I had to take a day off Thursday which was a day of near-misery, near-emergency-department, near-everything. In the end all was well. Anxiety, though, it eats at everything. I was wide awake until 4am after a trigger-inducing encounter with a woman I used to know. She ignited the bad flames, the torches and flame guns, not the good fires we used to know. I wish she had never entered my life but, true to form, I could find no way to get her out. She will menace and betray around me until I die. I don’t know what it is about me that lets this happen. I know I have a hunger for abuse, a vulnerability to abusive relationships.
But yesterday was good. Serene. Pharmaceuticals and actual sleep work miracles. I feel fine today, too, so far. I find I have to rush a lot more on Saturdays to get here to the office my usual hour+ early. I’m saving almost $375/month cutting store-bought breakfast, coffee, and pizza out of my day.
In Corona last week I find myself cursed to remember every payphone that used to stand along and around Roosevelt Avenue. There is one I always look for. It’s gone now. They all are gone. But one phone could have changed everything. I experimented with it. It had a good long cord connecting the handset to the chassis. I wrapped it around my neck just to know what it felt like, and to see if hanging one’s self is as easy as I’d read. It seemed like it might have been. The feeling was not painful but flush, like the head filled with warmth. I could see where ten seconds would be all it took. I came away frightened, but satisfied at the curiosity being sated.
I tried one other time, in Elmhurst. I had to find phones without surveillance cameras staring at them. Those were hard to find, but a vacated storefront off Broadway had a phone with no one looking. I tried again, wrapping the cord, this time more tightly. That was the attempt that really scared me. How easy it would be. That’s all I wanted to know. I had no intention of following through. I just wanted to know how people felt in that last instant of decision-making.
I love the water here. Sounds crazy or funny but the endless supply of drinking water is something I value at this place of work. I value the structure of the environment, as well. At home things are cluttered, chaotic, and falling apart. Here things are clean, the computers are all taken care of by someone other than myself, I don’t have to do everything to keep the business afloat. Working at home was killing me, it really was. I was drowning. Yet I still come home with an enthusiasm and sense of opportunity when I sit at the computer. All my stuff is there. 30 years of email, 30+ years of writings and detritus, half-assed attempts at computer programming, a lot of pictures, audio, and more recently video. Oceans of content, oceans of output, so much that the enthusiasm quickly turns to a more sodden reality that I will never come close to cataloging or even remembering most of this stuff. It’s too much. It’s like J. said the night I lost my virginity to her: “It’s too much Too fast.” This was before we actually had sex. I thought we were warming up but she found it too fast and furious, the rapid fire kisses and non-stop deep-tongue kissing. She needed it slower, softer, and that’s how it happened. But in all my output — textual, visual, sexual — it always ends up being too much for one party or the other. Too much for one or never enough for the other.
