Tag: drugs

My other lives

Inspired by this poem from Bridgette Kay.

Hopped a freight, saw gang in Thompson 
Falls, flatcar next track over. They liked 
my car better, took it by force. No, wait...
Hopped freight into someone else's car,
who pushed me out again without my
knapsack, broke my leg, or...
I remember: clinging to moving car, one
hand desperately grabbing a handle,
slipped, lost my legs while those
startled drivers waited, watched,
horrified behind barricades. Or
did the speed freak sipping Mickey's
Big Mouths not drop me off, but
instead mug me miles from home?

Eloquently, asked blond Orphan Annie
out when snow bounced like Styrofoam.
Followed her eastward to Midwest. Sat
bouncing one child after another while
she conducted services at her church.
Or did we split angrily over my lack
of faith? I can never remember.

My epileptic buddy seized while training
for his bicycle road race, hit his head,
died. Knowing he didn't take his meds,
dedicated my life to medical counseling,
patient support/advocacy. Died early,
stress from lack of success, debt.

Indulged whim to own motorcycle.
Pretending to slalom along Woods Creek,
hit gravel, slid into oncoming lane,
already occupied by one-ton pickup.
Or did I just slide right over the edge,
mangling my body, my hopes for 
being energetic weekly news reporter?

Did my heart burst when I snorted
Black Beauties? Or did I die after
doing same with PCP disguised
as so-called cannabinol? How 'bout
that time "chocolate mesc" turned
out to be rat poison, not placebo?

Millions of me's live in my memories,
branched from events gone right,
events gone wrong, events gone
different. When my editor ended
my career for once again failing 
to put "ly" on adverbs. When my 
employer marketed my database, 
fame, money, a new career following.
When I got hired in Southern
California instead of upstate 
New York. When my wife died
from cancer instead of lived.

70/100
100 poems in 100 days

Every one of those branching events could have happened, the only speculative one being the one about getting fired for not using “ly” on adverbs—although an editor/publisher could have ended my teaching career before it started when upon learning I intended to teach journalism he laughed and said, “You?”

  • I did indeed hop a freight while in college. There was a sinister looking bunch of guys on a flatbed. There could have been a guy in my car. I did hang on gamely when I tried to mount a moving freight car now way too high due to a raised railbed. After getting off of the freight, a tweaked out guy picked me up in a Roadrunner around midnight.
  • I did have a crush on that young woman in college, but too insecure, I didn’t ask her out. I speculated on her future career.
  • My epileptic buddy fortunately had his seizure on the dormitory floor, not while he was out training for the race. He’d stopped taking his meds.
  • I did slide right into the oncoming lane of traffic. It was a lonely road. I righted the bike, got back into my own lane.
  • Uh….yeah I did do those substances as described. The capsules at the end only had chocolate in them, not mescaline.
  • The rest is self-explanatory.

It’s interesting to me how I think about all of the ways my life could’ve gone wrong, only rarely think how it could’ve gone differently, and not at all how something could have gone right instead of how it went down. Does that make me a glass-half-full kind of guy? Or do some of us innately focus on good things instead of bad ones?

Summer ’76

Pop quiz: young man below (who hopefully will not be recognized because I doubt he will be flattered) was a real-life grad student. This photo represents what?

  • A. a waste of his parents’ money
  • B. proof “too much education” actually is a thing
  • C. the dangers of drinking
  • D. the empirical method at work, determining remaining quantity of beer
  • E. a complete lack of hand-eye coordination
  • F. pick any two above and provide a complete argument for your choices
College dormmate, Fall of 1976
Summer, nineteen seventy-six,
living my self-realized dream of
poverty, danger, emotional
confusion combined with
dead-end work. No car.
Walk two miles to work,
six days per, rain, shine.
Three of us with Crazy
Pete supervising(?),
performing work long since
killed by technology's steady
advance. Loaned co-worker
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle 
Maintenance precipitating
his mental descent, believing
himself to be Jesus. Nearly
killed my roommate, here now 
first confessed. My defense,
your honor, has to do with
his pistol-waving girlfriend,
sister to his wife—plus their
side business, stealing pills
from our state mental ward
to sell them later. Thinking
America's Bicentennial 
would prompt Jefferson
Starship plus Grateful Dead
to perform freely in
Golden Gate Park, headed
south with friend Ray, driving
one-oh-one down entire coast
(nearly killing us when his
bald-tired Vee-Dub spun
circles on twisting roads
through California's
redwoods). No concert
transpired but our good
friend entertained us
from his expensive digs 
above Oakland, serving up
ridge views with top-flight
drugs. Returning, faced up
to first failure as freelance
writer of fiction, looked in
my mirror, predicted, "If
you don't get your ass back
to college for some kind of
degree, you never will."
U-Dub to my rescue,
restoring my transcripts,
enabling graduation
in five college quarters.

Postscript: afraid to take
summer off (because I'd
drop out again), attended
said institution for nineteen
months, grabbed its
sheepskin after Christmas,
proving to myself how one
can be right/wrong 
simultaneously.

52/100

Count me in

Counting pills, the final year. April 2018.

Every week I count out three different prescription pills and one over-the-counter drug into a one-week pill minder. Every week I think of my mother doing the same.

My brother and I traded exasperated texts when one of us witnessed this. By the time I shot the photo above, Mom had only eight months until others would count out the pills for her, and she had but 18 months left with us. She’s closer to 89 than 88 in that photo. Never strong in linear thought and simple arithmetic progressions, aging had taken a bit more away from what once was there. Our exasperation hid our anguish at several things: who in their right mind would think it’s a great idea to make tiny little white pills which will be taken mostly by old people with arthritic hands? And shouldn’t it be a regulation that no pill can look exactly like another? And how can a person not just look inside the pill minder partitions to see if there’s a pill in there before you start? Which of course left us with the question, how can one not notice when a pill isn’t taken one day of the week?

Having worked in pharmaceutical manufacturing, I have a formalized method for dispensing my pills, and for taking them.

  • Open the container and flip out all ‘leftovers’. (I sometimes elect not to take the decongestant so I have leftovers.)
  • Take prescription blood pressure medicine #1. Drop one into each partition. Double-check that it’s just one-per-cell. Close that pill bottle. Turn it upside down.
  • Take prescription #2. Cut a tab in half. Drop one half each into the first two cells. Work left to right and repeat for cells 3-4 and 5-6. Drop another half tab into the seventh day’s cell. Close that bottle. Turn it upside down.
  • Start the same for prescription #3, dropping two tabs in each cell.
  • Cut seven tabs of the OTC drug in half, dropping the split tab each time into a cell.
  • When it comes time to take the day’s pills, flip out the day’s cell into a little pill cup I have, then put one half OTC tab back in. At the end of my breakfast, dump the contents of the pill cup into my palm. Stop. Stare at the pills to be sure I know each of them and that there are the right number of each. Swallow them down.

“Rigidity for the things which should be rigid,” is my motto. Otherwise I don’t care. (Okay, yeah I do, but that’s a lengthier post about borderline OCD-ness.) Yet…when I dispense my pills each week, I think of how difficult this was for my mother when she was but 15 or so years older than I am now. I don’t believe she had nearly as much trouble when she was 70. What’s coming down the road? Why couldn’t I see that being 88 is not like being 64?

Next week: how to torture yourself about any trivial thing for the rest of your life. Please prepare by reflecting on your teenaged years and the relationship you had with your parents.