Holy damnarama! It’s been two, three weeks and the world has changed! Just about everything’s happened. Why haven’t I been writing about it? I’ll tell you why. On top of being occupied with many other new, v. difficult, exciting, and crazy things—and being overwhelmed with it all—my computer finally crapped out, kicked the hot-swappable bucket. Right there on that last post, right where the ellipsis is. Actually, way past there. My fingers were flying. I was already behind in the logging camp, and the events leading up to that post were already of a quasi-planetary-shattering nature. So, I’m going, going, going, and of course telling myself to save, that it’s better to save than be sorry, and in so doing—or not doing—I cursed myself. Deep into a blow-by-blow account of my sobbing, hysterical and embarrassing breakdown—an account that included psychological intricacies that are now lost to me—I got the ol’ blue screen of death. I yelped and ran out of the room. My mother was watching TV. She knew immediately. In fact, she had marvelled to herself at the roll I was on shortly before. She had heard the veritable roar coming from my fingers. And its fruits were gone in a poof.

Not only did I lose the writing, I lost the machine, more or less. The heart of the thing actually works as well as it did (which wasn’t all that well at all) but the USB ports went out. You’ll remember that I went to the USB bank after blowing my PCMCIA slot…I’m losing you. Point is, no more Internet access, no way to connect the camera or iPod…time to bite the bullet and borrow more money (more debt!) to replace the essential tool of my existence. I did. I’m using it now. But I’m getting ahead of myself and, besides, in the meantime, I was demoralized. Don’t underestimate the power of demoralization. And now, telling the story overwhelms me, and in such cases I scrap the straight narrative and go for a more nuggety nougatey style. So where did I leave off?

I’m self-conscious about coming home late which makes me either pickup on or imagine my mother’s worrisome wonder, which adds a measure of defensiveness to the equation. All put together, I do something awkward I think—I don’t remember what—and say, “I’m not high, I swear.” The self-consciousness ups a notch, Mom looks closer (now that you brought it up…), the SC ups again in response, I laugh, which only serves to increase her suspicions and my SC even more, she says, “Are you sure?” and I start to address the issue as well when the phone rings. She answers. I feel it was a serious moment that shouldn’t have been interrupted. It was my sister (who’s made cameos here before). She had called to share a non-12-step site she found. Now I’m upset that she’s discussing, sharing, and/or coordinating this with Mom and not me, so that comes into the mix at hang-up. Another call. Another answer. I go to my room pissed and close the door, ranting ‘n’ raving in my little head. After the long call, Mom knocks gently, apologizes nicely but I’m needing to vent and do, including a statement about how I felt she didn’t listen to me. Her turn to get defensive. I go on. Pretty soon I’m breaking down in those big embarrassing heaving tears you get when everything just volcanoes up to the surface. I get quite dramatic, too, saying things like what a hard, lonely road to hoe it’s been lately, and other crap like that. Mom softens right up; she knows I need it. I finish catharting, we eat a late dinner and I speak calmly and at more length about how I just feel lost and don’t know what to do with myself and life or how to reconstruct aspects of myself, like my social self, in a way that works. Dismal.

Some where along back in there, Mom told me she saw a 911 dispatcher job listing in the paper. I like that idea very much because I’ve always been drawn to witnessing the most intense, terrifying, sad and hysterical moments in real people’s lives. I go on the city website and check out the volunteer ops while I’m at it. There’s one for contemporary arts docent. I’m excited about that, too. Later Mom spots a veterinarian assistant opening. I’ve long and often daydreamed about my becoming a vet. On Friday after intermediate obedience class, I ask the teacher about what happened to that assistant guy that was there the first class but not since. And can I have his job. I figured it was something intern-y. He encourages me to just apply for a pet training instructor position through the website. Suddenly there’s a shift in my world view. My outlook on life. I’ve got exciting prospects and there’s a calm that follows the crash.

The dispatcher application arrives in the mail and has questions like “Have you ever been stopped by a police officer? Have you ever used drugs? How many times?” Uhm, innumerable? Background check, too. I don’t bother. Here you have a great example of the negative repercussions of being delinquent on several fronts. Applied for arts volunteering and am still waiting to hear. Ditto with the vet. Got the training gig at the big ol’ pet store. Happened so fast. Had to buy pants and shoes. (It should be noted, especially considering my aversion to shopping, that I finally got some shorts and a cazh shirt not long ago, as well.) I’m knee deep or deeper into training. Two 40-hourers for that, then part-time thereafter until business supports more. Loving it. Am pretty good, too, I think. Have to substitute for Jess Wednesday and Saturday of this week. Five classes each day, 10 different classes total. I’m excited and nervous.

Got a work anec for you: there’s a kind of kooky (but cool) woman in Charlie’s class. We comment on her kookiness. Michelle from equine is walking by. Charlie asks her opinion. She puts the thumb-and-forefinger joint jesture to her lips and says, “Crack’s not good for you.” Charlie laughs and agrees back with his own version of same. I’m this close to agreeing up with my sober (in both senses) version.

It’s a good thing I’m gainfully (more or less) employed because I did taxes back in there somewhere and whew! $2K I owed. They don’t take credit cards but my debit rolls over to my 0% intro rated Visa. Only problem is that I discovered after the fact that it was billed not as a purchase but as a payment. Which equals cash. Which garners that crazy 20% finance charge. $50 just on the first statement.

The major drawback to reentering the job force and experiencing increased activity on other fronts at the same time (good heavens, imagine the time toll the girlfriend I wouldn’t mind having would take!) is that my major goals of electronicizing my notebooks, roughly drafting out a novel, and bringing the Tribology project more perfectly together, not to mention learning to play the bongos and getting in shape and…are not anywhere near being done or even very well on their way and will surely come to a standstill. That’s a big price to pay. It’s very disappointing. But, too, they were big projects and moving on in other areas is healthy and good for the biggest project of never smoking crack or sniffsnorting up any little bit of cocaine ever again.

Out of the blue I got an email from Ricardo, El Chaparro, in Xela. About one sentence. I wrote back and referenced his much earlier email in which he’d confessed to giving up what we used to call the “chifle” (a term I picked up from an Argentinian in Granada), cutting way back on time with Chilly Willy and Co at Coco Loco, finding a girlfriend, and God, too. I told him I’d done some of that. Pretty much the distancing myself from my Chapin friends and giving up the cocococaine. He emailed back right away. Confirmed that he was still on the new track. We quietly celebrated our chiflelessness long distance.

Hung with cousins I haven’t seen since the ’80s and whose names I’d forgotten. I had to tell them that, too. And ask them if they’d forgotten mine as well. They had.

Easter came and went as it does every year. Mom likes Peeps (you know, those foul pink or yellow sugarcoated marshmallow lumps that are supposed to look like baby chicks). I gathered up an armful of boxes, 12 I think, in the drugstore and asked the staring lady on the way out whether she thought I had enough. She said she didn’t know. It was 180 in total and with them I created a veritable Peep pyramid on the dining table in a shallow arc with flowers on each end for my mom to find when she came home from church. When she did, she busted out laughing and laughing. Bingo. I’d also left a card at the base of the stack. In it I wrote something to the effect that if Easter is about rebirth, new growth, and redemption, thank you for giving me mine this year. That choked her up. Double bingo. In fact, Bingo was his name-o.

I shopped for and bought a computer as I mentioned. Let me mention also my restraint in not upgrading to a gig of RAM and an extra 20 of hard space and so on. Once again, I buy the cheapest I can find (short of picking up a used or three year old model). And I got a good deal. Sufficient for my needs. Whoopee!

The Gators won the NCAA championship this year. Go Gators! The Gator Nation rules the world on two fronts now. And now “El Matador” Mayorga has got a pay-per-view event coming up with De La Hoya. Too bad I can’t justify the $50. Figured I could get a situation together on Craigslist that would have a few guys splitting the cost to sit together on one of our couches that Saturday, but figured also that that would inevitably mean beer, too, and I didn’t want that distraction and challenge. Not yet. My bossboy invited me out for a drink and chat after work for a little getting-to-know-ya’ time, I guess. I said, “Ah, I’ll hang out…” He said, “Soda or water?” I said, “Yeah.” And, though not ideal, that works. Different context. And before we move on, let me state for the record that I think boxing is not the most noble or proud human pasttime, but Mayorga is Nica and he’s got a distinctly street style which I love, though not so much when he gets too dirty and lowdown.

I’ve been averaging .71 visits to the library per day. Lots more fascinating dog books, including Cesar Millan’s new bestseller. Now I don’t have time to read them. Also, a tiny novel by a German kid called The Bird Is a Raven. Also, all the Twilight Zone videos not already checked out, and checked out the Rod Serling website in my new TZ enthusiasm (he’s the guy who created, produced, narrated and wrote half the episodes for the series; Charles Beaumont wrote some of my favorites, though).

Younger sis invited me to Fiddlesticks for go-carting, mini-golfing, and laser-tagging with her boy while her daughters and husband were off at the church daddy-daughter campout. Running around in the dark shooting single-digit-aged people is every bit as much and more fun than I expected it to be, which is good when we’re trying out or going back to good, clean wholesome funs. Older sis invited me to Gene Autry for their church picnic. That included Hailey. Actually, it was Hailey that invited me, now that I think about it. I told her to check her schedule and call me so that we could practice our sword dancing. The outing would provide the perfect opportunity. We did it. I suck but 10-year-old kicks booty. Don’t take this the wrong way but she’s way cool. Just lacks about 20 years…

Shit done gone down at the dog park. First, I finally got my friend Maria with the gorgeous Akita mixes to speak more than nine words of Spanish with me. She gave me her email and took my number to faciliate our getting together with her husband who also wants to/should learn. I emailed but haven’t heard. Ran into her today as she was bringing one of those beautiful boys into the store for an appointment with the vet. He’s not eating, and she didn’t mention anything about our plans to intercambiar over some carne asada in their backyard. But neither was she as forthcoming with the sympathy, shock, or horror that I would have liked when I told her what happened to Buddy. First thing she says to me is why haven’t I been going to the dogpark. (And that’s something, I’ll admit; she/they missed me or at least noticed my absence). So I answer her by telling her that not this last Saturday but the one before, an unneutered dog bit a deep gash in Buddy’s paw and punctured his leg, that I had to spend $126 and the morning at the vet’s to get four staples put in the foot (sans anesthesia! the poor kid screamed four times!), and that I couldn’t return until it healed. (I didn’t tell her that in the meantime he’d become stir-crazy and torn out a couple staples chasing pigeons at the empty alternative park in a wipe out chasing pigeons.) She helped me remember that it was Jimmy and not his housemate Buster, whom I thought was the culprit, but she didn’t say it was a shame or any of that.

I may be enjoying a break from the hassledrama of Bark Avenue but I’m not happy about missing Megan. I finally finagled my way into getting her to plan a hike for us with our dogs. She knows a trail nearby. I couldn’t understand her directions, you see. She’d have to take us. And she agreed. But that was to be the Sunday after the dog-fight Saturday. I had to meet her to cancel. (Yes, I should have gotten a phone number under the pretense of just such a possibility.) Man, I hated to do that. She’s smart, interesting, and cute. I’m lonely-ish (but not in the pathetic way I just made it sound). I did confirm my willingness to help her move this coming weekend (citing a karmic obligation after the help I myself have received over the years). She said she’d counted on it, which I choose to read as a positive sign. In short, it’s about as big as my rejoining the workforce, but it’s far more precarious at this point.

Yes, good stuff seems to be materializing but it’s been hard sucky hard of late, too. The coke and crack dreams have gotten worse, have sunk to new all-time lows, and the key difference is that in them I typically have a sense of having gone without for sometime and am frustrated and tired of it to the point of giving up. Let me rattle off some examples:

• In one I’ve got goods but no lighter so I borrow one but the wind is blowing and/or there are untrusted people in the vicinity and so on.
• In another I get busted in a coke buy.
• And on another night, the cops bust me twice.

Perhaps there’s something to this getting busted part. Like the white side of my subconscious is doing its damnedest to turn these peep shows into little morality tales.

There was a crescendo of these foreboding and wearisome dreams that would bleed over into those half-awake times during which I’d beg for mercy from this abstinence slog. I’d think that I really did want to go out and do a just-this-once to put myself out of my misery. Just This Once is the number one lie addicts tell themselves and thank God, Darwin, or my own old soul that upon full wakefulness, I decided that was not, in fact, what I truly wanted or needed. At my last appointment, I told Doc about it. He told me it was because I had no dopamine up there. He told me about a recent study, that he learned of in a recent seminary, that found little or no improvement, change, or healing in the brain of a cocaine addict after four months of abstinence. He showed me images of brain scans at four months post. I’m right at four months myself. So doc pondered over strategy. He came up with Gabitril, an anti-seizure med just starting to be used alternatively in cases like mine. But it’s new and I’m his Guinea pig, as he put it. Mom says it has flattened my affect (which is embarrassing to say the least; who wants a flat affect?). I felt grumpy for a 2-3 day spell, maybe more, but don’t know if there was a relationship there. The Internet said it makes you stupid and drunk, which was and is scary in a new job context but it’s seemed to maybe make me chilled but also maybe something else I can’t quite touch a finger to.

Just the other day—April 29th, to be exact—in the paper—the East Valley Tribune, to be exact—there was a front-pager about Mexico’s new drug laws which essentially make possession and usage of small quantities lawful. As the paper put it, “Some of the amounts are eye-popping.” The stated logic behind it involves the reduction of enforcement’s burden from what they consider petty crimes in order to focus on larger-scale trafficking and to help, rather than incarcerate, addicts. The Whitehouse calls the move “unhelpful” but I can’t think of anything more helpful. Part of me pines to return to that golden land of cocaine. It was damn easy last time I was in Mexico City; I can only imagine the free-for-all it will now be. I’m not sure how I feel about the law itself, but I don’t like the effect it’s had on me already.

Is that enough stuff? I think it’s a lot of stuff. I’d have more if I could decipher the shorthand I scribbled on a Post-It to, ironically, remember to write about it. Here’s what it says (if I’m making out the spelling correctly):

• magical footwear
• kyon -dog
• ymir -spirit of evil
• “I hate you” (crack)

It’s a love-hate relationship in which I’m cultivating the hate aspects, actually. That part’s significant. The first three, God only knows.

Anyway, it was interesting, that storm before the calm. The freakout and then the possibility. Directions to try. I’m down with that. Up with that. Something.

Oh, speaking of upping…I’m still huckin’ up black donut holes. Just for the record. Or if anybody’s doing a scientific experiment to see how long it takes for crack tar to leave the system. Four months and running, so far.