Hi, Hum

Take this right on Country Lane, (curb-stone 1948, well-kept lawns and respectable grandmotherly houses) (it goes only one block, Country Lane)--- then left on Worley-Worley (the drive-by street, dangerous even in daylight) seven blocks, a right turn, a u-turn on Mexican Gravel Road (leads to Mexico, Mo.) since I drove too far on Worley-Worley. Back one block to the Oak Wilt apartments, left, (which would have been a right, correct) and there's a city truck with a wood-chipper parked and shooting fresh golden wood chips into the street. I drive through, and down the street are two fire trucks, and men opening and testing the fire hydrants. It's refreshing to your ears, driving across the thickish, white foamy stream.

Two miles. I slide into the gravel parking of The Dead End Club, where there are about 15 cars and trucks baking in the sun. The summer heat enforces its menacing silence here.

A black Ford Cherokee has a bumper-sticker that reads "Higher Powered". Someone else, another AA conventioneer, has a sticker that makes me blush even more: "Screw Guilt" it says.

Attending a meeting feels like a surrender again. That's just as well, perhaps.

It felt better back in the days I was simply lonesome and lascivious. On the look-out. Now, recently, I've stopped thinking of these people as "alcoholics" and more as "confused, emotional fuck-ups" like me, who didn't grow up and were out-smarted in their bluff, given away by their tall, thin shadows at dawn.

They're unattractive and I belong. The joke is about being a quitter, but I was a quitter before I quit. My last few months stoned, I'd watched everything go. I did nothing so something would finally happen.

I'm not looking for answers, and I'm not able to provide any, not even to the newcomer. There's a spirit here I need. Something inside of me turns around toward new life again, during most AA meetings. There is a reminder of something important and impossible to actually remember for more than a few days at a time.

Oh. Here it is. What I have to remember: That we're free now, and growing again, and it's easier together but it's hard. And fair.

There's hope. We might pass for normal, the world might not get its revenge if we stay together and have these services. The preamble, the reading of "How It Works", the 12 traditions (a masterpiece of Anarchism), evolved over twenty years and finally written down, and then the "Promises", which I find believable, without mysticism, full of contractual Ifs and Thens.

There's dread. The world might pass us by all right. Every year sober is another year older, too.

That's what's been crawling down my neck and my back lately, something else that makes me want to drink and gamble this paycheck. There have been moments on the assembly line, with too much time to think, I become certain that if I sat down at a bar and had a drink, suddenly everything would make sense again. Suddenly I would remember myself and god help me, be almost tearfully happy.

In mid-sentence.... "...You may understand me, Quilty, but thank god I don't understand you..."

This sobriety, unlike one previous, has been an angry, wriggling like a bug stuck on a pin sobriety; two years now, after being put down, staying put down. Allowing this has --at times--shamed me. Sometimes it shames me I haven't gone criminal at last; by now I should have the brains, the initiative -- just the initiative!-- to try and get myself some government or insurance money misdirected into my account.

I can't work. I've worked, don't you see, so I know this. I can't work. I have to get by.

I'm safe but condemned. I'm loved, possibly, but I don't love back, except in agape or by obsession, an attempt to do right or being helplessly infatuated ...either way, all resentful affairs, doomed from the start.

What did I want. I would remember, I think, in a barrel going over the falls.