31 posts tagged “2008”

Duke University Neuroscience doesn't know what to do with me either. And they don't have my records for some reason; I can't call it. They're being sent again.

I did my best to explain myself: which is to say, I exhaustively and circuitously brought up every potentially relevant detail and laid it out on the table as unobtrusively as possible, while Dr. Attix's gorgeous grey-green eyes traced back and forth across my face. This is a courtesy that molders with impatience as she stares through my head as if looking for me where I should be, but for some reason am not. I just keep talking. I hide behind myself by hiding nothing.

People don't know how to respond when you break the fourth wall to evangelize them about the floorboards.

The filthy homeless guy with a sharpie-scrawled Bible verse on a cardboard sign, standing out in the sun, panhandling on the highway seems disheveled and out-of-touch with reality. But the truth is, just by being there, holding up his hopeless request for a few dollars of your guilty Christian charity, drawing flies in the heat and getting older, he's showing you exactly how homeless he really is, and how badly he needs your help. He's showing us what he doesn't have: it's our sin that we roll up our windows, count our blessings, and offer him nothing. It's our fault he's still there because we looked at him, looked away, and just waited for the light to change.

Awkwardness comes from having slept outside.

She doesn't think there would be any use for cognitive therapy, since I didn't have a stroke. At least there won't be any more pills.

My cup mouldeth over outside Cup A Joe's on Hillsborough St, and I'm reading theology blogs and watching traffic drag past from a little stone table on the sidewalk. It's dusky, and as the light and heat fade, I'm chewing the ice from my iced mocha, and ponder the phrase "balls deep in culture." Surely, if such a feat could be, this scene, right here, right now, has nothing remarkably in common with what it signifies. How many remarkable little conversations are going on just inside that window pane? How much goes unsaid? There's nobody to ask out here, and nobody who'd know.

I'm soon to go play some video games or something. After I finish this beverage, $3.16 worth of an excuse to sit out here, I'm off to waste an evening on wine and Halo 3. In truth of course, I'd like to come back here; or follow these people, or find them again - people like the hot (as in 'sweaty') girl and her boyfriend who just ran past me, indefatigably intent on another quarter mile, or the little mutt Ziggy and his black-socked-and-sneakered, middle-aged rock-and-roll-guy owner - and accompany them to wherever and whatever misadventure is sure to befall them after they take a shower (and yeah, they all need a shower).

That whatever they're up to is as pedestrian as... well, as pedestrian as they are, is no injunction. It's kind of the ideal. The paraphilia of it: the lust to know what's going on in the lives of people who just happen to be around. It's filthy gratification: sipping coffee, watching them, and guessing.

What could be a better hobby?

As the ambiance cools here before closing time, and I prepare to leave here, I accept, for the moment, that I am to the people here at the cafe what they all are to me: somebody walking by, of middling interest and plausible intrigue. I'm aware of a deep abrogation what structure comprises us, a chiasmus of sorts, an antinomy:

When you're alone, everybody's with everybody else, but to everybody else who's alone, you're with everybody else.

Throw in the word 'God', and it's theological.

It's hard work.

We form sentences so carefully. My tongue whirs my words around as fast as I need but if my teeth catch I'll stutter and spit. A fleck of vowels, a wobbled word, a lump in my cheek inexpertly slicked away from the subject is the difference between - between many things, actually. Between thing-saying artfully, or a making a mess of hollow speech. Between two regular-ass people who don't seem to trust one another.

Today we were trying to share a space.

The art of turning a phrase that will hold what you mean takes patience. It's messy and lots of words get wasted while you practice. For some people, making points is good practice (and while some people still collect sayings, that's a little declase nowadays). That's how a phone call can be a workshop. Practice practice.

Truth is durable but impractical. You have to dilute it in order to use it. But the wrong admixture will turn to chalk on you, so if it doesn't start to set right away, everything you've just been trying to say is probably useless. Even if it still sounds good to you at the moment, take it from me: if it didn't take, there's nothing you can add to make it fix. You're going to have to just throw it out and start all over again.  

A brush no thicker than your eyelashes to apply the glaze, and be careful to speak evenly. The right thing to say doesn't crack in the silence while it sets. That's how you know you got it right. That's when your technique is perfect.

Anybody can tell the professionals from the journeymen just by listening. I sound good improvising sometimes but really, I mutter through a lot of mistakes. I'm not going to lie.

When we're around each other and talking, I try to be careful not to take up too much space, but today no matter what I was saying, it seemed like we were all over each other.

Right now my mouth tastes like mud 'cause I spent the whole day talking. I was at it for hours today and nothing I said held together right. Some days are like that. The silence didn't agree with them or something. Maybe I came on too thick. From what I could overhear, you weren't doing too well either. We were both at it hard, but my heart wasn't in it.

Maybe there just wasn't enough quiet for the both of us. 

Back to normal.

Swervedriver was awesome. It was good to see them. I never would have thought I'd have gotten the chance.

Church today. 

First hail of the season yesterday. God spitting ice down on the woods. I took a picture.

Drove to Greensboro, to Piedmont-Triad Int'l Airport, picked up the folks around 1 am.

Drank liters of espresso to wake myself up just to stay awake for the hour and a half drive, pulled into the terminal yawning. Fell asleep as soon as I got home. For like two hours. Up since 5am.

I write this stuff here so I have it written somewhere. The reason?

Fatigue, exhaustion: withdrawal effects from discontinuing these medications. Nobody told me about this. A week or so of failed workouts, constantly tired, more worthless sleep at night than ever, and I hopped a curb in the Tercel after I dropped Tom off at the truck rental place the other day? Damn. I figured this out looking it up only like 3 hours ago.

The more I researched all the stuff I've been given the more I'm sure that these mafuckz don't really know what the fuck they're doing. Shit is poisonous and they push it on you smiling. Vyvanse, even in small doses, can cause psychotic episodes with people of certain neuro-psychological profiles? And apparently you're not supposed to take that shit if they give you an SSRI? Then they give me the Seroquil for sleep? AND the other shit I was taking? AND Vyvanse depletes your body's nutrients? Plus what is this weight gain really about? Doctors are trying to fuckin' kill me, man!

I miss the tiny towns.

Drove around little villages north of me, up by Creedmoor and caught in traffic, all over 98 and cardboard flicking in the wind in the back of my truck, down from the clouds cooling as the sun went down. At 7pm, the dump closed, but I was stuck on two-lanes with country people. 98 closed, so we shared a detour amongst us, shared a different way to wherever we were heading. I think we were all happy to see a new way; it's very nice to drive through little towns on the way to little towns. We looked at ourselves in passing houses, inching ahead, listening to children play, seeing our kids in every driveway, our pasts and futures. I miss all the little towns I never lived in.

By the time I got home it was near 8, still pulling a full load of trash from a guy named Ian's house. He moved to New York because of his 22 year-old son's Lyme disease: the boy was having seizures, and in North Carolina they don't treat Lyme disease. My dad isn't having seizures yet. I hope that he won't. We emptied their house of trash and boxed their belongings so that they'll have them next week. They finally rented a home up there. They've been living in a motel. I've never met them.

Went out tonight.

I miss the tiny towns in the daytime. The lives we miss, living how we do. We get our best days back eventually, but without faith they come back all written-on and crumpled-into.

It's a narcissistic sadness to wonder, I bet they know, but I wonder if I'm still being prayed for. Let theologians, atheists, busy folks and better men correct my failings when they come around, but its time and time past but I hope I've not been forgotten. I hope I've not been given up on. I'd so like to do somebody justice someday. 

And not a day too soon.

Thanks to the good people at Alliance Medical Ministries, I'm not taking anything anymore - God willing, we can close that whole awkward chapter of life, huh? I feel like a get to start again, like I'm free to put an X through the last couple of months, throw all those stacks of wasted days in the trash along with all the pills and put myself back in charge of myself. A month from now, I've got an appointment at Duke. Dr. Tucerro tells me they've got strategies. She's so awesome. I fell asleep in her office. I hope she's right.

I'll make a way out of this.  We get rain all day today.

I'm going to go running.

I am waiting for the coffee to drip. The dog begged his way into the garage.

Without the Seroquil, I don't sleep at all.

The house is empty at 6am. Less empty than at 3am, but only because the blue light of morning brings resolution to a longing, false uncertainty:  it's lonely staring all night, but hey, cheer up! you get to spend all day on your own. Go wander, take in some sights.

The heart objects to such logic; my tired brain lets it slide.

It's been raining a little since before dawn, and now the ground is moist. Today will be wet and rainy, not much above 70. There's a free concert somewhere at 4.

I have long been becoming a different way. These changes, man. They take your whole life and make it a meantime; not much and for nobody, and it still takes your whole life.

Anybody seeing God nowadays? 

Drug abused.

I can sleep all day, all day and tomorrow too.

The verdict on Seroquil seems to be: it'll knock you the fuck out and you'll dream about singing + wake up exhausted, 13 hours later

Seroquil + Melatonin: knocked the fuck out + dreams about abstract things + wake up exhausted, 13 hours later

Seroquil + Melatonin + Deep Sleep = TKtF'O + dreams with seemingly no content at all? + barely wake up 11 hours later

The daytime pills have only random effects. The daytime pills affect me randomly. The pills I take in the daytime don't make any sense to me. Everything minor or explosive.

Outside the Intake, this guy told me that I looked like I should be traveling the world, wandering Europe or something. He listened to me say why I wasn't, and he talked and smoked his cigarette before going back to work. Jeff, who's been around. A peaceful, respectable dude. He told me that people find themselves at the intake for lots of different reasons, from serious to fictional I suppose, but there's no stigma to it. Dave picked me up at 2 in the morning, and we got some beer and talked all night at a hotel, and drove around in the rain until it was safe for me to come back.

When they led an emo kid out of the building in handcuffs, I almost laughed out loud. Thin as a slat in his generic scene t-shirt, with the chains between his wrists gently slapping his jeans, he bounced a little as he walked; young-looking as he was, at that moment he seemed affable, aware, confident, almost playful in his sense of self-certainty. When he nodded at me with a saturnine expression as he walked to a patrol car, I nodded back and opened my mouth, in case anything funny to say came to mind. He turned away. In the cool night air I exhaled a cool breath and watched the boy load himself into the back seat, and watched that space until the patrol car pulled out of it and he disappeared.

When I was a teenager, handcuffs brought out the smartass in me, too.

Dave's doing good: thinking about moving to escape the impending economic collapse, wrestling intermittently with the pressures of success and the static and silence that his wins brings out in friends and family. He's making some mature-sounding decisions, talking some pretty foreboding politics, and living well in the meantime.

I drove my parents to Asheville and wandered around downtown for hours. Ate at a Cuban restaurant called Havana's, where my dad asked the Germanic-looking kid who was our server if he was from the island. He replied, "Do I LOOK Cuban?" and then immediately seemed to regret how it came out. I laughed to forgive him, while my dad tried to hide his embarrassment at seeming so foolish. Dad was just being friendly.

Dad had a Cuban coffee. The restaurant owner was Venezuelan, we found out. I had lechon, with a salad and pineapple. I couldn't help staring at a girl eating with her blonde, preppie family at a table by the window. She noticed and looked over, and I felt like a tool. Pretty soon, she was playing with her hair and staring back as if to bust me, and I'm looking anywhere else, pretending I'm not caught, focusing on anything, talking to the waiter, talking to my dad, drinking water. The pineapples were like cubes of sun.

A kid stumbles in the rain, wearing dirty fatigue pants and a soiled shirt, and picks up something from the middle of the street. He looks at me, eyes so wide he can't seem to control them. He seems to want to say something. I say something, and suddenly he's walking beside me. "Look at this rock I found..." He opens his dirty hand and shows me a little mountain stone. "Isn't it awesome?" He's a foot taller than me, skinny, hunched over, black hair long on his face. His voice is pacific, urgent, enthused, but his eyes are a mess, so dilated that I can't tell if he even sees me. "Look at this rock", he says again, and I can see from the look on his face that he's talking religion, but his body, so close to mine on the sidewalk, feels hypertense and dangerous. There's no mind to talk back to: his expression is tumbling between torpid bliss and unfocused animality. He's oily and wet. The rock is unremarkable. I turn his way walking, and put my hand on his arm to stop him. His frame steady itself uncertainly as he stops, and I feel him bristling under my fingertips with different reactions, as if he was tempted to hit me, hug me, repeat himself and apologize all at the same time, and the impulses took hold of different parts of his body in waves in spasms. I growl at him, it's cool, and to get out of the rain and take care of himself, and I leave him standing there.

At a book reading, I listened to a tall, beautiful blonde woman with an amazing Western North Carolina accent read a pretty good fourth chapter to her unfinished book about the fictional story of the life of a maid at the Biltmore Estate. Her prose was natural as she seemed, standing in a little cove at a podium in the Malaprop Bookstore, gently drawling a tale about a girl who left her family farm to try and get a job in town, wearing every outfit she had in layers and sleeping on the street. She swore she was nervous. I sipped my coffee and marveled at how people can seem.

I saw a thousand art galleries full of pointless things. I walked through a thousand art galleries, and saw some beautiful artwork. I went to at least 10 different art galleries and left the last one excited.

I finally walked into the Dripolator for the first time, but I didn't want any more coffee. I read the paper and fell asleep.

My life in Where's Waldo? continues. Where's my Wanda? Where is she, Whitebeard?

Before her, a college student read the beginning of her short story, and all I could think was that every time she read us the word "she", I felt like she was saying "I". There were some other readers I sat through before I left, who reminded me that, in the art of storytelling, being "pretty good" means that you're not worth listening to - unless your voice is like mountain honey coming from between perfect white teeth and your blonde hair wreathes your face like a mane and your nose is nice and your sense of fashion is totally kickin' and lacking in cheapness or irony, and maintains a youthfulness without seeming at all adolescent. 

Ass for days.

Big ol' ass.

I'm for real, she could write well and all that shit but.

Leafed through Erwin McManus at a Border's in Asheville, counting all the different namechecks to featureless white-suburban-cultural touchstones he makes: Starbucks, Death Cab for Cutie, liberal guiltiness, "going Green", 'interesting' books, postmodernism, the desire to be 'authentic', the need for Christ to save us from a life of ennui and half-consciousness. The (never-ending) Search For Self never seemed to me so obviously a conceited privation of a bored, alienated middle class. The powerful and the homeless always seem to have better things to do.

Today I strung cable under the house and hooked up the TV in the garage. We'll put a phone in there soon.

Kelly wants me out of the house, and she's been complaining to my mom. Scott called here to restate her case. I talked to him for awhile about why I'm here, what's going on, and made it as clear as I could that he and they should mind their own business.

The Yoo-Hoo came off my mom's shirt. We haven't spoken about it since. I brought up what happened the other day during an argument, and the subject died on the spot.

Mom and Dad are going to DC tomorrow, while Kelly is going to Disney with all my cousins, their kids, my aunts and uncles. Because she is, it's better that I don't. Kelly and Scott should hopefully find a house in Virginia soon.

UNC's going to call me back with some help; they're getting a copy of the evaluation. Duke's given me the runaround.

As the days lengthen, I take something every night and sleep through them. As the days lengthen, they empty. As long as these days are getting, the middle part is getting so thin. I sleep through the consequences. I wake up and the sun is on outside. Here the lights are off, and dad's always taking a nap at noon. He's always taking a nap at 5. He sleeps too much, too. I sleep through days and I miss them. I miss them already.

Walking on my toes down the driveway, trying to keep my heels off the wet things: wormy-looking little brownseed, translucent pods that look like insect wings, giant black ants trooping across the squares who don't notice anything; being careful makes me feel very tall. Green algae thrushes in the shady spots where the light doesn't come through the trees after it rains; between the texture of the cement is another forest, an eighth of a millimeter high. I don't want to step on anything wet, dry, or sharp. What if the wet things are alive?