Drinking at Work, 1

(Tuesday)

I woke at 2 am to a good high, effortless, natural, that timelessness feeling was strong but seamless.

I had drunk a bottle of Merlot and fallen asleep. I didn’t remember going to sleep, or even laying down.

It’s the middle of the night. Music is on (I‘m Awesome by Spose), the Bonnie Hunt Show is on.
I feel like a soul. I feel like that first chapter in
Invisible Man. Where he is separate from life; life’s a distant thing that he allows into his house through a record playing. He steps out the door, but not out of that place and enters into life and experiences it. I like being in this place. It’s just me here.

Brokenspirits is gonna get on me for taking the pills but I did good. This feels good, I feel good, relaxed, springy, enjoying myself. It's hard to
know how to feel this way when you haven't felt this way much in your entire life. I've always been under a lot of strain. American life is extremely demanding. It's exhausting on the senses. I'm amazed that I got this far by twenty seven. I feel lucky, more than anything, life seems too fragile to feel any other way.

Is sex here? I look around, try to feel out the plane I've shifted to. The answer is no. I can’t figure out why. Maybe it means this place I’ve shifted to isn't where I want to be either. Dam mite.

I’m officially single. I can feel it now. Especially after reading farm girl’s post about her husband in bed with her. I feel normal. Like I fit into the situation I’m in. This is human life. I’m not a freak. Life really is this hard, and I really did do this well. I can feel the difference between being with someone and not being with someone. I don’t mean friendship. I mean that place two people can be in, that only two people can be in.

I get the TV show Friends now, I get everything now, my head is clear. This is a good place, why are you going to complicate things? Because it's sex.

So I'm me, but I'm Him? By knowing you're Him, by seeing yourself as Him, by seeing yourself the way someone who loves you sees you, that's how you love yourself.
Think about a woman falling in love with a man, she sees him as Him. And a man falling in love with a woman sees her as Her. Or a man to a
man or a woman to a woman, etc. etc.

I really didn't know that.

That's what those kids on the playground didn't have. They had freaked me out with how vulnerable they were at the family cookout. As soon as you give them a little attention, they quickly did whatever they had to do to keep it,
or if you told them they had done something well it wasn’t long before they bragged to another adult how skilled they were.
It was like they were out of control, like they needed a guardian to keep them within certain lines - they were so easily manipulate-able. That's why they would so easily get off track -- because they don't have themselves yet. That's what maturity meant all along.

That's why child sexual abuse is so wrong.

So by my learning to be Him, I matured before I came of age. That's the correct way to do it. But R__ tried to make me come of age before I matured. That's how child sexual abuse steals a person's soul.

I kept watching the show Friends. It was like I had never really seen the show before. When I was a teenager, I didn’t like the show - so superficial, so simply written.
I thought about the concept of Fresh. I have lived a tumultuous existence, but I feel fresh. When a sitcom get stale it's because the characters' stories have gotten to heavy, too loaded, they can't make fun anymore. Everything's gotten too serious, too egocentric.
They seem Fresh on the show right now because it’s the beginning of the series and because
they're so young. And at the end of the series they're older and married off and have kids and the show's not funny anymore.

But that doesn't seem right. Life should be fresh all the time, regardless of physical age. Maybe youth is a mental thing, a discipline. Maybe
being fresh and young has nothing to do with the physical. Seems contradictory, or miraculous -- but that's Life, I guess.

I suddenly thought out of nowhere: Do I want to go to school if my whole life’s been a school? The toughest school?

And then: They're bored, b. W__ and K__ and House. I hadn’t realized that before. I hadn’t been happy before. I hadn’t realized how boring
happiness could be. But they're so strong and capable they've made me feel jealous. But they're not Brave. Which means they're not Real.

That’s why K__ always kept referring to that study done where it was shown that a human being was biologically happier with a new car if he had to work hard to get it. The study showed that the harder the difficulties the human being was put through, the happier he was.
His happiness was in direct ratio with his troubles. If he had few troubles, he had little happiness. K__ would always reference that as if he was talking about something personal, something that had to do more with him than it did me.

And there I was complaining so much. I remember those old Bible stories of
the Israelites crossing the Red Sea and trekking it to Israel. In that story the God gives them one of the greatest, most epic stories in the Bible, yet they
couldn’t see it at the time.

This is a country of Aristocrats. They’ve been deeply privileged, deeply wealthy for hundreds of years. I can see that now, can feel it. The stark
reality of it.

The more troubles, the more bravery. A high risk, high gain evolutionary scenario. The Brave one.

It’s like the roles on Friends. Before I saw each character as an individual; I didn’t see the classic roles they were playing, so I didn’t get the jokes. Now I see that. And I see which role I’m playing in human society: the Brave one.

__________


I didn’t go back to sleep, but instead went on to work when the time came.

Thing about being high is that you can't ever forget that you're high, otherwise you'll get clumsy, you'll drop things, you'll not be able to use a paper clip when you need to, little things, imperceptible maybe.

The high didn’t last long. One of my first tasks at work was to drive out about an hour and pick up a special part from an Equipment Parts dealer.
When I got there the front of the store was full of riding lawnmowers and four by fours. Two guys were standing there, looking at me. People
looking at me like that remind me that I’m in uniform and have ventured way out into the civilian world. One of the guys was a Him, and I had to force myself not to stare. I felt intimidated. He was a Him because he was natural. Maybe twenty years old, with an easy masculinity, and a quiet attitude, so that his watching me didn’t feel aggressive. He didn’t let me catch him looking at me, and I was glad for the vulnerability he implied.
The other guy was similar in age but had a sloppy expression about him, an unchecked manner like that of Jess.

At the front counter it took awhile for them to get my paper work right, one of their tax exempt codes was off. The guy seemed to work there, maybe he was the son of one of the full timers.
The store had some mechanics on staff who fixed equipment in the back. He never looked right at me but I could see him looking at me through my peripherals.
I felt accused. I spoke in a low voice, I kept my posture knife straight, but it was like he could see that I couldn’t feel it on the other side of my skin, I could feel the rape instead, but not the source of these masculine habits.
Or maybe he was just looking at my uniform, trying to figure out if I had ever deployed or not and if so, with what unit.

On the way back to my workplace I tried to make sense of it. You are Him, I told myself, and I felt the switch. If only I believe it, it’s true, and I
can feel the source of my masculine habits.
But it’s like the rape will yank me to the other side of my brain - (the artistic, introverted side?) -
yank me away from my self, from Him.
But if I concentrate, and forget the rape, disbelieve its supposed consequences - I’m a boy again, and it feels as effortless as if I were stoned.
It just takes a lot more presence than I had thought possible.

__________