The Shit Splift schedule truly makes a healthy work-life balance difficult. Sleeps hygiene becomes a distant chagrin. I alsmot always come in on Thursdays feeling like death warmed over, largely on account of having slept in the day before, sometimes until after 11am, then rising at 5:30 the next day. It’s a bad balance. I shouldn’t sleep so late on Wednesdays but it’s irresistable. I am weak, and tired, and sleep is especially seductive after taking BP and anxiety meds. Normally I take those while seated in the shower, and the calming effect is not really felt until later, after the bodily excitement and cacophony of showering has ended and the competing forces of the meds and the heightened blood pressure and heart rate that comes with taking a hot shower no longer are attacking each other. The calm on those days does not usually arrive until I find a seat on the subway. I feel the calm now. I was unsure about its arrival. The pills I take don’t always go down the way they should. The smaller one gets stuck under my tongue and dissolves before I can swallow it. This makes me think it will be ineffective but it seems this concern is misguided. I also have occasional surprise appearances of snot blobs in my sinuses and throat tract that make swallowing seem impossible without a vomit chaser to evacuate the pills.
I did not make it to Rosedale on Wednesday. I was ambitious about it at first but after I could not find my notes on what I wanted to see out there I said fuggit. My destinations there are unspeakably mundane and forgettable. I get a special kink in knowing that I am in search of something that no one would seek out.
Writing a poem about how my work password summons a memory of room 317 at the Parc Lincoln, a room I knew over 30 years ago. The memory of room 317, as it rises up from this password, is slashed and smashed and pounded into a twisted mess by the gibberish characters used to strengthen the string. The ^^^ evokes the elderly woman pounding on my door and trying to unlock it, unaware she had gone to the wrong room. The *** echoes the sound of me pounding on the door to signal to her she was at the wrong place. I heard her cluck and, it seemed, she gobbled a little bit, confused for the moment but clear on the situation quickly enough. In the moment it was a little scary. THe doorknob and the door in general was extremely weak and even a woman of her slight strength could probably breach it with enough determination. She would have emerged in my apartment, thinking it was hers, finding me naked and alone in what she thought was her room. But when I heard the pitter-patter of her footsteps upstairs, in room 417, all was resolved.
I intend to mail a copy of this poem to whoever might presently live in that room, if it even still exists. There were renovations done to that building but they didn’t go far and I would not know if 317 was assimilated into another larger apartment room, or given its paucity of space perhaps it was turned into a closet or storage.
