What is Your Illness This Month?
Martha has been down in North Carolina for most of the week and with this trip I have stayed home. I’m alone a lot and dare I say it, I think I need to be around people a little more. Shocking I know. When weeks go by and the longest face-to-face conversation that I’d had with a human has been with my dentists, well then maybe, just maybe I need to socialize a little more beyond the 17 year-old taskmaster of a black and white cat that rules my days.
The reason for Martha’s visit to North Carolina has been a source of some intense dread for a while now. Gen needed to move into a smaller room and her care increased. A week ago she fell. She can’t remember how or why or how she got back up or anything about it. They only noticed that something was wrong because she showed up for dinner with a bump on her head. If you ask her about it now, she thinks it happened three weeks ago.
So they sent her to the hospital. Amazingly, she did not break her hip but now things are different. Add on that prior to the fall she had refused to take her heart medicine. Plus a bunch of other shit that I don’t want to think about and wish I didn’t know about. Things must change and Gen positively hates change and she can be pretty mean about it.
All these things have increased Martha’s anxiety level a great deal.
“Maybe it will be pleasant. Maybe this will all be just fine.” Martha said to me right before she left.
“Well, maybe if she takes another blow to the head. Just keep hitting her until nice comes out.” I replied.
And you know what? I was WRONG. Oh it started out rocky. Gen was unhappy and pissy on moving day. Wanting no parts of any of it, instead choosing to sit on the couch and reread the paper for the first time. Then in what I like to think of as more proof that Xanax is the most wonderful drug on the planet, Martha gave Gen half a pill and within twenty minutes, the sun came out, birds started singing and Gen was normal. Not fucked up, just normal. Thank god. See people, drugs are good. Now she is in her new apartment and she even thanked Martha for everything.
Speaking of medication and dramatic transformations, now that I am medicated, I don’t want the alone time. I think I would enjoy the time alone if I wasn’t medicated. As fucked up as that sounds… I think what I’m saying here is that I almost want to be unmediated so I can enjoy the alone time more. Relax, I’m not going to stop taking my pill just so I can have a rocket ride to crazy town but it is what I know. This whole, wanting to see people thing is new.
I’m working on it. I went for a walk and stuff. It’s not like I sat around all day in my pink polka dot pajama bottoms and a Las Vegas T-shirt, doing bong hits while watching a Twilight Zone Marathon on the Sci-Fi channel.
Rod Serling
It was in celebration of July 4th and I see the leap. What show better represents a slice of ‘Americana Nightmare’ better than The Twilight Zone Besides, how could I possibly resist Rod Sterling’s opening and closing narration? Standing there in his tidy little suit while smoking a cigarette was just too awesome to pass up.
Well, I guess I sort of did that, but anyway, my point is that I didn’t just lay around. I did other things like, archiving every fucking thing I have ever created on a computer, every negative I’ve ever scanned, and every retarded piece of writing to an external hard drive. The manic stuff is always right there under the surface.
I weeded. I cleaned and I worked. I even went to bed before 2:00am.
Most awesome overhead conversation outside of Penn Station.
Woman screaming at man:
“I don’t care what you fuck’en think. I’m fuck’en mad as hell at you and I tells you what, you’re a fuck’en IDIOT. That’s what I think.”
How fantastic is that?
I walked all over Manhattan last week and what I think just might be a personal best, I saw all three of my dentists in one day. Also known as the Oral Trifecta or as Martha likes to call it, “I hate your fucking dentists”.
I was up down and all around the city running errands and trying to shoot a few photos. I think my path would make an excellent graphic.
Graphic is to scale. I think this was the pattern for the wallpaper in my parents kitchen.
This was the day I realized that while wearing elevated flip-flops and carrying an extremely heavy bag, I could walk a mile in just under 15 minutes. At the end of seven hours of running around, I was rewarded with a train ride home.
Dreams
Martha and I sure do have many dreams. I think that is probably one of the greatest things about who we both become when we are together. We dream really well. I can’t wait to see her.
