If You Have Trouble Speaking, Call Your Doctor Immediately

My second day sober, and I broke the cleansing juice fast with some potatoes, which were the powdered kind, to which I reconstituted with water, olive oil, mustard, salt and pepper in the middle of the night. It' almost like it would behoove me to rid my place of all foods when embarking upon such a cleansing fast. The potatoes started looking good to me about 44 hours in...

I was asleep not much later, waking up around 9 in the morning out of some pretty weird dreams that were just slightly depressing, like a light fog that had to dissipate over a cup of coffee in the morning.

This made me wonder about whatever it is about the potatoes, probably the levels of starch in them, that caused my blood sugar level to dip to the point that I would have dreams that might have been enlightening, had I written down as much as I could remember of them upon waking, but which had me feeling kind of gloomy. I have noticed the same phenomenon after eating white rice before going to sleep.

So, I resolved to shrug off the diversion into potatoes and get back on the cleansing diet of apple juice and alkaline water. I've acquired a desire to read a lot more out of the library of books I have, and the mental focus that comes with fasting is helpful towards that goal. I used to read for quantity, thinking that if I stuffed my head with as much of the classics as possible, I would gain some kind of timeless wisdom. Now I realize that the quality of the reading is of paramount importance and, reading just a few pages of Shakespeare and then sleeping on them can be of greater value than rushing through a Tolstoy novel, trying just to finish it, so as to have it "under my belt" and maybe put another notch in my book case.

No sooner had I decided to run to the Family Dollar for more juice and alkaline water came a knock at my door. 

It was Jr., already drunk and probably stoned, and raring to jam drunkenly and stonedly on the 2 or 3 chords that he has under his own belt. I told him I was going to finish watching an episode of Game of Thrones and then walk to the store and back. This is the point where he will usually ask me what I intended to get at the store, and often offer me the same out of his own stockpile of foods, mostly unhealthy. "I' got a bottle of apple juice I can give you; come on, let's jam!"

It used to bother me a lot more to hear him repeat the same phrases over and over, like he is a doll that, when you pull its string and let it go; will only say one of about a dozen different things. I've learned the hard way that, should I take him up on his offer to jam, rather than go to the store, he will hold back on the promised bottle of apple juice or whatever, until I have spent an amount of time jamming with him, sufficient in his mind to compensate himself for the loss. I can usually walk all the way to the store to get my own stuff, and then return with it well before I could ever expect to quit his apartment with whatever he might give me on the way out. In the case of apple juice, that could easily be some "apple flavored" concoction of corn syrup and artificial apple flavor or, in the case of tuna fish, that could mean some bargain brand that has added "soy protein" or something else on my forbidden list.

But, pulling his string this time didn't produce one of his pat phrases. I owe this to the fact that I have blown him off over the past couple days; partly because he is a source of a couple of the addictions that I was resolving to kick, namely alcohol and weed, and certainly crack; and I hadn't answered his frantic knocks upon my door over the past 48 hours of my sobriety through fasting.

He wanted to play guitars, but was willing to allow me the freedom to go and get whatever I would at the store, without trying to short circuit the exchange in his habitual way. That's the thing about people who use others; they know enough to let out a little line, like the fisherman who knows that he has a strong fish hooked, that might disentangle itself through a combination of its brute strength combined with him vigorously reeling it in, and so he lets out a little bit of line to allow the fish to tire itself out some in between his attempts to pull it in. These are the type of people who will rip you off for, say, 50 bucks, but then show up later, apologetic and pleading for mercy with maybe 38 bucks and a few gulps of whiskey and a joint, begging for forgiveness and extending an olive branch, type of thing...

So, now I am back at the apartment, after opening the door to see the place full of smoke from a pan of coffee that I had been heating up but forgot about, before leaving for the store. Not a good sign.

I remember when I was a teenager, and one of the guys my dad worked with had a son who had been in a car accident. Because of the amount of drugs and alcohol in his system, according to doctors, his survival of the head trauma incurred in the crash came with the heavy cost of him having sustained some kind of brain damage. "He will go into the next room and then forget what it was he went in there for," lamented my dad. In addition to this being a dire warning to me about the dangers of drugs and alcohol, it also invoked pity in my for the guy. Someone who would go into the next room but forget what it was he wanted from there, was a pathetic individual, I thought. No drugs or alcohol for me, I thought. That probably kept me away from those intoxicants a few years past the time I might otherwise have experimented with them, I must say. I never smoked weed until I was about 18 years old. I made up for lost time, but can still notice a difference in my mental state compared to those who started smoking it at the age of 12 or 8...

Though, now, I leave a pan of coffee heating on the stove, then run to the store, while the water boils out of it; and return an hour later to find the whole pan glowing orange just like the burner, making sounds like cracking ice, and in an apartment full of smoke, redolent of burnt coffee.

I really feel more like messing around with music in my own place, rather than jamming with Jr. It would really be the hits of weed that I would be going there for, should I.

I just might make an appointment with the mental health professionals that I entitled to the services of through my medicaid enrollment. Maybe they can actually give me something like that Prevagen drug for memory improvement, and not something that will treat depression with only a slight risk of "suicidal tendencies" as a possible side effect.

"If you have trouble speaking; call your doctor immediately." (and blather to his secretary incoherently until she just hangs up on you, thinking it is an obscene caller).