...this has been a very educational day. it's been emotional, and physical, and mental, and ethereal and instructive and metaphorical. and i am weary in my brain and in my body, and it's been a while since i could say that about both at the same time. i'm starting this very late, because i've barely been home today.
i started with a bit of a row with Syd. the child wanted to have conversation this morning, but yesterday when i asked about her school day and how she was, it was the shoulder-shrug-head-tilt-onewordanswer bullshit. she tried to tell me an event today that happened yesterday in school, as well as telling me that she spoke to the person she's on the outs with in her 'relationship'. so i told her that i am not doing the up and down thing, that i try to engage her and she blows me off and i'm not going to just turn back on to it because now she wants something or wants to make sure i know all is cool with her in case she wants something later. so i took her and a friend to their bus stop and i went to the gym.
i've started working on this gut again, because i know though my insulin intake is decreasing, its still enough to make weight loss a bit of a challenge in the stomach area. so i got on an abdominal press machine and R called in the middle of my reps. i left the gym (no phone use in the fitness center itself) and called R back and she asked if i could give her a ride to her doctor's appointment. i said sure, as i had nothing else going on except taking my dad to his conference this evening. so i finished my abbreviated workout, came home, ate breakfast, took a shower and got my ass out the door. i took R to her doctor appointment, she took me for brunch and i dropped her off at the hospital. por que, you ask?
because when we were talking on the phone last night, she had to go because she got a call in. the call was, first, a friend of hers whose mother had died that night, and second was a relative who is very ill. the ill relative being in the hospital i dropped her at. so i chose to go to a meeting from there since i was on that side of town and it was just about meeting time. i went to the meeting and i saw someone i haven't seen in some years, with their young child and the same issues they've had since i've met them. the meeting was small, which always makes me sad, as i remember meetings with dozens and dozens of recovering addicts and now there's maybe an average of five to eight people who attend the fellowship's meetings that i go to. i digress. i came back home, put together a quick spaghetti for Syd and went to my parents to wait for my dad to take him to his conference.
now, when i was leaving the gym, i headed down Gypsy instead of up and across at Roosevelt, as i usually do. i saw a bike sitting at the bus stop and i wondered why someone would abandon a good bike at a bus stop. as i passed, i saw it was attached to someone's life.
there was a brother sitting on the ground in the bus stop, sleeping. he had a bike, he had bags of his things, he had a piece of cardboard to shield him from the wind on the street side. i don't know if he had cardboard behind him as well. i thought he looked like the brother i've seen on campus, by the library and the taco bell down there, but i couldn't be sure. i felt sad, and i felt kind of negligent, as if i should have stopped and checked on the brother. but what i really felt, what was really going through me, was nostalgia.
when i was at the end of my addiction, i had lost my mind. but i wasn't crazy. that may not make sense, but its the way it was. i left my uncle's house in Columbus, because i knew i wasn't doing right by him, and because i knew i wouldn't. the cocaine was calling me all the time. people who have never really done it, never really smoked cocaine, don't know what this is like, and i don't know if its the same if you snort it. i just know all i wanted was to know where i could get more to smoke. so i left, and i stayed in the greenbriar housing apartments. i was hanging with a guy who was dealing, was a friend of my uncle (before my uncle burned that bridge behind him, as i'm sure he did) and had treated me as decently as a coke dealer could treat a junkie. but in the end, the coke hunger was stronger than friendship. it had to be; it was stronger than family. i slept on stairwells in this housing project. i slept on floors in empty apartments that someone had broken into. if i could find something worth eating, i'd scavenge it from garbage cans. i had lost so much weight at that time, i used a rope to keep my pants up. i was a picture perfect skid row alky, but i was a coke fiend. hair unkempt and nappy, unwashed, undeodorized, unsane. i wouldn't eat for days, and when i did, it was something like stale popcorn and a candy bar from the Stop N Go convenience store across the street from the project. i actually worked there for a period, only because i needed money for drugs, before the drugs convinced me work was just getting in the way of me using drugs. how's that for logic?
i also worked on campus in columbus about twenty years ago, when i first moved to columbus with Syd's mom as my hostage. i saw lots of transients, and some i was kind to, and some i was aloof toward, but it was due to their game rather than their condition. some would come with the most lame bullshit because they knew my boss was an easy touch. but i remember once i took a young dopefiend lady to a store to buy groceries for her kids, and when i went to my car and watched her, she went right back into the store to return the groceries for the money so she could get high. she would always ask for money to feed her kids. before that night, i mean. we're not dumb, we're just fucked up, because after that night she never asked me for anything again.
so i think, if and or when i go to the gym tomorrow, i'm going to look for that dude. and if he's still there, i'm going to give him something to eat. i don't have money to spare, and that's for real. i have bills yet to pay, and just trying to pinch pennies to insure there's cash for an emergency means a lot of shit gets neglected. but...
right, here's the relativity...the farther from me i get, the closer i am to my spiritual wellness.
i am grateful. because though i don't have much to spare, i HAVE.
though my health is not the greatest, i am WELL ENOUGH. i'm not in the hospital struggling for my life.
though the program often infuriates me, i am SOBER. i'm not struggling to get clean, by Jehovah's grace I AM CLEAN TODAY.
that's perspective that i can use. i ate okay, but not great today. i will do better tomorrow. should tomorrow come and the creek don't rise. good night.
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