I’m not the only one who’s blogging about me. Today I came across an Amazon author’s blog (yes, there are such things). Here’s an excerpt from an entry entitled “Saturday, Act II - The Swains” posted at 6:03 PM PST, February 26, 2006 (thinking that for safety’s sake, better not go any further with the identifying details):

In the summer of 2005…I went a little crazy once again. Wait. It wasn’t “a little.” It was all the nuns I ever knew spinning in their graves. Yes, there is a Cosmo myth that’s not a myth. Riding crops have charms. My apartment, I explained to my concerned therapist & psychiatrist, has very thin walls. I could make myself heard in an emergency.

Out of that field two men emerged. One is nearly a boy — 35: C. We’ll call him C. The other is a self-described poly-amorous man my age who reminds me very much of Eye-ore. D. We’ll call him D.

Into the mix came an email from Phone Boy, S.

C has more than a few personal problems to work out but he has my heart. I’ve never laughed & cried & experienced the Cosmo myth all at the same time. But that’s what he does to me. He’s also 2000 miles away & not in a communicative mood as he faces down some badass demons. D has a sort of harum & the Eye-ore thing can get tedious. H & A are friends. S puts in an occasional word, & has the most incredibly sexy voice & the most incredibly sexy words I’ve every witnessed.

Somehow or another it all sort of works. I miss C. Sometimes it’s an icicle in my heart. Mostly, though, I know what he’s dealing with & for once I’ve protected myself. I have swains.

I’m “C”. Wonder what that stands for. What do you think?

…personal problems…

…badass demons…

…country lads & young mute shepherds…

I hate it when people tell me their dreams all the time.

So, anyway, here’s two from last night. They’re not here to entertain, they’re here for me to consider:

• I’m in one of those foreign dream places that you can’t really define in English. One of its aspects is as the former residence of an older more connected man than. He has left it and I’m about to, but first I’m gathering a few things to take with me, which has me in a bottom drawer which has folders which have envelopes left by this adulter figure as if to hide something. The first has old foreign currency folded in half but in otherwise pristine condition. The others have flat plastic bags with maybe 10 grams of white powder. One spills open. I’m gathering the others. People are coming. Cut.
• I’m in a foreign country that seems to be an amalgam of Nicaragua and Guatemala. On a dusty rocky road like those of Cantabal I talk to two guys. One vouches for me to the other saying that his dad said it was okay. The other agrees to go on a run for me. I watch him walk off and onto a narrow trail into a jungley overgrowth. He begins to run and climb. I chase. Cut.

Not sure to what degree dreams mean anything, but still a little thoughtful over whether this is the bad sign of a festering disease below my superficial actions or the draining away of all this history and obsession. I’ll be positive.

Okay, fine, it’s a dream journal. This afternoon I’m reading Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. I fall asleep (that should not be taken as an indication of my appreciation for the letters; I like them very much). I dream I’m going to a dinner at strangers’ house who have some connection to my family—in-laws’ cousins or something like that. My mom and a couple sisters are there. Zach de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine comes. I tell my mom he’s famous! I want to tell him that I used to be tight with his good friend Rob from State Of The Nation and about the time we saw them with Quicksand at Roseland in the NYC and how I snuck myself and this guy I was working for into the VIP area where he was and how this idiot guy went up to talk to him thinking it was Rob, but Zach is hanging back in the room of the guy he knows. I’m being pissy with people and alienating myself because they run out of plates and I think they’re rude. My “bro” Sean is there, too. He was also on that trip to the NYC but what he’s doing at my family’s family dinner is beyond me. And here’s the thing, I have to get to him to tell him I’m sorry about not calling me back. But what’s my excuse?

And that’s an issue I’m facing now in real life. This past week I’ve gotten a call from Hector, two from Stella (the second one saying “you must be really busy”), and two from Sean who then followed-on with an email saying “is anybody out there?” He might be worried. The other two don’t know to be.

When I was a crackhead I avoided my friends, didn’t return calls or emails, and kept as much as possible in my cocoon. I assumed that would end with the habit, and it has to some extent, but especially lately, I’ve reverted to that somewhat and I’ve wondered why. I can think of two things:

1. The things I’m occupying myself with these days fill these days, and they’re the things that I care about most. Perhaps the things I’ve cared about the most ever. My friends, as much as I love them, are so removed from my crucial daily concerns, which never give me a moment’s rest.
2. I don’t have much to show for myself right now. I’ve been saying I’ve been working on a writing project or two for sometime now. That’s what I wanted to do when I went to South Carolina. I did a little, but I did a lot more coke. I have nothing new to say. It looks like I’m doing nothing to Stella. To Sean, I really don’t want to talk about my writing projects because he’s my writing buddy, and these are partly therapeutic and partly exploratory and partly still-undefined. If they were other kinds of writing projects, I’d love to talk shop with him about them, but these are too personal. Also with him, since he knows, is that desire to come back when my shit is demonstrably together. With Hector, he’ll want to make plans to get together in Vegas or somewhere and he being a coke buddy, I can’t do that. At some point I’ll say to him, I don’t do any of that anymore and I may or may not hang out with him, but for now, I don’t feel like crossing that bridge. I want to be really there. Sure. Ready to take him, that, and anything on.

On the other hand, being honest and slipping myself back into the world have been key components of my prescription, and I feel bad for not being responsive. And when I do finally call them–as I feel obligated to do…tomorrow—what can I say to them? That I’ve been busy? I have been but the with-what is my business, at least for now.

My uncle is the COO of the Utah Symphony and they were in town last night. He comped us tickets: Orchestra B 25-26. That’s front and center for the ignorami among us. The program included Shchedrin’s Concerto for Orchestra No. 1, aka Nauthy Limericks. Nice. Also Shostakovich’s Concerto for Violin in A minor, opus 77 (previously op. 99). That was my favorite. The second half was Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique.” My mother’s favorite, which I thought was overwrought. The best part of all, though, was that my uncle came over for pie and ice cream afterwards and I got to finally ask him all the symphony questions I’ve been harboring since at least Miwako had me in Carnegie Hall. The main one was Where do conductors come from? (Write me for the answer. It’s pretty satisfying.)

But what does all this have to do with recovery from crack and cocaine addiction? I was both self-conscious and a little smug about being the crackhead at the symphony. After three months of what they oddly call sobriety, perhaps calling myself a crackhead was a bit presumptuous, but to many it’s a life-long disease: once a crackhead, always a crackhead, even if/when abstinent. I didn’t look quite the part, but I never did look quite the part. I was casual, though. Quite. And I had a feeling much like the one I used to get when I smoked crack in the office bathrooms of that large bank on Wall Street bank that shall remain unnamed for the time being. Kind of like being undercover. Kind of like you don’t belong. Kind of like these poor people have no idea. Kind of like you’ve been clever enough to pull the wool over the eyes of these educated, monied, cultured people, which reminds you that education, money, and social veneers aren’t what they’re…uh, cracked up to be.

Let me dump a few little things here today:

• “…the drum can…be a tool for personal transformation and healing.” Well, then! Putting bongo learning and practice into my daily regimen is even more powerfully beneficial than I thought. My instincts must have known and steered me in the right direction while my rational mind was happy enough to have something to bang on and release pent-up and bad energies. Arthur Hull wrote that in his book Drum Circle Spirit: Facilitating Human Potential Through Rhythm. Yech! Hippy crap. I’m embarrassed to say I got something out of it, but that was the only line I read in it, honest! It’s a pull quote that I happened to notice when I was putting the accompanying CD back in the sleeve glued to the inside cover so that I could take it back to the library. I only got it to have something to play my bongos along to. I did a couple time. It sucked for the most part. But that quote sure fits my circumstances in an eerilly providential way. Speaking of library books I just want to say that I finished Christine Schutt’s A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer. That has nothing whatsoever to do with my “circumstances” except for the fact that ‘read’ is an item on my daily must-do list. The stories have a voice in harmony with mine in my story-to-novel chrysalis, which is also on my list. So that could tangentially relate in a positive way. But basically I just wanted a public record of my reading the book. Because it’s a cool book. And I first published one of the stories in there. So there. I did it.
• Speaking of quotes, and the novel… In an interview published in the January 30th edition of Time magazine this year, Larry McMurtry said, “If you let yourself go on a good day and write 25 pages, the well is sucked dry, and it’s harder to go on. The thing about a long narrative is momentum. A little bit every day is better than a lot one day and nothing the next.” He limits himself to five pages a day, which he usually gets done by 8:30 in the morning, and then passes off to his writing “partner” who keys it into a word processor, subtracting things, adding things, moving things around and restructuring. I could use a partner like that. Not going to get one in the near future, so I’ll focus on building some momentum by writing a little bit every day.
• In the mail that came this week from my box in New York was a nice letter from Newby, Sartip, Masel, & Casper, LLC. They’re attorneys at law, they say. For a second, the pitch of my heartbeat went high, but it was old; I’ve transferred my Carolina Radiology debt to the more patient folks at American Express.