Back,  And back on the wagon.

I do that shit before posting, it’s not just something to write about, it’s filled the empty hours. Without it, I got nothing to write about. I haven’t gone out to a bar, I’ve sat around the house.

Being at the bar with smoking and drinking is something rather than nothing, and you have people with whom to share it, and you’re getting fucked up. Plus it’s dark so everyone looks good (see also: you’re getting fucked up) and there’s often good music.*

I go to a bar without smoking and drinking, I say to myself, why am I hanging out with these sorry fucks? With smoking and drinking we are comrades, brothers-in-arms, fighting side by side in the trenches.

See? You got something. Sit around sober at home and what do you got? Mocking reminders of what you claim to be, what you claim to be doing. Go to a bar sober and and you see reflections of what you have really become.

I can’t seem to make a solid case for sobriety here. Therefore I’ll probably inflict it on myself for a while.  Let’s see how far down I sink into this morass of sobriety before I allow myself a cheerful bottle with which to buoy myself back upwards.

*You see those people in daylight, sober, without a soundtrack, not animated by booze and you have to repress a shudder.  Let’s just say the difference between the bar and reality is striking.

Warm, yes; body, also a yes.

Ashen face, check; no discernable pulse, afraid so.

But dead?  Not quite.

Could the EMTs on the scene revive him by injecting marcaine into his system, a drug that is often nearly instantaneous in its effects, that of re-animating people deep under a heavy spell of opiates?

That would be a no.

In fact when the ambulance left, it left with what I, the staff, and the cops all assumed was a corpse. But it turns out that the scrawny kid who I crawled into the tiny bathroom after, the 21 year-old junkie from Florida whose body amazingly effectively blocked the door from opening, and who I had to spider-man in after, and then bodily pick up so the door could be opened and I could drag him out, was not totally dead.  The staff at the hospital managed to revive him.

I don’t know if he’s still alive.  I don’t know what state he’s in, vegetative or not.  But together we managed to drag him back from whatever oblivion he’d managed to find, whether he wanted us to or not.

Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful- I suppose. Maybe a good thing happened. Maybe somewhat thanks to me. Maybe I should feel good. But yesterday I was off my game. To an extent that I need to check my head.

I have a guy crashing with me, a guy who has the usual wheelbarrow full of issues. In the morning before any of this occurred I inadvertently managed to dislodge one of his issues. He and I were discussing all the progress he’s managed to make in the past week, and where he still wants to make progress, when suddenly, in the conversation with me, he started feeling under attack. (He now acknowledges that he was not under attack.) He responded by raising his voice. He also became slightly agitated while adopting an aggrieved tone.

Not in the mood for that, I asked him to relax a bit, just to be cool, but that didn’t help matters at all. As matters continued, I quickly started to respond to them inappropriately- to tell him that he needed to relax, that he needed to calm down.

But that was stupid of me. What did I know of what he needed? I don’t know what he needed just then.  He probably felt the need to shout.

But that’s how it went.  I started to mirror him, raising my voice as I was telling him to relax, and there came a moment when we were shouting at each other in my kitchen.

I’m not responsible for anyone else. I’m not responsible for the issues that anyone else has, not those of my house-guest, nor those of a kid that takes heroin.  I’m just responsible for myself, and if I can’t stop myself from being “screaming guy” in that type of situation, I need to make damn sure that I stay out of situations that bring “screaming guy” out in me.  Which might mean that the man crashing at my place needs to go.

But anyway, during the day yesterday, as I slowly came to grips with who I had turned into in the morning, my mood was foul. I brooded. And so I was not on top of my game when one of the staff behind the counter asked me what their liability might be, should someone be shooting up in their bathroom.  ”Hey, Dave,” was their opening gambit, “you know about the law.  What would our legal liability be, should [yadda yadda yadda...] happen?”

I didn’t get it.  I backpedaled, telling them I knew nothing of the law despite teaching the LSAT, and then I wikied the term”legal culpability” for them, while insisting that I was merely a jackass with Google at a coffeeshop- and not to trust my notions.

The kid, please forgive me, just nodded his head distractedly while his eyes strayed continuously to the bathroom.  As I wrapped up my spiel of what I guessed “legal culpability” would be in an instance such as this (probably none, unless perhaps nailed on “negligence”), he nodded and said, “That’s great.  ’Cause a guy’s been in the bathroom for over half an hour and we think he’s shooting up heroin.”

I was at first thrown by this. I’m at this point so lost in my foul mood, and my feeling that I’d been an idiot drama queen that morning, that I’m having a hard enough time just engaging with abstract legal concepts, let alone concrete issues.

At least I managed to immediately tell him that it was more than a joking matter (for despite a measure of unease in his manner, his bearing indicated amusement as much as anything else) and that at other coffee shops I knew of, people had ODed in the bathrooms and ambulances had been called.  His face turned slightly at this, and I went to the bathroom, pounding on the locked door with no response.

So here’s where competing interests got interesting.  I hadn’t seen this guy come in, or enter the bathroom; I hadn’t glanced at the clock, nor had I any idea if anyone was in there other than their idea that yeah, maybe he was in there.  They thought so, maybe.

I told them they needed to find the key, but they had customers. I told them they needed to call their boss, but they were disinclined to.

The manager/owners were not on the premises, and they did NOT like being disturbed with minutiae when at home.  Was someone in the bathroom?  The kids weren’t certain.  I didn’t know the likelihoods of this and was having trouble parsing them.  The kids behind the counter were having difficulty other than seeing big guilt/trouble brewing on any horizon no matter their actions. (Disturb boss at home for nothing-BAD) (Disturb boss at home, admit letting junkie use bathroom-BAD) (let junkie slowly die in bathroom-BAD)

Should I really turn into Rambo-Drama-Queen and kick down the door to an empty restroom? I returned briefly to my seat on the faulty logic of “either a Junkie IS or ISN’T in the bathroom shooting up, and which is really more likely?” But the faces of the kids behind the counter were turning steadily worse.

Do I call the police? I don’t really know what’s going on here, and I’m in a bad mood.  I Google the non-emergency number on my phone but don’t call.

At this point, the kids behind the counter can do one thing right, and so are clinging to that- they’re waiting on customers.  I tell the senior one he has to call the police or the owner, and after some brow-beating he calls the owner.  He reassures me afterward that the owner will be there in two minutes.  Pretty quickly I realize that that’s probably not true. He admits that he didn’t tell the owner of his suspicions of a junkie squatter who’s gone radio-silent for going on 45 minutes.

As he stated directly to me later that day, “When I got up this morning, I just wanted to serve coffee to other people.  That’s it.  Not to deal with matters of life and death.”  He’s back to waiting on cutomers but I tell him that he needs to leave it to his 18 year old co-worker and get the door open.  I get back on the key issue.  I watch as he pulls keys out of drawers, and he grabs one, forces open the door and turns to me and says, “We need to call someone.”

His first thought is the owner.  I say call 911.  He affirms that he’s about to call the owner, and I say “NO. What YOU do is you call 911.” Then I ran across the street to the liquor store where a cop is always stationed outside on weekend evenings.

But the trouble is, is that I should have taken charge earlier.  I should have taken charge more.  I should have been on my game.  That junkie kid is probably never coming back.  If a person doesn’t immediately come out of it, thrashing and clawing, when injected by marcaine and under the influence of opiates, they’re not coming back the same.

Worse still. Dark confession time.

When I’d first become aware of the possibility of some Schrodinger junkie behind the door, and I was trying to weigh probabilities and options, I thought to myself- fuck him.  If he IS in there, and it’s been half an hour, and he’s not responding, by the time we figure this out, and by the time EMTs arrive- what good could they do?

And I felt inside a weighing going on of all the times I could attempt to be drama-rambo-hero in my life, and how great a percentage of the time it would all be for shadows and ghosts rather than actual human beings, I had this feeling of fuck him.

That was an effect of the morning.  I was a foul person yesterday and in my mood lay the difference to the long term functioning of a kids brain.

His state is not my fault.  The state of my mind that I have, and the way by which I lead my life, these are my concerns.  I need to be better.  I need to be better,

I need to be better.

Oh yeah, I helped, I definitely fucking helped. Objectively I did good things.

But I did not live up to my conception of self.

Hauled the warm corpse of a junkie out of my local bakery’s bathroom. Got the police, tried to calm down and reassure the staff.

Entertaining Friday thus far.
Anyone else got a classy emergency for me?
I’ll be out back smoking.

I’m not going to discount the possibility that some of these debts might be mutual, but this is also the last I’ll mention it FOR THE FOLLOWING REASONS:

1) How could that possibly matter? This isn’t about monetary debts that can be cancelled out, this is a debt of affection, of behavior owed to another, of proper behavior that I owe to my conception of myself, my conception of the universe.

2) For a brief moment, DO look at it as a monetary debt. Suppose that I owe someone $10.00- if that same person owed me $.75, our debts wouldn’t cancel out. I still owe what I owe.

3) It’s safe to say that my being a better person in behavior and affection will not hurt myself. In the past, it might have.  I might have hurt myself- badly- by trying over and over to do the right thing to others that didn’t care how they were treating me. It’s safe to say that that (my getting hurt) now that won’t be the case. So, although in many instances it’s better to err on the side of caution, in this instance that should not be my guiding principle.  No harm and much good may come of it.

My mother and older sister in particular are owed better behavior from me. Also my father and my younger sister.

Just sayin’.

By the way, 90 minutes of sober messing with my computer have fixed last night’s problems.  All is right with the world.

so far, so ( rather amazingly) good.   the major casualties so far appeared to be parentheses and capitalization. it’s not perfect, however. For instance, the word ‘parentheses’ first appeared as ‘processed cheese’. all quotation marks so far have had to be inputted.

beyond that? Well, so far, still getting fat. And that’s about it.

had a good day and heading to sleep. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be back on my computer.

but we shall see what we shall see.

It’s about being this absolute monarch in this little kingdom of the skull, with the ability to be tyrannical, to choose emotions or ideas, activities and dreams, to choose or abandon goals, and to be able to imagine this bright transcendant universe which you yourself own and manage, and then to have to be forced to leave this kingdom and travel outside of it for a bit.

They WILL NOT ACKNOWLEDGE THE SUPERIORITY OF YOUR COUNTRY. They’re total jingoists, self-involved, full of conceited ideas and unwilling to see things in the correct light.

To get slightly less silly for a second, after sitting around fantasizing about the way that things should be for a while and then looking at, say, Google News, is to feel this sense of towering impotence. I’m one man. I’m a cell out of a body. I’m a human member of a republic. I’m just a single man that shuns the limelight, that shuns crowds or making my voice heard.

I mean, I’m putting my voice out *here*, but this is hardly an attempt to make my voice heard.

And there’s this desire that at least I feel, a desire to help my country, to work with my fellow human beings to create a better world for all of us, and yet I (outside of my kingdom) I can’t superimpose what is (outside of my kingdom) my poorly thought, shoddily imagined, and generally half-baked ideas over this intricate and functioning layer of ideas, corrupt or old fashioned though they might occasionally be.

I’m just a man, poorly schooled. I’d like to contribute my voice to the larger conversation. But the best I can really hope to do is to add the hubbub, the general clamor. A democratic republic is designed so that it can withstand factioned politics and the raging of the mob. It is designed, in other words, to exclude my voice in all but the most general way.

I suppose that that is as it should be.  I can make my voice more directly heard by writing letters and by communicating with my congresspeople.  That would make my voice more strongly heard than that of most other citizens, or at least more strongly heard than the voice that I’ve had til now.

And yet my crazy tyrannical ego clamors for a full say.  For speeches on  the floor of the Senate. To expound wittily on The Daily Show.  To be exactly as charming as I am in my skull, outside of my skull, where- truthfully?- where I’m just another ignorant blowhard.  A right-thinking blowhard, surely.  But a blowhard nonetheless.

That’s not, I suppose, totally true.  What is this, after all,  but an attempt to write, even if haltingly, and to think, even if poorly?  It’s a playground, it’s a one-speed with training wheels.  Here I can run alongside myself urging myself along, here to pick myself up after I skin my metaphorical knee and dissolve from imperial tyrant to hurt child.  I’m trying to write, trying to think.   Points for effort must be awarded.  As I slowly leak out onto the page old rehashed thoughts that need to escape, perhaps room for new thoughts, better thoughts, will emerge within my skull.

Perhaps.

Either way I’m neither as great nor as terrible as I like to imagine.  And the continued application of fingertips to keyboard will surely not hurt anyone.  It probably can only help.

Probably.

Let’s settle on chiseler, anyway, until I get it back to him.

I hate the fact that I haven’t gotten it back to him.  There’s this other sense, though, that of “Wow, I’ve sunk this low, and no one cares… how much lower could I go… and get away with it?” that’s terrifying, in that it’s minorly beguiling; but for the most part it eats at me.  It’s so much better being the patron than the mendicant.

I should charge him for the privilege.

The kid’s got more than enough, it doesn’t bother him in the slightest, and the adult and the rational man in me knows that it shouldn’t bother me much either.  Slowly collect the money and pay him.  Which I’m doing.

It’s just frustrating.

So there’s part of the balance to my being the huge patron to Regor.

There’s a balance, at times, to this universe.

Oh yeah- damn near forgot the point of all this.  The blog ellsadaysaysdawedcalm is shaping up.  In 6 months might not look half bad.  But right now I need cash, and the best way might simply be to put flyers up all over town.  Nottoc mentioned that all the kids in the Starbucks in Davis are poring over test-prep books, and they all stare at the bulletin board there,

Flyers and business cards.  My mission for tomorrow.

And then make some fucking money.  I haven’t really looked at myself in so long.  If I get some money coming in I might finally muster up the courage to do that.

So here it: the scab, the blood, and the pus.

I got me a houseguest.  He’s a charismatic douchebag, not a lick of malice in him but more than his share of mischief.  He’s super good looking and has fucked more women (and probably more than a few men) than any person has any right to, but he’s down on his luck now, has nowhere to go, and he know I’ll kick him out on the street in a New York second if he pulls any shit.  He has a sweet nature and is beating himself up for having struck out in L.A. yet again, reduced to living in his car there and couch-surfing, before coming back here.  (Granted he’s couchsurfing once again, but he’s on familiar ground.)  He was due to stay with some other guy in town but he died the day before Regor arrived. This is exactly the type of implausible story you’d expect a charismatic douchebag to tell, and sure enough he’s telling it, yet I believe him.  You’d have to know Regor.  This is exactly his type of luck.

WTF, you say.  What possible good could it do me and my life to have this idiot here?  Well, a number of things.  I’ve known the guy for 15 years and although I loathed the guy within minutes of meeting him, I’ve come to have a soft spot for him, arrogant prick though he was.  I know of secret ways he tried to help out the homeless and the powerless when he was in power and it cost him nothing.  It makes me feel good (to some small degree) to be able to provide shelter for him.  It’ll provide some impetus to get my house cleaned up to guest standards.  In fact, he did about a year’s worth of dishes for me while I was out last night.

Although I received his emergency beacon/text at 4 yeterday, I went ahead with my plans and went out last night to catch some shocking improv in Central Square with Esined Odacrem (shocking in that it was consistently funny- really funny- throughout) and caught a beer and some potato skins afterward with her and the cast.  We chatted a bit about her boy issues: the guys she’s been dating, sleeping with- or not- and generally flirted for a good while, until I had to return.  (I’d told Regor I’d be back around 10.)  She realized she had no money, so I berated her for not being able to buy my me MY items, slapped down $15 for her items, and stole her license as collateral.  She’s a lot of fun to flirt with.  I arrived home and Roger had washed all that shit, cleaned out the sink, and scrubbed off the top of the stove.  Yeoman’s work, even though I realized today a thin scum of grease now covers the admittedly shiny, crud-free dishes.

Plus it’s nice to have someone around that loathes himself more than I despise myself.  Or at least who does it more openly.  He may be a weasel and a chiseler and an insecure douchebag and a manipulator and an egomaniac, but as I am guilty on all counts I merely accept him in- for the moment.  We’ll take it day by day.  Perhaps, even if oh-so-briefly, we can be forces for good in each others lives.

I washed laundry for him, bought him some food, and gave him a brand new pair of Nikes I had, too. I’m a prince, i know.  This’ll never come back to me, but someday it’ll make its way to someone that needs it more.  Maybe.  Maybe.

I mentioned the improv.  That it was great.  It was.  I need to take a course.  First I should Google for the UBC comedy bible and memorize it.

Damn it.  Can’t find anything.

But in speaking with one of the instructors out for a beer afterward, he mentioned “Committing to the character.”  Someone mentioned “Go with facial/body expressiosn before speaking,” “just going with the scene/not contradicting each other” and natural acting/singing/mimicing abilties that help but aren’t trained.

Today had a Study date with Nottoc.  We met over several hours at two coffee shops: Eht Tiucsib and Retrop Erauqs books, that sandwiched an interlude for lunch at Eht Babek Yrotcaf.  The experience was great.  I was very productive.  I had two people ask me (Nottoc and Enised) why I don’t have a girlfriend and two people tell me that it was tragic that I have a ponytail.  I agree with them. Been thinking about that myself.  I think it comes off.