumped in a pile in a shallow grave all of which bore the evidence of disastrous head trauma, aged 2 to old, and only a few of which were related genetically. The scientists speculated as to what had happened, what led these bound victims to their brainings, but if you pay attention to this family over here, you already know. A massive, ugly truth from the deep unrecorded.

A barista delivering a meal passed within arms length. I chuckled about that. Last night A and I finished a movie, I'm Thinking of Ending Things, which is, as far as I could ascertain, largely themed around the armature narrative of the unknowable other. (Jesus, will you ever shut up about that?) It was good, infuriatingly so, the way decent works of Art are supposed to elicit outrage. Of course I wanted to argue with A about it but she would have none. There is an ancient man, a gnome by rights, who frequents the cafe in the same way as I. The baristas know him, his usual, and I even saw one of the prettier ones, one who works here no longer, hug him once. He sits and watches and I rarely see him speak. Is he a widower? He is always solo, save for that legendary scene where, over bibles and notebooks, the blonde woman a quarter his seeming age asked for a hug and received one (avuncular, well-meaning, rightly-intentioned, no hint of filth). Fuck I hope she's doing well, wherever she is.

The other day at work, I consoled (one wishes), a young lady from the village about a recent test result that had not gone in the intended direction. She was upset (it seemed) at not having performed on a metric that others had impressed upon her as important. She'd called to see if it were appropriate to visit my office at the oddness of the hour and I said yes, natch. She asked on the test results' seeming import and I explained that, while I understood her concern, to not bother with feeling shame, or bad, or negative as the test was an absolute falsehood. I tried to inform her of testing's inherent bias and of things cultural and societal that had conspired such that she'd never reach the hoped for goal and as such pining about missing the mark was a waste of energy. Can you imagine the roles reversed? Can you imagine yourself hunting seals and being graded on your performance adversely and then feeling poorly because strangers might be disappointed at your failure? Absurd. Insane. Possibly unethical. Definitely wrong. She left after a quick chat and her eyes smiled but I don't know if it was genuine as she was wearing a mask for the duration of our visit. Bizarre. Wonderful. I cried after, about the futility, the hopelessness, the implicit consent with all the things that conspired to make her feel bad that her score decreased. 

White guy in dreads across the cafe, near where the paleolithic massacre victims had sit. I've been flogging the beast of race in these posts lately, mostly thoughts about whiteness. I don't know what I'm saying and I have no agenda. I don't even have a cogent position as you have seen. It's like hearing an idiot's blather. Yet it won't leave my mind unless the trepanning here. Earlier today I learned that Trump was set to launch his own social media platform. Other things I learned from the news recently was that a man killed a six year old girl, shot twice in the chest after spilling some water. Some guy killed a bunch of Atlantan Asian people the other day. The same student I spoke to about her test results had previously taught me the Yup'ik word for caribou. I described my life to Nick and Dan as a "series of potions" and I think that's pretty accurate for us all. When challenged about the grandiosity of a woman's armpit aroma this morning, I maintained that it was definitely top ten in odors. (You're making up that part.) A young blonde woman is eating a pumpkin roll in front of me. I mean, if you can't see the species connections here, I'm not sure I can paint a clearer picture. 

The Return

Something, something, COVID-19 denial, I am a sudden epidemiologist who reads at a 6th grade level and I saw on the internet that the vaccine is Satanic mind control mark of the beast end times, masks are a tool to tyrannize and oppress and pacify, and the numbers are all wrong, and what happened to the flu this year, and if masks work why distance, and if distance works why masks? Don't even get me started on the election. Hoo boy, do you have hours to lose, to educate yourself?

It is rainy and a windy 37 degrees here in the nexus of my universe and there are three boys, my boys, crouching in this living room and all of us meditating on the reality of our screens. They've been back home for a while now, early November, and the shock of their nearness, their presence in my home that they'd previously mostly known during the summer, in the dim of the year, is a thing of wonder. It's fulfillment and despair and choked silent weeping as you make dinner because of the goodness and rightness and wholeness of it all.  

Something, something, raising children is so soft today because I can't beat the living shit out of them and they exist and grow in an environment that is safer and less traumatic than my childhood and for this they are weaker and of less substance than I and did I mention that problem alcoholism is just fine as the model for your adult life with children? It's science, and religion, and the truth. 

Uly-bear, apropos of nothing, decided to draw this scene which he described as a graveyard where the person alive was in despair. All this he narrated with a smile, an innocence that burned, as if he could never really know the true sadness of death because he's yet to experience it on the root level. 

Don't mind me, I'm into the weeds on this one.

Something, something if homeless people wanted to work they'd find work but they don't and so I won't give them any of my hard earned money that I earn at my work which is stressful and busy and I have to prove, and prove again, my worth, my life to the company/my boss/shareholders and please press the gun of my financial debt into my skull a little harder so that I may find yet a lower place of groveling in the work worship, to abase myself more for money or position or status or whatever employment god I choose to deify.

All sense of propriety and ethical professionalism have exited the stage of the work comedy and this past few weeks I've devoted hefty chunks of company time to the pursuits of elevation, creative indulgence, and formless drifting stares out of the winter window at falling snow and the hope of birds in the frame and a shameless gaming on a miraculously unblocked site for school-aged children. I crafted these three, these gifts, for my sons, each piece informing the creation of the other and each again a small perception of who I believe these human animals so dear to me, to be in this world. The works are rendered poorly, and all I can focus on is their imperfections and they're one of those smarmingly saccharine tchotchkes of child/young adult hood that one hopes they cling to and port with them the places they will go, perhaps hanging them up, perhaps in packing, or in a well-meaning pile for the non-event of their hanging.  I suppose it won't matter, in the end, even if these creations get shit-canned at some point, and one hopes it will be the memory of the effort that will inform their future selves. Who knows? I'm definitely not going to be around long enough to know, I'm sure.

This is the night of their finally completed arrival. I messaged my friends Nick and Dan that this was perfection, and I maintain it was one of the grandest peaks of my life to have these two smelly teen boys crowding my space. Uly loves them, their more attuned age, their energy. Even now, as they gaze screenward at games he hovers and watches, hovers and watches. I should yell at them to stop, to go do something else, to interact with the "real world" but I won't and so I'll let it go on and watch these watchers. It's pretty good, these scenes and prompts marveling at luck in how the world rolls along.

The view here is nice, you should join me.  

 

Invasive Weed Counter-Insurgency and Other Insanities

Two weekends ago Andrea and the boys and I trooped downtown to assist with a local endeavor to help stem the ever burgeoning crop of bird vetch that is encroaching our public spaces here in town. The vetch, an invasive species introduced locally in an effort to provide a hardy feed stock for ruminants, used to only be on the other side of Arctic Avenue but has spread, as it is wont, to choke out the derelict train tracks where, otherwise, native fireweed would bloom. In an ironic turn, livestock don't even like the stuff. If the information presented to us by the organizers of the weed-pull is accurate, something like 2400 seeds can be produced by a single plant. Biology's fecundity is a hell of a thing.

The event was sponsored by Conoco Phillips, Alaska's Oil and Gas Company, and they had graciously provided reams and reams of industrial grade plastic bags in which to house the vetch once uprooted. A platoon of well meaning citizens, myself and family included, descended upon the weeds, bags in hand, and began to stuff them. Once completed, we stacked the bags with our catch to await hauling to the landfill for disposal. Something like 100s of bags were transported to the dump, taken in shifts, in the back of the chief organizer's older model pick up truck (Toyota?). We were only out with the weeds two hours, but we alone accounted for 33 bags of the quarry. Then came the raffle.

I've seen somewhere with G and K that the amount of water to produce a single, reusable cotton bag borders on 700 gallons and that the minimum uses for said bag reaches into the 5 digits before it becomes more sustainable than its plastic counterpart. The boys asked me about this and I attempted to explain the logistical chain of acquiring one of these fabric bags and how, it's likely, someone arrived at this figure. The raffle, such as it was for the few who attended the invasive weed removal, was chock full of t-shirts, gratis, and other items like gift certificates and free tours of farms and state fair tickets and sundry other items to incentive-ize the endeavor. I was grounding after a substantially altered weed pulling experience wherein the boys and I had talked about the absurdity of counterinsurgency operations and the inevitability of the vetch's resurgence despite our efforts. I don't know if they made the connection I wanted them to see, but such is parenting. 

Recently, our governor, who was elected on the backs of greedy fools who clamored for a 3K plus PFD (Bring up the idea of universal basic income with any of his voters and they'll be aghast at the concept.), endorsed a budget that eliminated funding for the Arts Council here in Alaska, making us the only state in the union without such a body. Hell, even Mississippi is doing better than us in that department. I'm not too worried, though, as the creative impulse is a thing that can never be squelched, regardless of how hard The Man and his cronies may want it to be. Someone is always going to be around who is willing and able to paint cave walls. 

After the weed pulling, we went to a strawberry festival at Pyrah's farm. Admission was 5 bucks a head and we labored about the farm grounds on which the festival was held under the overlook of the looming Talkeetna mountains. It was truly a grand time, one wherein I harvested kohlrabi and kale, collards and radishes, while the others of my party amused themselves with the diversions provided - forced air inflated plastic, pedaled carts, chickens, a calf. When I rejoined them, A and I took Uly to a vinyl sided swimming pool filled with feed corn so that he could play in the grains. He shoveled and dumped, shoveled and dumped, and the mystery of agriculture shook me, as it always does. I mean, people are dropping spaceships on fucking asteroids because of corn. 

I find myself increasingly unable to reconcile the world and its implications.

The Weeknd, on his track "Privilege", documents his recovery process after a failed love in that he'll "Drink the pain away" and be "back to his old ways" and that he's got "two red pills to take the blues away". Who knows if any of this makes sense?

Summer Solstice, D plus 1

I've been seeing a lot of post on social media lately about the inevitability of civilization's collapse, mostly due to climate change, and the world to come wherein the rich are miraculously saved due to their wealth and the hoi polloi masses are resigned to a post apocalyptic ruin of strife and misery. The doomsayers have put me in mind of our species as a whole, in that we have always feared the looming future (each of our deaths most of all) associated with the perceived threat at the gate, the annihilation of everyone - God, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Huns, Goths, Black Death, Moors, Nazis, Commies, Swine Flu, Aliens, Terrorism, Judgment Day. Consciousness seems to mandate that we perseverate on our destruction.

I went for a walk today. I visited the town garden, food from which would go to aid the seniors at the local old folks' home up the street. I sat on a wooden bench inlaid with a mosaic of tiles that spelled "ART". There were some tourists there, a group of three women, discussing the flora with respect to the region of their own living. I went behind the row of trees to where, only two weeks prior, there had been a bevy of fledging magpies perched in the trees, all fat and short tailed and bushy still in their down. The birds made lots of noise at A and Uly and I and one of the parents came to deliver to one of the chicks a cracker gleaned from somewhere. The newly flown birds had gone and none of their number were about. I went to the bar for beers.

A former student messaged me recently to ask about a new and fast moving relationship and I tried to go through some things with her about self-worth and critical thinking and boundaries and trust. All things I've miraculously failed with in my own life. I tried to tell her the importance of maintaining in this life, and the ridiculous knowledge that her ancestors had persisted in a frozen waste for millennia with only the help of stone age technology and the wisdom of fire and that she was imminently strong and capable. Truly, I hope those words, the same that I tell all my students, will enkindle some sort of magic flame inside them and they, despite their varied and traumatic pasts, will be okay, as much as any of us are.

This morning I went to the cafe and felt on the precipice of a mental breakdown. It was almost as if I felt like the real me was a prisoner inside my skull and I needed a hasty exit, like a pupa grown too large for its chrysalis, to split open and emerge into some new, higher ordered thing. I walked more and found this note binding the trees. I can't explain how grand this is, and if you can't glean that for yourself, I'm afraid you're outside of my light cone and all information I have will never reach you and vice versa. I've come to this realization a lot lately and the loneliness of it fills me up in a way that I hope you, too, can also understand even if my photons can't ever reach you.

I walked home in a wood, the path of which had been manufactured by machines. There were mosquitoes about and if I walked quickly enough they were unmolesting. I, by degrees, found myself in a rolling meadow of partially mown grass where I stumbled through an ambush of nettles that burned the exposed skin of my sandalled feet and shorts wearing legs. Finding the path again, it was strewn with cottonwood fluff, a blizzard in June, and so much information blanketing the ground. The internet tells me that the internet itself houses 1200 petabytes of data. Paltry when in comparison to this life stuff, all swamping the planet. Moving forward, I made for home.

Home. Respite. Solace. I sat in the hammock and smelled the rank acridity of my unwashed being. There were flies visiting the grass flowers of our uncut lawn. A butterfly flitted toward a bush. In the street there were dogs and a woman and children. A triad of bike pedaling children, two girls, one boy, headed home, the boy with a plastic bag dangling from his left handlebar. Inside the house Captain mewled for release. The sky overhead cleared, clouded, cleared. Lilacs clouded the breeze's aroma. I watched a solitary cottonwood seed drift down, into the grass, where it clung to a seeding stalk, a scant inches from the earth below, the rest of its cousins yet coasting on the wind.

NO BOOZE LIVE BLOGGING LENT, Episode 3

01APR2019 - April Fool's Day

Crazed notes found on the northbound Cascades train that was the third leg of my journey home. Seemed appropriate for the "{PIC}" designator I had inserted into the text as a reminder of where I was going with this. I couldn't decide if this was a novel outline or, as Nick put it, "a life plan". Either way, it's one of those things that you find that are the briefest of cigarette pulls of illumination of a face in an otherwise gloomy alleyway, as if you could see everything of the smoker's existence in that one flash, time present, past, future. For myself, I couldn't decide whether the script was tragic or comedic or scornful or empathetic. In that way, I suppose, that author had at once failed and succeeded in engaging his reader. The train conductor ignored the open sheet yet picked up the slim rectangular and yellow boarding pass left by a departed passenger on the seat next as he passed among his rounds. Something, something metaphor.

02APR-07APR2019 - Week 4

The return to work and Lenten sobriety was a welcome embrace after the near psychotic break feared and barely held at bay from the failed assault into Portland. The first day I was on benzo-flight stress-exhaustion hangover autopilot of disagreement. Sleep that night was less than ideal and in the morning of the second day, after A took Uly to daycare, I lay awake in the silent house and listened to my guts churn and roil (borborygmi, for Dan if he's reading), a disgustingly present memento mori. I rose and biked down to the cafe where there were the open carrying veterans at their morning coffees and the advance scouts of the tourist season crowding up the aisles where I must walk.

Later, A and I would have a conversation about our differences in opinion about the tourist pilot fishes. Agree to disagree indeed. I thought about cursing their journey, pointing out their sins, and wishing them ill, cancerous lesions, heartbreak, malaise, suffering of the highest order, yet I refrained. Probably should go to confession about that regardless of my withholding those invections.

Today I arose at a strange hour after troubled dreams of love and love unrequited and death and absurdity and music and terror and terror and terror. I had the day free from PTSD guy and I decided to get fucking busy. A went downtown to work and for a "meeting" and Uly and I motored for home improvement digs and yardwork things and it bore us to Wasilla proper which was right trash as she is wont to be. I saw a former student at the Lowes where we stopped for potted crotons and ficus and South African succulents. He, the student, lamented the waste of his life Job Corps had been. I refrained from indicating his common denominator in that waste. Uly said hello. We shopped.

At home there was, sans A, activity. I repotted and potted plants and rearranged and thoroughly peeved the kitties. Then came a garage tidying. Car detailing. A car wash about which Uly said, "I'm going to have to tell Mama about this!". Police call. Hanging basket seeding. A returned and we ambled to a garage sale, defunct in the chill wind of April and turning breakup skies of gray and blue and gray and blue and white and eagles thermaling over the roadway in pursuit of food or mates or both. Back home, we cobbled pizzas (With kale. Wait, kale?) and ate and read stories. Uly went to bed. A persisted some venture, yet retreated and left me and the fat orange bastard cat to our mountain without and the tunes within and the tubes withal. Blame naught. Lean in. 

I have failed in my Lenten aspirations. 

NO BOOZE LIVE BLOGGING LENT, Episode 1

This isn't really a live blog, more like a, I scribbled some shit down as it happened or in retrospect or maybe some crazed and meaningless sludge from my sleeping subconsciousness that I've plastered the digital walls with prior to and during my Lenten pilgrimage this year.


Weekend prior to Lent, 28FEB - 02MAR2019

06MAR2019 - Ash Wednesday

Mardi Gras had come and gone and I went to work, early-ish and hungover properly to struggle through the hours before it was time for one last pre-Mass debauch with A at the Moosehead as we'd not gone in previous to alert the staff (Sarah, Kelsey, Carol) that we were abstaining from our usual Wednesday night hockey pints and Sunday NASCAR vroom vroom day liquoring and not to worry. We sucked down pints like arrant and sunburned tropical sailors. Mass was scheduled for 7PM but Uly got too squirrelly and we had to repair home for tea et al. before the long slow dryness of this year's purgatorial Lenten progression from sinner to penitent to forgiven.

11MAR2019

Today I decided to go to the gym after seeming to catch up on all the sleep I've ever missed. The sleep without booze was my biggest fear for this Lenten season. I've abstained before, sure, but recently it's been a daily encounter on the field of substance use with my favored weighted blanket of alteration. In its absence, I've been supplementing with tea and smoke and edibles and it's been a bit of an amelioration to the longing for that which is forbidden but not something I'm altogether okay with in its execution. Questions arise, in this state, about my long term drinking's feasibility with respect to liver enzymes and an already scarred and fatty liver and all the health rot my provider parrots ad nauseum. Almost as if she doesn't get that I've got to get through the next 12 hours with a minimum of suicidal ideation and what happens to this frame when I'm 60 takes a backseat to my continued churning into the present. Why don't more folks understand this?

Notes: 
1. Dreams are absolutely insane and memorable and nearly always nightmare.
2. Two older middle aged white dudes wearing MAGA hats and holding a Corgi puppy named Thor stock up on copious amounts of weed of a 1030 Monday morning at the shop where all the cute lady shoptenders know the puppy and benignly look away at the red ribbon of these dudes' political leanings. What a world.
3. Yesterday, did it even happen?

12MAR2019

Flight and lodging logistical horseshit with train and plane timetables and scheduling and all the inane horseshit borne from a lack of a truly integrated public transport system. Like, why in the fuck can't I just get on A train and have it ferry me to AWP. A, as in a singular, fucking TRAIN. This can't be that difficult.

Sober sleeping. Wouldn't recommend it.

The problem as I've come to understand it, and I've not read so many substance use narratives but I've asked around enough to the shades who dip into escape's gravity well, is the inimitable boredom of quotidian horseshit. Wake up, dress, work, small talk, moil, drudgery, small talk, home, dinner, diversion, wait to sleep. It's absolute bullshit. Why go through that with full on pain and reality? It's like speed running a video game on legendary difficulty. Dial it back to merely hero and you can actually get some enjoyment out of all the PvP and NPC content. Hell, download yourself a bottle and really amp up the fun buff of your living stats. Sure, I could revel in the utter terror/goodness of watching Uly and A play Chinese checkers while stone cold but why do that when I could do the same twisted? Makes little sense. 2 weeks until the oasis of AWP.

14MAR2019

Blustery day. Proto-spring. Waxwings are about and furiously chittering as they lap from pools of snow and ice melt. Self-worth plummeting; sense of fraud rising. Libido is trash. So many hours to fill.

16MAR2019

Saturday. Loneliest of all days of the week. Normally, I'd wait until noon and amble to the Moosehead for socialization by proxy with all the old drunkards there backslapping and guffawing and pull tabbing and sportsing and bell ringing and all the chintzy and low-rent sparkle-light thrills of the poor. Bottles of top shelf whisky never touched, gathering dust. I'm in the cafe right now, perusing the drama of flesh. I'm aware that Lent is supposed to be a spiritual journey and that none among us can shoulder it alone and therefore the need for supplication to the divine in our period of bodily abjuration but this is missing on the current Lenten adventure. Probably accounts for the difficulty level. Team Sleep, the soundtrack. 

The cafe is all bougie white folks while outside in the hallway a team of Southeast Asian ladies janitor the facilities, stony faced, enduring.

I've been reading Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad. I do recommend.

Even-keeled, Hopefully

Yeah, I felt a little like this guy.

You know that scene where HAL 9000 is talking to Dave and pleading with him not to undo his higher logic, or whatever, circuits and Dave is doing it anyway, and HAL just degenerates into this kind of simpering sideshow who is a shadow of his former self? That's what the fuck I am talking about.

Yesterday was not good. Let me set up some back story for you all. I have to take a pill because I no longer have a thyroid gland. This is usually no big deal unless I forget to take it for an extended period of time, or the dosage of the pill is a little off, in which case I kind of turn into this crazy hormone deprived freak. Deprivation of said pill usually manifests itself as lethargy/apathy. The fuck-side of that is after admitting the proper dose (this is for myself personally, I don't claim to be a physician) the lethargy/apathy gives way to suicidal ideation/rage, quickly followed by a return to normal emotional states. Usually, I'm back semi-on-top-of-things within a few days. Now let's talk bout what I'm talkin' bout.

This past weekend we went to Fairbanks and I forgot to take my pill for 4 or so days. So I crashed. Then on Tuesday of this week, I realized I hadn't taken it for a while so I started to. The first day, I was all lethargy, the second lethargy/apathy, the third day was the worst.

I called Felicia on Thursday because I was at the end of my rope. The kids were pissing me off, I was too violent, I felt my methods were becoming "unsound". I had told Gavin at the store earlier that (because I felt like blowing my head off) this is "why we don't keep guns around the house." In short it was fucking scary, not only to the kids, but to me. I really thought that this was it, I was losing it (whatever "it" might be), and that the uncontrollable swings from rage to despair would finally get the best of me. It was like being pushed over the edge of a cliff with an infinite drop, barely able to cling on, and only doing so because the alternative was the event horizon and I could just sense that whatever was in there was much worse than anything that I had already experienced.

I'll let you in on a little secret: Friday afternoon is the best day to go to the store. All the hot bitches are out. Word.