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.

-mailpatturnballdnest dream sun pm

-fry nye dreams to point of desperation. 2 hallmarqs:
.hard time doing it
.hardtime getting hi
+new: new sighkaietryst beclaws old naught efeqtibe

~the want to qwit meds
-med mom memo: incl. patient judgement volition. & responsibility

-09tues06>time2cuthe sugar(add)

-210 libras 2 liberate ad lib in libya

-*party cake*
-duh tyring worq of putting a life baq togeathear

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…

Last night had to’ve been the worse night I’ve had since my last smoke, though with my memory being what it is, who can tell?

I was sleepless, my legs electrified. I felt like life was sucky, or not so much sucky as just futile and uninteresting, but not particularly bad, per se. (That may be a fine line.) I wondered whether the Prosack had finally left my blood and left me dry. And with closer crack thoughts, like the Well-B had dug up and brought dezire to the surface. I was restless and unpleased, more accurately mildly, chronically, inescapably bugged. A buzzy bug that made my skin crawly.

I read about Larry L. King’s life in None But a Blockhead, which also seemed sucky and yet exciting. Here’s a line that strikes close to house:

After one has lived with a writing project for months or years, finishing it brings one quick burst of elation and then that unnerving feeling of being at loose ends. A deep-blue funky melancholy soon follows.

I soon learned there was also a physiological reason for my morose catatonia and deep fatigue. For months I had been taking “diet pills,” then easily available across the counter or loosely prescribed by many physicians. They were amphetamines or, in street jargon, plain old “speed.” I honestly did not know that or the long-range consequences of popping speed; all I knew was the pills made work easier. Each morning, on waking, I would take a diet pill with my coffee; soon would come this incredible burst of energy. I wrote, fingers flying, hour after hour, while sipping beer. When my energies flagged, I simply popped another pill. Invariably, there came a time each day when I was too energized to stay at a desk and so I fled into bars or the streets, rattling to strangers like a machine gun. Sometimes they looked at me funny.

Each morning, however, I woke to increasing fatigue and depression. I remember saying to Rosie, “I feel as if I want to cry, but I don’t know why.” “Take a pill,” she said. Thbe magic pills, sure enough, quickly restored my energy; I kept repeating the cycle and increasing the dose.…I ignored food for days and then devoured great masses of pizza or fried shrimp or cheeseburgers—usually to find that my body quickly rejected them. So I would pop another pill.

My morning (or some time morning-ish, anyway) this morning was coke, coke, coke: white crumbly leftovers across several bags, spilling and snorted up with the lint off a tweedy sportcoat, to almost tannish yellow good stuff that looked and snortled more like heroin than cocaine, and none of this not without a sensory experience of the side effects.

A cool, crisp morning away from the drama of the dog park, training and playing with Buddy in a new little grassy spot the city kindly fenced in for us to discover yesterday in our meanderings, cured the funk, at least for the time being.

Later this morning, Mom was in the process of writing me out a heftily generous check to pay off 80% of my credit card debt so I won’t have that hanging over my head, God bless her soul for that and everything else, and she jokes (half? I wonder) about that money not going to…a drug boss? was that how she put it?, and me assuring her that no dealer no matter the history with his or her client, no matter the money involved, no matter the relationship, no matter nothing, would ever give drugs out on credit. She said she did trust me, and I said, “Since we’re on the subject…” and I told her how it has become hard(er) again. So we had what turned into a talk. It ended with a point I admitted perhaps dramatic: it’s like the drugs are out of my body but not yet out of my soul, or spirit.

I didn’t mean that in the hellfire and damnation way it might have sounded, but yesterday I think I may have promised some more God talk today, so let’s go there now. Having my buddy Buddy has been maybe therapeutic in one or more of the obvious pop-psych ways and as an almost forcible redirecting of my focus and energies (outward to others and outward into the world, etc. etc.) but also, and perhaps most surpisingly, as a look at my own ridiculously stupid behavior as it is reflected by the dog.

The dog follows his nose, does what makes him happy, and he’s got some inexplicable weaknesses for things that stink and move fast. He sniffs things he shouldn’t. He doesn’t know what’s good for him. I try to tell him but we don’t communicate and he doesn’t listen and bad things happen and he still does those things that make those bad things happen. I cause some of those and have nothing to do with others and protect him from still others. I realize I shouldn’t be so dog like (dogged, if you will) and I realize that God, the one of the New Testament portion of the Christian bible specifically, has a role with me not unlike my role viz a vis the puppy. Which suddenly makes the whole idea of diety at once sensible and logical (if still short of self-evident) and exposed for what it is: an anthropomorphetish spawned from our utter helplessness in the galaxy.

I’m reminded of a (Mighty) Sphicter line I onced loved: “God sees dog in the mirror.”

Or, in terms mathematic: God <-> human <-> dog.

That time we knew would come has come. It has begun, at least.

The pipe dreams are stacking up. In the last two days I’ve had one take place in Guatemala—though it was Nicaragua I smoked crack in–and another take place in some kind of circus-y university-ish math-intensive environment which included the music of The Arctic Monkeys and the presence of my old friend Sam—not an insignificant detail considering my disappointment in Sam’s non-reaction when I came out to on the email list about a dozen college friends keep tight on. It might be petty; we haven’t seen each other for a while and haven’t written directly to each other for that long either, but he was a guy that was important to me and who I assumed still was and vice versa. In fact, my whole Osterized inner life seems to be on parade. The crack won’t go and neither will my ex-wife. I also dreamed that I was in a van with her and she was driving me to tears and shouts by turns and in combination. I ended up asking my mother to buy me a flight out of there—a very not insignificant detail considering the role ol’ Mom has played in rescuing me from the clutches of crack. Clearly I’m running back to mommy in hopes that she’ll rescue me from the clutches of that woman, too. Pathetic. It’ll be nice to see them leave my life. I don’t need to be haunted no more.

The dreams are old hat, sure, even if they are intensifying in quantity and quality, but the scary thing is that crack has lurked in those weird no-man’s lands between full sleep and full wakefulness when I’m thinking, not dreaming, but not thinking quite right, either. I’ve thought more thoroughly and in detail about that last week at Joe’s, the moment of loading and lighting and holding that first one and the sudden relaxation it brings. I’ve thought about the dealers I liked, Rich and Sparks, and meeting up with them again on the street for a handshake. I even considered, in the snoozy space after my mom left for the doctor’s and then babysitting grandkids and running errands leaving most of a day to me that maybe it was a day to get in the truck and find that trailer park again. That startled me a little. And then I made what seemed like the first actual no decision. The first time I really had to hold back. I thought about what it would mean and feel like—not thoroughly, mind you, but still—to go almost four months (I even guessulated how close to four months I must now be) and then have a setback, even if it was a one time thing, as I only ever thought of it being. It was all at least a little further than I’ve gone here in Arizona, but I was still in bed just shy of 100% cogniscient.

And then I was riding the bike back from Petco, lil’ buddy at myself. I start to wonder what it would be like—what I would be like—if there was really absolutely no God and I knew it. Sum totaled, I’m more or less an agnostic fellow. I say in sum total because bits and pieces of me scoff pure hogwash and other parts and parcels hesitate and hedge and worry and try to add up the coincidences and accidents that evolution has had to enjoy to get us where we are today. Of course, it has had time…

Anyway, there are temporal & terrestrial motivations for living clean and healthy, but if you were quite certain without even that shadow of a doubt that all the joy and pleasure you would ever receive you would get in this life and that thereafter would not bring punishment or reward of any kind, or even anything at all. I might just then be full-on hedonistic, perhaps selfish, maybe even evil if it served my happy purposes. Dogs have a contingency not unlike my hypothetical and many find it most advantageous and utilitarian to be good little doggies. And some of those have the life sucked out of them. It’s easier to be in a house and get your food for free. You do get heat and AC. But you’re stuck there almost all the time and when you’re not your at the end of a short leash that a big guy or gal feels free to jerk now and again.

It’s an interesting question and I think I’ll bring up the god<->dog analogy again next time, but let me get on to what happened after that. I reach the intersection and some cholo type with a beanie and a passenger make a right turn in front of me. I look at him and he looks at me. It’s too long a look. And I say to myself, if he stops, it’s a sign (from God!), and I’m asking. I thought that. But it was a longshot and the resolution was off the cuff anyway. I don’t think I would have gone through with it. I was awake, though, it’s worth noting. And it wasn’t a deliberation, note also. It was a giving up of responsibility. The kind that drug addiction hinges on.

This surfacing started Saturday (today’s Monday) when I was talking to a girl, Megan, at the dog park. She’s cute and cool as far as I can tell but that’s beside the point. Maybe… She mentions Pioneer park, the one I mentioned here and speculated about not long ago. I don’t even remember what it was in reference to now (which says something both about what life has done to my memory and where my mind was at the moment, what was important), but she was like, “you know, the one with the drug deals…”. I was right! I thought, and then, briefly, felt a draw from that very direction.

Time to dig in.