first person

there is a goal. a tentative goal. better than nothing.

burning out, burned out. the dog days. i am positively canine. sweat constantly. thirst like a maniac. can't drink enough water. or beer. or water. committed a terrible deed but didn't realize til post hoc that it was a terrible thing. shooting off at the mouth. every day before i go to work or before i go to the bar i think to myself "this is going to be the time when i rein myself in." when i'm not such an asshole. when customers at tables tell me i'm a good man. or when they thank me for something effusively. i want to yell at them. that's not my hallmark. someone said the other day (the other week) "that's what i like about you. you don't care. you do what you want." how can they be so blind to the 304.80 that i so clearly exhibit? my polysubstance dependence.

quit my therapist. she wasn't helping. none of them do. you get what you pay for. you pay as you go. more about mindfulness. more pema chodron, more thich nat hanh. more about breathing. always questions about "do you think about suicide?" who doesn't. it's life. it has an opposite. how can you not think about the opposite? turn over every rock, investigate every cranny. shine a light on where light could be found.

working on writing. it's something largely continuous yet with no discernable plot. as always. as nauseam. the same character, unnamed. a slice of me. some turbulent idiot who goes around collecting observations that mean nothing, yet observations that i as the creator imbue with some sort of meaning. seems like an inverted attempt to get God to say "HI THIS IS WHAT THIS MEANS" in a booming voice. even through dream. c'mon. i'm waiting.

taken to bloody marys. ozzies call a virgin mary a bloody shame. so now do i. make my little jokes to the people at the tables. keep my jaw wired shut around the people i work with. still not over the shockwave of what my idiot mouth said, so i try to keep it shut. booze corrodes the wires. my jaw hangs open and stupid comes out. i used to be all about forward motion. but my mind is always running everything that happened over again. i live in dual-layered time. my left ear hears the present, my right ear hears only the past. i mix it up in the studio of my skull. sometimes things overlap. what did you just say a second from now? oh - you've just now said it. there's a third ear like a mutation in the folds of my brain. it hears the future. or thinks it does.

there are dependencies and then there are dependencies. who among us isn't dependent on something. rueful choice that my selection is poison. so many others have it so much worse. sometimes i feel like i'm watching myself through a spyglass. drowning in the ocean. i tell people i don't know how to swim like i tell people i've never had sex. it's become integral to my mythology. i can understand the irritation from those who've heard it before. do you think a monk ever gets tired of reading the Bible? (anecdote: in Spring Harbor, there was a bearded kid who shuffled the hallways, endlessly peripateic, in socks that wore through after a week, murmuring the Bible to himself. upon asking a nurse what happened when he reached the end, she shrugged and said "he starts all over again.")

trying to shake the habit. if you want to change your life, you have to start by changing the days. the hours. the seconds. you have to learn how to set up roadblocks in your brain. my thought is a careening, drunk driver who gets blasted & swerves over rain-slick roads. crashing from one tree to the next and somehow keeps going. scot-free. maybe a little bruised. sometimes it's a big tree. sometimes it's someone else's car. this is how anxiety works. pressing the brake pedal before you even see headlights. 300.02.

quit my therapist because i hated her. didn't give her much of a chance. they say that if you realize everyone else is just as scared as you are you could love just about anyone. she said i should focus on what i was doing. what the now was. jesus woman i said jesus woman now's already gone. stupid words from someone who knows all about the Importance of the Now.

hamartia, hubris, anagnorisis, nemesis. peripateia. catharsis. where on the weird list of the tragic scale am i now? have i jumped scales? should i begin a new hagiography? it's about time i did. that means a new language. or a new phonetics.

i will begin to watch objectively the motions of my mouth