The crack dreams are getting worse. In the past couple days (with post-company naps, and all), I’ve had three or four of those puppies. In the first one, I dreamt that I was at some conglomeration of a university, wading into crack territory, went to the Trails store (an Arizona head shop chain) across the street to get a stem, and somewhere in there realized I had one to scrape. In the worse one, I was on my way to cop some crack and suddenly I was back in New York and back at my old job, dealing not only with the shame of coming back to work but also seeing close friends again. I was preparing to start work but was thinking about/planning on finishing the score for one last time before shaping up and shipping out the habit. (This is typical logic for me and a lot of other addicts. A very seductive one.) The one today has already faded. It was fairly generic from what I remember.

Though intuitively, you’d expect it to get easier the more entrenched the habit becomes, but in a way this worsening makes sense to me. Time and time again I’ve been able to resolve to drop something just like that and hold it for any number of hours, days, and weeks, even years, but, as evidenced that I’ve done it “time and time again,” those first steps have been easier than the keeping it going because at the point of my resolve, I’ve grown tired of the thing I’m quitting, seen too much of the downside, and exhausted its productive and social value and fun. I get health, energy, perspective, productivity and happiness back again and then I start to miss the good old times before I got sick of it all and began to suffer the consequences. I start to forget what it actually felt like, smelled like. I begin to think I’ve learned my lesson, that I’ve innured myself, that I can control it, and deserve it, and that, in fact, the novelty of normal living has now, too, lost its luster in turn. I’m the pendulum over the pit.

Was reading the East Valley Tribune this morning. Back page of the first section, I think it was, a headline read that meth use on the reservation had reached near-crisis levels. I hate this. My thoughts were as follows:

• There’s a reservation less than a mile from here.
• Haven’t done some proper meth for a good long time.
• Wonder how easy it would be to worm in with some native Americans?
• Hanging with injuns would be a fun new twist.

Again, it wasn’t a serious consideration. Just an imagining that lasted only a couple moments. But that was my first reaction.

Meth is bad. (As if crack isn’t, but, I mean, it is.) I’m not going to say it’s a bad sign because I don’t think it determines my future, but it does say something about where I am the process mentally.

Where I am physically is comparable. Significant progress has been made as noted this morning by my departing maternal grandparents who operate under the belief that I contracted some crud in Guatemala, but there’s still plenty to go as noted indirectly by my waking mother this morning whose first words to me were “You had a rough night” in reference to the violent and prolonged coughing fits I suffered through the dark hours. When it was light enough to see, I saw that what came up matched the night in darkness viscosity.

For the afternoon exercise session ayer I pulled out the beach cruiser with baskets, roped up the dog, and set off ziggily-zaggily throught the neighborhood. Eventually we came upon the backside of an apartment complex that I have seen the frontiside of many a day, whizzing past on my way to or fro, and invariably, whether in some cobby recess of the mind or right there front and center behind my forehead, have reckoned with a gunmetal wistiness that the place is the kind of place where connections and maybe deals could be made. I have, as mentioned, a cursed knack for making such assessments. Now the place was in reach, accessible, and it brimmed no less with possibility, and I wanted to crack that nut, for its own sake, in order to prove myself on those grounds, but not necessarily to sniff, snort, or smoke the fruits of that labor. So there’s a twist.

I turn down toward home and some Pacific Nor’wester guy with a stufft burrito backpack, blond beard, saggy-assed jeans, blue canvas/suede hikers, and a lopey gait was walking on the sidewalk in front of us. With the baskets and the dog, even a bike lane is a little narrow on a five-laner that busy, so I opted to turn out onto the vacant lot conveniently located right there beside us and pass him that way. Somehow I timed that move perfectly enough to run both tires and all four paws smackdab through a wide pile of sticker burrs the same color as the beige dust below them. The bike made a sound just more thuddy than snow tires on asphalt and the dog stood arched. I dragged both through the traffic light and swerved off into the grass on the corner. Poor dog stood there funny because all his feet had thorns in them. I made quick work of those, and then passed several light cycles plucking the 168 others studding the fat tires’ radius.

The rehabilitation lesson for the day? Don’t waver from the path.

I just want to say that I had no dreams last night.

Thank you.

And today I’m off Prozac.

Thank you, thank you.

Lots of family things going on—sisters’ and brother’s families coming for dinner to visit G&G G, not to mention time spent with G&G G themselves—all of which is good, but disruptive to any sort of self-rescuing program.

All of those folks are very into their religion, the religion I was raised in. This isn’t a chill Catholic kiind of religion where if you show up for Easter and Christmas, you’ve gone an extra day. This one’s a big deal. I’m out with Mom. She asked me why I don’t go. I said I didn’t buy it. I added that I’d like to believe, that it would make things easy, at least in terms of direction and focus, and those are the big things in my life, especially now. But that data isn’t shared with the extended family. I don’t know how much of it seeps through in vibes and other signs but it wasn’t an issue until this weekend when the church broadcast their semi-annual shindig: two sessions each Saturday and Sunday. I planned to bow out. I told Mom I wouldn’t mind showing up for one two-hour block, but four of them was quite a lot. But it was sticky and I didn’t feel like making an issue. At the last minute I sat down in front of the cable channel with the other three. And then I did again in the afternoon. And twice again Sunday. At one point, at least, I was only one out of four (counting the dog) watching the sermons. Ironic, indeed.

I feel like a relunctant good sport. But does it smack of avoidance to everybody else? I “wasted” eight hours to that Godly odyssey. One could make an effective argument that honesty and healing require that I be true to my own beliefs (or non-beliefs), own up to who I am and be up front about it. Yes, but I also think an argument can be made for making your mother, who is supporting you, happy by throwing an occasional bone her way, and for not causing your grandparents concern, and for not making waves and rumors ripple out into the family, and for taking what you can get out of a bunch of old Christians advocating charity and other quality of life issues. I even acquiesed to pray, which was difficult, but since we’re eating three meals a day together, each preceded by a blessing, it would be awkward for the turns to go only three ways and not four (when it’s just me and Mom, she always says it), so in my mind I made “God” a metaphor for good things and looked at it as a way to acknowledge general gratitude and focus on our lofty good-hearted desires. That’s a good thing, even if I went about it in a way that for me was euphemistic. Interesting issues in any case. And, incidentally (or spookily or inspiredly or…depending on one’s position on the subject), two of the Saturday discourses spoke very directly about the chains of addiction, and if I remember right, the big A got a nod the second day as well.

Okay, now that we have the meaty stuff of waking life out of the way, let’s get back to the dreamlog, shall we?

In one weekend episode, I’m traveling up to a sacred land up north (okay, it’s obvious now, isn’t it?) and I’m planning to do crack one (last?) time during the day off and into the night before I go back to work. It had been awhile, I’d almost forgotten how it tasted. This is how I feel in real life right now, surprise, surprise. And getting back to work, well, the job market is calling. Anyway, then suddenly I’m in New York. Maybe I traveled up there actually. I’m looking for Hec. I’m drinking, smoking, and literally holding on to a self-propelled (at a very high velocity) lawn mower, my feet flying out behind me. Well, that last detail was just a minor moment in the dream but I couldn’t leave it out. I lose Hector, if I ever find him (who can remember these things?), but some other vaguely familiar or newly familiar or not at all familiar partier finds me and invites me back to his place with 2-3 others. We climb up a ladder. Guy is rolling 420. Tall female cop shows up through the window. I run other way, crack pipe in pocket. I move it to my nearly knee-high mud boot (why?) en route. I foggy-feel like I, at some point, had some sense  of or awareness that I was dreaming of crack and/or coke in the first segment(s) and then doing it for real in final dream as I contemplated on that. How’s that for metadata?

All of that was in one night, Friday or Saturday, my records are incomplete. Last (Sunday) night I have what I only remember as a barrage of crack dreams in some ways similar to the above. I’ve not done it for a while but it’s almost as if I can’t hold out any longer. The draw is there, and the resistance not so much now that I’m feeling better and the good life isn’t seeming to lead me anywhere. So I end up buying against my better judgement (all of these dreams are about procuring and not so much about consuming). But this buying-against-my-better-judgement is not like the BAMBJ of old. This time I’ve more like given up. And for that it’s more disturbing, both in the logic of the dream and after I wake.