October 6, 2004

• S I C K

  I’m sick, I tell you.  No, not ill particularly, not this day
  anyway.  That virus or whatever seems to  have run its course
  in 48 hours.  I was so ungrateful, criticizing my immune system as
  I did.  It actually does work, after a fashion, sometimes.

  No, I’m really sick — bent, twisted, perverted and FUBAR.  I’m actually beginning to enjoy
  the housecleaning!  All along, my reward and incentive have just
  been my results:  the order emerging from five years of chaos, and
  my bit-by-bit triumph over entropy.  That’s a Virgo thing, I know,
  and I accept that.  What I cannot accept is that I’m now starting
  to really get INTO the process.

  What did it for me just now, and sent me out here to tell the world,
  was finding Greyfox’s drug hoard.  He’s a hoarder — bet you
  didn’t know that about him.  Back when Coca-Cola® came out with
  New Coke® (April 23, 1985), Greyfox put aside a stash of Classic Coke®
  in fear that one of his primary drugs of choice was about to go
  extinct.  I don’t know how much Coke he stashed originally, but he
  still had a few cases of it left when I went to Harrisburg in fall of
  1990 to help him pack for the move up here.  I helped him drink it.

  But that’s beside the point.  What happened was that I’d gotten to
  the last grungy, cluttered space in the bathroom, the three-door
  cabinet below the wash basin and counter.  There in one corner was
  a heap of boxes and bags, all filled with ephedra or
  ephedrine-containing products.  We’ve probably got a lifetime
  supply of stimulants, considering what old folks we are at this
  point.  I wonder what surpises might lurk in some of the other
  dank neglected corners of this trailer.  There are spaces I’ve not
  invaded since I moved in here, and there are things left behind both by
  the man who gave me this squalid hovel and by the housesitters who were
  here before we moved in.  I wonder….

  After I get a snack, I think I’ll go back and count how many doses of
  ups my darlin’ Old Fart stashed away.  Update to follow.

  Also to follow, I suppose, is some commentary and response to your
  comments on the George the wood guy series.  You guys are sweet,
  but you need some setting straight on a few things.  Later….
  
  Update:

  It’s 2,318 capsules, and that’s not counting the bottles in the pantry
  here, where he usually keeps his supplements, the ones in my stash (at
  least a few hundred hits, ’cause I derive a lot of benefit from the
  stuff, too — couldn’t make some of those runs to town without my stims
  – and the stash he has in town at his cabin.  Woohoo, we’re
  rich! 

  Shhhhh, now, don’t tell my buddies at NA, that “program of complete
  abstinence from all drugs,” (except of course for the caffeine,
  nicotine, sugar and other things various ones of us approve
  of).   NA literature clearly defines drug as a mood-changing,
  mind-altering substance, but there’s a lot of denial going on among the
  members.  For many years, and possibly still even now in some
  groups, marijuana was excluded from drug status and accepted as
  okay.  The organization needed at one point to explicitly state
  that alcohol is a drug, just to make that little fact perfectly clear.

  Greyfox and I fit right in with the other hypocrites, and frequently
  laugh at the irony of our needing herbal stimulants so that I can
  function to drive the rehab van to NA meetings and so he can walk his
  beat at the stand with his sign to drum up business, and also that
  we’ve become the members responsible for maintaining the supplies of
  coffee, sugar and powdered creamer for meetings — all substances that
  I’ve given up as too dangerous for me.  Ain’t real life a hoot?

  • 3:39 pm
  • 11 Comments