Letter to a Recovery friend

I read a sermon in the NyTimes today, one of those full-page, warning:weird font, warning: Korean writer possibly Moonie, "Why do the heathen rage?" style, paid features you may remember from your small town paper.

I've been feeling very powerless lately, losing to this rebellion of emotions --- and holy crap that diabolical fiend/nemisis Dr. Hashimoto, who is always pulling my leg--- so I suppose I needed to slake some spritual thirst , the way I absorbed every word.

It was a helpful article because about a month ago I read the third step of AA and suddenly it made no sense to me. A year ago, yes. Eight years ago, it made sense. But suddenly not. I made no sense, and when I read the chapter on the third step in the 12X12, the advice seemed to be to just move along through the 12 and come back and you'll understand.

I came away with news, of a sort. News to myself. And that is that I once had a "higher power", I could turn my will and my life over to, nearly, and this was my older brother, whom I idolized. (Idolized, as in Idol, as in The Realm where our God is a Jealous God.) God-like but false, but never mind that. I had in my childhood a capacity to subdue my own thoughts and feelings to another.

I wanted to be near him all the time so I could learn. So I could see how he reacted to people, places, and situations.

It was easy to mimic his "cool" but I also had to try and mimic his good grades, his better manners and friendlier ways, his willingness to work. And do you know, I did have this capacity to surrender, in that sense, long ago. My grades were better than they would have been, for instance, if I didn't care what he thought of me.

I hadn't really thought of that , in relation to what it's like to have a higher power you surrender your will to.

Then this funny thought: if only God were as cool as my brother. (Did you sense that coming?)
____
Last night I had to get out of myself and I started to imagine what was going on in the world , anywhere in this world of 4 billion , at that very moment. I meditated by picturing all types of situations that individuals must be going through. I went back and forth between the hellish and , say, picturing a homecoming, a child delighted to see his/her father and running to jump in his arms. I pictured a murder, from the point of view of the terrified victim, and the point of view of someone who'd just realized they'd lost their soul by doing such a thing.

I re-imagined this , where the murderer did not murder but showed mercy.

Then I thought of all the prayers going up, all the time, and I thought how people worry themselves sick and how usually things turn out well!! And if not, so often in retrospect "for the best". The bump in the night is almost always nothing. All we hear are the bad things, news is when things go wrong and ...here is my point, ...the vast majority of the time, everything turns out to be fine, so can that be because of all these prayers going up? Maybe civilization really is dependent upon grateful prayer and faith.

I put myself to sleep this way finally thinking of a little girl dutifully saying her prayers, after some joyous day, in front of her smiling and understanding elders, before jumping in bed, and being teased a little perhaps, as we are toward children; and her falling asleep smiling in her comfortable bed (a pallete on the floor with blankets would be like royalty to some). Happy 7 and 8 year old children are blessed.

I fell asleep feeling blessed. (then as always I awoke with a start this morning , making emergency prayers, establishing that contact immediatly, like I'm in mortal danger for some reason).

I can never forget because all my life I've left so much half finished.

Stupid-head

When I first came here--- I think it was after about a year--- I turned 23 and flipped my lid.

I had this life-loving mania fueling me into being very nearly improvisational. I couldn't sleep for days and maybe more than a week, or even ten days, all the while drinking too. I wrote, I wrote like this probably, though I'm far from manic now. And I visited friends, established friends and new friends, carrying with me a slim tube from which I fired bottle rockets to announce my arrival.

This was in the summer and the Spring before I'd been heart-sick over a girl with a parakeet she'd named "Oliver". Her name was Lisa and she loved "Green Acres" reruns, so it was "Oliver and Lisa" and she loved to call for Oliver in the Hungarian accent of Eva Gabor.

"Oliver?" (where are you?").

"Oh, Oliver!! (disappointed. let down.)"

So you can well understand. She was the prototype of many a garpish novel, say where a widowed professor falls for a free spirited grad student who plays the cello and collects marbles and paints her letters and the envelopes too.

Anyway, she came by with a twelve pack of beer several Fridays in a row while I house-sat at a homeless shelter and we had some wonderful, laugh-filled evenings reminiscing about our untroubled childhoods.

One of those nights she stayed, so for a couple of weeks we were a couple. I was hoping she wouldn't fly away and then she flew away. Or rather hooked up with some guy who worked at the head-shop ( a rare black man in white hippy culture, it didn't stop him from ending up in prison and when he got out, he threatened her with a gun, and went back. They have a beautiful son.)

If I measured that Spring's loss with this Summer's euphoria, I must have been completely distraught but in denial.

I was not tentative, I wasn't halting or balking or hesitating with people.

Surprising to remember now, I think I was imitating Lisa, adopting her ready laughter and even some of her mannerisms.

It was a revelation to me that other people were a little shy but wanted to be drawn out. I reasoned that , like characters in a book, you had to give them something to react to, to discover what made them different.

But everyone was the same: happy to see me. Except for my friends. My real friends, I'd already had. They were not happy. They could see, I suppose.
---
Lying down was boring, no matter what time of day or night, because I might be doing something else.

It became a sort of game between my friends and me, how and when I would be committed. I knew perfectly well I was sick now. I'd vandalized the police station one night, and I was regularly stalking Mudhead on his job runs for the food bank, firing rockets at him.

I started calling the cops on myself, and do you know how hard it is to get committed when you want to be committed? It was like , "No, son, we admit that's over the top but you're not quite there yet."

A second time, they came again and I suddenly realized they might think I was armed. I cowered in the dark kitchen, yelling that I was paralysed, I couldn't move! Pretending hysterical paralysis until the cuffs were on. "Just didn't want to scare you guys into shooting me. I'm fine."

They left me in an unlocked waiting room at the psych-ward and I got bored and walked home, this perfectly still, warm June night, under the Dutch Elms.
___
Finally a Hindu interviewed me and concluded that I believed I was the smartest person in the world. (I read his notes later, and knew they were out of a book, so I didn't get defensive and argue I was actually quite unsure.) That was--- as we liked to quote SNL--- the ticket.

I was led up there to the third floor and I settled down to read All Quiet On The Western Front. (You should laugh. But shame!) It was not the best choice, but Wodehouse was out of the question since I think Psmith had given me as much of my new personality as Lisa had.

It was a weekend, and a holiday weekend at that, so my 72 hours observation turned into 96. I suddenly wanted my freedom so bad I paid serious attention to how the orderlies came and went, which way of escape, how maybe to steal a key. Of course there was a key ring to grab at the nurses desk, sometimes, but which of those 50 keys was the one?

I was still manic and forward. I met a slender crazy girl named Joanne, who later became my first girlfriend and shack-partner. She twirled and plucked her hairs out. She had a smart, edgy sense of humor, and was fascinated with Edie Sedgewick and Andy Warhol.

Her mom was just out of prison and they lived in a trailer park. She'd had sex with her brother on the bathroom floor when she was 13 and got caught. She couldn't keep her hands out of her hair and would eventually become bald, but that was months later, after living with me.

Then the bad thing happened, I think changed me forever. Anyway it taught me to fear mania and in a sense, to fear happiness.

They gave me a walloping dose of haldol or something and I crashed like a jumbo jet. I was out for a night and a day and into the next evening. I dreamed horrible dreams, where my friends and I were at a farm and had decided to start executing one another by firing squad. One by one. We'd take the bodies away in between wooden planks, tied together with rope. Mudhead was gone now. My insides squeezed into themselves, my heart stopped and my mind consciously refused to register.

I got up, asked for an apple, and went to my claimed space on the couch, where my books were. A nurse handed me a painted envelope. One of these days was my birthday. All my friends had signed the "get well" card "Happy Birthday". Mudhead scrawl: "bastard". I looked for Lisa's name and it was there. Even her signature was happy-happy. Perfect cursive script, feminine, artistic.

I don't remember getting out, I don't remember craving a beer although I'm sure I needed one and got twelve. My apartment was empty until I picked up Joanne, but the main house where my friends lived was full. Mudhead took us to a place called the Devil's Icebox, which is a cave outside of town. You go down several wooden flights of stairs and at one particular step, the temperature drops twenty degrees, though you're still in the sunlight. It makes you stop and step back up and step back down, marveling at the invisible borderline.

The rest of the summer was dull and listless, uninteresting except for Joanne being a fugitive. I ignored her , except when to express aggravation at her pulling her hair out. I was always a little drunk. One night she came home and said she'd just been raped by an old boyfriend. I believed her. We started out downtown to look for him when suddenly she swung around and shoved me so I fell flat on my back, caught completely by surprise.

The breath was knocked out of me for the first time since 5th grade and I thought, this is only my breath knocked out of me, I'm not going to die. She was sorry and after awhile helped me up. She took me to the bushes near the Wendy's where it happened. It wasn't meaningless to see the spot. We looked up and all around, I saw a lot of guys in white t-shirts but she couldn't see him so we went home. Really, I don't remember what we were thinking to do. Later she told me, and I believed her, that she had to relax while he was on top of her. Fighting would make it hurt.

She started spending more time at her mother's trailer, and I missed her a little. I took a bus to Iowa for some reason, and on the way back she was supposed to be at the bus station. Then she was at the bus station and I couldn't believe something so happily anticipated was actually occurring as planned. She looked beautiful too, I remember to this day how she was dressed to slay me. She wore a kercheif by now.

All these months I can't remember where my money came from. I didn't work, so my parents must have been sending checks. I had parents like some people have doting grandparents. Sometime in August I wanted to come home, and that Fall I was back in the damned English -Philosophy building again, musing over Turtle Island. My teachers told me I was a good writer, "humor comes from pain sometimes", and that if I graduated I'd have a good shot at the then renowned Iowa International Writers WorkGarp.

"Huh."

Acid Head

My unspoken thoughts felt surreptitious. I was innocent but conscious of guilt and ever fearful of discovery when I was that age.

I would hear about her second hand, and listen intently, bi-polar, with hope and a sense of dream-like helplessness. I remember overhearing she would arrive with three other women from Dutch Elm, and then later seeing the car coming down the gravel park road and, when she wasn't inside, waiting for someone else to make a remark, or ask about her.
_ _ _

On campus I liked to rest with a book open, upside down on my chest. "Being And Nothingness", "Finegan's Wake", "Language, Truth, And Logic". Any lofty tome, transparently and outrageously pretentious.

Mary Lee was the only woman to actually step up and give me the business. She crossed her arms, jutted her hips and smiled, waiting.

"What?"

She asked if my library book wasn't over-due. I looked down and then feigned surprise and embarrassment.

She was tickled and I got to say something about learning this one backwards and forwards and standing on my head. I remember then, a second of quiet she spent, looking at me then, with her very young, slightly blemished but attractive round face. She seemed pleased with me (or pleased with herself). She kept her arms crossed and kicked my leg with the side of her foot and said "see you later, crocodile".

"In awhile, alligator." She looked back and laughed, "That's right, JohnJackson."

Maybe we'd have had an actual conversation if either of us had read any of those titles. It was a one minute encounter, an Impressionist's minute that made me smile for days just before going to sleep each night.

Simple as that, I was in love then and thought about her every quarter hour of every waking day that semester. Once, seeing her coming down one of the looping , clover-leaf paths toward me I startled and had just enough time to plausibly miss her. You'd think I'd have had something to say, but no. At that age I didn't comprehend the possibility of her, or any woman, being flattered by my admiration.
----
Down, and paranoid-down, these terms of surrender I imposed on myself were almost too much to bear. I spent most of my time in my apartment, drinking, reading and writing.

I imagined myself horribly disfigured, incidentally. Not long before, acid-stoned, I'd got a bad look in the mirror and my face was like I'd never seen it before. Also a friend had recently confided to me that a certain girl everyone was sharing considered me unbelievably ugly. (He added, "I don't know what she means, John! I don't think you're ugly at all!" But that didn't help.) I knew she was right, and lamented that I couldn't make up for my unattractiveness with a theatrical, magnetic personality.
___
That May, the newly extant "Yippies" (meaning "Youth International Party") in New York got my phone number from The Worker House and called late one night about a "Rock Against Reagan" music tour that would be arriving in our university town. They wanted an organizer and I was excited in earnest to say yeah.

I applied for and got a city park permit, designed artless flyers ("rock against republicans, religion, REO Speedwagon, revolvers, royalty " ---you name it if it started with an "R") and posted them to the downtown telephone poles with all the other academic/ musical advertisements.

I anticipated some positive attention, primarily from Mary Lee, who by the way was the sister of a friend of mine I didn't like, Russell. She had won a student council seat. We pronounced her name "Merrily", and it fit. She was a joy and, I imagined, popular.
____
It was a disappointing show with at most 50 people gathered. I was pleasantly drunk and stoned, and discovered I enjoyed speaking into a live microphone. I got one laugh and warmed up and got a second and didn't push it, but introduced the first band.

There were ten bands playing for six hours on this Spring weekend afternoon. Sixties-style outrage was hard to conjure as of course there was little to protest (what about, Grenada?)
The names of the bands answered any question: this day's rage was against "apathy" and all that was trivial but had raised itself to a level of English-Major contempt.

It had rained the night before, so there was a little pond formed in front of the stage, unfortunately. The audience stood back in a way that seemed apropos.

Then the screeching, talentless punk rockers opened with a song that made me hope for an accidental electric guitar electrocution. I left. I knew there had to be some relief in leaving and of course I was correct.
-----
There was a picnic for some labor union across the Frisbee way, and one of these dopes started shouting insults at the older folks (with their children) there.

But I heard about this later, since I spent most of the day up the hill in my apartment with a couple of friends. I felt like a producer whose show had flopped. Or , was flopping indefinitely. It seemed a disaster from the start.

We made frequent trips back and forth. I still hoped she would be there. We'd get out of the car and be spotted and there was a lot of contentious talk over the in-your-face yippie music.

Don't we celebrate unions? I asked no one in particular.

No, we're for One Big Union, man. "They're not politically correct", someone actually said of the labor people. It was the first time I ever heard that expression.

Merrily showed up around 4, while I was up in my room receiving reports. I was three, four or five times removed by acid or mushrooms, and liquor, and the people in my same condition.

The young men and women of the RAR tour were their own audience now, except for a very few locals. There was a far left student group called "The New Wave" but even most of them had called it quits.
------
It was just a matter of coasting down the hill in my yellow VW bug to get there. I spotted her with one of the hippie wood-winds, and I sensed right away their conversation was off to a good long start.

They'd be together the whole time. We had a keg and a fire, the drummers drummed but soon sensed to quit. For sometime I mixed in with a part of the group she'd joined. Her brother said do you remember Jackson and she said "hi John-Jackson" and looked down and took a short puff from a cigarette, like it was her first smoke.

The equipment was packed up, and she helped where she could, taking directions mostly from her very flower-childish, new friend. The Yippies would spend the night parked there, and I didn't know if that was stipulated in the city permit or not. I didn't know if the beer was legal. I went back home with two of my friends, who were from the Worker Farm about 40 miles away, and Russell, who told one of them that Mary Lee was staying.

I was drunk and quiet, disappointed. But at that age I'd already stopped thinking that anything but a miracle would hook me up with a girl like 'Merrily'.

Such a sham, I said.

"what?"

A sham. And a shame, I thought. Lucky that wasn't a family reunion nearby, they'd probably have shouted pro-abortion slogans at 'em.

The next morning we went down to find everyone groggy and still resentful about the "lake". As if there would have been a large audience if not for the water sitting about eight feet out in front of the stage in this large city park.

Merrily was sitting on the ground against a stone wall, and had covered herself with a grey blanket. She pulled it over her head as the flutist was sitting very close, not touching but talking and gesturing with starts and stops.

I got close enough to realize she was crying and he was apologizing for something.

"It shouldn't have happened. I'm sorry."

She was unresponsive, then shook her head, not angrily but slowly and philosophically. I caught sight of eyes, which were finished crying. She was out of his reach now. He didn't dare reach out and comfort.

I couldn't think, but for suddenly knowing something, and I couldn't feel, except I felt I should feel something.

Someone from the show came out of nowhere and put it to me directly: "Are you the guy who was supposed to set this up, man?"

What with the acid and my morning brew I was detached, but deep down I imagined a part of me was collapsing. Some part of myself I'd remember not to visit, was all. Not my center.

One of my soft-spoken friends answered for me, in his most diplomatic, obliquely humorous way, so the fellow just shook his head and walked off. I did have one or two cool friends, thank goodness.

I couldn't take my eyes off of her, but got some walking distance.

"It shouldn't have happened." Like something fell on them during the night. Not, "I shouldn't have done that."
---------
Russell went over and stood over her, asking something. He came back and said, "I think she's going with them." But I knew she wasn't.

Somehow part of my dream came true, and she joined us in the car and we went to breakfast, four of five of us for biscuits and sausage gravy. Russell was a motor mouth and I didn't like him but I was glad he was talking now. I sat across the table from her and found myself surprisingly relaxed, speechless now when, what else could I be?

Everyone was talking but her and me. She was in her world, alone, only looking up from her plate to drink from her water glass and let her eyes glide across us, always giving me sufficient time to look away from her. I didn't want our eyes to meet.

I was in my world, with her actually present. But still solely in my imagination.

Every thought was an off-beat guess, a glum, useless calculation, what was what. It seemed good for her that she was with her brother and that we were her circle of friends for the moment, but I felt like I'd done something wrong. The drugs I took in those days fractured my perception, but this time I was aware of what distance this mirror to mirror maze would actually comprise if it were straightened out.
It crossed my mind, what if I accidentally spilled a glass of water, would that change everything? Because then she might have laughed and said something that would somehow let me off my imaginary hook. Maybe then we'd somehow have a conversation and get to know one another.
***
Eight years passed , and certain convictions I'd held since school, lifted, or just skipped my mind.

My mind was the right size again, and my eyes were uncrossed. I hadn't used "psychedelics" in all that time, and hadn't wished to.

I found myself in a sort of theatre troupe, all friendly , extroverted but bookish people, not in any competition with one another, but older, sharing laughs about their foolish younger days.

On warm spring days my co-workers and I would loiter at the top of the company's parking garage, which was built so high you could barely hear the traffic. My name was called upon more often, still "john-jackson". I had a moment then, I realized I'd matured just with the years gone by. I breathed in the air and knew I was still young, and this was the same world as ever before but now without menace.

Resting in pieces

School's out with a doctor's excuse,

it being May and my needing to be in some critical care unit for a full battery of...well, for a full battery. I have a wild blood stream due to miscalculated synthetic thyroid.

Or! It might be too much too much coffee coffee.

Actually, the Newspaper Factory is out, what am I talking, school... she's just a brick metaphor for the pile of bricks you always hope to see each morning, arriving to work.

Back now from collecting my paycheck. The university is still full, but the town is teeming with parents. There are lots of slow moving vans and double parked SUVs as you drive near downtown, in my case baking in my black, A/C-less Cavalier in the mid-afternoon sun.

Left turn lane, waiting for my chance to turn on to Small Bear from Big Bear. The oncoming traffic is backed up in one lane, closest to me, while the other lane is fast and free and hard to see. Someone in the slow lane stops and waves for me to turn in front of her.

No, no. Follow the traffic rules, madam. Be predictable. Your gracious good intentions will bloom in glass and blood. You think I'll make it, do you?

The friendly smile falls. Sometimes we don't get the friendly reaction we expect.

I pulled over for gas and all ten stations were full, so I semi-circled back around onto the main road. Some fool riding his bike in the midst of this tight traffic jam. Cars from behind braking, then giving him a wide berth.

There's a sidewalk three miles along this highway, scoff at that law, use it.

I am always so grouchy. Ha, ha! Ah, me.

Floor it here, get in front of him for sure or I'll go up on the sidewalk myself.
____

Last night suddenly she was squeezing my arm and saying, measured and calmly, "John, honey, it's me, Dee. I just want you to know you're at home, in bed, asleep."

: - |

Yes, yes that was true I could see. I was home in bed. Can't remember believing otherwise, but hmm...

Sit up and take a drink of this strawberry Nee-Hi to cleanse my palate. Flop back onto my pillow and reflect on zero.

I couldn't recall having just survived any fearsome, struggling nightmare, so I went back to Zeep. That was all. It wasn't until this afternoon I remembered any of this.

What she witnessed, I have no idea. Was I talking in my sleep. More fearfully, was I making sense??

"I don't care what you do to me, Ya think I'm afraid!? I'm ...Wait! Not that! Not there! No! Not again, I'll tell you everything, I'll give you names, addresses, I'll draw you a map, all my friends, my family, to heck with them, what do I care, just put it away! I'll do anything. I'll floss! Ok? I'll floss, I promise you! No I really mean it this time i mean it i mean it i will i will!"

I remember dozing off in high school psychology class once and the teacher called from the front of the room , "Jackson, don't do that, it's embarrassing people".

"Wha-?"

"Just stop."

Six girls turned in their seats, dis-interested dark eyes giving me the once over, then quickly turning back around...

In retrospect I can see now that my teacher was a god-damned sadist. High School Psychology was a dangerous thing in his hands.

I was totally baffled, what I'd been "doing". It was an accidental snooze. He must have known that his mysterious words would fill me with horror and dreading wonderment. What might I have said in my sleep at age 17??

I was embarassing people? Please tell me right away you're joking.

I never go to class reunions, but that's because in my four years there I never met anybody. Hehe, that's true almost. I was a shy kid, transfered from a small town.

After class he waved me away, and wouldn't tell me. Mr. Beam, I remember his name now. That son of a bitch...

Like us, but taller maybe

Suppose the world were so small you could walk its horizons, and there were many people but not so numerous there were complete strangers.

A world of fairly close trees, sparse forests, small falling waters, and grassy clearings or meadows, with animals that cower or low. Other animals friendly, even companionable... and then the stand-offish and amusing ones, up in the limbs of the trees, acting as if they owned the ground.

What if, just occasionally, a star would fall and it turned out to be nothing but a small, fragile orb, you could hold in your hand. Curious and pretty but nothing to shout about, nothing to carry around with you.

What if the oceans were small, life-stirred lakes to fish and swim? You could walk around them if you wished.

I wonder if creation were less gargantuan, would I be more amazed, rather than less? It seems I would be more certain there was a land-lord, say, who made this, and gave this to us.

I would walk and anticipate one day crossing paths with Him, the Creator. He would be older than everyone else, I'd have to reason. I'd anticipate he was benevolent. Indeed, kind and loving, for having created and given these things perfectly suited to our comfort and happiness.

How much could he explain? Would it occur to me that not only was this world his creation, but we were also?

Would we call him father, or "mister"?

Wouldn't we be so much more amazed and certain there was a God, if this world were only as large and far as the eye could see? Rolling earth with a cloudy edge and no falling, but just floating into the darkness of space without gravity. (How dull, to float off into nothingness. You wouldn't want to except once, and then swim the space back.)

The world is gigantic. It is a trillion times more complex than in my dream.

This is a fallen world, and it is our world. Its creator has to be deduced, its God sought after with prayers and imaginings.

In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve can hear the Lord's footsteps. They hear him coming and there must have been ordinary days when this was not frightening but comforting. How they must have loved him like children, before they had their secret.

Ok. Amen. So be it...

(When I stood in Brooklyn Heights and looked across the river to Manhattan I was amazed and pleased that the greatest city on earth looked surprisingly modest and simple to me. A feeling came over me then that God was close, and I trembled.)

__
The room was very dark for 9 am. Day-dark with the blinds of the one window shut.

She was holding my alarm clock, which was beeping and a-buzzing. She was laughing, so at first I concluded she'd made it go off, to wake me. Mischievous laugh.

What, is that for me?

"No, I'm just" ...she handed it to me, like 'make it stop!'

Nine o'clock. Holy cow I've got to be at work in three hours... I fell back on my pillow.

Los Angeles radio was still on, last night's wonder of the Internet. Traffic reports to a hard rockin' score.

I wondered if she was shy to turn it off. But that would be odd, she's no guest here.

Still I said , Honey you don't have to keep that on!

"No, I've been laughing at it."

Oh.
That guy sounds like Jim Cramer.

"Yeah He does but they're not talking about ...that."

The news was just coming on. It was about Phil Spector. "Specter opened the door with a gun." said the reporter.

How do you...
They should rephrase that.

She needed to leave for awhile, she said. Must go, regretably.

Oh!
I was already up, one trouser leg at a time.

You could have taken the keys, honey, you didn't have to wait for me.

"I know. I'll be back soon..." She kissed me goodbye and was a go-go, back to her house for a bit.
_____
It seems I want to develop a persona for each day...and usually I don't.

I went to the kitchen and sat down and, being alone but in love, re-imagined our father again, to thank Him. I looked through the window into the sun-shot leaves of the trees , this perfect May day, and quite simply believed.

The Drunk

It's nearly two years now.

A holiday weekend at the mental hospital, four months at The Last Word, and now a year and a half in a Sober House.

I knew they'd got me good, the day the special yellow-shirted deputy arrived. Not only was I broke, I couldn't work anymore. All my things in this efficiency apartment, oh my god, what would happen to my computer, my papers, my books? It was the end.

People at our recovery meetings often say, "I could drink, but I choose not to."

I can't drink. This might as well be a halfway house to me, though it is democratically run and I'm in no legal jeopardy. This is not will power.
____
It's a large house, out in the residential sprawl. Sharing the rent with five other men, I also have cheap high speed internet and cable tv. I have my own room and complete privacy when I want. If there is a light tap at the door, I can ignore it without pretending to be away. It's as unusual as in an apartment house. Or, I can yell "FORK OFF!" and there's a laugh and they come in, or try the door knob anyway. BAM BAM! OPEN UP! So at worst this can be like a fraternity.

Firmly established here, with a reputation for being a stand-off, I'm left alone. The love of my sober life may be the one knocking, though, I shouldn't forget that. Being a part of this large Recovery community, she gets by the monastic hoods pretty easy, abruptly taking her stance and warning them, "I know the J-word!"

"Yeah? What's that?"

"Jiu-Jitzsu!"

"Oh all right then..."
___
Now see, I was going to write here as the Drunk who is still caught in his trap, but then I remembered her.

And I've described how nice these accomodations are. I can tell you also that I have a part-time job that is wonderfully phony-baloney and only requires me to stand up straight, initial papers, and sometimes buffalo my boxx (sweet man. huge man! godfrey daniel!)

Let me say then, "despite myself".

All of this is against my will. Everything. I am an Alcoholic through and through since age 15, and just about everything I've learned about life, people, relationships, God, must have in someway been misapprehended. If living life were reading, I'd have gotten no farther than a "Whole Language" standard. Call me an impressionist.

Now I am very near writing a "gratitude list". A list of wonderful things I just can hardly believe, especially given my backward instincts. But I will spare you. There's no comedy in being fucking serene anyway. Hey, look. Everyone off my blog. Now. Get out of here!
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Yesterday Anonydoc was in Atlanta instead of Baton Rouge, so I went to pieces. (Yes, yes I'm in Missouri, do you want me to make sense?? ) It was a mistake , getting up and failing to turn on the Sanford And Son marathon, which would have saved me.

Then my greensleeves wanted to go see the play adaptation of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest at the Dutch Elm Theatre Barn. We were going to sit on the lawn there and, I supposed, watch the sun set on civilization itself. I didn't tell her how Ken Kesey used to be one of my leading lights, nor what visceral , unhealthy loathing I have for him now. (I think she may not know of him , since his career finished so early on, what with his project to spike all our drinks with his L.S.D. kool-aid. ) (And yes, it was kool-aide. Most people think "drinking the kool-aide " refers to Jim Jones and cyanide, I suppose, but Jonestown was ten years after The Merry Pranksters and the first Grateful Dead parties.)

Earlier in the day, in fact, we were talking about my 'drain bamage'. How I can't throw a frizbee forward anymore, only squarely to my right or , incredibly, backwards behind me (surprising the hell out of me everytime...That surprise is also brain damage, haha).

I don't think it's too far a stretch to link Kesey's Eugene, Oregon to my hometown of Oakapallohka, Iowa, where LSD and Mushrooms were plentiful even down to the junior high school.

Anyway, I say to the devil with Kesey. Please don't ask me about Sgt. Pepper , though. I can't be completely consistent now...(really, please)

Someone recently wrote about Cuckoo's Nest, savaging it so thoroughly as a cultural watermark I felt my natural pre-adolescent conservativism re-affirmed (trust your instincts, all you twelve year olds).

I grew up in the 70's, when the adults mimiced the kids, and "everything was a little upside down, as a matter of fact the wheels had stopped: what's good is bad, what's bad is good!..." (dylan paraphrasing and maybe misinterpreting) . Cuckoo's Nest was coincidentally the first serious movie my parents took me to, I remember well my mother whispering in my ear helpfully, through-out: for instance she knew that I'd be slow to gather that the Head Nurse was Evil Incarnate.

"She's a bad woman, John," she whispered as soon as Nurse Ratchet appeared on the screen. I wasn't going to understand that on my own until the end, so it was right for her to help me focus, or aim high in my steering , so to speak. I don't blame her.

But what was the moral persuasion of Kesey's novel and this movie? Sexually repressive Society was the central evil in our lives, preventing individuals from becoming fully born, fully themselves. We were born to live out our dreams, follow our bliss, and to interfere with someone's journey to Giganticism was petty and reflected our own cowardice.

(Suddenly I remember a Henry Miller title, just the title: "The Smile At The Foot Of The Ladder".)

From my teens to my late 30's I re-educated myself (drunk) into an Anarchist. If you'd put the question to me, "how is a flimsy fellow like you going to survive in anarchy?" I'd have answered that all hatred and violence comes from our being governed, our having our moral perogatives taken away from us by rule of law, and in anarchist society no one would hate anymore, no one would be violent except for the insane... who, by the way, should be set free.

I don't know if I ruined the day cancelling our date to the play, or saved it. I might have become overbearingly pedantic or polemical. I like to keep my cool now, ...sober. Oh thank you lord I'm sober. jayz.

I post this quick without re-reading. If I re-read it will take me hours to re-write and fake a theme here.

zip of the lip

Listening to the grateful recovering alcohol-addicts makes me wonder why I am not so happy to be saved.

I know they are sincere, especially these hard-core losers who have stayed sober for years and are now effusive, winning, and touchingly emotional. Even several of the younger people are convincing, those who really understand that they were going to die or go to prison.

Maybe I never really believed I was doomed. You say, "all evidence to the contrary", and I agree but still there is a part of me, as I note in the sidebar, I have never surrendered. A part of me that that is always on the edge of panic---but not the right panic, not human panic in which one flaps his limbs and runs in place.

Instead it's high anxiety about other's perceptions.

But it's not that I fear they will discover the truth about me but that they will "discover" a falsehood. (And I should reflect that strangers are on pretty thin ice with me, so why shouldn't I be on thin ice with them?)

I don't wish to raise my head above the parapet. I'm superstitious about three on a match. I talk about this now because lately I find that I can barely write here, and in the last three months or so I haven't spoken in an A.A. meeting except once, when called. I still have questions. The loaded questions I used to ask counselors and my parents and, once upon a time, a sympathetic county sheriff.

What I know of other people is that , in the main, they are dopey, happy, sneezy, grumpy, sleepy and Doc.
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There's a fear of discovery of my low self-worth.

Low self-worth! I'll sometimes think, when anyone is so benighted: "well he's the one to know".

Deep down inside myself, when I was in jail and in a twilight sleep I dreamed myself a cipher on top of a short, white Roman style column. Where nothing had ever stood.

Zero, after years and years of recounting and recalibrating, always the same "equals Not".

People come and go, reach into this box of confetti, toss it up in the air for me, "there!" pause "and there!" pause. Flying colored paper confetti , this is you, love.

But the Zed just watches the paper come down, and waits for the merry one to realize that I don't know how to deal anymore.

It's when I pray. As bad as it is, if I am lead back to consider and to pray, there is a reprieve.

But men are slaves to themselves and they forget. So , in my prayers, I ask not to forget that I have asked these things, that I have come to realize these wonders and the miracle of my life. I still can thoughtlessly throw away without extra help.

It's free will with a exacerbated character defects. I face the world as a committed , already ravaged alcoholic.

and it's time for a meeting. Thanks for reading.

May I pray will stay

5:45 a.m. this first day of May, not light yet...

Kitchen window wide open breathing Spring and Shang-ri-la. Say, yeah. It goes outside to the whole wide world, air, land and sea.

The temperature right now is 'no temperature', to me.

All the chairs are broken except this one. It still has the foam backing in its metal frame.

Lean back and light this smoke and recollect. Dylan sings "I am hanging in the balance of a perfect finished plan". (Or is it "the reality of man"?)

When I shuffle off this doubting mortal coil I'll fly to heaven and recover from this doleful amnesia: God is too great, He is, He IS! A magnificient recollection that is so stunning we sing joyously forever, praising creation.

And think, "I knew that. How did I forget?" And in forgetting, all ready again to absorb.

I used to wonder if babies dropped from heaven into life, "a little lower than the angels", were fully aware of what they had, and now what they were in for. Good reason to squall for a year.

And if there's reincarnation and yours is a second-go for getting it wrong the first time, maybe your first truly waking thought is a curse. Maybe you go : AH ! GODDAMMIT!

...And there's your original sin already. Tch.
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I uttered the most ungrateful, pessimistic assesment to my mother the other day. I said, "We wait ten months for these two months". She said, no, it's more like six months for six months. And yes, for six months it's no Garden Of Eden. Really, we settled in the wrong climate, she conceded about our great-greats. At the gateway to the West in St. Louis, what you do is turn left and keep going, by steam-boat to New Orleans.

But ah well oh my it's lovely isn't it.
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Now what have I been up to lately, I can record here. Something is a pity, too, but I can't recall, trying as hard as I can, what- what- what. I'm squinting, trying to remember what's sad. Rubbing my temples. Think, man, think!

Murf the Surf walks by just now muttering about bluebirds. I call him back, I'm curious to witness this fugue. He is a day-sleeper and a sleep walker, Monday through Friday, or Sunday through Thursday, I don't know. He says they are the state bird, John, they're finches I think but it's rare you ever see one. They're finches, yeah.

Ok move along.

I will write like I talk lately.