Woke up sad this morning. ‘S mostly worn off now but, whew, was a God damn day yesterday.

Starts off Mom’s going to the temple with her newbie friend, which means she won’t be home for old fashioned rolled oats and raisins when Buddy and I get home from the park, and that means I’m off to search out some Mexicano hole in the wall for a hearty clogging chorizo breakfast. That’s just what I do when we don’t eat meals together, which is rare.

I found a gem, too. Tiny place. Called Adrian’s #2, right on Main. One guy to take the orders, cook them up, ring them up, and say que te vaya bien. Two dirty ass manual laboring fellows at one table, I take the first dirty table I come to, and later to snazzy fellas take a table in the corner. Mexi-snaz. Possibly pearled snaps down the front of a muraled shirt. The alligator boots. The whole nine. Breakfast is good: potatoes, refrieds runny the way they should be, scrambleds and the crumbled sausage, salsa and hot rolled tortilla on the side, all preceded by a banana liquado because I couldn’t wait to save it for my meal. I wish the end of the day was like the beginning…

So, I’m in there watching these two polar opposite pairs in there because I have nothing else to do (and even if I did, I might not like it as much), and I think about which might be better to approach. Theoretically, of course. I did the same thing the day before at Salsita’s. Not quite as magically hole-y a place, but still predominantly patronized by hispanics among who I scouted out coke leads. I didn’t dwell on it, but it crossed my mind. The Mexican connection.

Later in the day it became suddenly obvious and I was almost ashamed for not realizing it sooner: most of the coke I got in New York was from Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, then I’m bingeing on a daily and occasionally epic basis in Nicaragua, buying from the locals, of course, who else?, and then I’m scoring all over Guatemala. I score in Honduras. I score in Mexico. And later I ingratiate myself in and further foster a Carolina cocaine culture with nothing but a network of illegal Santa Cruzians (and the token Michoacano) across several apartments and houses. Can I be blamed if I see Latinos and think coke? Given my history, it’s not only a natural association, but damn near Pavlovian in the best (or worst) sense.

Down Main from the restaurant I pass a trailer park and rubber neck as I go by. Was it the trailer park? The fated location of my one and only Arizona score? (I say ‘fated’—and this is an important point—because if I hadn’t've copped and binged here in Arizona, I probably wouldn’t have been driven to ‘fess up and ask for help, instead trying to go on hiding and making excuses, which could have very well, especially considering my track record on this propensity, been counterproductive and failure-doomed). I fleetingly imagine pulling in just to see how it feels. Up on the left is the park. I know about the park. I scan it. It’s pretty much empty. I’m kind of surprised. Yeah, it’s not the right time. It’s like nine or something, but come on, aren’t there any hardcorers around here? Weak.

And that’s that.

I’m laundering, I’m puttering, and late afternoon I’m going to meet this so-called Karen in Tempe to practice Spanish. She’s not the best, but finally I’m actually stringing more than one sentence together and saying it out. After all the imaginary Spanish conversations I’ve had in my head while driving around this brown-gravied town, that was quite a relief. I think I bubbled up and spilled over.

And I see good looking college girls around. And I think in all this floundering I should just pick some hard science that will admit a non-traditional liberal arts grad and thereafter pay a handsome sum, and just go back to school. Pick a new, possibly exciting direction and have one of those socially prescribed, rote, and nearly guaranteed paths on which to get there.

Easy. Except I know that I don’t know how to do that any more. And that was my strong suit. I always admired the smartest, wittiest kid I knew, Ben, for being a community college dropout after one semester and coming to know just about everything through pure osmositic autodidactism. That’s bad ass. But me, I excel in a structured environment. I like school. I do school fairly to pretty well.

But on American college campuses there is a lot of drinking and drug partaking and it’s not like you can avoid any social scene at all, like you can at the office from which you go home to family or whatever. You’ve got social groups. And hell, who would want to isolate her or himself in such a luscious, brimming-with-possibility atmosphere anyway. Wouldn’t half the fun (and frustration) be seeing how many twenty-something girlies would have a thirty-something something? You get friends for free at universities. And I like friends. But even if I’m selective to the point of limiting myself to only the finest, most upstanding citizen students who have a Fridaynight glass of $8 merlot with dinner whether they need it or not, I am historically and notoriously bad at single glasses of anything. They seem to multiply in my hands, and from there I prove once and for all that with my expertise, the slippery-slope argument is not a categorical fallacy but a perrenial reality.

I.E. I cannot handle school.

And that realization brings with it the realization that I’m a hermit. This was the first time I’d been out anywhere with anyone other than my immediate family. Karen, only been in Arizona for two weeks, knew more places and had met more friends than I had in almost four months. Pathetic. And hard. And maybe good for right now, but it’s like adding insult to injury. Getting one’s life put back together should not bring on such utter loneliness.

I go by the public library and rent about 14 things to drown my sorrows in—mostly dog training porn and old Twilight Zone episodes. The latter will prove pinpointedly relevant as the night progresses. Here’s a quote I pulled:

Because I’m sad. Because I’m nothing and because I”ll live and die in a crumby one-roomer with dirty walls and crack[ed] pipes. I’ll never even have a girl. I’ll never be anybody because half of me is this horn. I can’t even talk to people, Barron, ’cause this horn, that’s half my language, but not when I’m drunk, Barron.

Oh, when I’m drunk, boy, I don’t see the dirty walls or the crack[ed] pipes. I don’t know the clock’s goin’, that the hours are going by, ’cause then I’m Gabriel. Oh, I’m Gabriel with a golden horn, and when I put it to mylips it comes out jewels, it comes out a symphony, comes out the smell of, off fresh flowers in summer. It comes out beauty.

Beauty.

When I’m drunk, Barron, only when I’m drunk.

from “A Passage For Trumpet,” The Twilight Zone, 20 May 1960

But ‘progress’ isn’t the right word, I don’t think.

By the time these outings, moral dilemm…