Thought I was doing alright with that stuff. Slept well enough. The first thing people who drink a lot say about going sober is that they don’t miss the bars, they don’t miss the women, they don’t even miss the booze. All they miss is the sleep. I went along with that until the last few times I went dry, and either slept surprisingly well or else just enjoyed the journey of self-aware near-consciousness. I’ve learned to relax my extremities better than before, but somehow I cannot get my eyeballs to settle down, ever. So today I was surprised to plug into the BP machine and find I’d only dropped 30 points since yesterday, but it also felt like something was getting at me for being at the desk all day. Unlike a lot of people I can actually tell when my BP is jacked, through anxiety and fidgeting, at least most of the time. Today was surprising, but I haven’t taken the pills in a while so maybe I’ve forgotten the routine. I intend to ask for a higher dosage prescription next time, which could be this week, or even switch to librium. If I could try and compare both that would be even better. The ER guy last month strongly suggested librium but I, trying to impress upon him that I don’t drink like I did the last time I was there (which is true), said no thanks.
Moving right along here is a picture of my dad’s place in Daytona Beach, probably 2012 or 2013. The car in the garage is his Lincoln Town Car, which later became mine, and which now belongs to my friend Dave, who paid me $500 for it. $500 might seem like a pittance but the way I looked at it it would have taken months to sell that thing at book price, which I think was three grand. The car stunk deeply of cigarette smoke, so no limo company would take it. In the time it would have taken to get book price for it I would have been spending however many hundreds a month just having that thing in my possession. For $500 I got it off my hands without spending as much to have it as I didn’t make by just getting rid of it. And it landed into the paws of someone who drives me around in the car once in a while.
The care on the left is dad’s previous Town Car, sold to John, who lived downstairs and did a lot of maintenance work around the property. The two streaks just above the center of the frame are not clotheslines or anything physical. That’s evidence that my much-used Fuji ScanSnap ADF device was in need of fresh consumables when I scanned this last November.
There are two American flags on the front of dad’s car (the one in the garage). When I met up with Dad in Washington, D.C., and he drove us around town people would stop and look at us like we were dignitaries or senators. On the right side of the garage you see two photographs hanging there. The top one is, I believe, a print of this picture, which I took in the summer of 2000 from a Circle Line Cruise that took dad and I us past the Twin Towers. The picture below that, on the garage, is of dad standing on the boat with the Twin Towers behind him.
The place looks a lot better in this picture than it did by the time I finally sold it, although I gotta ask what it looks like now. Bing Maps has it looking positively respectable as of 4 years ago, whole Google Maps at about that same time has it looking like a frazzled, overgrown squall of distended bushes and trees.
My money’s on Bing’s imagery, since I’ve seen Google’s Maps make the house I grew up in in Tampa look like it is engulfed in trees when that had never been the case. In the case of dad’s place I’m seeing bushes and overgrowth seemingly hanging in thin air over the sidewalk, in an area where I know there had never been any such growth. The Google Maps just seem to go wild with making trees and such look more sprawling than they are.
Anyway, just commenting on this as I am getting settled down with this new computer and getting the stuff from the old computer organized and put to some kind of use. I am listening through the recent shower talk recordings, which seem to deal almost entirely with the kiosk street theater. I’ve been on the fence about sending the writer of two of the stories about me a note explaining that it I who has been doing this. but I might as well wait.
