Life in the time of Plasma

Personal Rehab Post #3
After my stumble, we get back on the path to "faking it till I make it." Today I joked around with the girl who visits my desk all the damn time ....we'll call her...hmmmm... Swerve... and put the weekend and it's disappointments behind me. The journey of thousand miles. Man I hope I make it.


I was a broke college student. I don't mean the pansy broke that means you're cutting back on food quality, I mean the kind of broke where you're cutting back on food. There were times when dinner cost me $2 or less, as I would stop at the Spur gas station at the bottom of the hill leaving campus and get a bargin basement pint of juice for fifty cents and a dollar's worth of 'tater logs - potato wedges fried in chicken grease (about 6 or 8 depending on how they felt). Occasionally I would spring the extra quarter and get a Little Debbie snack to treat myself.

Thank god my neighbors cable signal bled through the wall so I had a decent number of channels.

But occasionally there would be a need for a boost, a proverbial (and literal) shot in the arm, a few extra dollars. And that, friends and neighbors, is when you would donate plasma.

I don't see plasma donor spots around anymore, so maybe the laws are different in Georgia. I used to like them because in 40 mins to an hour you could have a fast $20 in your pocket and as an added bonus you got free blood screenings. As long as they would let you donate you knew you were good healthwise. It was like being paid to make a doctor visit, so like groovy.

And that $20 to a college student was a fortune. Or it least it was when gas was a $1 a gallon. A few dollars in the tank, a four dollar six pack and two fifty wing special? Sheeit.

The other bonus was that donating plasma made drinking much more effective. I'm not going to lie, I had worked up a pretty high tolerance while matriculating. One night a friend & I polished off a bottle of 151 proof rum with no chaser like we were drinking soda. It was only after we were done did we then decide we probably should have cut it with something. However, after donating plasma...three beers might leave you to the sleep of babies, drunks and well hung men.

But then I sleep that way all the time. *Rimshot*

Combine the sudden low threshold with the beer barn special where they would fill a gallon jug of cold delicious hops and barley water for $3, young and less than discriminating women and cheap food...well let's just say sometimes you donated plasma to get the party started.

Good times, good times.

Barkeep. What you got back there from 1990?

Though I stumble...

What had shoulda happened this weekend, but I ain't been nowhere and ain't seent nobody. I swear I'm putting on the makeup as fast as I can.

Friday I should have gone to Sporty's long delayed Going Away/En.....well, Going Away party but she got upset with me because I told her I might not make it. I was worried I might not be festive and didn't want to put that on her. She told me she didn't want the drama. So we agreed on something. I stayed home on a Friday night in Atlanta depressed. Did I eat?

Saturday I could have gone to Utopia (around the corner), or Old School Saturday (a little further around the corner) or to a house party (I'd still be driving back from Villa Rica) but I stayed home and watched crazy movies. At 4am something with Nick Nolte and Terrance Howard in the 20's where they talked about deviant sex. Yep, a little depressed.

And now it's Sunday morning and the sky has opened up with a glorious rain that city needs desperately. So the Urban Soul pool party is probably off. Well, in this rain it probably won't be as festive as it could be. Bummer.

That would be 0-3 for the weekend and now the batter should take his ass back to the dugout.

I did send Sporty the internet version of "let's be friends still"...the silly pictures with even sillier captions email. I hope I don't have to break out the stupid videos.

In other parts of my life, Shade has moved to DC to pursue yet even more medicine. Schmoopy is trying to get me to go back out for another Saturday of Habitat for Humanity, bless her little too damn energetic soul. Slim is having her own semi-drama, and won't tell me what she means by her "magic trick." Her new semi-man betta get it together.

There is just too much going on.

Barkeep. What you got in the back? Way way in the back? It will do.

I-285

Personal Rehab Post #2
More of the mental diatribes that were running through my head prior to my personal debacle. I'm going to just keep it moving, another step and then another. I don't expect to make it anytime soon, but all I can do it close my eyes and go.

I've driven in a number of cities and rural backwaters. New York on the Skyway at 3am. Doing 120 just to keep up on the JFK in Chicago. That lonely stretch of I-10 between Jville and Tallahassee where I took my hands off the wheel for ten minutes doing 85. But I've never driven anything for pure evil and frustration like Atlanta's 285.

I once heard someone remark that they'd driven the world over, London, Hong Kong, South America, through minefields in Iraq, through parts of Africa where regulations are more suggestions than things you can break but they'd never seen anything like the perimeter that circles this jewel of the south. We'll not even get into Spaghetti Junction.


Most highways slow down if there is an accident.
Traffic on 285 can slow down because somebody is changing a tire on the side of the road. On the opposite side of the divider.

Most highways slow at rush hour.
Traffic on 285 can slow to a creep because it's Tuesday. Anytime Tuesday.

Most highways will encounter a reason for time to time - volume, sporting events, etc - that can cause delays.
Traffic on 285 will occasionally come to halt...for no damn reason at all.

Up until a few months ago, I was lucky enough to always be going in the opposite direction of traffic both coming and going to work. Unlike most people, I lived INSIDE the perimeter and worked OUTSIDE the perimeter. I used to joke I needed a passport to get to work. I never understood the need for a cell phone conversation in the car..or why a headset was important.

Then I moved.

Now as soon as I get on now the next exit is right there. Then there is a long long long ass gap between exits and if there are issues, they usually don't start until right after you pass that first one. Like maybe by 100 yards. And since the road curves right there as well, you can't really tell from the on-ramp and don't see the red tail lights 'til about 5 seconds too late. I get on, traffic is moving nicely and then slowly we grind to a halt. And creep a little bit and slow then creep then slow then creep. I'm only listening to classical and jazz right now (long story) and sitting there, looking at the clock wondering what the hell is going on is so frustrating.

Then, since my ride is something like 10-15 miles, I should be able to see what the issue is. Only once have I ever seen an actual accident that closed lanes. Sometimes traffic will get real real slow, then it picks back up again. No accident, nobody pulled over, not even a naked big booty chick walking down the side of the highway. Nothing! I'd really like to get some monitors and study the cyclical nature the damn system myself. Not that I'm in a rush to get to job and try not to commit interoffice papercide. But sometimes you're just like...WHAT IS GOING ON?

Is it so wrong that I want to know?

Since I like to imagine that I'd like to follow up that admittedly general inquiry with a small missile launcher and a backseat full of Molotov cocktails, and get someone's attention. But since traffic stops because the wind changes direction, a real incident might shut the city down for weeks. As it is now, I'm thinking of upgrading to the bluetooth headset. Please forgive me.

Now the city wants to add these little lights to on-ramps to ease traffic in slowly, thus creating backups on the ramps. Which ain't gonna help 285 any. The concept that I'll be mad when I get there hasn't struck anyone. yet.

Barkeep ...I'm driving. Make it a Whiskey Sour.

El Moostache

Personal Rehab Post #1
Today I begin mentally rehabbing. You would not believe how many things can remind someone of...well, you know. I just got an invite to her "celebration" which really wasn't a bolt from the blue. But the journey of thousand miles begins with a single step, so I better get to walking. This spot however is marked on the map of my life however. Can't get around that. Not sure I want to.

I want to tell you I born with a full set of teeth and mustache, nursed on Jack Daniels and was riding out on my big wheel like I didn't have good sense before I could walk, but I'm not prone to that much lying in less than 50 words. Maybe 75, but certainly not 50. I do understand however that I never used a pacifier, which might be a whole other issue.

I did however grow a mustache, or the first wispy hairs of one, sometime between 13 and 14 years old. I know this because I was able to pass for 18 with the little bit of hair on my face to buy the "adult" magazines at the newsstand down the street from my dad's business. That or the old dude who ran the store just didn't care. At 13 with a real dirty magazine, not the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, I couldn't have cared less either. But I thus attached a certain significance to that little bit of facial hair. It meant I was a man. Or at least looked like one.

I keep the mustache all through high school, experimenting with the attached goatee, the pencil line, the thick bush, and all the other variations that beguile your average teen in a small town with no friends who live anywhere close. I groomed it. It looked good. In college it unknowingly became my brand. Let me explain.

In 1992 I was on internship, living in Rahway, New Jersey with two house mates, slipping up to NYC on weekends to club and be "in the city" and generally living large. Well, extra medium, but I was a kid from rural SC with NYC 20 minutes via the Skyway so I thought I was getting ready to take over. Between three guys, all of us had mustaches and one night we all apparently lost our minds. It started, as most nights do, with alcohol. We had been drinking and playing video games (Sega system...man, I'm old) when our resident youth mentioned he might shave off his meager mustache. Why I don't remember. We other two doubted he would, but as the discussion wore on my other roommate mentioned that if the youngster would shave his off, he would too. In a moment of lubricated solidarity, I joined in the pact.

The next morning I awoke last. In the kitchen I noticed the youngster had duly removed the hair from his face. I was unimpressed, as the difference was a best subtle. My other house mate emerged from the single restroom a few moments later his face also cleansed and a thought suddenly struck me. What madness had I entered into?

Looking at myself in the mirror thirty minutes later, face hairless for the first time since I was 12 was, well, odd. I was amazed at how much that little bit of hair changed the shape of my perception of my own face. Frankly I thought I looked goofy. But the best was yet to come.

We had guests coming up that day from Philadelphia, a couple of girls (yeah, bad math 3/2) and so we would seen by people who knew us, to get an idea of how much of a change we had made.

Youngster opened the door, and the girls greeted him with nary a blink. The other roommate got an "oh, you shaved, you look different" comment, to which the girls then noticed the youngster was without. Then I entered the room.

The first girl's eyes bugged out a little. The second girl screamed and clapped her hand over her mouth. Apparently I wasn't the only person who thought I looked different. The very idea of me without facial hair seemed to fascinate them. Today's version has people saying I look much younger. But I digress.

That smooth faced bastard lasted a week and other than now I have always had a mustache in some form or fashion. The beard has been off and on, off lately because it's now straight gray, but you know. 16 years. Whoa.

Which actually leads into another story which I'll share now because it ranks as the oddest shopping experience I'll ever have. I hope.

Later on this same day that I had taken on a nude face and shocked the world so to speak, we found ourselves on 3rd Ave as the sun went down having wandered the Village and other hinterparts of NYC, now looking for someplace to eat. For the purposes of storytelling, we eventually ended up eating in New Jersey, so that part is irrelevant.

And as women are won't to do, we passed a storefront with what looked like interesting items and they wanted to stop in, so as men, shut up and wandered in behind them. It was a typical NY boutique, which has for the sake of argument has currently been transplanted everywhere else in the world, jam packed with wares for sale that look like nobody would buy them except the people that work there. And then only because they got a discount.

Only something was ....odd.

It took me a little while to get it. I'm from the country and maybe a native New Yorker would have spotted it in seconds. Or maybe not, as the store had a good number of customers. Or maybe we were all tourists.

All the people working there still had their coats on.
They didn't use the cash register and all the sales were cash. No coin change. No credit cards.
They would bring things out of the back, set some down for inspection and take the rest to a truck waiting on the curb.
Everybody working there looked a little nervous.

Now maybe I'm wrong, paranoid or just plain have too much imagination, because I suddenly was of the inclination that the store was being robbed and the enterprising criminals, probably interrupted by a nosy city dweller, had decided to cut out the middle man and had simply started selling the stuff right there. The cheek of the blighters. I mentioned my theory to one of the guys. Influenced by my insanity he drew pretty much the same conclusion.

So we'd walked into what I suspected was a robbery and the girls were so into the shoes they weren't even paying attention. Oh the dilemma. Do I scream like a little girl, give the game away and suddenly create a hostage situation? Leave everybody behind and save myself? Do I turn into SuperIdiot and apprehend the thieves? My body tensed as I plotted my course of action.

So the girls didn't find anything the liked and we wandered out with much the same speed had wandered in. Maybe the owner was too cheap to turn on the heat as he sent the slow moving stuff down to a reseller. Who knows? But as far as a shopping experience goes, it was memorable.
Either way it made for lively dinner conversation.

Barkeep...I thirst. Bring me solace and understanding on ice.

Someplace I haven't been in a while

I'm on the edge of real depression here. Once in college after a parting of company, I holed up in my apartment for two weeks and didn't go to class for a month. I spent most of the time sleeping and wondering why fate had done me so wrong. I can safely say that was bad semester.

Somebody once remarked that I wallow in my pain, instead of just letting it go. I say to them that if you can let it go that easy, then you really didn't feel anything when you did have it. Real emotion begets real pain. Sometimes physical. She made me feel shooting pains once.

Currently I haven't been able to look myself in the eye since Tuesday. Which has made shaving kinda hard, so I just went ahead and shaved it clean.

The last time I haven't had a mustache or a beard since I was able to get a mustache or a beard was the object of a drunken bet I made while living in New Jersey in 1992. I still remember getting up and finding out my two roommates had dutifully shaved as we'd agreed, much to my chagrin, and then the reaction, a single scream directed at me that came when when the girls arrived. That was the last time I didn't have hair on my face. There is a funny story there, but I'll have to tell it later. So shaving the face bald is kinda big.

I haven't been able to look myself in the eye because I'm ashamed that it came to this. That I let her..note, my underlying belief that I has some control here...that I let her get away. That there was no movie moment that changed everything. That I may not be all I think I am. Damn Hollywood. I think that's kinda big.

I haven't really been out, haven't seen anyone, haven't done anything. I visited my brother two days in a row (that rarely happens), and he noticed something was "listless" about me, but then we don't really talk about things like this. I put it down to job dissatisfaction and other upcoming changes. When I talked to Shade on the phone she said she noticed I wasn't myself either.

I'm going to need more makeup.

I'm having to remember to eat. Sometimes I've gone as late at 4pm before it strikes me that I haven't eaten, simply because I'm not hungry. Today I'm gorging myself on cereal, then a steak, and then something else. Or I was supposed to, because it's almost evening and I still haven't eaten. I went to the store and everything.

It's also amazing how often marriage imagery and romance dominates the modern television storytelling as well. I find myself switching off commercials, flipping away from shows I've watched all because they're not helping. It evens seeps into your normal action movie. Damn Hollywood.

Last night I had a dream about Sporty. She, I, and I guess him were on a couch all watching television. I don't remember the show, but we were all focused. I wanted to leave but my hand was trapped under her thigh. Then the show ended and they got up, but I was still there. I'm fairly certain it couldn't mean anything, other than my subconscious needs some heavy medication.

I can feel my emotions rippling like exercised muscles.

If people with what I imagine to be real emotional issues feel like this all the time (I'm hoping this is just temporary, really I don't want to join your club) then I understand medication. Cause this sucks. Like for real.

So I'm not looking at myself. Not eating. Listless. We're not even going to discuss my lack of interest in sex...or porn. Feeling worthless, maybe a little used. On the verge of emotional collapse.

And since I'm starting Law School in a month (Yay me!), have I job that I cannot stand whose circumstances are about to change, a new venture I wanted to start before that but now I'm getting lambasted over and feel that in the midpoint of my life I haven't accomplished that one thing that I really wanted to accomplish....

...oh yeah, good times.

Barkeep...Golden Grain. Dirty Glass. No ice.

2008 been 'berry 'berry bad to me

I cried.

Last night I lay down on my bed and cried.


So hard my head hurt, curled up in a fetal position wishing the world would go away. Just like that day in Ms. Gordon's English class when I was thirteen. So hard that I had to fight the emotion back down and put it back inside it's proverbial box, to I guess, let it eat away me until I can afford good therapy. Really really good therapy.

The show is over. Sporty and I talked and... dreamtime is no more.

At work I can feel it behind my eyes when an errant memory flashes, a visceral emotion that threatens to cause a torrent of tears, which would then lead to a need for explanations. I suddenly would like the Lacuna treatment from that Jim Carrey movie I only half watched. I'm having dangerous thoughts. I feel like I only imagined the whole thing.

Sometime in the next few months, I'll open the door to that mental dressing room in the back of my mind and put on the makeup again. And pretend to be that someone else. Maybe forever.

I really hoped it wouldn't come to this. Playing at being someone that someone will like. I just wanted to be that someone that they did like. Really like.

I really really did.