In Flushing today I made a somewhat amusing discovery. I had seen this place before, called Four Choises One Soup. I never thought anything of it except to assume that “choises” was some exotic food stuff. Today I went in there for the first time and discovered that for $5.50 you get a pile of rice and your “choise” of 4 items from a food bar, and either soup or an ice tea. I didn’t think of the “choises” sign again until I left, and realized that yep, they mis-spelled the fuck out of that word. I saw typos everywhere on Union and Main Streets. There was CHIKEN and TARKEY and SOOP and SANWICHS. I didn’t get any pictures though. Good deal at the CHOISES place, though. A decent pile of food for $5.50, though the place feels like it set up shop in an abandoned garage. Flushing is just so fucking crowded around Main Street and the 7 train station.
Going to cut therapy down to once a week. It’s a time thing. It’s only 40 minutes but it has a way of taking over my whole day. And I think these meetings may have run their course. I’ve learned a lot about myself these past 6 or so months. Some stuff I already knew but I was not so aware of its significance in making me such a sorry fuckup. I can’t believe how strong my love was, and is, for my mother. It’s been overpowering to realize how true this is. The last full scale panic attack I experienced was at the Rockefeller Center Post Office, or as I call it, the 181. Someone was standing on the same spot I stood when my sister called and said “She’s gone.” This person was staring at the floor the same way I did when I heard those words. I went white in my mind for probably 30 seconds. The therapist said she’s never heard anybody describe a panic attack as “white” or as “noise” but that’s the only way I know to describe it. Something shrill fills me, inarticulate, a decades-delayed expression of some still-repressed childhood trauma. Was I a failure as a son, and am I so as a brother?
Talking to a friend last night — about skin disease, strangely enough — when I hit the side of my nose with a fingernail and caused a fucking gusher of blood to come roaring forth. I had to explain that this was not a nose bleed. It was a little pimple or something such that I’d noticed a few weeks earlier, but which passed inspection at the dermatologist last week. I got a full body scan at the behest of the therapist. I’ve never done this, nor have I really ever seen a dermatologist except for once when I had gnarly fungus that nearly took over my whole left arm. The derm lanced off one of the little white things on my right calf, saying he would call me asap if there was anything bad in it. He did not call asap, and I go back next week for the lab results. It’s the closest I’ve come to getting inside 200 Central Park South, a curved building that fascinated me from the first time I saw it, but which holds little real interest to me now.
I am in a place where it has gotten too dark to type.
