/ Day 19

Obviously, my biggest concern giving up the devil's juice was that I would somehow become dull, uninteresting and humorless, but after spending my entire weekend replacing the flapper valve in our master bedroom toilet, I can completely ASSURE you that I am just as...oh, never mind.

Pleasepleaseplease if anyone knows of an effective non-alcoholic high, give it up! And don't say Elizabethan poetry because I wouldn't begin to know even how to respond to that. I am running out of leaky toilets! and being the worst handyman in the history of both hands and men, I more than anyone desperately want the table saw and cordless drill and plumber's tape to stop calling out to me in my sleep.

The real victims of recovering alcoholics are housemates who cannot appreciate a glut of newly tiled picture frames, trashcan dollies made from scrap pallets and any remodel that relies upon imitation stucco.



In defense of recovery, however, I will say that while I am much less interesting to ambiguously gendered prostitutes, much less prone to break into maniacal laughter at cleverly captioned cat photos and much less able to sit for hours at a time squeezing my eyes as hard as possible to discover new constellations, I AM much better at following my kids around taking endless photographs to put in all those newly tiled pictured frames. So on the whole, I think you will agree that this is clearly an argument for giving up...oh, never mind.

/ Sincere as April Snow

We suffer these days from late snows, the promise of global warming broken into millions of six-sided dendrites, each one unique but equally unlikable. It is nothing like the gleeful anticipation of early snow, with teasing promises of artificial marshmallows floating in year-old cocoa, and frostbite from gloveless battles. These precipitations do not accumulate, they cover the ground killing the early birds and saving the worms, sublimating overnight so that no one believes what you saw. Late snows are charming, thrilling and deceitful paramours. They are cold, all the same.

Bird log, March 30 – Spotted Towhee, Pine Siskin, Rufous Hummingbird, Junco, Black-capped Chickadee, Robin, Varied Thrush, Red-breasted Nuthatch, House Finch, Steller's Jay.

When I was a kid in upstate New York, we were generally riding our bikes when the first snows of October came, and it caused us to ride harder so that by the end of the street we could pull tight on the brakes and slide all the way past the general's house. It was better than kissing, which even though might lead to second base, at least in the snow, on our bicycles, we actually knew what we were doing, knew exactly where to put our hands and our feet, knew exactly how much pressure to press into the pressing matter. Chipped teeth and bloodied knees were all part of the charm, we could track the drops of our efforts back along the sidewalk well into the night when the streetlights cast the colors into tones of black and white. The neighborhood parents knew where to find their boys, and called out only when their cruelty had been held at record-setting bays.

Weather report for March 31 – Snow showers, low of 28°. Confusion reins. Chance of sunset: 75%.

Lately, the town where I work has decided to specialize in bilocation, and I keep running across the fetch of every person to whom I still owe an apology, though the time is growing late and my remorse, were I to gather the courage of expression, would likely seem sincere as April snow.

/ Day 15

It is like waking, these last few days.

What are you waking from? she would ask, lifting her nose from the pages of her book.

I wish I knew, but it feels like it must have been a struggle, because my eyelids are still heavy, and I cannot blink hard enough to temper the brightness of the lightness of the dawning of the days.

Maybe it was me, she said, maybe I was your struggle, and if that is the case, you have my sympathy, because I can be cruel and heartless.

No, I said, no, I don't think I would have slept through a struggle with you, I would have pinched myself awake and slammed headfirst into your body and taken my chances. It had to have been something else. Not heartless, but something that offered some sort of voyage, a free trip to some temptation nearly enough to fall out of my old routine, and you know how much I adore my habits.

You do. It is charming and infuriating.

Lately, she has taken to tucking old black and white photographs into the corners of paintings and portraits. It's lovely, and makes it seem like we have lived in this house for decades, and these are the footprints of graduated generations. But it's sad in that it belies our intentions to leave, and we eventually will need to grind the mortar that bears our children's handprints and initials.

I have no problem admitting that I have always awaited the new, whether that is a move or a different job or some sort of survivable cosmic collision. I am newly mature, have even cut back on my profanities, but I still hold on to the hope of what is around the bend. A co-worker of mine recently retired after working in the same job for 35 years. I haven't stopped shuddering. The thought that with my one chance here on planet hollywood I would get into UGH a routine is almost more than I can bear.

It was easier when everything was clouded in booze, though, and I always had something new to look forward to at the end of the day, this is what I told myself, anyway, but now I am pissed at my old best friend because it represented the queen of routine. My mild anesthetic that allowed me to slowly amputate my legs then my arms then my head.

To think, I was actually purchasing the gasoline that fueled my rut. Thank god I didn't have to overcome religion along with my addiction. My parents go to church every Sunday and have their entire lives. I can barely control my shuddering.

I only wish I could figure out what I'm waking from, what I'm waking to.

/ Further Afield

Well it is now a fortnight booze free with the main withdrawal effect being that I am incapable of being awake past 7:30 PM. Also, I have not hit on any co-workers during this time, but I am sure that's more correlation than causal (n=20).

Most importantly, the clarity has struck me like a meat plant (oxymoron?) explosion, and I have finally realized that I have a purpose in this life. I now know that the reason I was born upon this earth was to surf the internet. I'm not sure what I am looking for, but I am assuming that the journey is the destination. I wish you all could see it, the enlightenment of self-actualization. It is a benefit of being what I call a PERSON OF DESTINY. Today I read about tuataras and the great Mexican emo war. I also watched episodes 2-4 of Little Women on Youtube. What destiny fulfillment awaits me tomorrow? These are not questions for me to ask. I am simply here to carry out the will of fate.

While this new calling has certainly filled a void that was missing in my life, it has cut down somewhat on my productivity. Although technically, I am pretired. Which means that although I am still collecting a paycheck and benefits, really I have stopped working. The main problem with pretirement, as any pretiree will tell you, is combating boredom and the loss of all those free sandwiches and other goodies that some kind co-worker always seemed to leave lying around in the refrigerator, with funny little sticky notes saying things like, 'I LICKED THIS' and 'INSULIN.'

***

I cannot believe I am making such a big deal about this and I cannot believe that I am still too afraid to tell my wife why I am on the straight and narrow and I cannot believe that I have lost all interest in professional sports, most of all. Every day, I run through the woods looking for morels and owl pellets and pish-pish to see what I might scare up. I think about the stories and characters in my head, but when I get home I cannot bear to write down what is going on in their lives. It seems to be enough that they are living, and maybe they wouldn't appreciate the spotlight anyway, or god forbid endless literary analysis of the choices they have made.

Mostly, I cannot believe how eagerly I am anticipating spring, and returning to days of taking these children of mine out onto the lake, in search of trout and garter snakes and salmon berries, how eager I am to get home to see them, as though they have been returned to me upon a long absence afield. There is no way I am ever going to tell them where I've been.

/ I need a shero

I met the most fascinating girl today along the coast, a comic artist who created a superhero version of herself to fight the looming threat of science lecturers who stood upon the brink of destroying her favorite subject: marine ecology! Other than that, she said, her superhero's main nemesis was boredom, as she had yet to draw any bad guys, not wanting to get to those characters before she had a chance to come up with some sidekick. "Ooh," I offered, "You should give the sidekick an alter ego who in fact IS your superhero's arch enemy! That would be clever."

It really didn't seem as though she was considering this possibility.

"And really," I continued, because she herself said she was looking for a creative partner, "Stay with me here. And REALLY, the sidekick/arch nemesis isn't REALLY a bad guy, it's just that these two superheroes realize some basic quirks about human societies, namely the consideration that people who cannot identify some external threat are generally unproductive and bound to fall into a state of social liberalism. So the superheroes must stage large scale fights with each other in order to keep up the illusion that we could lose all that we have at any given moment. That the destruction of the Brooklyn Bridge proves that you should not take for granted your loved ones. That the toxic cloud released from the detonation of the BP tanker is symbolic of our tenuous grip on clean living. That the super ray gun aimed square at the center of the San Andreas fault...you get the picture."

And then she proceeded to explain how she got into comic book art, but she didn't need to. She is her own inconspicuous alter ego, trying to melt anonymously into the crowd at the high school where she has few friends, trying to freeze time at the end of the day before she makes the perilous journey over booby-trapped feet to her regular seat on the bus, trying to steel her resolve to a night where most of her drawing time must give way to taking care of younger brothers and sisters.

“This superhero,” I ask, “Does he talk to the people he saves?”

“She.”

“I'm sorry. Does she talk to the people she saves? Or does she simply drop them off at their doorsteps and steal away? Or does she bill them? Does her sidekick send a bill for services rendered? How would you respond to that, I wonder? Let's say you fall while hiking up a mountain, and just before you hit the craggy rocks below, this superhero catches you, returns you to your friends and a week later you get a bill for $75 in the mail. I mean, you'd pay, right? I mean, if the doctor cures your cancer, you generally have no problem paying the bill.”

“That wouldn't make her much of a superhero.”

“Yes, I suppose superheroes are supposed to be kind of communist about the whole thing.”

“You're funny.”

She seems surprised, I think, because I am dressed as my alter ego, as well, and in my hip new suit, underneath my superhero hair and walking remarkably tall and straight these days, she seems entirely fooled that I was not very much like her when I was 17, that I fell on my own dark days and turned away from those in need, fought myself to maintain a bit of productivity.

Or maybe I am just telling myself that I was like her, because it wouldn't make my story very remarkable if there wasn't some barrier, social or otherwise, that I had to overcome. Maybe my superpower is the unmatched ability to delude myself, so persuasive my supercharms that I actually believe half the shit I think about my childhood, or even the last few years.

Or not.

(Wow. I'm good.)

/ ungettable

Dear me, it is me, and apologies for getting kicked out of the local poker club, how sentimental I have become, one of those side effects that the doctors treat with the best medicine, although they could certainly do without the pointing. It is just so hard to maintain cynicism when your eyes are cleared of their chemical glaucoma, and the world is held at bay by the power of a room with its curtains drawn.

I am thinking about breathing, and how the best kisses are her every exhalation, brought deep into your lungs, though sometimes the best are certainly her every inhalation, when her eyes seem explicit warnings of a pending explosive decompression, though the safest are certainly when you both inhale together, leaving you with no choice but to slowly make your way around the bends. I have not assessed the relative danger of simultaneous exhalation, though not because I am unafraid to re-run the experiments, nor have I exhausted my research funding.

Or maybe I am thinking about flat out running! Yes, that is what I am effectively doing during my healing process, wind sprints from affection. As she caresses my cheek, I take her hand and gently kiss the wee scar on her wrist and whisper, 'Look! Over there!' And as soon as her head is turned I am gone. My starter pistol is considered a deadly weapon.

I think this is because of all the fears I have forgotten, the one that has returned with clarity and vengeance is my fear of being understood. I harbor nightmares of accidentally picking up the phone while she is talking to her sister only to overhear her lament, 'Oh, I wish he would confuse me more.' bored sigh. Ooh! Ooh! No, contented sigh.

I did this before, with a bit more ease. I would drop her off at her flat, or not, because the only thing predictable about me back then was my unpredictability, and she would sit with her sister in the kitchen and lament, 'I just don't get him. Maybe it's because he's older, or foreign or maybe it's just because he's ungettable, but damn.'

Though, for a laugh, I would forgive her manually picking the pepperoncinis out of my salad and exclaiming to our tablemates, 'THEY UPSET HIS TUMMY, YOU KNOW.' Which I would answer by saying, 'Look! Over there!' in a rare display of meta-predictability.

/ can can

I consider it to be some sort of growth nowadays that whenever I humiliate myself in real life I do not immediately run and tell my blog. Other things I consider to be some sort of growth? Cancer, erectile function, the dark spot underneath my pickup truck's oil pan.

For my karma demons who consider all this to be a game and are keeping score, here is where the majority of points will be won today: trying to suck every last bit of buzz from a cup of Plantation Mint Tea and an antihistamine free cold tablet. The promises of wide-eyed euphoric hallucination shattered by an inconvenient illness, I am forced to reckon with trying to get by on my power of wit in the absence of my previous power of denial. This doesn't make any sense to me, either.

This is embarrassing to admit, but I do occasionally type in my father's name (in double quotations, even! BOO-lean, motherfucker!) in a search engine here and there, and of course, being as how I come from a long line of persons indistinguishable from any other persons, I might as well just leave the search field blank and click FEELING LUCKY while thinking patriarchal thoughts. So then, because this is how it goes with us common folk, I re-type his name and then add DUI ARREST, because, well, just because.

No, you see, it's not JUST BECAUSE. It's because to have any memory of this man is to remember what it is to be soaked in booze, inside and out. And not just drunk in that literary sense, because let's face it, if there's one place where it's cool and hip to be a drunk it's in the field of literature. It doesn't get much cooler than drunk Ernest Hemingway washing down that final bourbon with a 12-gauge round. And who wouldn't want to die impotent and consumed with a weak ticker like good old F. Scott Fitzgerald? Poe died in a gutter. That's gotta be hard to top.

Applying for a temporary driver's license that will allow you to get to work and back? Takes a bit of the shine off that lushful lustre. Balancing on one foot and bending over to blow into what appears to be a modified crack pipe? Nice. Somehow escaping such an unfortunate fate only to pull over as soon as the next gas station BECAUSE WHEW THAT WAS CLOSE NOW I REALLY NEED A DRINK? That's just fucking terrific.

I had a friend in college who always used to get me in the deepest shit, and what I loved about him was that I knew that whatever shit we got in at least we were in it together. There's a lot of power in that kind of camaraderie that helps you forget about asking if the trouble is worth it in the first place.

The past ten days, everyone in the house and at work keep asking me if I am alright and wondering why I am so quiet, and I don't have the courage to tell them that this is who I am. I am not funny and quick witted and easy going and laid back. I am not quick to smile and ready to laugh. I am sober, in that most boring sense of the word. I don't like me, either. I would not choose to spend time with me, much less in this skin.

But I hate failing at those few things I attempt in earnest, and if I am honest with myself I have to admit that I have completely and utterly failed at being a drunk.

It snowed this morning, and I was worried that the frost would damage the awakening plum blossoms. I'm not so concerned with any of our other trees, but this plum was one we found ready to be discarded at the local nursery, and it had already been given up for dead, and near enough, I suppose, because the first year it seemed completely dormant, but the next spring it somehow decided to come to life. It produced a few flowers, and the energy to do so set it back a good year, but by the third year it put on the most spectacular display of pageantry that I was almost embarrassed for the entire garden. Last year, it even churned out a dozen or so fruits, and I thought, now this is going a bit overboard, but it is almost as though the thing has a mind of its own, and regardless of how we feel about the matter, there is going to be a show, and we can choose to watch or go about our business, our modesties offended and be damned.

I don't have much of that in me these days, but I'm going to try and shout my intentions by the weekend's end. I will work my way up from a whisper, so as not arouse any undue suspicion.

/ end transmission

The depths of my crapulence are readily apparent when I am dry and feverish, when I am aguishly calling for personal mothering, when I am whispering underneath my breath, 'Oh, how could I have been such a fool.' I am hoping that I have reached some sort of emotional dew point, and that the intense sweating lately has more to do with promise than regret. Not that I would ever overthink that sort of thing.

I am recently completing the first 7-day leg of a journey that began with undeniable, oppressive inauspiciousness. Oh, how could I have been such a fool! The reason I am so sick, I tell myself, is because I want to take for granted how nice it is in the confines of my little home, where I am able to win every fight when the other person leaves the room, and where stumbling and slurred speech is not only encouraged, but duly rewarded by eager kisses and back-rides around the living room.

As soon as I get a day to myself, I swear, I am going to take 5 hot showers in a row and raid the candy drawer and leave the lights on in a room clear on the other side of the house. I am going to apologize without any sense of remorse. Later, I will build a fire in the backyard using entirely too much lighter fluid, and then fall asleep on the floor in front of the television set, think about how my dad used to do the same, back when they played the national anthem at the end of the broadcast day, the scene would fade to the no signal transmission, all the colors of the spectrum.

/ lucky

Notes, Prior to an Engagement

(Nontraditional, like lace to fur.)

I say -
Mrs. 12 B, your fear of unwanted guests has arrived,
bearing flowers missing their 13th petals,
like malnourished Appalachian daisies.

I think -
The fear of loss competing for the affections of my fear of having,
competing for your fondness of superstition.

I continue -
You ask me why I am silent these 14 days, and I say,
“It takes a thousand dreams of flying to eclipse a single nightmare;
Our union is about to reach its teenage years,
I will enjoy the quiet while it lasts.”

She says -
Mr. M, your fears are irrational, and let me tell you why,
the thirteenth year is the one we've passed, and not the one to come.
Our building has a 14th floor, our plane a 14th row.
This last year never happened at all, except maybe for a day in January,
one I will hold as an exception to the rule, our leap day, you know.

She thinks -
You went through three sets of clothes trying to sleep through the night.
It reminds me of a man I met who swam across the Danube,
Hoping to escape the confines of home.
But when he made it, it was not long before he came back,
How much he missed his wife.

I think -
This is not how normal people communicate.

She says -
Thank god for it.

/ Die Coping

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“You don’t remember me, do you?”

I have a theory; what I want to say is that I have a perfectly rational theory about these endless names that roll in and out like marbles, that I do not remember people because I am so ambivalent about being remembered myself.

“Your face seems so familiar. I meet so many people at these things.”

Of the few individuals more sensitive than a storybook princess, I can say that even behind 20 walls I could feel the uncomfortable stare of a single individual, and spend a restless hour trying to look occupied, when all I am doing is wondering when it will stop.

I tried to let go of a few odd behaviors, and with mixed success I let go of at least a few. In the hallways where there are dozens upon dozens of faces, most, I tell myself, likely with accompanying names, I let go of one. I can now walk with my gaze forming a perfect right angle with the line of my body, my gaze a perfect parallel to the path in front of me, and when that gaze meets with another, our lines of sight, our erect profiles and the distance on the ground beneath us might form a rectangle, depending on her height, a square once we draw nearer. I used to do no better than triangles in these situations, sometimes complete circles as I did a figurative 180, thought better and came back around after a moment or two.

Along the sidewalks, it is still like it has always been, when I am faced with a crowd of one or two people, I will hit the crosswalk button for both directions, check my phone for messages, and jog my memory for names that I know I threw out almost upon receipt.

/ horizontal gaze nystagmus

I suffer occasional, unexplained episodes, have suffered the past 15 years. They feel like the onset of bells. They rang so loudly on Monday that my little dog became nervous, and wandered up and down the hall trying to rid her ears of the ringing. She is 13 and deaf, so you can imagine the peal in my own head. She walked near me, as I was in bed, my arm draped over the side, as I do when I experience these attacks, and she licked my hand for awhile, until the bells subsided enough so that she could return to her own bed, directly underneath the space heater, at the entrance to our room. My hands go numb during these times, and the disorienting headaches feel strangely localized, as though they are following grooves like mountain water, long, winnowing streams clearing the sand and ash from the slate. I used to be frightened of and shaken by the experience. I used to hold it in for as long as possible, shut the bathroom door tightly during the multiple trips to release my clouds in private. I try not to look into the mirror, to see how many people I might see. I am always a different person afterwards, but not usually the better for it, and this week I lost something of myself to the most recent host, who was conceited beyond acceptability, and in love with the romantic notions of vice and verisimilitude. My back hurts terribly, I’m assuming from bearing all that worldly weight.

/ Scamperlings

Until I realized there was no future in moralities, I lived in a small western town in the right corner of my mind where only the weeds tumbled, and even then, repentantly.

I lived in one of those small western towns in a time well beyond the idyll of the greatest generations, but before the spiritual reawakening of their children, who spent the final decade of the century trying to sober up and set right their little mistakes. Every one of the grandmothers in my neighborhood was a hopeless alcoholic, but I was the only grandchild actually raised in one of these homes, so well preserved by the booze that we slept like figures in a wax museum. Whenever the summer heat of this beloved and majestic land we know as this land is our land set in, the sweat collected like droplets of oil upon our foreheads, and the ice ticked like the second hand of a clock against glass tumblers of gin and tonic, or a pinch of vermouth and a pearl onion.

Alex told me that she and her sister would fight over the opportunity to ride on their father's back during summer camp, and would probably spend more energy skipping along side him begging for their turns than if all three of them had walked on their own at some steady pace. And it's hard to remember what felt like the lion's share of time, either the victory of riding princess above the masses, or the agony of being looked down upon, un-chosen and un-admired. They were both two entirely different kinds of eternities.

My son asked one of the local mystics what sleep is, and she said it was the temporary absence of your soul. I was horrified, of course, until he said that she told him death was when this absence became permanent, and goddamn if I never equated dreaming with dying, but it makes a kind of sense when it’s a child telling you, even if filtered like must through the grapevine.

She would walk around at all hours of the night, and I didn't know this for a time, but she only slept during the day, like a child does, and probably just lay there soullessly through the night. We have been struggling against the unkind music of the last two months, blown in from the coast on its way to eat the snow on the other side of the Cascades, but things have quieted down a bit, and when I pretend I have fallen asleep, I can feel her scratch my back, gently, though I am not sure who claims the better part of the comfort, as though we are like pets bred specifically for hospice.

I am fascinated with service pets lately, if only because we have a new employee, and she suffers from seizures, and her companion just happens to be the largest Great Dane I have ever seen. And occasionally she will walk by to the copier, and behind her, this slow lumbering giant out of a children’s book throwing shadows on both sides, casting a sad smile from his mythical profile, daring me almost to choose the wrong bottle. I would, if I wanted somehow to run full standing between the animal’s paws, maybe give it all I can and jump, swing from his tail until the potion wore off.

/ Hold me in the darkness

When I was a kid, 1980 was the future, it was bright and scary and hard to understand. On the other hand, it was the only decade of the genuine slow dance, and god bless rap and grunge and ska and hip hop, but the art of the power ballad has been lost.

Most weekends I am unproductive but the last three days I can honestly say I have come close to fulfilling my potential. I have been studying 80s ballads enough to BLEED TEARS and SWEAT BLOOD in search of the perfect 1980s prom song.

http://www.youtube.com/my_playlists?p=FBC0F966E641DFA1

I am sure that someone will think that the perfect prom slow dance is not to be found among these entries. I am even more sure that that someone is in desperate need of a sweet caress.