Suffering from a Case of Sobriety

I just sat down in the cafe where an older white woman sitting behind me said, "It's been a month of a week." I had to move because my back was to the window and I couldn't see the street and had to keep both exits in view because, obviously, if you're not watching the street in addition to the entryways, that's how they get you. So, I moved to have my back to a wall and still have eyes on the exits but I felt like going back to the lady and asking her if she, like I had last night, inadvertently pissed their pants, toddler style, while trying to navigate the labyrinth of my belt, or that I have eaten no food for 36 hours (and counting), or that I couldn't stop anxiety vomiting all day yesterday, or that I had just cried and cried in my vehicle while on the phone with a representative from the VA, a nice lady, who helped me begin to a file claim. I refrained from the dickwaving. But yeah, I hear her and I'm sure her week has been similarly challenging.

This is a book I'm currently loving. It's atrocious. Containing lines like, "Remember, this is top secret!" and "The porter was an oriental." and a raft of characters one of whom, whose greatest affliction was not the mysterious plague broken out on a military installation or the various shady and definitely nefarious conservative agents bent on upending the nation but was the problem of his sexual impotency, in a moment of self-reflection exclaims inside his head "Goddamn, I feel horny!" The book was published in 1986 by the now defunct "Leisure Books". Things like this used to greatly upset me, but the comedy on display here is SUBLIME. I'm halfway through and it is a gasser. Few things have pleased me as much as this in some time. Make your own conclusions about this set of data.

I am a fraud. I moved on from the work at Job Corps only to move from the move and I am reminded about all the times I told the students inane, unheard, and definitely unbelievable messages about career planning and making sound, adult decisions. In the interim, I've been forced to return to taking care of things I've let slip in the wake of trying to "fix" others (e.g., the VA call mentioned above, basic hygiene - I changed out of my pissed pants and put on the first pair of clean pants in a month). It's strange, as if the dormancy of adulting for myself has erupted to the surface and I'm accomplishing all manner of concerns not to be discussed on the internet, almost like a waking from sleep. Things are terrifying, clear, crystalline, pure horror, yet right.

We've had fools' spring here in the valley. Now it's back to snow and overcast. I'm still in the cafe, spending money I shouldn't and listening to music instead of looking for employment. I'm sure you all know the feelings - the guilt, the irresponsibility, the shame - of doing so but I'm pushing away at those emotions, in a gentle, non-hostile way. As for the Pabst above, I'd advise against. It tastes like a mix of Yoohoo and a mocha flavored Monster energy coffee drink and I knew, after the first sip, I'd finish the drink and regret it. The experience brought back memories of childhood, when my mother would pack shelf stable boxes of Yoohoo into my lunch. She'd have preferred my drinking milk, but was afraid of spoilage due to lack of refrigeration at school and so she went with the next best thing, one supposes. She would have, and sometimes did, give me money for lunch at school but my middle brother tuned me onto the scam of pocketing the money, a cool $6.25 per week, and going hungry during the day. She wanted me to eat and could have saved the money I was embezzling by applying for a free or reduced lunch but there was a strict taboo in the house against getting things "for free". Hence the brown bagged lunches and the Yoohoo. Again, make your own hypotheses about those data points and their inclusion here.

Well, shit, what are you doing?

COVID-19 INSANITY

With the advent of my work's absolutely farcical "telework" shenanigans that the corporate drones have cooked up to justify the DOL paying our absolutely obscene salaries while their employees essentially have snow-days from actually showing up to work, I've been taking to long walks to cure the mind and refresh the spirit during the hysterical national nightmare that is COVID-19. It's been a heartening time and I try to get out for an hour or so each day and I've been disappointed in the lack of treasures that I've found. The spring is thawing and items are beginning to rebirth from their frozen wombs and present themselves to the world once more yet I'd not cached a find worthy of note. Then, Saturday came and I was rewarded with the gem below.

I was tooling down Evergreen in a serious alter and listening to shoegaze on my Spotify and it was the most right and just soundtrack to everything - gray sky, spotty patches of dim sunlight, gutter water moving in a capillarian sludge underneath an icy skin, other extrusions of yet to be melted ice like molten glass arrested in mid pour, the trash, the trash, the trash, half exposed newspapers in plasticine wrappers, the cars pouring by in the street at a much reduced rate, the general deadness of a town, much like everyone else's, in the midst of a shutdown. It was likely shed by the insane man who wanders town and smokes weed from a huge glass pipe on the bench outside the Moosehead and it reminded me of a younger time, one filled with a ridiculous patriotism, merged with the current, seeming endless panic that reappears anew, yet in a different avatar each year - Ebola, housing crash, Great Recession, the, holy shit, 19 year war with Afghanis, shelves denuded of paper and cleaning products, climate change, runs on meat, eggs, milk, cheese, SARS, swine flu, the general, interminable, group paranoia quelled momentarily by a new distraction or ever more dire catastrophe. It's something, being alive that is, in the current era, but then again that's true for each Ecclesiastical, in the Biblical sense, time frame. 

On today's walk I found this chit along the path that runs behind the high school. It's torn from a spiral notebook and written in what looks like a middle school girl's block print. I folded the paper and secreted it in my coat and resumed my walk. The air outside was rank with the odor of spring, a smell that reminds me of when I was a young boy and I visited one of my father's worksites and there was a large excavation that had filled with rainwater and the sides were a viscous mud. It was springtime then too, and I didn't spend long at the site yet the memory persists. I've smelt similar odors on farmyards and in the plains states rich with grain and livestock. I remember the old man describing it as "sour" when I asked him what it was. Everyone connected with that site, except for me, is likely dead and the thought that the memory only resides in one remaining mind is disturbing, for obvious reasons. This paper affected me likewise, in that this jejune and unfinished start to a narrative only existed in one other mind, one other cluster of neurons, of someone wholly alien to me and this reality made me weep at the importance of my finding it and of Art and the immortal desire to be remembered, if only for a time.

I'm certain I've got corona'd.