Tomorrow I don’t know. Where. What. Why. Someone mentioned that I looked like I’d gotten some sun. Indeed, I got a little burned from Sunday’s jaunt to Rockaway and Riis. The white shirt I wore, I think, further exaggerated the color. In certain lighting I look like a tomato.
I dreamed about my face last night. It was partly burned, as in blowtorch burned, with the left cheek mostly burned away and my teeth and jaw bones exposed. I ate anyway, shoving food through the hole in my cheek, having found that eating through my mouth caused food to simply slide out of the uncloseable cheek.
I could hold the mouth shut. So I spooned food into the side of my face and covered it with my hand, providing a crude but effective enclosed space in which the teeth could do as they were designed.
I also dreamed of the eggs I get for breakfast almost every day. Two scoops of “Scrambled Only” and two sausage links which, today, I was able to consume with a fully intact face and jaw. The dream made the burned-out side of my face feel so real I could not believe it was intact upon waking.
Apparently I sat in a small pool of water on the 4 train today. I sat and, in the moments of assaying my surroundings, distantly asking myself why no one was sitting on any of the 5 or 6 seats to my left when this was a crowded train, a woman reached and said “Sir, there’s water on that seat.”
I stood up, apologetic (for whatever reason) then said thank you. I walked away to the other end of the subway car, as if I’d been chased away, embarrassed, humiliated. I sat in the water. I must leave this space. I have subway-seat water on my ass.
I groped at my butt a little bit, feeling no wetness (huhhuh). Not a lot of moisture in here. I didn’t doubt the woman who warned me I’d sat on the horrible, wretched, disgusting spit of water (I mean, I hope that’s all it was. Liquefied Polio germs? Let’s hope not…)
I had a flash memory of a woman on a bus who, warned that a seat was damp with a small pool of water, she just sat her ass down on it anyway. People generally seem to regard these bus and subway seat pools of water like it’s a kind of vermin, or a pox upon society. Not this woman. She sat in whatever the fluid was with a look of sanctimony, and triumph. I will not let a pool of water deter me from taking my seat on this crowded bus.
…
Last night featured a brief scare. The smell of gas suddenly wafted through the apartment, from the kitchen into the living room, causing me almost instant illness. It’s like my brain squashed itself. I had read earlier that day about chemical weapons used in WWII, and the agonizing ways in which thousands of Allied solders died on the field of combat.
Gas smell, this blast of it at least, doesn’t have that kind of effect on me, not anything even close. But it is sickening, not to mention annoying when it’s discovered that the source is a neighbor who no one wants to talk to. For whatever reasons I cannot remember anymore the dude is just unapproachable, and considered unwilling to accept that his place on earth represents anything short of absolute perfection.
Someone must have got to him or maybe he became nauseous himself. But the gas smell, I think related to a lawnmower or something like it, stopped.
I could have sicced 911 on him. The smell of gas, if you think there is anything weird about it, is always a 911 call.
…
I have flash memories of the woman I knew, the closest I came to even considering marriage, though even at that the idea of marriage with her was virtually a no-starter. Too much cultural differences. Race. That’s one powerful motherfucker.
But I think of her with smiles inside. She talked about us as a “place in time.” I did not disagree, adding that to me it was also a “place on earth.” A tangible, tactile piece of earth that we inhabited and gave life.
I intend to write the story of her at some point. How somehow the years kept ticking away despite all the obvious impossibilities. Did I want to be with someone who could not be seen with me in public? We’d be walking then, without comment or even a detectable grimace, we’d turn the other way. It was because a strict Muslim neighbor of hers was coming the other way. She could not be seen with a white guy, at least not by this person.
My story about her would be embellished with a mixture of tales from other woman I’ve known. It has to be that way, doesn’t it? No one can know I’m writing about her, so to mix things up some I write about others but keep the narrative on her. There would even be some outright fiction in this tale, just to keep it fully safe.
I’ve considered myself a master at keeping my dalliances out of any public eye the past several years. People do pay attention, and assume that one’s embrace of a woman is only a sign of happiness, and success. Your stature is raised, you get invited more places, and you are generally just taken more seriously as a member of society when you are in a relationship.
I don’t think of it like that, at least I don’t think I think of it like that. But then why I keep making these mistakes of thinking I need to be with a woman? Is it my tendency toward abusive relationships writ large across my life?
…
I’ve made peace with my meds, and my booze. For now, at least. The meds I’ve started taking regularly, having been afraid to do so in years past. This is entirely on account of the job, and how much easier things seem when I’m properly calmed down and serene.
I could reach that state without the medz, but not with the booze still present. I know the dynamic too well. But the peace I’ve made with the medz and the booze now is that I don’t consume enough of either for there to be conflict or danger. IN the past I’d had the experience of taking too much of the benzos and drinking too quickly afterward. That’s a very bad combination, which echoed the day after I did coke and drank 47 beers just for the sake of the life experience. Day after was the worst day of my existence, hands down.
But the effects of booze after benzos came close to the post-coke episode on a few occasions. Not anymore. It’s all good.
Gotta get to work!
