Alone is Good?

I snapped awake today.

It was 8:30am. I had overslept. Well, I do that often. Still, I would like to get up at a reasonably early enough hour so that I can go to a job if one ever comes up. Yeah, I'm a psycho looking for employment. How do you like that? The man sitting next to you at work is on more pills to keep his head together than you.

"There's nothing wrong that I can see with you, Hobobob," Nurse G says. Well, that's why you're a nurse and not a doctor. Well, I didn't say this, I thought this because I didn't want her to get up and fire off a couple of rounds into my ass from her gun in the drawer. I stayed silent and listened to her shit. "Except for your high anxiety there is nothing wrong with you." I wanted to remind her again of the Blonde woman looking for Manhattan that had suddenly vanished. That's why she upped my ABILIFY right the fuck away.

"Your anxiety makes you avoid people," she states the obvious. I still go to poetry readings. "Yes, but you still isolate yourself. You hide in the shadows. You stay in your poetry." Yeah, that is true, I'm not all that outgoing at the readings. I rather work on the setting up and breaking down of the SHOUT OUT than mingle. "You must be depressed," she sits back and crosses her arms around her rounded belly. That's why I'm on WELLBUTRIN, I cheerily remind her. "You can't medicate your problems away. You have to use Dr. D's Exposure Therapy to break though this barrier of isolation."

Dr. D. is a bit of a crackpot. But he was right about the catastro- phizing. He wants me do to weird things, like be more outgoing in crowds, stay in large groups of people and interact, ride more on crowded trains and busses, shit like that. Which is true. I've avoided crowds since I took that night job at Sharp Electronics so many years ago. That night job was followed by another night job at Thomson Financial, where crowded transportation was not an issue. Crowds of people were never there. But now, since I've became homeless, but now have the money to ride the subways, I'm being exposed to more people, which I have been avoiding.

"There is an entire world out there for you if you just open up. Look at what you're missing." Oh, boy. Here comes the happiness pitch. "Don't you want to be like Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, President Obama? Wildly successful?" I thought about that seriously. No, I respond. I want to be off the streets, in a good paying job with a home and woman, but not a celebrity. A little more Hobobob, a little less Brad Pitt. Nurse G sits up and leans forward over her desk, both arms draped across it. "Well we have to end our session now." Yep, time is up.

More pills than you. Under serious therapy. Getting up late in the morning. All of this is my life right now. In an SRO. I look at the stark walls, the strange silence, until the pipes start banging like construction workers are just outside my window. The kid outside and some windows down, I suppose, is trying to play a tune on his guitar again. He sounds bad, his notes off, but if you listen good you can hear the song, "Little Drummer Boy."

I get up and do my exercise. Today it was difficult to crank through my push ups and sit ups for some reason. On the weekends I take a break to let the muscles knit, then on Monday I raise the number.

I make coffee, you know, from Darling. Then it dawns on me...this is T Minus 96hours before I'm on a bus hurtling down to Ahoskie, North Carolina. This fucking town is so small that they have the words "You are Entering Ahoskie" on the same sign that on the other side reads: "You are Leaving Ahoskie". The fucking town is so small that they had to widen the main street just to put a double yellow line down it's middle.

Now how to update my blog? That's the question. Is there probably going to be a big gap for a week, and then I catch up by accelerating my posts? Or, by some miracle, there might be a WIFI signal, letting me get online, and then all will be good. I know that I'm coming back with a wealth of information because I'm taking my camera and voice recorder. My father alone will be the mouth of a wellspring of data. Now you'll be able to see just how I got to be the fucked up person that I am. Dysfunctional family at it's best.

I turn on my baby, my laptop and watch her boot up with a cup of coffee in my hand. Then I look at my clean white walls, bare as autumn. My bed with its crumpled sheets, and the garbage can and empty bottles in neat rows on the other side of the front door. This is the inside of an SRO.

Silent and quiet, and quite alone.

"Your anxiety makes you avoid people," Nurse G said.

The pipes rattle and bang. The kid's guitar strings twang.

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