Look Out!

Eleven o’clock. On my way to the store, I realized how manic I was on the two liter of Coca Cola I had over 24 hours. That’s too much caffeine and sugar. My experiment with caffeine failed again. I can never control my intake once I start. The first day, I bought a one liter, then the second day it doubled. That’s true addictive behavior. Today I bought ginger ale, but two liters of it. That’s still excessive. Now I have to wait all day for the effect to go away. Well might I be a disciple of Edgar Allan Poe, being as he was alcoholic and unstable, and dead at age forty. My appointment with Todd is this Wednesday. I have to call Ridesource today or tomorrow. I also bought a big burrito and scarfed it down as soon as I got home. That might help buffer some of the caffeine. Thank goodness it wasn’t alcohol I had! The harm would be much worse. The Beast lies dormant below the threshold of consciousness, but it doesn’t take much to wake it up. When it is awake, like Smaug the Dragon it is insatiably greedy. The best way to keep it manageable is not to feed it at all. One taste of Coca Cola is enough to start the snowball rolling. Next, it becomes a boulder of ice, steamrolling everything in its path. The whiteness of it resembles the white whale Moby Dick, whose mighty bulk and strength pulled down the Pequod, drowning every sailor but one. The Rachel circled back and rescued Ishmael… but who’s going to rescue us?

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Mardi Gris

Seven o’clock. The night was very long, and still the morning is black as ink outside. I was a fool to experiment with caffeine over the past month. Play with fire and you will get burned. Do we learn from the burning? It started with thinking a Coke would be a nice treat, but it mushroomed into a daily habit until one night I was short of breath. This scared me. Fortunately now I’m back to normal, yet I don’t have much energy. Alcohol was so unhealthy for me, but I did it for the pleasure of being high. It had to nearly kill me before I would quit drinking. Is there a better way to live than by pleasure and pain? Reward and punishment? It seems to me that any religion offers to remove the pain of life, so that Buddhism and Epicureanism have something in common. Christianity promises treasures in heaven in return for self denial in this life. My attitude when I drank was that I’d already found heaven here on earth, so why give it up? I didn’t yet believe that alcoholism could be fatal. As for deferring satisfaction to the afterlife, I don’t know the answer. There are other pleasures on earth, not quite as good as alcohol. Music can be one of them. Writing is another thing I do for pleasure and for truth. The search for truth is a pleasure for me, perhaps in a masochistic way; I’m not sure. Is there solace in knowledge and wisdom? For me, ignorance is not bliss. Robert Browning wrote that the two main human functions are to love and to know… It’s another gray morning, the sun compromised by cloud cover. I feel like crawling back into bed.

Desperate

One o’clock. I dreamed about Jeromy from C— Market back when I used to drink. He had “sex” with me, then I went from place to place trying to push some authorization through regarding my “dog.” I kept getting rejected. Meanwhile there was a problem with another dog that was mean, possibly rabid, and threatening Jeromy. I still wanted the “authorization,” but he didn’t. Moreover, I discussed with him a bass I’d bought but returned because the electronics weren’t right. It looked like a blue Yamaha I bought from Todd. I wanted to exchange it for the right model, and Jeromy said he’d look into it…

In reality, I almost talked Jeromy into buying legal insurance from me. I was only doing that job for beer money, so in the end it was good that he said no. Instead, he left his job at the store and started working for P—Health. The sales job was something rather shady and dishonest that I got involved in in April 2017. It didn’t take any particular skill to lie to people and hit them up on the phone. It was supposed to be a get rich quick scheme, but I don’t see that it was anything like a real job. The salespeople went to conventions and dressed up slick and talked about ways of cheating the public. I was really desperate. Later that year I stopped drinking and started my recovery by throwing myself at the Lutheran church…

Sun-sugar

Two thirty. The window work continues while I delve into the journals of Emerson, borrowing elements of style and substance until I find my voice afresh. I heard the man say that the windows should be finished tomorrow, and the house wrap. He’s concerned about putting on the siding. The weather is cloudless sunshine, beautifully autumnal, and I can hear the highway traffic roar. Reminiscent of my dad, now twenty years gone. I was reading Emerson’s essays when Dad, comatose, wrestled with death, his conscience assailing him at the very end. I was there to release him and guide him toward our celestial home. He finally relaxed and resigned his fight, breathing his last at three in the morning…

I had one liter of Coke today and it kickstarted my system a bit. But I wouldn’t hazard two liters again. My Vraylar prescription is ready, so I’ll grab it tomorrow sometime. Saturday I’ll have too much walking to do. The sunlight is muted and mellow like watercolor, the sun low in the southwest. The day is amber and azure, deep and rather sensuous. I feel something for a change, a sensation like pleasure. I remember how the succession of American literature from Emerson to, say, Tennessee Williams was a moral decline. The former aimed at virtue, however elusive his goal, and was a straight arrow concerning alcohol and drugs. Williams was anything but a straight, and seemed motivated to write from a need to free himself from addiction. From the 1840s to the 1940s was generally a downhill run, like from the Knight to the Reeve in Chaucer. You start with a just and honorable example, then for some reason the dream decays to a moral ruin. But I aim to do my life in the reverse order, from decadence to the restoration of purity…

Just one worker is cleaning up the broken glass inside the house. They must be calling it a day. The soft sunshine is like a nectarine, wet and naturally sweet.

Take care that the fruit not ferment…

The Street

One forty. My close call last night shook me up more than I realized. I could’ve been killed or seriously hurt. I took an unnecessary risk in venturing out after midnight on foot. Without acknowledging it, I was afraid. The fear carried over to yesterday all day, rattling me deep down. Who likes to recognize fear? I’d been having thoughts of my mortality while trying to sleep but didn’t allow that the hoodlum had scared me. However, it was significant that I didn’t leave the house all day yesterday. The heat was only one reason. There lurked another kind of heat in the jungle…