Last night had to’ve been the worse night I’ve had since my last smoke, though with my memory being what it is, who can tell?

I was sleepless, my legs electrified. I felt like life was sucky, or not so much sucky as just futile and uninteresting, but not particularly bad, per se. (That may be a fine line.) I wondered whether the Prosack had finally left my blood and left me dry. And with closer crack thoughts, like the Well-B had dug up and brought dezire to the surface. I was restless and unpleased, more accurately mildly, chronically, inescapably bugged. A buzzy bug that made my skin crawly.

I read about Larry L. King’s life in None But a Blockhead, which also seemed sucky and yet exciting. Here’s a line that strikes close to house:

After one has lived with a writing project for months or years, finishing it brings one quick burst of elation and then that unnerving feeling of being at loose ends. A deep-blue funky melancholy soon follows.

I soon learned there was also a physiological reason for my morose catatonia and deep fatigue. For months I had been taking “diet pills,” then easily available across the counter or loosely prescribed by many physicians. They were amphetamines or, in street jargon, plain old “speed.” I honestly did not know that or the long-range consequences of popping speed; all I knew was the pills made work easier. Each morning, on waking, I would take a diet pill with my coffee; soon would come this incredible burst of energy. I wrote, fingers flying, hour after hour, while sipping beer. When my energies flagged, I simply popped another pill. Invariably, there came a time each day when I was too energized to stay at a desk and so I fled into bars or the streets, rattling to strangers like a machine gun. Sometimes they looked at me funny.

Each morning, however, I woke to increasing fatigue and depression. I remember saying to Rosie, “I feel as if I want to cry, but I don’t know why.” “Take a pill,” she said. Thbe magic pills, sure enough, quickly restored my energy; I kept repeating the cycle and increasing the dose.…I ignored food for days and then devoured great masses of pizza or fried shrimp or cheeseburgers—usually to find that my body quickly rejected them. So I would pop another pill.

My morning (or some time morning-ish, anyway) this morning was coke, coke, coke: white crumbly leftovers across several bags, spilling and snorted up with the lint off a tweedy sportcoat, to almost tannish yellow good stuff that looked and snortled more like heroin than cocaine, and none of this not without a sensory experience of the side effects.

A cool, crisp morning away from the drama of the dog park, training and playing with Buddy in a new little grassy spot the city kindly fenced in for us to discover yesterday in our meanderings, cured the funk, at least for the time being.

Later this morning, Mom was in the process of writing me out a heftily generous check to pay off 80% of my credit card debt so I won’t have that hanging over my head, God bless her soul for that and everything else, and she jokes (half? I wonder) about that money not going to…a drug boss? was that how she put it?, and me assuring her that no dealer no matter the history with his or her client, no matter the money involved, no matter the relationship, no matter nothing, would ever give drugs out on credit. She said she did trust me, and I said, “Since we’re on the subject…” and I told her how it has become hard(er) again. So we had what turned into a talk. It ended with a point I admitted perhaps dramatic: it’s like the drugs are out of my body but not yet out of my soul, or spirit.

I didn’t mean that in the hellfire and damnation way it might have sounded, but yesterday I think I may have promised some more God talk today, so let’s go there now. Having my buddy Buddy has been maybe therapeutic in one or more of the obvious pop-psych ways and as an almost forcible redirecting of my focus and energies (outward to others and outward into the world, etc. etc.) but also, and perhaps most surpisingly, as a look at my own ridiculously stupid behavior as it is reflected by the dog.

The dog follows his nose, does what makes him happy, and he’s got some inexplicable weaknesses for things that stink and move fast. He sniffs things he shouldn’t. He doesn’t know what’s good for him. I try to tell him but we don’t communicate and he doesn’t listen and bad things happen and he still does those things that make those bad things happen. I cause some of those and have nothing to do with others and protect him from still others. I realize I shouldn’t be so dog like (dogged, if you will) and I realize that God, the one of the New Testament portion of the Christian bible specifically, has a role with me not unlike my role viz a vis the puppy. Which suddenly makes the whole idea of diety at once sensible and logical (if still short of self-evident) and exposed for what it is: an anthropomorphetish spawned from our utter helplessness in the galaxy.

I’m reminded of a (Mighty) Sphicter line I onced loved: “God sees dog in the mirror.”

Or, in terms mathematic: God <-> human <-> dog.