May 11, 2019
It’s a week before vacation starts. I am working, running an errand on the clock. I am at 6th and San Pedro flowers for Mother’s Day. It is a scented alley lined with caged walls. People milling about and haggling over daisies, sunflowers, roses, hydrangeas, tulips and irises. The array is reminiscent of times when love wasn’t a stranger. When romance was a tangible, knowable thing. But this is a Saturday night more familiar to my actual world. While the 80 percenters are on their regular days off enjoying dates, family time or staying home, I’m sitting shotgun in an obviously ‘off duty’ Dodge Charger with this hard headed salty LAPD sergeant three years from retirement. We park in the red in front of a taco stand where an attendant in a greasy stained smock is smoking a cigarette and chatting on the phone; he does not even look at us. The LA night unfurls around him. We precariously jaywalk to the flower warehouse across the street. The place is littered with petals, rubber bands and bits of newspaper; the stampede has long since abated. We are truly the last customers of the last- minute Mother’s Day rush.
The transaction was simple, but painful. Mostly because I was thinking. What I was thinking about was how cheap a gesture it was for my mother, who went through god knows what to bring me into a world that I seem bent on meting out derision upon via the keyboard. I am thinking because I am buying two bouquets: one for my mother and one for my “god” son, Max. His mother is my cousin but she really isn’t. Her husband and Max’s father succumbed to The Cancer when the kid was 2 ½ and about a month after they married. What I was thinking about was how they’d both been through losses known for their soul-crushing keening. The thoughts in the background are predictable, things I know and feel but that are seldom expressed. How many more mother’s days would I be womanless and how soon would I be without a mother or a woman? I slip the guy $50 and we walk back to the car and dump our purchases in the trunk. I slam the door and make eye contact with this frail kid frenetically ambling past us. He is out of his element: sandy haired, blue eyed and gaunt, but not in the crackhead kind of way. He affects an aura of privilege, but not in the traditional sense. His privilege is more like he’s 2 blocks east away from his high tower loft that mommy pays for. He makes eye contact with me briefly, yapping into the phone.
“I know how much weed was there mom and they took some of it, but not all of it….”
As we sit there and my driver texts his flavor of the week, I ruminate. It’s something I’m wont to do for the past 12 years in this job. The kid reminds me of a way I’ll never be; or once was but am no longer. I remember his voice as a flat amplified monotone. Maybe he’s on “the spectrum,” (as they often accuse me of being) or maybe he is lacking the weed he doesn’t have any more and what I hear is deadpan anxiety, chronic pain, soul doubt and eye cancer that nothing can help except oblivion. He continues to speak matter of factly, his eyes wandering. He stops on the street corner right at the curb. That’s where there’s gum and a pool of viscous sticky god knows what. There is a small tornado of greasy papers and food plates and Styrofoam, then he spins around and walks back from whence he came. Pacing at 6th and San Pedro on a Saturday night before Mother’s Day. Now he is back in front of taco man, who’s since retired back to the kitchen. The place has no customers, but it is a clean well -lighted place for its location in the bowels of HelLA.
I want that kid’s problems. I want to walk through skid row complaining to my Mom about the weed that was pilfered from the “friends” that I invited to the apartment I’m not paying for. I want to worry about the MRSA-infested gum and Hepatitis A shitstains on my fresh kicks. I don’t want to know what I once knew about and do no longer. There is comfort there. Somewhere. I want to find it again. It’s here, I think. In the telling of the stories.
The next day was Mother’s Day. I tried to be present despite the tidal wave of sadness about me. Freddie fell and then we went to dinner where he was slow and shuffling and drinking and barking at the bartenders and waitresses and I wanted a drink too. I thought about Sweet Pea and the emptiness of my life trying to love someone that went away, which is my handicap, the constantly recurring ghost of my cycle of attraction. I was swiping and checking my phone. Reaching for straws. Grasping for lust, sand through the digital fingers. I fantasized about asking the chubby waitress out full of delusions she was smiling at me because she liked me. I tried to eat sane. We drove straight to the ER after dinner as Freddie sat groaning. We were there for an hour before they took him in. I left my mom in the ER with her husband. I felt relieved and free and wondered absently if the tradeoff of feeling lonely was the payoff for being attached to someone who dragged you down with them as your own health declined. I often want to shut my head off. I often want to kill the head so the body will die. That’s what the Late Great Dr. HS Thompson talked about. And eventually did. While on the phone. With his wife.
I drove home numb. The next day I got tattooed, more work on an ode to the human condition on my back. The next day tattoo hangover was one of shame and narcissism. Like I was no different; I’m just as guilty as the next guy in said human condition, full of deadly sins and foibles and shortcomings, a walking defect. I slept fitfully, the endorphins and substance “P” providing just the right amount of tension to make uninterrupted sleep a godsend. I woke up to the usual wave of darkness and waxed apocalyptic. Staring at the ceiling it dawned on me that I would be on vacation by week’s end. Just needed to get past the hurdle to get there. But what if the days were all hurdles; the moments were like bear traps and landmines; what if the random thoughts of loss that came and poked you in the cerebellum never really subsided? When sleep found me, my prayers were curses. The disappointments and almost compounded; a mound of kevlar scar tissue now. Sleep was precipitated by a gratitude list, but so often preempted by a Reality Check. My handful of attempts at love all terminated similarly. One brother in the ground after a single car DWI car wreck, mom’s screams still echoing. Survived by the one who just got released and wanders the same city streets with his tent, his accusations and recriminations. Who calls his mother to blame her for his existence. Who starts cussing out everyone that’s trying to case manage his unmanageability by inciting my name.
May 18- 2019
On my last day at work before vacation, I didn’t leave the office until almost 0400. When I got home, I had to take my shoes off and delouse them with vinegar and Lysol as I tried to recall what kind of toxoplasmosis bacterial infections lingered in stagnant cat urine, dander and furballs. Earlier that night, I’d spent a minute that felt like 10 in the cloistered pungent confines of a cat prison for reasons that I just can’t get into here. (Consider two or three adult cats that lived in a house. They were free to spray and drop wherever they liked. And she didn’t clean it.) I took the obligatory post work shower and fell into a broken, uneasy sleep as the sun rose and the city birds began their song unto the dry, poisoned city air.
VC Day 1 aka a pilgrimage away from crisis and into the anarchy oven. It was a Saturday night and I ventured to the Garden Grove amphitheater where the The Streetwalkin’ Cheetahs were opening for Dramarama..but save that tired dayglo adolescent noise for your mama and KRTH 101; I could give a flying fuck about them and don’t even recall one of their songs. It was a long foray into the OC on a Saturday at dusk. Reminded me how crowded the planet is and how selfishly reckless it is to populate it more. The venue was about 3 miles off the 22 fwy in an old town type district on Main Street. I pulled into a church parking lot across the street and made it inside 10 minutes into their set. The place had a vibe to it I couldn’t quite put my finger on…until one of the ticket takers remarked on my HELLO MY NAME IS SATAN satirical name badge. “UH OH! HI SATAN….I love jesus!” I nodded and grimaced. I didn’t make eye contact with her. I heard that stuff’s contagious. Besides, I never know what to say.
The crowd was predictably older and gave off a definitive churchy, Aryan vibe—the kind you usually find in the OC. These were, after all, the jock and cheerleader Soc ass hats from the 80’s that were all grown up now—injected with Botox and sunwashed and weatherbeaten and successful in all the surface ways. The SUV’s and dually Hemi trucks (sans toy boxes laden with graphics wraps) lined the streets. They were out for a Saturday night in the family friendly venue where the beer was flowing and the ambience ripe for social media likes. There were kids—born in the 2000’s–and there were toddlers—born in the shit-hole Trump Era. There were crew cuts and high and tights and izods and loafers and flannels. There were red necks and MAGAtudes and the unmistakable air of entitled douchey conservative dickhead. The women were haggard and looked rough around the edges. They wore pleather and had dyed hair and giant ear rings. The babies wore giant ear muffs and the kids had skinny jeans (boys) and high waisted jorts (girls). They looked bored. Most everyone was looking past everyone else. Or at their phones.
I stood in the back with the rest of the SWC locals. Many of us probably fancied and postured ourselves as leftovers form the wastelands of the MC5 and The Stooges, but we were far too young. We looked the part, regardless. There were a lot of shitty tattoos. Gray scraggly beards. Porkpie hats and watchcaps. Heads bobbing to the gruff chunky fuck you chord progressions of The Frank Meyer and Co. There was no secret handshake to this club; being there was it
Their set lasted about 45 minutes and didn’t disappoint. I appreciated the sax in lieu of piano for a decidedly rock and roll finesse. They finished with an elongated tune that I didn’t recognize but which paid its dues to the predecessors of garage rock from whence it came. I escaped to the bathroom and then lingered in the crowd for a few minutes. I felt out of place and subdued and out of sorts. But then again, I feel that way at work and every place I go except when I’m in my own company. I thought about the cat piss dungeon from the night before. I thought about Los Angeles. I thought about my own disconnection and where that would eventually lead me. The apparition was an armadillo. The music is where it all started–and ended. But what happened when the music’s over? What was the contingency plan? Hope and adrenaline sprung eternal from music and if that went away, there would be dark days ahead indeed.
As I drove home, I felt like I should be doing something else. But this wasn’t a new feeling; not unique to any other time in my day to day. There exists a baseline anxiety about a life not lived and time wasted on doing things that aren’t important in the bigger scheme of things. It usually subsides when replaced by a different distraction. I was hungry but didn’t know where to eat. Eventually I stopped at In N Out in South Gate off of Carson. When I parked, a light rain was falling. I held the door open for a young married couple. I ordered. The young wife looked at me a couple times. Likely because my mien and facial expression are not the type that would hold doors open for people. But I never feel like that person. I am an impostor.
My food came and I ate heartily, quietly in a corner while watching everyone. I didn’t cry much. Things taste different through a veil of tears. When I got home, I held Henry and told him a familiar story about how it was he and i came to be. He lay on me and it’s only when he lets out this sigh that I know he’s relaxed. He exhales, content and I tell him the story. The thoughts come like they always do: What would I do when it was time to see him off? I winced, like I do when I feel a phantom neck fart. Or I’m still crying in the crook of her neck at my kitchen window as the eggs boil and the music mellows in the background. Who rescued who? And who’s still left? I know what dreading the death of Henry portends: losing him will be the pinnacle of all losses, of all the loves I’d mistaken as unconditional, of the impermanence of security, warmth and safety. It will be the one to untether 25 years of pain, anger and rage at all the things that I could not control. The pin that becomes delicately unhinged from the emotional grenade.
Which is to say, this reminded me of the apocryphal story that goes thusly: A woman in Southern California was tending her garden one sunny and cloudless day. She lived with her husband at the location and the home was in the flight path of a nearby international airport. Suddenly, the ambient noise of planes taking off and landing was interrupted by the sounds of a horrific crash and strained, ruptured engines. She looked up to see a smaller aircraft pirouetting away in smoke and flames from a bigger plane. The commercial airplane had suffered a catastrophic injury and was now travelling in a sickening downward trajectory with flames and smoke and… other things trailing out of it. This all happened in slow motion, as trauma has a way of scrambling and slowing down forms of sensory input during the event. She was kneeling in her garden, gardening tools in hand, mouth agape, head turned skyward. She watched dumbstruck as a cascade of objects rained down from the azure crystal -clear Southern California sky. The commercial airliner plane spun downward in the not so far distance. She heard things land around her and something went plop! nearby in the freshly fecund soil where she had just sown tomato seeds. She registered that it was a human head, the stump of neck a craggy torn mess of flesh, muscle and sinew. She acknowledged what had just happened, put her tools down, stood up, went into the house and told her husband.
The air disaster involving two aircraft over suburbia was unprecedented; body parts and wreckage strewn for several miles. Her husband sat her down and called 911, told her not to go back outside. She remained relatively unaffected (if not stable and asymptomatic) for several months after the event. The wreckage and body parts were cleared and life returned to an approximation of routine not too much different than the one before that day. The woman’s dog (or cat, I forget) passed away several months later and she immediately fell into a debilitating state of crippling depression. She experienced the vegetative symptoms of said diagnosis: couldn’t get out of bed, function or experience joy. The crying about the pet extended far past what would be expected and she eventually she needed to be hospitalized. She had what’s known as a delayed onset traumatic reaction to the whole “severed human head floating from above and plopping! n the soft, turned soil a few feet away from where she’d just planted tomato seeds” incident some months before. I’m not bringing that story up to argue the merits of psychiatric diagnosis one way or another. Here’s the thing: I’m presciently relating to it. Is there such a thing? Like relating to a character in a film who was cheated on—years before your first kiss. Like falling in love and setting the timer on it to auto destruct.
Maybe it’s like that.
Maybe that’s why when I’m in the throes of enjoying something beautiful I’m already thinking about its demise.
The rest of the weekend passed in a haze of domesticity. I tried to meditate on Sunday and fell asleep a few times. There were attractive women in the room at the meditation meeting. Making eye contact with them instills this odd sense of foreboding and the need to both look away and gravitate towards them. Afterwards, a colleague and I ate vegan food at the local hotspot. We talked about porn, about not having children, about paraphilias, about the hamster wheel exercise in futility most days were. We discussed the horrors of modern dating and of feeling like an impostor despite titles, achievements and accomplishments. As I drove home, it felt like I should have felt something. Accomplishment maybe; fulfillment; another day well lived. But none of this left me with a sense of purpose. Mostly I felt more separate from everyone with whom I’d just spent time. If there was a wall, I’d built it long ago and it was now becoming more and more difficult process to deconstruct it. I didn’t know where to start. And every time I tried to engage some healthy coping mechanism, I felt like a fraud.
I wanted to go home and bake a pie but sunk into my recliner and anaesthetized the anomie with television. I was critical of the story arc and the season finale but knew deep down it was envy. For those to have created and wrought such carefully crafted albeit faulty worlds for millions to enjoy. Escape from this shitty place if only for an hour at a time on Sundays.
The next day I sat down and insisted on my story here—whether it plays or pans out. I’m still writing it. I’m sure no one will like the season finale; the prelude’s looking grim and predictable as it is. Maybe we need to hire new writers. Maybe the story arc isn’t consistent. Maybe it’s not remaining true to the blueprint.
When sleep finds me, I am sobbing, heavily sedated and wrung out from doing what I always do. The last words were something like this:
We were so close, I’m so tired.
5/23/19 God’s Army
The road out. Barstow. Arrival.
The freeways were an open artery at 1000am on a holiday weekend. The one where we honor the war dead by having a sale at Sit n Sleep and MACY*S. The weekend where the pentagon— “that five sided Fistagon”— sends 1,500 troops to yet another oil rich shit hole where people that dress, eat and prey differently than us. They did this without so much as a televised appearance. It’s How Things Are Done Now. By word of mouth. By circumvention of the illusion of checks and balances. By edict. Most dream of the financial freedom a fat lottery win would afford them. I dream of expatriation.
Now more than ever.
Safe to say I’ve driven my share of US of A. Not the south or the Eastern seaboard though. The south—never. The Eastern Seaboard…perhaps–someday. Post lotto win I’ll load up an obnoxious oversized Cadillac and ship up to Boston, then take the first flight to Stockholm. Or Oslo, which I once heard was a nation of introverts. Where people stand in line 3 feet apart from one another. I like that.
The trek on the I-15 was unremarkable in the way of traffic and scenery; the storied jaunts of yore were usually about the journey itself: half blasted on white blotter acid while en route to go hang out in the parking lot of UNLV where The Grateful Dead were playing. Of course, the point then was to get as close to the grave as possible without getting in.
This pilgrimage was to revisit my reckless, drunken adolescence in a 50 -year-old body. I passed the usual road markers with little fanfare. My exposure to darkness and pain usually begins with impulses which emanate from either my cock or my stomach. Today it was the latter; I got hungry. And I wanted an overpriced omelet at the closest chain restaurant that specializes in pancakes—and in my case some memories I often tried to kill with food but could no longer. I was in Barstow, that proverbial location where bats overtook the fabled Cadillac commandeered by the late great Doctor and his lawyer so many moons ago. In my case, it was a whole separate set of demons but they may as well have been fucking bats. Psychic bats, maybe. I pulled over, parked the beast and entered the air-conditioned confines of a diner like so many others on the great stretch of American asphalt worm.
The host greeted me warmly and seated me in the back and in a corner. Like a mind reader.
I noticed the young mother and her two crotch cretins in the booth adjacent to mine; we were separated by an eye level partition of wood and glass. She was talking loudly—the way people talk when they are advertising what they’re doing to others around them rather than actually interacting. A kind of adult show and tell thing that still lingers. Look at me. Look at the way in which I raise these children with purpose and morals. She glanced at me as I sat down. She was instructing the children about something; the menu perhaps. I skimmed mine as if I didn’t know what I already wanted. The waitress came and I ordered. I noticed him approaching as the chubby tattooed heavily painted waitress ambled away making googly eyes at me. He was tall, goateed and bald. He had hand tattoos and indecipherable crude prison type drawings on his forearms. His shirt announced everything about him and the table he was approaching:
GOD’S
ARMY
Then the lens came into focus. He sat down at Look At Me I’m Being an Attentive Mommy’s table. The handmaiden said that she ordered for him and the children already. “Thanks, honey” he said gently as the children stopped squirming and deferred quietly to accommodate the Breadwinner and Chief Disciplinarian. I caught a glance of one of the hand tattoos which said
JESUS
Of course. This was Barstow, where most of Trump’s grimly enthused Base dwelled, made babies, beat them into submission and attracted women whose lot in life was to breed and be subservient to men like them. Barstow is a light year in traffic from Los Angeles, but still looked down upon by the true believers because it’s California. If the sovereign citizens from countries like Alabama, Texas and Mississippi had their way, we would have been sold off to the next highest bidder with no fanfare.
The patriarch pulled out his phone as mom filled in the blanks for me. She implored the children to identify various animals, their spelling, functions and description and praised them with a well- rehearsed stay at home mom approved falsetto for every correct answer. It was hard not to notice that all of the answers were, in fact, correct. Dad sat with his head in his phone, practiced at the art of letting the nanny do what she needed to do. I intuited that he was in charge of instructing them on lessons in the Bile and ensuring they were all in Church or whatever on the indicated days. And discipline. Of teaching the boy to be a man and the little girl to grow up and be just like mom. The implications were horrific. I ate quickly, dropped some bills and couldn’t leave Bartstow soon enough. I thought about the bats and owning a Cadillac.
I fantasized about expatriation.
Arrival. I unpacked and showered and started to write. I left the hotel dressed to the 9’s for no one in particular and gambled on the dollar and quarter machines. I was in a rare fevered state of throwing money and away and chasing the dragon, betting 2-3 bucks sometimes 5 a spin and I Lost my ass. I wandered around leaving half-finished cloves everywhere. My mouth was rotten and I felt lost. People-watching. Observing. Fantasizing at the roulette table, shaking the thoughts out quickly and walking away into the thrush of the crowds as lost as I. Random memories would haunt me. About how much time I wasted with food, empty love, avoidance, fear, and overthinking.
5-25 thru 5-27 Twenty 19
Punk Rock Bowling 2019
This was my second rodeo in DTLV at the Stern Brothers/ punk rock party of the year was held in the desert. I actually have no fucking idea who the Stern Brothers are but after this weekend I learned that they
- Once owned Godzilla’s, Los Angeles’ own version of CBGB”s OMFUG if ever there was one;
- Are well respected by the OG’s in the old school community;
- Are likely more well off than the average slam dancing shmoe due to their own entrepreneurial skill set and belief in The Scene.
I gleaned the last bit of information after watching one well –organized* voluntarily destroyed dude in denim whip out his phone/camera/calculator/wallet/videocam/photo library/internet connection and do the math after one Keith Morris of BLACK FLAG and CIRCLE JERKS fame remarked that there were 32,000 attendees at this year’s PRB. I watched him calculate 150.00 x 32,0000 and it came out to like 5.8 million or someshit. And that wasn’t counting the sales in booze, water and other beverages sanctioned by the event.
Keith remarked this between bursts of powerfully riveting and bone chilling tunes like FIX ME, RISE ABOVE and DAMAGED. Such were the credos of my (get) high school years and beyond. I mean, really, who doesn’t want to feel fixed by whom their fucking, driving, married to or employed by; who doesn’t want to RISE ABOVE the working stiff and be an independently wealthy business shark type; who isn’t damaged?
There was the obligatory wandering, and finding nowhere to go. There was so much to see but not so much to do but take the mental notes.
My biggest struggle is the perseveration of futility. Always thinking that I have nothing to add to the party. The impostor theory is just another form of self- obsession, which makes it worse. Those who really love you, the ones that walk up and down outside The Wall would disagree, but you know the truth when it knows you and bleeds through. The last great offense is observation and my flawed and fucked up perception. That’s all I brought this year—again. My only accomplishment was in writing it down this time. Thank god for the small miracles in fine tuning a craft I’ll never really master. I spent a lot of time alone, which is nothing new. I observed a lot. I took a lot of pictures of the things that caught my eye and ultimately didn’t take a lot more because I didn’t want to be that dipshit who was taking cellphone pictures. The self -absorption of not wanting anyone to pay attention to me or judge me works against me. Because in the end, no one is paying attention and no one gives a shit. What an ironic truth in a self-referential world destroyed by social media and self- importance.
*AA Big Book synonym: hammered; sloshed; pissed; tossed.
August 14-15 2019
Los Angeles- Las Vegas
Psycho Las Vegas 2019
The leaving is the thing. Getting out of town, burning rubber, making tracks, being a human hallucinatory acid trail on the interstate, that’s always been the romantic pursuit of dope fiends, poets, free spirits, mavericks, conquerors and madmen. People with roots and responsibilities don’t pick up and leave. They stay mired in what they know, where they were told and taught to be, where the derelict conscience keeps them stationary, contained and obedient. The strange and terrible saga isn’t on the road, isn’t in the 21st century Easy Rider in a Tesla powered hearse or hybrid; it’s in those who stay stuck, who breed and don’t do anything different. Their lusts become their undoing; the things they’ve prayed to keep at bay are in the dark and feeding, growing, multiplying and preying exponentially; what stringent rules of the world to which they abided boomerang back and sever the carotid of expectations; silent forays into tranquility by creating family and community bear short lived and easily spoiled fruit; the karma and reincarnations of responsibility. Leaving is the thing. Even if it entails bringing the robotic comforts and familiarities of existence: toothbrush, handhled gadgets, books, the touchstones that keep your head just above the quicksand, always rising and stifling.
That was a rare glimpse of writing on the eve of, which I was positive was absolute shit. But the morning comes two days later (more on that in a bit) and my perception is a bit less twisted.
My god died on August 4. He was my ride or die. My good buddy. My handsome boy. Imperfect and handicapped, he was quick to change the minds of even the dog-weary. (Save for those mauled as children, mail delivery people and psychopaths.) His death was sudden, traumatic and unexpected. His chronic illness in life was me; his real handicap wasn’t his missing leg and goofily perfect way he would walk. It was that he couldn’t talk in order to instruct me property about unconditional love, patience and acceptance. I thought the worst was over the next day because I fell into a dreamless sleep because I was already running on fumes the day he died.
There were, however, many firsts and things to come with this particular brand of dog grief. I guess all grief is not the same. In the past, when family members died or when a romantic relationship went characteristically sideways there was the requisite sickness within and without. This was different and in a daunting, terrifying way. The constant presence in the house, knowing unconsciously or not where he was lying or doing. Getting misty eyed in the TREATS section of the local Trader Joe’s. How loud silence is at home. That absence can take up so much space. Domestic evils such as vacuuming and cooking come with bizarre thoughts: This is the last of his fur. I will eat this food without him laying close by, hoping for a scrap of meathchunks.
His leftover arthritis medicine and glucosamine tablets. The home video surveillance system not alerting several times a day. Talking to him while home alone; mimicking him talking to me now that he was apparently witness to my daily routines and forays into the people world. These are the machinations of grief. Awakening to the fact of someone’s death every day, it’s a common theme that they are “watching down over us” and bear witness to our imperfect lives, foibles and all the decisions we make based on limited information.
As I went about my life outside of home—work, play, family and recreation–I thought about him running around doing circle patterns in a pen lined with clouds instead of a fence, he sees me and that pneumatic tail is making visible wind trails like the ones you can see in cartoons; the tongue is flapping, he’s hyped, panting but slightly confused that he can’t get to me. The only tradeoff, I suppose, is that he is now dog-enlightened in the ever after about my daily activities without him:
Oh, so he was gone most days to go that building where they needed him to do things. He got money for that, and that’s how he provided me my best life…now he’s in a big room and people talk one at a time and then they hold hands and stuff and pray out loud….oh look he’s in the CAR CAR…and he went to a gargantuan magical warehouses full of TREATS AND FOOD AND TOYS…he is swimming, running, sweating, sleeping, crying, laughing, going about life in our house…..but I’m not there. He’s alone on the couch. He’s calling my name. He still tells me I was a good boy. The bestest boy ever. And he answers himself.
In the two weeks leading up to this repeat Vegas hiatus, I was haunted by my last moments with him. A terrible insomnia laden with regret, second guessing and his absence would prevent me from sleeping or, once awake (to adjust the fans; use the head; shut windows; close the blinds) I would be unable to return. Traumatic flashbacks in the form of violent wincing would visit me when I thought about the look he gave me when they carried him back into that Room. How he was yelping and screaming in pain when I went to pick him up. And how rare that was in the 11 years I had him. He’d seen me yelping, complaining, crying and bemoaning the pangs of human existence….and he would bear whatever ailed him by licking it, enduring it and accepting it as part of daily life, his lot. As is custom with goDs. The first day back at work was a test of the neurons and several people asked me if I was taking FMLA time off, “Fuck you,” I would say because I assumed they were poking fun at my customary child-free, girlfriend/wife-free and roommate free living situation all these years.
But they were serious.
And after that week, I knew why.
First day out: Slept 4 hours. Like the day he died. Eyes heavy, crusty and puffy. I’m in a fog doing the leaving things. I hit the road at 0718 hours. I set the motion alarm and head East. The drive is a predictable one punctuated by the paranoia of the unbearable heat ahead. I drink coffee, water, eat food and drive, drive, drive.
Difficult To Cure 
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