I Have the Touch

Peter gets it.

 - The woman behind me nudges me lightly with her bag. It feels like the soft nose of a dog in the small of my back. I turn to see if I'm crowding her, and she says, "Sorry." I nod, and shift to my left to give her some room.

- I look up from my book to find I'm being watched by a woman. She holds her own book in her hand. Like good New Yorkers, our gazes meet and slide away, so as not to intrude. 

- As I wait to get on the train, I turn my body sideways to let the passengers get off. Someone bumps into me from behind, impatient with my politeness. I don't even look.

- The train is crowded, and a person brushes my back to get past me to an open space. I have a vague impression of their mass, and then they are gone, and I go back to staring at the ad next to the transit map.

- Another woman looks me in the eye as I scan the train. There is only the slightest flicker of recognition that I am there, but I take it.

- At Grand Central Station, almost everybody is getting off. In adjusting my bag, I touch the sleeve of an older man's gray suit with my wrist. Neither he nor I react at all.

- On the platform, we all wait to ascend the stairs. A person comes a little too fast and bounces off my back. I have more mass, so I don't move, but I can feel their point of impact, a memory of motion. I feel solid like a tree, and I am secretly pleased to be so. 

Amidst the gentle collisions and jostlings of the commute, I am touched, spooned, butted, elbowed, pushed, shouldered, and looked at, and I do so in return. My boundaries are defined and rubbed smooth, like a stone in a river, and the world defines itself by being what I am not, and so on, energy exchanged and grounded and leaked and returned, until I arrive at work.

Fall, Fallen

"Why am I restless?" he asked. "Why do I have this feeling in my blood?" 

 "Wait and see," she said mysteriously. "Tomorrow, perhaps, or the day after...." 

- T.H. White, The Once and Future King 

We passed beneath the thick overhanging urban arbors of Third Street, down-slope from the park. The sky was so blue as to almost pass into purple, and the wind carried the slight spice of browning leaves in its chill breeze. The streets were mostly weekend quiet, until we walked by a particularly noisy, bird-thronged tree that rattled with a riot of squawks and twitters. The whole block echoed with constant conversation, all the birds flitting back and forth, quarreling and laughing at one another, searching for their friends and flock-mates, making plans and executing complicated test flights above the brownstones. I could hear the restlessness in their voices, in the way they seemed to be gathering momentum for a great journey.

I could picture the moment, maybe not today, but tomorrow, perhaps the day after that, when they would rise up, without any one leader giving the signal or calling a vote. At first one at a time, then in groups, then, suddenly, en masse, up into the sky they'd go, impelled by something they did not know and could not understand, a giant cloud of them, all of one mind, heading south, fleeing the coming cold, knowing-without-knowing where they were going, turning the wheel of the seasons on into fall.

Reading on the Subway (and On Being an Occasionally Moody Fucker)

Found this neat little website of folks reading on the subway: Underground New York Public Library. I often think of how I am presenting myself with the books I read, which is pretty typical of the narcissism I hate in myself, but there we are.

I mean, I'm a big person (six foot four, two hundred pounds), so I know I'm tough to miss. I make it a point never to sit on the train during rush hour if it's very crowded, so there I am, taking up all that space like a giant, and I read big, chunky books that hurt my wrists somewhat. So I try to be inconspicuous in my mind, as if, through some sort of meekness transference, I can make all this mass invisible and unobtrusive. Even so, I still sometimes find myself wondering if anybody is looking at whatever I'm reading - if they've read it too, if they want to read it, if they'd like to talk about it, if they hated it and are judging me viciously for my perceived lack of taste. Most of the time, I'm sure, they don't think of me at all.

I recently started reading Wilhelm Reich's The Function of the Orgasm, mostly because an author I admire, Robert Anton Wilson, was a big fan. The book itself was dry and dull, pretty typical mid-Twentieth Century psychological text, but let me tell you, that is a title to carry around on the train. I found the woman seated in front of me while I read it glancing up furtively at the cover, tilting her head a little to try and read the blurb on the back. It's a pretty audacious title for such a dull book. I was a little embarrassed by her frank perusal and, worried I might accidentally meet her eyes, I lifted my book so I couldn't see her over it. 

I eventually got tired of reading it, though, so I recently switched to trying to read The Wind-up Bird Chronicle again. It's much easier going this time than the last, which is understandable, considering what a mess I was the first time I tried to read it (circa 2009, stopped using kratom, blah-blah-blah). I'm hoping that Murakami wins the Nobel Prize tomorrow, so that I can be reading a book by him when he wins. And then people can see me reading it, and know how cool I am (i.e. not at all).

This past weekend's writing came to a little under 10,000 words. Some of them were even pretty good. 

As you may or may not be able to tell from my writing style, I'm feeling a little under the weather today. I swam yesterday, and I may have overdone it. Oddly enough, my physical distress manifests itself in emotional issues. It only took me forty years to figure that little bit of information out. If I'd known in high school that when I'm sore and tired or hungry I get cranky, anxious and depressed, I imagine I might have been a little kinder to myself. Better late than never, I suppose.

My Ideal Day

This morning, I got up, like I always do, at seven o'clock. The whiskey that I'd had at rehearsal with my friend Ray last night had a little something to say about the hour, but I'd been quite moderate in my imbibing, so I told it to shut the hell up. I kissed my wife on her sleeping shoulder, tried to get out of bed without disturbing the cat (who had been awake for hours (im)patiently awaiting my rising), and put both feet on the floor.

After feeding said cat, I took a shower, shaved, combed my hair, threw on some clothes, watched In the Papers (for you non-New Yorkers, a local anchor on the New York news channel reads the major articles in the dozens of newspapers from around the area. It sounds stupid, but trust me, it's awesome), ate some breakfast, kissed my wife one more time and headed out into the day.

That's where everything changed.

Because instead of turning left, walking to the subway, riding the train into work (reading my current book), sitting at my desk, and muddling my way through the next eight hours at a job that I don't hate, but certainly don't love, I turned right, and started down Seventh Avenue, walking in the morning cool.

That's right, kids. I'm not going to my day job today.

But I'm keeping most of my routines. I did my morning writing, I drank my morning tea (chamomile, thank you. Caffeine makes me jittery, then depressed. I know, very rock and roll of me) and am now sitting, looking with some trepidation at the outline for the novel. I'm sitting at a desk, much like if I went into my day job, but now it's my desk. My work that I gotta get through.

This is my ideal day. Later, I'm going to the library (for research), swimming, doing yoga, writing some more and playing some music. If I had my way, every day of my life would be like this. I would work on the things I love. Most of my life may not be like this, but for one day, I am getting what I think I want.

The thing is, I've realized that a good chunk of my ideal day involves work. Working towards my goals, making something, interacting with people, physical activity. And sometimes, no matter what your job is, work is stressful. I've spent a very large chunk of my life avoiding anything that would disturb my equilibrium, avoiding work that might "stress me out." I've ignored huge problems in my life, and pretended nothing's wrong. I've acted like I was happy doing things that I wasn't, and thought I was happy when really I was just numbing myself out.

Well, here's a different way of doing it. I'm gonna keep my routine. I'm gonna do my work. I'm gonna act like the things that I want in my life are important enough to do them all day, even if it's only for one day. And maybe, if I can string more and more of these types of days together, I can make the kind of life I've always dreamed of. Not a life of escape, not escaping from the day to day world, but making the day-to-day world my kind of world. One that I made. Let's see how it goes.

What's your ideal day look like?

Kratom and PAWS, a follow up post

Update: The original post referenced in this post can be found here. Please check it out.

So, not to get too inside baseball on things, but the post on this blog that has received the most hits in the past year is a post I wrote back in November about getting off kratom. Mostly from people looking up information on how to use kratom to get over their own issues with Post Acute Withdrawal Syndrome. This suggests a couple of issues to me:

1. People are doing a lot of drugs (duh)
2. People are looking for information on what they assume is a slightly less dangerous substance to do some of the heavy lifting of recovery from arguably more dangerous substances (I'm guessing alcohol and opiates).

Now, anybody who knows me knows that people using plants (technically called ethnobotany) is a hobby of mine. I've done a lot of research, and at the risk of sounding like an idiot, I'd like to state something very clearly - kratom is a very temporary fix for opiate addiction maintenance. Please note that just because it's "natural" (e.g. less processed, closer to the original plant) doesn't mean that it's "safer." It can be just as addictive as anything processed.

Kratom is a very mild narcotic, and most people can do it with little to no problems. People have used it for hundreds of years to enrich their lives and make living on earth a little nicer. The plants are not the problem.

The problem is you.

By you, I mean the person that is looking for relief from the pain of withdrawal, which presupposes that you have already managed to addict yourself to something or other. If you are addictive, your relationship to plants with abuse potential is, let's say, problematic. Another good word is dangerous.

What all the convoluted logic above amounts to is this - if you're trying to get off opiates, be very careful doing kratom. It may temporarily relieve your depression and the physical symptoms of withdrawal, but ultimately it can flip on you, and you will be no better off than when you started. It is easy to develop tolerance to kratom, and there are new processing methods, including extractions and reinforced strains, that up the ante in a big way. It is less expensive, and the social stigma of stirring powder into juice or brewing a relatively inexpensive legal tea is a lot lower than trying to score pills or snorting heroin. I'm not saying it doesn't work. If you are only in mild trouble, you might be able to hang. I'm just saying that, instead of turning to another substance, you might want to address behavioral and chemical issues (i.e. your internal neurochemistry, depression, anxiety) that might be better taken care of by a doctor. If you're self medicating in this way, you risk addicting yourself to a different substance. 

This might leave you saying "Well, dammit, what am I supposed to do, here? I am in pain!" You need to do what keeps you from killing yourself. All I'm saying is that at some point, like with methadone, really you are just extending the amount of time that you will be kicking. It is a risk/benefit analysis. If you're here looking for advice, I don't have a lot to offer, except please, please talk to somebody who's smarter than me. Don't get your advice for getting off drugs from some random guy off the internet. Please take care of your self, and know that with help, you can get through this. Please don't try to do it by yourself.

Moving on up and getting things done

Got my first spam comment today. It's a small accomplishment, but we take our victories where we can find them around here.

My horoscope today said:

You may feel as if your world isn't able to contain you now because you're ready to shed anything that holds you back. Just as a snake outgrows its skin, you, too, have moved beyond your teacher, job or relationship that brought you this far. However, you can't escape before tying up loose ends. Give yourself a break and let your greater ambitions slide for a couple of days while you gain the closure you need.

So I went through a pile of old (first) wedding photos that had been in a box for the past six years. I'd been putting it off, and Katie had mentioned how it was starting to hurt her feelings. Six years is long enough, I figure.

I kept a few - pictures of old friends that I wanted to remember from that day, pictures of my remaining grandparents and uncles that are no longer alive. I set aside some pics for my ex-wife, Stephanie, too, pictures of her dad and mom and friends of hers I'll probably never see again. It was interesting, and a little exhausting. Memory lane always seems to take the wind out of me.

My dreams have been busy lately, too. I suppose that comes from reading Jung (I always have been a bit suggestible), but far from being archetypes from the depths of the collective unconscious, they've been remarkably specific to my life and concerns, if as convoluted in plot and imagery as ever.

Though I've often heard that other people's dreams are boring, this particular one might be of interest to those who are here, most of whom I consider to be my friends. In this dream, I watched a test flight of a new jet, and the launch was spectacular. The plane, a short, stubby little bullet-shaped thing, catapulted faster than the eye could see, up into the night sky on a brilliant arc of flame until it was almost out of sight. The trouble started when it was on its way back. They'd built it perfectly for take-off, but landing was another matter entirely. The ship had nothing in the way of wings or landing gear, and it could barely steer. The things that had made the beginning of its flight such a success now threatened to destroy it. It wobbled through the sky, narrowly avoiding crashing until it finally skidded to an ignominious halt after a very harrowing descent. I stood beneath a tree where I'd been watching the flight with the designers and cried, saying, "I don't know about anybody else, but that's one of the saddest things I've ever seen."

The meaning for my life, once I figured it out, seems obvious to me, but you might disagree. My life, in almost every endeavor, has been a series of good beginnings, strong progress and quick success, followed by stagnation and falling off. I have a strong will, a good focus and a lot of natural talent, but the coming back to earth, finishing the thing and bringing it home, has always been difficult for me. When I woke up from this dream I realized that I need to put better wings on my work. I need to use the circumstances around me to better advantage. And most of all, I need to plan for the finish. I have great ideas. Now, I just need to finish them off, and get them out into the world.

Checking in after checking out

I celebrated my two year anniversary (and they said it wouldn't last!) with Katie last week by going up to Vermont. It was lovely and fun and boring in all the right proportions, so that we were really happy to be hanging out, just the two of us, and had a great, relaxing time, and then were really glad to get back to the familiar environs of Brooklyn.

One thing I discovered, and I never thought I would say this, is that I think I've had enough of driving for a while. I can't say what changed, but the guy that was really into driving hundreds of miles when Katie and I met on that children's theater tour seems to have had his fill. I came back from the trip exhausted, enervated, and just sort of ready to walk places for a while. That was a week ago, and I feel like I'm just starting to recover.

Since my return I've been working on the novel, which I basically took apart and started over. The structure is profoundly different - to the better, I believe. I'm considering posting a sample chapter up here as it gets closer to finish. Anybody reading this? Feel free to voice your approval. Or disapproval. Or profound indifference.

The Brooklyn Book Festival was this weekend, and I got to meet an author I've been corresponding with on Twitter named J.R. Angelella. He wrote a book called Zombie which I highly recommend. It's pretty grim, and has fewer actual zombies in it than the title might suggest (i.e. none), but it's well written, and I'm enjoying the hell out of it. On a personal note, he's been super encouraging of my writing, and I'd like everybody who reads this (you, especially. Yes, you.) to check out his work.

My currently reading project is The Essential Jung which I've owned for literally 15 years and never cracked, carrying it around with me from place to place. Well, I'm almost through it now, and I'll say this: I'm glad I'm reading it now, rather than when I was younger and expecting every goddamn book I read to somehow solve my life. It's interesting, complicated, dense, deep, and well-written, but I don't feel like it's really life-changing. This is a good thing. I'm a lot calmer now than I have been in a number of years. Maybe ever, and so there is a self, a boundaried I-ness that allows me to reflect on what I read and decide what I may eventually take in. Previously, any given book would be absorbed whole, and then, maybe, assimilated into a world view and behaviors. This was, you can imagine, rather destabilizing. So now I can read and enjoy and absorb without the ache of trying to fill some void inside me (hint: not possible, at least not with words, books, other people's world-views, drugs, sex, relationships, food, projects, art, beauty, poetry, magick, religion, or any of the million other ways that I've tried).

Regardless, I think it will inform a lot of my upcoming reading, which includes finally getting through The Golden Bough and Jaynes The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Don't worry, there's some fiction in there, too, including some more Murakami, and Brautigan. So there's that. Hope you're well.