My stuntman days are numbered.

The last few hours of sleep were spent slipping in and out of consciousness and fighting sensation. I was obsessively dreaming about psychoactive plants, specifically a variety of cactus. I wasted two different plants in one evening as soon as I’d procured them. In the dream I didn’t know what I was doing and I tried to eat them early and was ashamed by the mess I’d made and waste of money and resources.

I woke up when my alarm went off at 5:45am. That was 2 hours ago. I wanted dearly to call in and crawl back into my cocoon, but good judgement got the better of me this morning. I ate 3 scrambled eggs and drank 1.5 cups of coffee, shaved my face, showered, and dressed. I got to work and clocked in on time today. I checked the schedule. AB corner. I felt relaxed as I put my radio on. I went to the kitchen and made instant oatmeal. The static energy from the styrofoam cup caused a few of the flakes to jump around inside. For a second there I thought it might be bugs, but then I accepted it for what it was. I walked down the hall and into the bathroom, carefully setting my thermos and oatmeal outside the door on one of the water fountains so I could straighten up in front of the mirror. Good enough I guess.

I noticed that it was still dark out and decided to go outside and sit on one of the picnic tables before sitting down in front of the computer. Here I am warming up. I think it’s good practice to designate a document just for stretching. I am working up to finishing a story that I started over a year ago. This is where it starts. I’ve almost got my quiet confidence back after being down for about a year.

I quit writing as much because I was playing music all the time for a year. That is until my band broke up a couple of months ago. I was practicing all the time. I don’t think I ever practiced so much in my life. I miss it, but I am lucky that I have writing to go back to. I haven’t heard from the guys at all since it happened. I have been driving around with all my drum hardware in the trunk of my car. I think about the songs we were doing and though I was conflicted about playing gigs now I wish it were different. I practice when I can. A week and a half ago I almost got caught playing drums, but honesty and modesty prevailed.

I am not the world’s fastest typer, but at least I am accurate. That counts for something. I am accurate and spelling has never been a problem for me either. I bet if I were to utilize spell check right now I would have zero mistakes.

The voice in my head has been extremely critical lately to the point of freezing me out of my own inner world for months. My poetry output has been minimal to say the least and my prose sparse.

I have been haunted. The wall behind my dresser was reverberating loud and for over 30 seconds really early this morning. It woke me up and I moved it a little, what for I don’t know. I went back to sleep until my alarm went off. While I was drinking my coffee, the coffee maker started making this persistent growl in short and long bursts which I believed for a moment might have been a spectre, maybe my father attempting to communicate with me from the other side using morse code. I responded by saying ‘Hi Dad”

pretend to work

A couple of people who like to hear themselves talk are hovering around my desk. The first is an old man that paints everything. He dropped his false teeth earlier this week and yesterday he finally got them fixed. Right now he just keeps rattling off the names of all the restaurants in town that he’s painted over the years. He just keeps going, no matter how much or how little attention I pay him. He doesn’t seem to mind. He doesn’t mind talking crazy about any of his wingnut ideas about all things political and supernatural either. My wife calls this “diarrhea of the mouth.” I wear an earpiece and a radio to communicate with the other security guards and the old man’s strange recitation was interrupted by the other old man talking into my right ear about NOTHING.

It’s early yet, but that does not interfere with social, emotional, and mental disorders one iota. No sir, the freaks do not wait for nightfall. The creepy crawlers don’t always hide. They gravitate towards places like these where they are tolerated and encouraged until their fanaticism gains a confidence all it’s very own.

The weather doesn’t matter, isn’t as important as some feel, although it is a beautiful morning, brisk and sunny. There were way more people than usual at work when I got here this morning.

I am having a lot of body aches. My lower back and my shoulder specifically. The shoulder is nothing new, but the lower back pain is odd for me. I got a remicade infusion the day before yesterday that was long overdue. I waited over six weeks for it this time. I have been on the same frequency(4 wks) and dosage(7 vials) for a few years now. I wanted to try to stretch it out a little longer, but I began having night sweats and fevers about a week ago. I talked to my gastroenterologist about my concerns. He marveled at the fact that my awareness was so in tuned to the symptoms that precipitate a flare up. He also remarked that he had never seen a case with as many skin lesions as me in the beginning and he also said that I had come a long way.

Yellow funeral

They were all smiles mostly. They brought in a bunch of bright yellow balloons in clusters that resembled giant packs of bloated peeps. So all was bright and sunny on such a winter’s day. Such a sad occasion, some little kids funeral, where they rolled in the pretty little white casket with the gold trim on the pedestal of clean green astroturf. The kid was five. I don’t know how he died, but he knew a lot of good church people.

A little girl had a seizure in the parking lot at work. My boss wasn’t there at the time. It was only me, an old lady, and the old man that I’ve mentioned before. He was a prison guard for a while. He grew up on a dairy farm and was in the army. When the girl had the seizure he was first on the scene. He blurted out across the radio for somebody to call 911. He didn’t say why, or what for, or even where he was. He only said to call 911.

I asked him where he was and he said a little girl is choking in the parking lot in front of the children’s building. I was stationed at the desk, so I went out to see if I could help. The old man left almost as soon as I arrived. When I got outside, I could see that the old man did not have it under control, so I dialed 911 and told them what was going on. They gave me instructions about what to do, and I gave them directions for the paramedics as to our location in the parking lot. After that I stayed put and did my best to keep calm.

So the old man, the one with all of the experience, basically sounded the alarm, froze with panic, and then split the scene.

Wednesday is my Monday. I work Saturday mornings and Sunday nights by myself unless there is some kind event like a funeral or graduation for which backup is requested, in which case we have a couple of off duty policemen come in to help out. Most of the time it’s just me though, and I have no formal training or prior cop experience. In fact, it’s just the opposite. I used to do crimes. It’s funny how things work out sometimes. The last person you’d expect to be able to help in a situation often times is the only one who can.

(the next day)

We’re still talking about the incident that occurred five days ago. An hour before I clocked out yesterday I underwent the first in what I foresee as a long, drawn out series of good cop bad cop style inquisitions concerning not the manner in which I acted, being the only one to step up and handle the situation, but an off color remark that I do not remember making to an 18 yr. old rubberneck kid. I guess I said something to him about the way I felt the old man mishandled the whole deal and handed it off to me like a still flaming bag of baby poop. I probably did say it is the thing, and I have no problem admitting that I did, but the way that old cops do things…just drags on and stretches it out. They’ve probably asked everybody except me if I said whatever I said, and if they’d only ask me I’d tell them straight. Yes, I probably said that because I’d just gotten through a bit of intense drama.

No sooner than I’d typed the last sentence, I got called upstairs into my boss’s office for questioning. He told me that I’d let him down because I’d failed to include the details of my co-worker’s negligence in my report, and because I’d displayed a negative attitude while I was conducting security business.I felt awful, too, because he’s only ever called me into his office to praise me for my behavior. He said if he could prove that I’d made a certain comment to one of the day care workers then he would suspend me without pay. Point taken.

USE IT OR LOSE IT.

This keeps spinning in my mind, and what I mean by it, is your head and mine. Like, take that seizure situation for instance. I might have blown my cool a little, and showed my hand to some bit parts, but I did not, in any sense of the thing, lose my head. In fact I kept my head rather well. The old man lost it all. He lost his bearings, marbles, composure, and function of his right mind. My step grandma lost her head, totally. She had no idea where it was. She was suffering from dementia.

My favorite kind of music is instrumental music.

the baby mama parade goes by me fast. Time is passing. The sun is shining. I am sleepy. I have been taking nighttime cough medicine and my dreams have been vivid for the last four mornings. This morning I woke from kissing one of my exes for what seemed like a long time,  and her mother gave me a warning as I reminded her in the dream of sometime that I had gone to her seeking some advice or something late in the night. And we went back to kissing, picking up as we left off in the dream. And the gals walk on by in their workout gear, and maternity best, on their way to and from wherever they’ve been, never knowing where it is they’re going. I am in this arrested state of sleepy medicine head, wondering. I’m starting to realize, the more i get tattooed, that the worst and hardest part of it is in the healing process, dealing with all the various stages of irritation. The Mayan calendar ran out a couple of months ago. I got a tattoo on my right butt cheek of a false prophet carrying a sign that reads; The end is nigh. It hasn’t even begun to heal.

There is only so much you can do, but the trick is to do something as hard as you can everyday. In time it will amount to something.

I have done some writing my whole life and now I know that when I sit down to do it, that is if I sit down to do it…I know how to turn out stuff that makes some sense. When I do it enough I tend to write things that are unique to me, because I write about myself, and I don’t try to tell stories about things that I don’t know anything about… and that i guess is my secret.

Just keep going…

Here in the quiet and in the new

i hear things. I hear birds chirping. These are winter ones, and they are confused. They don’t know which way to go because there are no seasons in south texas. There are seasons, the lines are stretched thin and tend to blur though. My computer gurgles along with my antique heart. An automobile soars sonically past the front stoop of our apartment. Inside…nobody’s home but me.

Tags: art, belief, con men, creative nonfiction, doubt, dreams, emotional sobriety, influence, inner peace, memoir, mental health, observation, Philosophy, poetry, psychedelic, quietude, trust, wellness, work, writing