Me Versus December

I look at the clock on the microwave.

8:30. That's enough time to get ready and meet Bryan at the Port Authority. 9:30.

WHAT?! Just like that, I lost an hour. I bolt out of bed. I need to be at Port Authority at 10:00am. What the fuck happened? I jump into my pants, dash around my room, pack up my baby, take my meds, and run out the door like a breeze. One thing though: I left my heavy coat, instead, snatching away my light jacket. I jump the Way and switch trains effortlessly, getting to the Port at fifteen minutes past the hour. Bryan arrived at twenty minutes past. He had a boiler problem in his home. Whew.

We step outside to go to lunch, and the wind catches me, finding a gap in my jacket and pants, slipping under fabric and burrowing under flesh and muscle. My bones rattle from the cold, forcing me to huddle up into a jacket that no longer provided any warmth. It was me, the jacket, and an undershirt, against December. Guess who won the match? We made our way to a coffee house to wait for a Ruby Tuesday's to open. When it did, we shot upstairs, sat down for lunch and caught up with each other's past. Bryan and I can talk for hours on end about nothing in general. Soon, the restaurant's management begins to give us the stink eye when we finish our meal and just hang around drinks. I had a bottomless glass of lemonade, Bryan, his usual Coke. It wasn't that I didn't want a glass of wine with lunch, I wanted to have lemonade even more.

Afterwards, Bryan and I step once again out into the cold and it was clear to me that I could not take the cold dressed this way. I let Bryan know that I was going to return home to get a coat. He came with me for having nothing else to do and we were shortly at the mantrap to The Spot. The security guard wanted to know immediately who was with me and that they had to leave their ID. I invited Bryan into my room and he was immediately surprised as to how small it was. It was quaint, almost too quaint to him, almost like a jail cell. To me, I explained, the room seemed quite large, with enough space. Bryan, scanning the room, found a sign on the door that read: "Not more than two (2) adults permitted to sleep in this room. 27-2075 of the Administrative Code. " He points to the sign, reading it, then turns to me: "It says here two people." Yep. I change jackets, and this time actually dress for the weather.

We slip back out to the Way and head down and across town this time, where we kill time at the Madison Avenue Starbucks. Soon, it is time for me to leave and I head on down to Otto's Shrunken Head. I rush, thinking that I was late, getting there five after 4:00pm. I find no one there. The establishment still locked. I wait in the cold, grateful for the change in clothes until people start to arrive and the Bartender opens up, late as usual.

The SHOUT OUT is fun as usual, we have a guitarist as our feature who fills the house with guests. I am the MC for the first half which explains, honestly, why the first half is like a horse galloping through mud. I labor through it with many errors and faux pas' until it's time for me to hand the stage over to my brother who wraps the show up tight and brings it to an end. Even his mistakes go over well with the audience. It's called stage presence, and he has it far more than I do. I'm too self-conscious up on the stage, and it dearly shows. I concede defeat.

During the show I have a pint of PBR, Pabst Blue Ribbon, the cheapest beer in the house. While sitting on the floor, watching the show I see one of the poets passing around cupfuls of drink. I reach out for one and give it a sniff. One thing that I can tell you, with damn near absolute certainty, and that is that I know Jack Daniels when I smell it. It was only a cupful, but it splashed against my palate like a foaming, angry sea against shore. I swallowed the surging fluid, feeling it's white hot burn going down. When it hit my stomach, my shoulders became fire, pouring down the sides of my body, the sympathetic nerves firing. I waited for it to hit my skull, make me swoon, but it never came. There was nothing there.

There was no gap there to fill, no feeling that wasn't dead in the synapse. It was as if I drank hot Kool Aid. NAL- TRAXONE doing its miracle job. In plugging up the synapses that NEEDED the hit from alcohol, by feeding them constantly, it dulled the experience of drinking. There was nothing there if I can't get high. I returned my attention to the show.

Later, I still could not feel the affects of any of the drink. It did not warm me when I stood in the cold. I was quick to say goodnight after we pulled a few tokes from a communal joint. Let's see how THAT is handled by the ol' brain. My brother and I retired to a Kennedy Fried Chicken and he bought a dinner. I sat with him until he finished and then went shopping at a group of 99cent stores. I thought that I was alright, but my brother says that I was babbling like a brook, not making any sense at all. All that talking and I remember none of it. Marijuana must scramble the synapses.

Upon getting home I felt NOTHING. NALTRAXONE, which is a narcotic, feeds those synapses so completely in small doses, that there is no reason to hit your skull with soporifics. NOTHING WILL HAPPEN. I'll be damned if Dr. A. hasn't found the cure for alcoholism and addiction. Maybe it might not work in everybody, but I'll damn well guarantee that it'll work with some.

I get on the Internet, and blog and write email and generally make myself comfortable on the web. This is my lifeline, this is my home. I'll most likely be without it for a week.

In the morning, it is T minus 22.5 hours before I'm on that bus down South.

I'm packing now.

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