December 9 2022 8:12am
Just like that I feel like a normal human again. A night without booze, a night of Ativan and BP meds, a morning of the same. Without the booze I need none of this pill-popping regimen. I think the dynamic between the body wanting to experience anxiety fueled by alcohol withdrawal has been playing a huge and hairy game with my body. My liver might not be what it used to be, which was basically a perfectly functioning organ as of about a year ago. I don’t know what attacking the innards with booze, ativan, beta blockers, and BP meds … all this at once and basically for the first time … I don’t know how wise this was.
Fortunately for all things I don’t drink like I used to. I’m not at even a third of my former intake, down to probably less than ¼ of what I was doing during the toxic relationship.
I plugged in this blog to auto post to Twitter. I’d been messing around with that earlier when I accidentally sent a screenshot from a porn I’d been watching. It wasn’t X rated. In fact it was quite artistic and sweet. But it wasn’t what I intended. That’s what happens with auto-post, you just don’t realize what goes out sometimes.
Sleep is what surprised me most last night. It was mostly thorough, surrounded only by unwelcome images of processes and procedures from the office. This job, and its strictures, have changed a lot about my diurnal routines. One of my dreams in taking it was that I would dry out completely, not for necessity or for sake of being clean and sober for the work at hand. It turns out I can do this job hung over if not still drunk from the night before. I considered (but never did) stuffing a bottle of vokda in my enormous computer bag. Instead I leave a suite of pharmaceuticals, which I expect to dip into today for one last half a milligram of Ativan.
But sleep was good, thanks perhaps to the clean freshly laundered sheets and the great weighted blanket that makes everything beyond it disappear.
I vomited for a full night, Wednesday through Thursday until about noon time. It felt necessary, but I don’t know exactly where it came from ,the food poisoning. Sore inside but not as bad as the last time this happened, which has been quite a number of years now. After a while you just accept that you are a force of nature, delivering straight columns of bile as long as the body can evacuate it.
I read once that infants, if they are not forced to vomit by a certain, maybe never be able to do so. The muscles that need to be reversed for vomit to be vomited would become too looked in to their downward-only path, and the muscles locked into that pattern preventing bad food from being vomited out. It’s a theory I don’t want to believe but it seems like there has to be some basis, some merit, some inkling of truth to it.
Or maybe it’s just some shut my mother read on somewhere and passed along as gospel to me.
I may have a new payphone to seek out, this one another location culled from my unique ability to reverse-engineer derelict payphone locations from public records, where such reports of dead phones are not most people’s idea of useful. But I seem to have a fresh prospect for another intact dead phone on Staten Island.
Yes, I feel calm, and this time it’s not a fake calm undercut by alcohol withdrawal anxiety trying to rise up through the tough, restrained netting of the pharmaceuticals. Without that rising up of anxiety the meds could prove unnecessary. That is a goal. No more pill popping.
…
Thinking again about the woman who approached me on Broadway last week. She wears a clapboard sign on her chest that says she was screwed over by DOE, lost wages, this and that. I’ve seen her around for years. We had one conversation. It was more of a litany. I grunted and nodded as her words swam from reasonably coherent to delusional and paranoid. The words never stopped flowing and I said basically nothing. The presence of the clapboard signs made me think that however attractive I might have found her (and I did) I just couldn’t bring myself to stick my dick in crazy, not again, not ever again. I still don’t know what she was asking me last week. Something about me being a photographer, because I guess she remembers seeing me up on the Ed Koch/Queensboro making video and, perhaps to her recognition, getting her in the video for a few seconds. I think she still wants to talk to me. She asked if I lived on Crescent Street. I said no, without volunteering which street. I think she lives on Crescent Street.
She’s troubled but seems harmless. Another woman I’d seen around looked like a hellchild. Constant drama, barking out orders to men who seemed to know to expect such treatment, then she would disappear into a building’s vestibule where she walked in circles, looking busy, looking determined and purposeful when I could tell she had nothing going on, nowhere to go.
