Three days away from this workplace feel like a month has passed. I recorded a lot of audio yesterday while wandering the far east side of Manhattan around the United Nations. None of it is usable. Maybe just as well. It was a lot of depressing talk about suicide and my arrival at Bellevue, which I think was 9 years ago now. I never wrote this publicly but for posterity’s sake I wrote somewhere that if the woman I was with at that time drove me to drink myself to death then I wanted it documented as a suicide. She came close to doing that. It was as toxic a relationship as I can remember being a part of, yet I pretended otherwise, for what reason? The sex was relentless. By the end of our time together we were going at it 12-15 times a week. We  may have been bad for each other in most other ways but on the mattress we were a fucking force of nature. I do not drink anything like I did in those days. I reember her feeding me vodka shots, one after another, while she drank a fraction of what I was consuming. Yes, these past few days were a whirlwind of things, thoughts, and ramblings. Yesterday I walked 26,000 steps. The day before I found myself unexpectedly blinded, or nearly blinded, by an eye doctor’s dilation of my pupils. Everything became overly radiant and bright as the sun. I wasn’t even aware that certain bright spots were exaggerated by the dilation. It caused some amount of physical pain, but as with many things I have an extremely high threshold for pain and even abuse. I woke up with a strange set of bruises on my neck. They make no sense except to assume that I tried to choke myself in my sleep, or else I simply grabbed my neck for some nocturnally murky reason and squeezed it to the bruising point. It never really hurt or felt sensitive but it looked ugly as fuck, like someone else had tried to choke me. I have some very raucous dreams, most of them forgotten, but some of them include violence and self-loathing. During Dilation Day I thought I’d stay safe and just ride the subway all day. But that got me impatient, and I had to pee, so I changed course and went into the Atlantic Center, by the Barclay Center. I discovered that the Guitar Center is no longer at that location, so I could not dick around with their digital pianos as I sometimes like to do. I ended up walking a stretch of Atlantic Avenue I do not remember ever experiencing. It felt like Queens Boulevard at times, at other times it felt like I was walking on the side of an Interstate highway. People would emerge from buildings and deliberately fall to the ground, passing out or sleeping or just relaxing, I don’t kn ow what, but I nearly tripped over one dude who seemed to have appeared from nowhere. I walked as far as Nostrand Avenue, where I knew a subway to be nearby. I used to be such a ‘fraidy cat about areas like this but on this day at least I felt no fear. I think it was a C train that got me out of that area, and I don’t right recall at this moment what got me to Penn Station, where I bit into a scalding hot slab of pizza that still leaves a burning in my mouth. That pizza place at Penn is nasty and I know it, I don’t know why I make it seem like an inevitable destination. I have to go now.