Day #4 of hacking now and again--most particularly in the am I have difficulty breathing and bring up thick vivid chartreuse globules for breakfast. Fuck this shit. Aside from a 24-hour hack in Jan I hadn't been steadily sick for two years. Now, I'm ready to be better. Only last week I ran 20 miles and was feeling fantastic. Today, I'm tired walking to work.
Took a half day today and tomorrow in order to maximize bedtime in hopes of getting better without antibioticals. Now I sit at the Service Desk and watch beautiful women study.
Met Julio for lunch today at India Palace in Cockeysville. Hadn't been up there in a while, and the food wasn't as good as it used to be. Still, an ok buffet. Julio's in a bad way, and feels stuck in his art and can't get in gear. We talked about past foolishness in and around Cockeysville--he got thrown out of the Giant that's now a Food Lion for doing whippits and going nuts with the Twins. That unremarkable region of strip malls and groceries is where Cha and I had our first apartment together.
I told him that when I left the house this morning I found sawdust on the porch and I saw a bee hovering there and thought, "oh, shit." Sure enough, when I bent down and put my ear to the railing I heard the busy boring of wood-boring bees, and jammed a stick up in the hole I found, then felt guilty for it. Julio said he first started huffing ether when he tried to kill some wood-boring bees by spraying it at them.
He asked me about my "writing," and I recalled the last time I wrote a worthwhile story was based on an idea he'd given me in 1996 or 1997 about a hallucination he had, ironically enough, while huffing ether in the late '80s. That story came about because I was trying to come up with anything to work on and I picked up a box of junk and a journal fell out open to a page where I'd written this Julio/ether anecdote. Funny how that same ol' shit recycles again and again. His hallucination involved falling into a labyrinth and running into the Hereford High mascot, which is a cartoonish bull, all the while his heart was almost stopped and he thought he was dying, but once he saw the bull he found his way out. Shortly after he got sober and has been since. Our friendship resumed around that time (of course that bull couldn't have anything to do with the fact I'm a Taurus) and Julio's dad was the one who found another friend of mine dead on the side of the road.
KILL ME NOW! MY GRAD ASSISTANT JUST CALLED OUT AND I HAVE TO STAY UNTIL MIDNIGHT AGAIN!
I'm pissed now.
