Yesterday Buddy and I went to the library (he waited in the car) and then Pioneer Park where they’ve fenced off the old locomotive I played on as a kid. The park’s about as downtown Mesa as anything, and Mesa’s about as Mexican and Mexico. I like that. There were some freaks of all ethnicity roaming around in there. That started the juices flowing. Buddy’s juices flowed, too, but he didn’t poop in the park because something in his little brain requires a fence to be in front of his face before he squats. So we crossed the street and I walked him around the apartment building across the street in search of suitable pooping grounds. The apartment building across the street was clearly mostly rented by a Hispanic population without a lot of money. Now let’s do some addition (I just wrote ‘addiction’ and had to erase the ‘c’): I like to speak Spanish with strangers; Mexicans, if they like any drug at all, like la coca; there’s something about the ghetto microcosm that’s magnetic to my personality; the last place I lived I cracked (no pun) into the scene at La De Arana, made wonderful friends, did so-so coke, had a wonderful time; it had been a long time since I’d done anything like that, exercised willfull abandon, or even been out of my mother’s house. The sum total had me imagining myself living in that apartment building, the Latino lessors marveling at my perro as I’ve heard them do, me hanging around, maybe at dusk, saying hello, sipping a beer, eventually offering one when a where-did-you-learn-Spanish conversation went a little long, being invited in for tacos, laughing at the ranchera song, broaching the subject, going on a little errand, and having a grand night with my new friends with whom I would from then on enjoy evenings after work and barbecues if I could get up for them or stomach them. There I went too far. The point is that I was tempted to break that scene, and not just for the bliss of drugs but for its own sake, to prove once again that I could do it as an outsider. I felt myself feel that and I felt my loneliness sharper than usual, perhaps ever, since landing at Sky Harbor. And then I felt vulnerable, perhaps more than I have since landing at Sky Harbor. And then I felt frightened. More so than ever. It’s been relatively easy to be good so far, but I haven’t really been out in the world, and I haven’t been at it long. I may not be that good at being good yet. I haven’t passed any qualifying exams. I did take hope, though, in thinking of the hard parts (those crusty mornings on no sleep), the good things going now, and the likelihood that I’ll only grow stronger (though the whole episode was a reminder to not get to glib about any post-failure success).

I’ve mentioned that the grandfolks are here. I can’t keep up with them. They got to watching some crappy TV last night and I had to say goodnight. Think I was in bed by nine o’, which of course got me to marvellin’ at the difference between eight days straight of rapid brain movement without rapid eye movement and having your grandparents stay awake three hours longer than you. And that got me to dreaming, like I am wont. Last night it was my giving a glass of wine to my teetotaling grandmother who gulped it in one and then aske me what it was. I told her it was a fruit punch with a grape juice base and apples and oranges pureed on in. Then we tried not to act drunk, and we kind of went crazy in the mall.

’s been a week since I last showed my face around here. A lot’s happened. I’m pretty sure what got me off track was tackling my taxes last Thursday. I’s expecting to get a little to little-lot back. Worked six months, got taxed at my Project Manager salary, did take the early (way early) distribution on the IRA but I instructed Putnam to go ahead with the witholding. I assumed I was covered, safe from my addict self and addict ways. Bingo.

In fact, federal witholding they did. Ten percent penalty they did not. Nor did they state or city witholding, and in the NYC, that’s an unpretty penny for sure. By late morning I was almost another $2K in the hole. I was already walking a fine financial line. This was the debt that broke the addict’s back and I was despondent. It meant I had to get my ass back into the job market just when I was getting into a productive swing; everything else would have to go back on interminable hold.

I got depressed about it. Really depressed. Despite two Prozacs and two Wellbutrins. They were no match. Luckily I had my ladies. The old, straight-laced ones. Pretty much my only friends in Arizona: my mother and her almost lifelong friend (who, incidentally, takes so many supplements—like sixty a day—that her hair’s fallen out). We planned another matinee and sweet pork afternoon.

Nobody knew what we were watching. Mom got a recommendation from her trusted sources and off we were. It was Thursday, my day off, so I was allowed. Opening scenes have Matt McCaugnaheyheyhey (sp?) wiggle-wagging under the sheets with some dame. It turned my companions into Scarlett Johansens. “Risque” was a word I heard used. It didn’t bother me, but the fact that it was about loser 30-somethings still living at home did. Seemed like a targeted message from ma, but she swore up and down it wasn’t. I believe her. Despite my incessant teasing, I think she enjoys my company. Matthew, though, at least he’s attractive (hot!), smooth as fudge, and a yacht broker. He gets Sarah Jessica. I’m a bit (quite!) further down the loser ladder.

Friday Buddy and I start intermediate. Charlie, the new teach, kicks bumbum.

Saturday, who knows? The ol’ short-term memory won’t allow that kind of extraneous information, but I can tell you that all along I’m having the drug dreams. One’s a meth dream. In another my dealer’s nabbed. In a G-rated short, I’m hiding a half-smoked ciggy between my shorted thighs. And in another episode, I’m hiding bags of coke in my sexy negro Roger’s closet. They’re all reality show spinoffs, but that one takes its cues from when I was passing through the city right about two years ago. Hit Rog up for accomodations. His roomie was off on vacay so I crashed in his bed. Saw very little of my host and spent more than enough time trying not to snot up the roommate’s black and showy sheets.

And all of this is in fact significant, I found out. Sunday was markd by little more than the chuging up of a black speckled hemoGLOBin on the 100th day of my new fangled sobriety, but Monday was my monthly with Doc B. I said I was ready to leave the Prozac behind and lower the Well-B’s. He agreed on the Prozac. Can’t tell you how happy that’s made me. But I got to stick with the Wells until my “cravings” go away. Then we’ll go with a stimulant for the ADDDDD…

What counts as cravings, I politely inquire. Those times when I experience just a touch of high nostalgia though I’m sure I have no desire to cross that terrain again? Yes. And the dreams.

The dreams are a subconscious manifestation of my desire?

Apparently.

Interesting.

I need to think on that a bit.

Meantime, Tuesday, the fine faculty female from the school district I visited a while back called and said they want me to tutor the city’s children. Wednesday I’m filling out applications and discovering that I need substitute certification to fill this four-hour-per-week jobette and that that requires finger printing, a $60 fee, a $52 fee, letters of recommendation, official transcripts, orientation, application and so on through both state board and local district bueracracies. School’s out first week of June. That’s a tone of running rigmarole for what will amount to about $250 minus gas at $2.50 a gallon. I’ve left two messages saying, in effect, “call me back and try to talk me into it, but I’m thinking no.”

But here’s the cool thing. I tell my mom I’m going to look for a job (as an excuse to get the classified from her steely grip) and she’s concerned. She sees that I’m just starting to get some traction on this recovery business and would like to see me solidify habits and accomplish more of my goals for heading back in. She’s afraid of a relapse. I’m not. But I do critically wantneed a little more time to blather on like this and type in my notebooks and write another bad novel. (What confidence!) So, she called my brother who manages her modest portfolio to see if she could help temporarily. Looks like she can. I’ll have a lot to pay back, but it’s better to owe mom than the IRS and American Express. Bless her.

What else? Grandma and Grandpa came yesterday. That’s cool. Dog park people are buggin’. Buddy met a sheep the other day. Tonight I meet up with a woman-girl to practice Spanish and English. She the latter, me the former, all at the same time. That is if I got a hold of her in time.

10-4, over and out.

Just got off the phone with Hec. I’m confused. The conversation boiled up a stew of emotions. He tells me about his trip to LA, how crazy it was. Clubbing, friends DJing, playing congas in the warehouse, back to British guy’s four-level house on the hill with balcony, Ketel and champagne, “pharmaceutical grade” E (a meaningless phrase), wee hours, two hours sleep before hitting it again, other clubs, girlfriends named Foxy with treehouses and ’shrooms, harsh eight-hour drive back to Sac.

Every item in that list but the last seem so much fun. I miss it and will miss it. I remind myself of the cost of those items, how I don’t miss that and won’t. Heck reminds me of that yuck, too, with his “oh no” at wake-up. He didn’t mention the sun but it glared bright and hot in my imagination. I felt that oh-no. So I pine and wax prematurely nostalgic and self-righteous by turns.

Hector’s forty-four and still carrying on like that. It can be done. He can be proud of it. He can be pitied, too. He’s selling mortgages now. Cold calling. Cold calling sucks donkeys. We met because he broke bones in the cold, rigor-mortised bodies below the morgue two doors down from me in Brooklyn. That fascinated me. He cold calls now. He’s sold three loans, bought his first computer, and wants to show me trip photos on Myspace. Good for him. He tells me he wants to go back to school. Get his real estate license and shit. A degree in sociology. Why sociology? He nods to his age and says fuck it, he’s going to keep trucking on. Good for him.

Not counting any prenatal chickens, but how does he reconcile/manage/stand the tension of partydown nights and getting ahead in the world. He may or may not in the end, but already he’s wrapped his head around the concept. I can’t even do that. Is it my personality. Am I a one-extreme-or-the-other person? He also told me about how his sister was doing too much heroin and how he and his brother were going to sit her down and talk to her about that next time they saw her. Intervention Puerto Rican style. Now, yes, shooting junk everyday like an addict and munching on hallucinagins on a trip to LA are two very different things. There’s some rational part of me that makes sense of a guy who’s shared a lot of coke with me and gets on his sister for horse. (Good old fashioned terms…) But there’s an emotional side of me that can’t put those two in the same room. It’s like tough love and free love at the same time. Both having and eating the cake.

Thinking about it, I theorize that it’s because drugs for me are pure abandon and limitless fun. Anything goes. You don’t worry about anything, but what works and keeping it going, and that’s very different than drawing lines and establishing boundaries. It kind of spoils it for me. And therein lies the danger. The addict in me.

Do I like to hear his stories or do they make me uncomfortable? Do I want to see him (very much) or avoid a reunion (like the plague)? If I see him, will that nagging whispery rationale that once on a special occasion in particular and unrepeatable places, people, opportunities, and other miscellaneous circumstances, is okay? That’s some quicksand, there. But I stubbornly feel that how ever inadvisable and not for me it is, it is also possible, that juggling chainsaws on a tightrope. Likely? Not. Feasible? Must be. Do I go everywhere and do everything with him except for the tobacco, alcohol, and drugs? Just except the drugs? Is that fun? Do I plan other activities? Daylight drives, funky dinners, fishing, chillin’ & conversatin’? Is that fun?

Part (how much, I’m not sure) of my all-or-nothing tendency on this issue is the result of ambitions in areas I’m not particularly talented in. If I’m to be satisfied with myself on my terms, it’s going to take some damn hard work, focus, discipline, and sacrifice. I think. If it’s even possible. I may be wasting my time. Let’s factor the yearn for grandiosity out of the equation. Without that big hard thing (ahem) to achieve you have lots of time to entertain yourself and be social, which is naturally what one would want to do if not tick-tapping away on a laptop. What do you do? Watch TV, sit and talk with your friends? Sounds so boring to say it. Feels so blah to consider it. Or is it fulfilling? I once seriously planned (but not exactly executed) a strategy that would have me substituting all that energy, time and desire into sex, girls, even women, and relationships. Softball leagues?

I’m totally confused. Bewildered. I’ve always thought that this—a healthy balance in life—comes easy for a lot of people. To a lot of other people it doesn’t. I’m one of those.

Do I try to learn how to pull that stunt or do I not even go there? Do I trust your advice on the subject or my own gut feeling and well considered thoughts? What is my gut feeling? Do I have any fully formed, let alone considered, thoughts?

Big questions. But even down on the detail level: I don’t even want to have to say, much less explain why, I’m not drinking (or popping, smoking, snorting, or injecting). Not that it’s a huge hard thing (sorry) or an embarrassment. It’s just a hassle. It kills things slightly. Things become slightly dead. Slightly enough.

Makes me want to just wrap myself up in some snuggly, lofty goals that need constant attention and nurturing. Then I won’t have to worry about any of it. And I’ll have something to show for it at the end, whenever that is. If I make it that far. A surer route would be to get hitched and have a handful of kids to keep me busy and feeling good about my contribution to the world and where my energy is squandered. That just might be the way to go. It really might. But I’m not sure.

I’m confused.

And I don’t know how to feel about it.

Just read these passages from Rilke’s eighth letter to Mr. Kappus:

…we are alone with the alien thing that has entered into our self; because everything intimate and accustomed is for an instant taken away; beccause we stand in the middle of a transition where we cannot remain standing.

…learn to realize that that which we call destiny goes forth from within people, not from without into them. Only because so many have not absorbed their destinies and transmuted them within themselves while they were living in them, have they not recognized what has gone forth out of them; it was so strange to them that, in their bewildred fright, they thought it must only just then have entered into them, for they swear never before to have found anything like it in themselves.

From the M.D. Herter Norton translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, revised edition copyright 1954 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Last night it was me paperclip scraping a pretty cashed out glass pipe—screens thin, sides streaked with more ebonied tar than deep butter. But here’s the kicker (as my pops would put it): this was in the context of now, i.e. three months crack-free, and my rationale was like just this once to remind myself what it felt like. That’s a little frightening.