US Pencil

On his return trip, we knew something had happened, but we, none of us, not one of us, would ask.

Going to Louisiana

anonydoc writes , "You are definitely on the mend and no longer worthy of anxious solicitation. From now on all complaints wll be met with "buck up,,it's not that bad"."

are you dead?

" Did the flu kill you?? Are you lying there, alone, with a high fever, the chills and maybe sepsis? Is there nobody to bathe your brow with a cold towel and bring you ice chips and chicken soup? Is it critical?"

That's my Anonydoc, trying to get a rise out of me. She knows just exactly what's up.

Dead, not yet. (The question reminds me of when Fields yells at his mother-in-law after he's accidently fired a pistol and she faints: "Did I kill ya?")

Yes, lying alone, yes high fever and chills, yeah I hope it's sepsis, then the anti biotics work, right? Otherwise I'm cured by seven to ten days of rest and miserable boredom. Rest in which I eventually work on the line, too ashamed to call in restless. Tomorrow's off anyway. Naturally.

I've come to realize how seldomly I'm actually bored. This last three days, it's like waiting for the next sleep trolley. I hate being up. TV gets stuck on a channel somehow, a Michael J. Fox movie I never heard of, and I just suffer through it. It's not drama, it's not comedy, what is it? Something...sentimental I guess. And everything is making me angry. I don't want to talk.

Had a dream, some astronomer was playing me a video tape of a planet far away, a little speck like the earth looks from pluto, and watch this, we know it's got life by the way. POW. Meteror hit. All those people dead so fast and far away but it got to me good. F'ng nightmare. For some reason I thought Michael J. Fox was one of 'em. I don't know. I was really sorry. It woke me up.

Shoving off (1993 blog or letter)

:-]

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Speed readers (you know who you are) note the headline here is from 1993 :

Say! I've lost me freak-out job this afternoon.

It was swift.

A project went wrong this morning, in a way that I was not mentally equipped to understand at first. It was out of the blue, and happened after I'd spent some wonderful moments feeling competent.

After the disastor, this is how I attempted to save myself, in an email :

"I'll try to explain this now. It's taken me awhile to understand it.

First, since December's job was run twice, of course the new generation

became the 0 generation, and so the recorded payments were

accumulated twice in the second (+1) generation. This wouldn't have

happened if, upon restarting the BRPRH0PR step, we delete the GDS that has

just been created. I'll have that added to the comments in the production

JCL for this step.

"Then, looking back, we discovered that during the October abends, the GDS

had, of course, been distorted each time that BRPRH0PR

was rerun.

"I've done a file compare of the two December files and of course they are

different. (I understand now that there is a new backup tape created each

time we run the job. I found the vol=ser I wanted, and know how to

restore the file I want. So that's something else I've learned today,

thanks Ryan.)

"Angie, I can recopy my September month end file to the GDS and start over

again. I guess the hard part is breaking the news to the user. I'll make

the phone call if you want. Let me know.

"I apologize for the mess."

___

What I wanted to do was show that I understood my mistakes, at least.

Unfortunately, to do that, I had to reveal that I'd still been so ignorant.

It was the final straw, and I think the disaster was probably not very important, since the due date is still a week away, and I could have finished.

___

I've written some friends that I am not sure how I feel, but that whe

n I got home an hour ago, I caught myself in the mirror and involuntarily went 'weeeee'. And grinned at myself.

Disastor? Possibly.

But I am so childish, for the moment I feel like turning on some music and making like Fred Astair.

(Note: that picture is not of me. I found it by googling images for "grinning fool". And yes was much relieved not to find an actual picture of myself. Yeah, yeah..)

A Micawberish Unbosoming perhaps...

I am thinking, again.
_____________
A Moss Rose, a Memphis belle,---

(whose comb I stole.)

She grew up in Mississippi though, until about age of ten, then moved to Memphis (which makes me think of The Reivers, William Falkner's only comedy.)

Sober all her adult life until age 32 or sometime, then a few crazy-ing years on junk. She wasn't like the rest of them, Regis.

But I want to tell you what was said. (Yes she was this Ferlenghetti "Her", but that is incidental.)

She said to me of our long term treatment house, The Eclipse, "This is not a good place to be."

We were walking downtown to the post office this beautiful June day. There was reassurance in this simple statement, even as some fear entered and passed through me. It was true.

So, I'd got a friend who would make asides as simple as this, obviating the need for anyone to shout at me "You're in deep trouble!"

Soon we were laughing again, and would for another couple of summer months.
____
Nothing I write about anybody is about them, it's about me. This you already know already.
_____
Yes it was a good place too.

No it wasn't. Yes it was.

You could get lunged at. People were crazy and on drugs.
You could go swirly mad and be sent down the chute, further into the system --- prison or the asylum.

Lots could go wrong.

Now, though, everything revealed the intricacies of my day-dreams before I was saved. The Eclipse was made to order and reverse engineering seems to disclose me.

I wanted to stop dying of course, but I wanted life back in full, nearly day-dreamed glory. I wanted a large home with a menagerie of characters. I wanted for a small cosmos of semi-civilized humanity to surround me, with each person doing a turn, perhaps tilting toward me over time, then into orbit.

Periapsis, apoapsis.

People would come and go, I would miss them and welcome them back. I wanted life like a dream, only it could be a realistic novel or play.

But that is not all.

I wanted cooks to cook, nurses to nurse, counselors (philosophers) to argue with, authorities to play tag, or cat and mouse,
...
villians to bait,

rarely but surely some friends to make.
....
And the house not only had a ersatz family but regular guests!

In fact there were three emergency beds so in a sense we took in boarders, the 12 or 15 or us, and sometimes we'd invite the boarders to stay on.

Join us , where they say first you must rest, and then get well (from our luxurious disease).

I could be interviewed several times daily, which pleased me.

Everyone was a prisoner and it was important that I was a prisoner too, or else how could I defend this endless indulgence?

I am often like the big dope people have to tell him he's not in a good situation.

"No, this is not good. It looks like one of your obvious daydreams, is the problem. That tips us off."

It's struck some friends as so uncanny, they couldn't believe at first.

"And it ticks us off, those who care for you, Georgie. This is very serious. You need to be realistic..."

Work To Do

Seekers (and what have you)

My home is in an ordinary ranch house in a suburban area of a state university town. My housemates are drawn from the local Recovery community (A.A., N.A). We are democratically run, the rules are simple and obvious. Pay the rent and stay sober.

No leaders. One another's trusted servants, rather. (And maybe sometimes untrusted savants.)

Everyone is uniquely harum-scarum, reckless, and unhinged, but when newly sober---maybe for the first time since our teens --- unlike Tolstoy's axiomatic observation ("Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"), our personal happiness is unique as well.

I am very nearly going to write about people I do not understand. And I don't know any addicts like myself.

They say we are not unique. I know what A.A. means by that, but it's bunk, of course. Nonsense, is what that is.
_____
Some of us come from the "4th floor" (that is the mental hospital), many are just out from prison or jail. All of us are from "treatment center", I suppose.

Men and women, rich poor abused coddled, on the 4th step (moral inventory), on the 12th; men and women, young and old, some on probation or parole, others not so compelled.

And then you know there are personalities and personality disorders. There are also "dual - diagnosis" patients among us. I am one of those I suppose. Or I was allowed to think so anyway. (There are advantages, and disadvantages).

We are variously on our way up or on our way down. (Being stuck is on the way down.)

Professionals, laborers, unemployables. If you say "they are all crazy", you are not imparting very much information.

I almost drank myself to death. I almost drank until my life was over, too.
_____
I realize just now I don't wish to write for strangers/ newcomers today. It's all in the sidebar and there is my profile and there are the archives.

Life here is idylic at times, charming and serene, amusing with a cast of c

wait. a chat box opens.

Here is a transcript from just moments ago, this Sunday morning.

xxx
ENDD
But I've left the chat box open for some reason. I don't see how that could have been much different from my being collected once. Funny, that also took place during a chat too:

notadr (12:44:46 PM): fing AAAA
notadr (12:44:50 PM): knock on the door
et (12:45:03 PM): answer it
notadr(12:45:10 PM): heart attack heart attack
et (12:45:17 PM): answer the door, john
et (12:45:25 PM): it's probably just stacy or something
notadr(12:46:34 PM): deputy, i'm committed
notadr (12:46:35 PM): bye
et (12:46:47 PM): bye.

Yes, the deputy with the papers let me type goodbye on the computer. "et" knew during this hour long chat that commitment papers were about to be served and was unusually talkative. Or that is, she'd stopped hectoring me about getting help as I drank myself to death and awaited eviction.

This weekend our "sober house" has weekend guests. Sometimes coincidentally, many of my housemates are providing hospitality at the same time. This is a fairly large house, split level on a hill, with two kitchens and two baths, two living rooms if you count the new "media room" down below. Normally we are seven of us. This weekend, I believe we are 12 (and that is not counting girlfriends.)

Then we have visitors. For instance last night before a dance, two of the Gibson Girls stopped by to have me take their pictures. We were in a long term treatment together in 2005. One is at that moment remembering how to deal with me, behind the camera.

I'm not sure if any of us know each other really. We know the way we each can be in a stress and in hilarity. We know one another's boundaries, and some of our "boundaries" are not common-place or even common sense.

For instance, I pretty much draw the line at anything like conversation.

Or, ok, I have caused them to draw a line, since I tend to either fumble or make caustic remarks about any mention of, for instance, popular culture, i.e: horror novels, rap, My Space, divorces, break-ups, (though I do thrive on glossup).

and...

Words I don't know, if they are related to clothing, teenage behavior/slang,
Anything I suspect is a meme,
Cell Phone contracts,
Del.icio.us, RSS,
Brita Smart Pitcher Water Filtration Systems,
The Keurig B-70,
Kholer
HD TV
Beyonce
Dyson suctionless vaccums and this style of website.
Hummers
Anything hinting at the subject of this George and Melba song from Nashville in the early 60's. Unspeakable!

Also recommended (and again, Kurp)

Via the invaluable daily blogger at Anecdotal Evidence I have found Nancy Ruth, a writer from Canada who is "tracing my way from birth".

I noticed she has a mate (husband? I haven't read very far) who wrote:

"I am tired of being with people
who never have heard
of Charlie McCarthy
or Mortimer Snerd."


So I've shuffled her into my blogroll.

Also, you ought to visit another recent addition, Today In Letters, which is, simply put, "Letters and diary entries from this day in literary history."

For instance today's letter is from Hannah Arendt, on February 8, 1963. Anyone can turn up. Believe I've seen Samuel Johnson, William Falkner, Kafka, Shelly, Anais Nin, May Sarton...

May Sarton?? Yeah, but you can scroll down, you can go through the archives if you wish, any given visit.
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By the way, I am so taken with Kurp's "Anecdotal Evidence" that I've gone into the scroll's archives. He recently had his first blog-anniversary. I'll make my way through.

This may finally rescue me from the internet. My interest in literary fiction and even poetry increases every day now, it's coming back to me, all the wisdom in there (stolen and manipulated by political activists and self-help psychologists), goodness. It's like a letter from my favorite English professor everyday. Only I never liked any of my English professors but I like Kurp.

And thank heavens, evidently he's old.

Recommended

I love Kurp's post on Nabakov and Waugh today.

Even past the cringe, I do.

Lifeboat

I'd be lousy on the witness stand today. I could be testifying that rain is wet and bachelors are unmarried men and my eyes would be darting like REMs in a fast moving dream, explaining that the predicate should be considered already part and parcel of the subject, and I've never been to Mars either, no sir, no one saw me there I'm as positive as positive could be, your honor!!

These expressions of outraged innocence are highly suspicious?

Somethings bothering me? Oh, yes I can testify to that too. You don't know me very well do you ? Oh, sorry.

Sorry??

No I mean I'm sorry that I seemed to imply you should know me. Or, like I was , hahah, accusing you of some failing for not knowing me. I don't like my tone is all, or I was afraid you didn't, you see. That's all.

You know, I got on the wrong bus and there's no sense in telling the driver, it seems that I just have to 'see how it goes'.

I am supposed to be testifying in Cranberry v Vladimir Hatrack, right? No? Is this my stop? OH that was my stop back there? I'm finished? Thank you , thank you for your merciful kindness, now my only worry is whether tomorrow can worry sufficiently about itself with no help from me because I am flagging, man.
______
Raspberry red, lemon yellow, ORANGE ORANGE!

I loved how their voices held the trophy so high when they realized "orange orange!" And it is lovely and sun kissed isn't it...