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in a conspicuous place
Thursday, December 21 2000
In the middle of the afternoon a cold fog blew across Santa Monica and then clung like a heavy wet blanket. At one point I looked out the office window and saw clouds racing by. It was as if I was in a jet heading off to some place I've never been (as I should be doing this time of year). But no, I'm still at work, sort of sick, sort of unmotivated, wondering what specific small act I could take to make things completely different. I guess that's the thing about suicide, isn't it? You get a lot of life-changing bang for the buck. A tiny effort invested, and your reality is completely, irreversibly altered. It's even more powerful than LSD and there's no question about whether you'll ever come back.
In the evening I was drinking "rumtea" because I've grown sick of all the vodkatea that I had been drinking. I'd really prefer to be drinking brandy with weather like this, but there are only so many large containers I can carry on my bike, and when I went shopping today I knew I definitely needed beans, laundry detergent, soda water and orange juice.
I'm delighted to discover that John left behind all his prescription ADD medication. It's as if he did so deliberately, because the bottles are in a conspicuous place above the fireplace. I'm strongly tempted to eat some, but I just can't think of anything I'd like to do with the resulting boundless energy.
Randomly via AOL Instant Messenger, Sara Astruc and I found ourselves discussing our respective hospital stories. She had a stroke when she was in her 20s (ultimately requiring open heart surgery) and I had to have an inch or two of ulcerated intestine snipped out when I was 15 (if you were ever a University of Virginia medical student, it may have been passed to you in a bottle of formaldehyde with the label "Meckles Divereticulum from a 15 year old white male"). One of the hospital experiences Sara and I have shared had to do with subtle inattention to human comforts. When you're spending 24 hours each day in a hospital bed, there's not much to do except masturbate, yet it seems things are always set up to curtail this natural impulse. For example, IV tubes can be made just a little too short, causing a dripper-bottle alarm to sound the moment one starts getting busy with one's bad self. Obviously, though, if those sassy nurses would just shoot patients up with enough morphine then they wouldn't have any desire to masturbate. Do any of my dozens of junkie readers ever masturbate after shooting up? What's the point? Doesn't even the Catholic Church support morphine as a treatment for chronic seed spillage?
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