poem for sale.

I wrote this today. I had the thought for the aliens for a little while in my head, but I was reluctant to write it because Kim Addonizio uses the same kind of idea, of aliens…little beings that influence our thoughts and make us DO/FEEL certain things. Anyway, I finally just wrote it.

–

Does anyone else see the alien in the room?
He is editor to my thoughts. He is always there
Mashing up my feelings and pressing them
through the filter you cannot see.

He sifts and filters, and the good stuff
comes through, the good stuff…how he knows
I cannot say. But he does and it makes
the days a little easier. He takes the edge off.

When he keeps them at bay I’m mostly human
Only sometimes slipping into alien thoughts
Alien living. But sometimes I go days being
Disconnected. Thoroughly liking the feeling

Sometimes I catch him in mischief, or slacking
Taking the bad stuff, the bad thoughts–
Fermenting their pulp, and storing it away;
What he plans for them I cannot say

But I’ll whisper it: I think he plans toxicity.
For a torrent of it to flood through my system.
I think he’s dumping the stuff and staying,
To see if it’s Me or Him that remains.

Who would it be? I wonder. Him or Me?
Him or the brain? It’s tough to wonder
And even as I do he helms the filter,
Stronger, maybe, stronger than I am.

After all, it was Me who needed Him.
I wasn’t prescribed to fix the alien’s thoughts.
This he knows. This I know.
Our détente remains.

This may be inappropriate…

Considering it’s a writing blog and everything, but I thought I’d post it anyway. These are pieces of writing that I’ve read before and loved, and that, whether they relate to writing or not, relate to me, and probably inform my writing and influence my thoughts, so…Why not?

–

I’ve only known the first paragraph of this quotation for the past few years, but I’ve loved it since I read it. I acknowledge I’m a sucker for heroes, but one of the purposes of writing (one of the grandest purposes) is to elevate that which is mostly dreary. And since life has a tendency to be hard, sometimes it’s nice to escape into things like possibilities.

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world…

He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him…

The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.”

- Raymond Chandler

–

What’s to say? There’s another great Emerson quotation (below) that talks about universal truths. I feel like this is saying something true for all human beings. It’s humbling and uplifting, which might be a rare thing, now I think of it…

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”

- George Eliot, Middlemarch

–

Completely true of writing.

“The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things we get ashamed of, because words diminish them. Words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in our head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever our secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure our enemies would love to steal away. And we may make revelations that cost us dearly, only to have people look at us in a funny way, not understanding what we’ve said at all, or why we were almost crying while we were saying it. That’s the worst, I think: when the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller, but for want of an understanding ear.”

- Stephen King

–

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

-George Bernard Shaw

–

“I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance

On Writing.

I haven’t often written about the process unless I’ve been prompted to.

At this stage, I think we should all be uncomfortable talking about it, at least a little. Of course we’re immersed it, and that’s the point. We’re writers. We’re doing something many of us have never done, expressing ourselves in ways we wouldn’t have been able to without the assistance of an open mind and open forum, a room in which we feel safe to sound stupid and ridiculous. But we have those things, and we’re empowered by them, by the knowledge that our peers are feeling the same way…uncoordinated. Gawky. Undeveloped and foolish. So there’s that.

I’m hesitant to write about the craft, still, because I’m 20 years old, and I’ve “written” only for the past three months—no more, really—and though I narrate my life, I’m NOT a “writer.” Not yet. Not until I do this for the summer months, staying up late in my own home and feeling compelled to do it in no way for a grade. Because though it feels organic enough right now, there’s still that taint of expectation and that fear of not sounding good in workshop. And sometimes the risks are tempered, and sometimes the voice is stifled by the specter in the room.

If I’m not a writer, I should still be kind and say I’m…an artist in training. Something. Barbara might balk at this. I know it’s a stupid distinction. I know she might be pissed. But honestly I’ve made leaps and bounds, here—or I feel like I have—and these are the terms I’m prepared to use to talk about it.

What I am comfortable talking about is the development of my inner filter, or my unconscious writing self. I suspect that most writers are developing this when they learn to write. When we learn of narrative distance, of which dialogue sounds right (and what is merely useful or convenient), and of tone and of plot and story arcs, we let it roll across the sloped lobes of our brains and settle into whichever parts it will. In the end, these pieces of detritus are our filter, stretched sparingly over a thin membrane, porous and crass. And when we write, we let those fundamentals be drawn through the filter, and our constructions at their most basic are defined by what comes through. What doesn’t pass becomes the membrane, and so the failure is nourishing. Circle of life. Something.

I have overwhelming epiphanies like these (of obvious things) when I’m otherwise engaged. This time I was two feet from my door when it struck me that we have an inner voice that we call on when we write, and sometimes—in the best of times—that voice is insistent and fast, dictating things before we’ve gotten a chance to get our pen in hand and write them down. And the voice must be informed by something deeply rooted in our brains or the motor would be chugging, geared low, coming over a mountain pass…not whirring in a high whine, almost overtaxed but holding on…doing just what it takes to do this maddening shit every day.

I felt in an instant that this motor meant everything. This filter was the most important tool at my disposal. It was wrought of failures, and culture, too. It was things I’d heard my grandmother say ten years ago; broken bits of dialogue from conversations with everyone; books I’d read; people I’d met; places I’d gone; impressions of life in general. I want to say I felt the filter was worth dying for, something I’d stand in front of if I had to to defend it with my life. But that thought never came. That thought is good for writing. That thought might be useful in this piece.

Of course writing does different things for everyone. For some it’s the substitution of a brush stroke on a blank canvas. For others it’s an exercise in wordplay, a way to test their cleverness. For others it’s like empathy, and it enables them to tap into their human sides by seeing their peers for truly what they are.

For me it’s been catharsis. It’s been a long time in coming, and I can’t thank writing enough for that. It has let me craft creative nonfiction that was unwieldy but a part of me, something skewering and dangerous to hold onto, shapeless and unmastered, but mine…and writing meant letting it go, at least a little. It meant seeing it from a new perspective. It meant titling things “I’m exhausted, now,” and being exhausted.

Now I’m passing through a new landscape, a place that is not so humid or hard. I’m writing fiction. It feels so good to write anonymously, even if the effort doesn’t yet reflect the feeling.

–

I’m feeling the wind leave these sails as I write this, and I’m already segueing into writing something else—you can’t SEE that, because it’s happening off-page!—so I’ll wrap it up by saying that obviously I have no idea what the Hell I’m talking about. This still makes me feel presumptuous. It still lacks direction. I’m still exhausted.

An expansion of the piece, for fun.

This is the expansion I talked about in workshop…the “dumb” one. And I really do apologize for saying that to anyone who wrote a longer piece and shared it in workshop, because it’s NOT what I meant at all, and bleh.

–

The beautiful woman with her lips parted and her teeth exposed would have had a dumb expression if it wasn’t for the way her eyebrows arched suggestively, and her eyes were dark and bored. For his part the kid sat at a table close to hers, looking young and dumb and inexperienced. He was underdressed for a bar. He wore a brown hemp shirt over olive green, carpenter khakis and a pair of ratty tennis shoes, and he fingered his cuticles absently as he wondered if she’d notice him staring. She really was beautiful. Her body was…full, he thought, and he wondered what that meant for a moment before he figured it out. She had a taut stomach that he could see through the thin wedge of skin peeking out of her blouse, but she wasn’t waifish. Too often he saw women whose bodies looked prepubescent, but hers was developed and the muscles beneath her skin seemed to press outward toward the flesh. He thought she must be an athlete, and the thought warmed him. Athletes were economical and smart, and they knew something about urgency and ambition, and usually they were great in bed. That’s what they said, anyway.

The woman had noticed him staring, as she noticed everyone staring. She wondered what it would be like to sleep with him, and she briefly considered it, noting that his hands were thin and veiny, and his knuckles were prominent, and his shoulders were broad but beneath the ugly sweater he was probably kind of stringy and judging by the flush on his cheeks that was always there and the pallor of his skin, he might just be…ordinary. She knew he was of a dying breed of classic American boys who had thin masculine bodies and pouty lips, and she became less interested in him by the second as she thought she knew his type. He was her age but younger, and she had no energy for sensitive kids and she met his eyes with a stern invective on her tongue, and for whatever reason, she started to walk toward his table.

The short Asian man watched his girlfriend between breaks of the ball and held his pool cue loosely at his side. His glances were quick, but he knew enough of her to see how she was feeling. Evidently she was bored, and he thought he’d be done soon enough and he’d take her home. In the meantime he stood hunched over the table, crouched at a 90-degree angle, his hips hovering inches from the table, dangerously close to making love to it as the cue slid purposefully through his fingers, 8, ten times before he finally released it in a flash and watched it crash into a ball and looked away. Then he noticed his girlfriend wasn’t at the table and his crouched and calm demeanor gained a new economy as his strides were purposeful and his pool cue was gripped tightly in his hand.

The boy was more flushed than normal as the woman came closer to his table, and he gripped his drink in his hand and rubbed his thumb in quick frenetic motions over the surface of the glass. As the first notes of her voice hit his ears, he felt a sharp crack against the back of his neck and his vision suffered, and he slumped forward in his seat, stunned.

The woman stood still for a moment and then glanced at her boyfriend and rolled her eyes. She walked back to her table and collected her purse.

Her boyfriend stood still behind the boy, and the rush of blood in his head blocked out the shouts of the screaming barman and quickly and stiffly he strode out the door, not looking back.

a pseudopoem

Pallbearer to an Angry Funeral

Pallbearer bear witness to witless crime
Old woman screaming and pleading in time
Give it back, Georgie! You said it was mine!–
Evelyn, shut up, he seems to say from the grave,
His casket alight four aluminum tracks waiting
to bear him down to Heaven forever.
Pallbearer gives him a nod and Georgie says,
“It’s a nice tux you’ve got on. You got class, kid.”
Georgie’s tone is so approving that Pallbearer smiles
and hums a tune from his distant past that George might know.
He thinks their pasts overlap at least that much.

Georgie’s breath comes out in a violent hiss
and Pallbearer stares, alarmed until he
realizes Georgie is beckoning him closer to whisper
something in his ear. In all the commotion
Pallbearer thinks he can steal a moment with
Georgie. The priest is flustered at the pulpit
and Evelyn is making a scene.
Georgie says, “Evelyn would shit if she knew this,
but I buried our treasure in Malibu, and I wanted
you to know that.”
The statement is abrupt, and Pallbearer thinks Georgie may be just pausing before saying something else
but he doesn’t, and Pallbearer is touched to be
let in on this secret.

4:30 in the morning.

in moments of silence, i concede that i have changed.

who i was is not who i am, and that sad fact confronts me. someday i will put to rest the notions of life as a vehicle for change, and i will see that cogs do justice to other cogs if they just fit properly, and hope is a fresh coat of oil on our backs as we slide together coolly and hardly. whether we were conceived as smooth ball bearings moving slickly in time, or massive rusted iron interlocking in space, i cannot say.

my only authority is the precision of being in line at the right time, and my grinding squeal is a call to other cogs whose turn it will be in only a moment’s time.

Baby: this is your daddy.

I…have no idea why.

–

Children,

This is God.

My son and I are on a motorcycle ride through Heaven, and I thought now would be an appropriate time to maybe tell you some things. Many of you have stopped talking to me, and I feel our bond is kind of tenuous, so…listen. You’ve had the Catholic Church shoving me down your throats since you were little boys and girls, and for that I apologize. It’s not strictly my fault, but without me, there would be no them, and you’d be chilling out listening to Zoroastrians do their song and dance, or worshipping the Buddha. So, for whatever part I played in this, I am sorry.

You have heard me spoken of as a kind God, as a vengeful God…as a God who hears every one of you, or as a God who has no bearing on your individual lives. You have heard me spoken of as caring or uncaring, as petty or magnanimous, and I wanted to tell you that I’m none of those things. Instead I’m like…your dad. And your dad’s dad. And his dad’s dad stretched out through time, until Adam and before him—until before there was time. In fact, I’m all of those things. I’m limitless. I’m…really arrogant, aren’t I?

Let me give you a brief history of time. It should help you guys figure out why you are the way you are, now:

Before there was speech, you guys weren’t happy. You’d grunt at each other and never get your meaning across exactly as you intended. You’d hunt the mastodons and be pissed that your mate was out with another guy. You’d hunt him down and kill him, and that was beginning to be a problem, so I granted you speech. Then you were fine for awhile. You spoke things through pretty reasonably, and everyone was on the same page.

Then one of you invented fire. It was bound to happen—I know that—but one of you rubbed sticks together or struck a flint against a rock or witnessed lightning striking tinder—I honestly don’t remember—and then there was fire. You stuck your hand in and it was hotter than the hottest sun beating down on the flat rocks where you stretched and lazed during the day, and you were burnt. No one would come near you, so you became consumed with the fire. You stuck other things in. They…stole the fire. You put water in—it extinguished the flames. You put food in: it was that much better. You digested it more easily. Your mouth would water when you put that food on the fire, and you learned to make it better, and you were slowly starting to grasp what the fire did when you were killed. By the group that cast you out. To possess the fire themselves.

For thousands of years, your species would find and develop other things—more glorious things—things that were made of parts unlike the whole. As your comprehension of the world grew, and as science took its root in your lives, you became “smarter.” Your brains got bigger. You thought you were pretty awesome.

That’s when I sent a flood to waste your asses.

Because even though you had basic communication and fewer base instincts than the animals around you…even though you had fire and invention (the wheel!) and the world was beginning to take shape around you, and even though you were slowly crafting a kingdom…even though you had potential to be peaceful and loving and gracious and hosts whose baser instincts were won over by your better ones…you still killed each other. Instead of living in harmony, you wiped each other out. You were jealous and spiteful, and instead of hugging the man who brought you fire, you exterminated him. That pissed me off.

The Catholic Church will tell you it was your false prophets and your greed and your abandon…fundamentalist Christians will tell you it was Sodom and Gomorra (like I hate my gay children…), and Republicans will tell you it was campaign finance reform. Nope. Don’t believe it, any of it. It was the killing.

You must think I’m a hypocrite, then, for sending my son to die, and I guess I have that to answer for, but…well, no I don’t. If you’re lucky enough to ever come up here (and most of you will—it’s not like we have a seating capacity), I’ll explain it to you. I’ll sit down and talk to you, and you’ll be nervous at first, but then you’ll realize that I’m a pretty nice guy, and really I just want us all to get along.

Don’t you know that I love all of you? Doesn’t that ring true? Don’t you know that when you sing to me, I’m singing back? Don’t you see me smile?

Erica: last week, your lover died from complications due to AIDS. You railed at me for a long time, and you asked me why don’t you understand? You told me I couldn’t possibly exist if I let this happen. You said he hadn’t ever deserved it—he was a kind and gentle man. Erica: do you think I didn’t know that? Do you think I didn’t grieve with you? Didn’t cry with you? Did you think I wanted to take him away from you? You said I did. You called me a bully. And that’s not true. He was just…fated to die. He had options. He’d made decisions. He had to live with them, and he did. He was a wonderful man. He was my son.

The universe is a bubble in my heart, and it sometimes expands, and it sometimes shrinks. I feel all of it.

Thomas: your father left the world, and you didn’t know what to think. You said he never cared for you, but you don’t know the half of it. Every day your father spoke to me and praised you…in that order. He spoke to me because he thought it was easier than telling you how proud he was. I’m sorry for that; I just thought you should know.

Rita: Your son is out there, waiting. Go find him.

Jim: She knows.

Alice: I will help you. Always.

I’m exhausted, now.

I think what I remember best about home is summer. It’s funny how memory works, especially if you’re a computer scientist. You think about caches and data loss and integrity and checksums. You think about RAM and failing hard drives…bigger capacities…faster speeds. You try to digitize your thoughts, and make them into something comprehensible by a better system than the one you’re employing, but you can’t. What it all comes down to is you’re a human being whose mind is governed by vague indiscernible (transient) rules.

I think about waking up and counting and trying to do Calculus and reminding myself of my great brain but thinking later that none of what I thought before made ANY sense at all.

I forget who the acting coach was who brought his theories here and made us better, but I know that he talked about sense memories, and I think it’s foolish to discount them. I remember writing earlier this year that last winter was blue and as I thought of it I thought of driving down Route 89 alone, listening to nothing but the high whine of an overtaxed motor and knowing that THIS is the kind of solitude I enjoy–solitude in movement, where even loneliness is progress.

I think of back home and the way summer smelled. I can remember something sweet about it, and the wind that passed through my open window (my mother opened it) and maybe fabric softener, maybe not…I remember the heat of it and my father’s office being so close and the moments I enjoyed when my parents were away, and the ones I enjoyed when everyone was there. I remember gatherings the likes of which we’ll never have again, and not knowing things I didn’t want to know.

Now my thoughts are a jumble and I get my dog confused with my father and the love I have for both is overwhelming. I think about dying, and I know the dog is close, and I hope my father isn’t. I choke down a sob every time I hear songs about mothers. I am an overtaxed motor.

When I was younger I thought I was cynical, and I wanted to be just like everyone else whose life hasn’t been that hard yet. Now I just want to be younger.

–

This is for me: I remember reading late at night with a laptop older than me on my bed (the one Neil gave me) and no one’s urging me to go to sleep but I know I have to, soon, or I’ll fall asleep all throughout the next day. I haven’t yet met the people who I’ll carry with me in my darkest hours but I haven’t met my darkest hours yet. I’m thinking of grilling out and eating steak that my dad marinated all day and it’s very good (yes, please, I’d like some Pleasoning on it) and Chute Pond near Green Bay with that eroded stone marvel called Slippery Rock. I’m thinking of my mother and how she’s always depended on me to validate herself as a person and that’s a burden but I can’t complain. I spoke to her a few days ago on the phone and we talked about me sweeter: me when I was young and I prayed to God that everyone in La Crosse be safe from the tornado that threatened to ravage our town. I’m thinking I don’t have very many memories of being younger and I wonder if that’s a defense mechanism and why: “You had a very good childhood, I thought.” “I think I did, too, mom…I just remember in pictures, and we haven’t got many of those.” I remember that once she cried because she hurt me clipping my nails, and she had this ridiculous notion that because she hadn’t clipped them for awhile when I was young, I now had some sensitivity to it.

Somehow when I remember it’s always summer.

I remember I was a “creature of the night.” I did my best then, when no one could see my face but I’d be illuminated by the fire we’d lit in the backyard of Michael’s home. I’d be at my best when no one could see me, but my voice would be a disembodied joke.

I remember summer school, and that I went there because I guess I was bored, but I also wanted to impress my mother. I took karate and did Spanish, and I was never very good at either, and I never continued on in karate because we couldn’t afford the lessons. We couldn’t afford our home, either, and we moved to Broadview Place when I was 10.

I’ll go mad when I can’t remember anymore.

Remember when we went to Ericson Pool (I’d honestly almost forgotten) and we paid 50 cents for a days’ worth of fun? I could never swim without plugging my nose (I still can’t) and Ross would have more fun than me, and he’d be more brown than me and bigger than me, but I’d like to learn to do something new (like diving) and I was pleased with myself when I could. I remember with Ross I would divide myself into the other part–the more daring part…the more judgmental part, and the one that got us into scrapes and made our younger days more fun. I remember that Ross’s dad used to be a good man, but a stupid man. He would seem to neglect Ross accidentally. Now he doesn’t; he’s not a good man anymore.

I remember when I used to learn lyrics to songs. Now I hardly ever do; for some reason, I can remember melodies better than lyrics.

-

Do you remember eating at Spence in the summer and your parents forgetting you at Summer School and your mother being so horrified she’d forgotten but so impressed you made it all the way back (3 miles) by yourself when you were seven? I don’t. I guess it happened anyway.

Sometimes you imagine your chest as a cavernous chamber miles wide and when you open your mouth you expect to hear an echo, and when you breathe out you think a gust of bats and old wind will follow…and when you sing you think you’ll hear the opera, and when you scream you want the whole world to reverberate with the sound. But you’re thin and gangly and no one would ever expect it of you, because of the way you joke around, and looking back you were so isolated by yourself. You never thought you had much to offer. You were always never charismatic enough–never good enough–always a little evil…You expected your mouth to burn the stale wind you exhaled; you always expected smoke.

Someday (many years later) they will read these things and be surprised at you, but not yet. You are still a sturdy male and you’ve not yet cracked.

-

You think you could do anything. You could scream so loud the earth would crack and out of it its marrow would seep and float in the wide expanse of galaxy holding it up like a colloid in cream. You are immensely powerful. You could change the world. But then the music stops or changes and you are suddenly a boy in a room and you are insignificant. Elections will continue to be beauty pageants and backward-thinking (and false progressive thinking) will domineer over the world and the way you think you could maybe-craft words–like a tower with coils inside–won’t matter. Your thoughts are not radical. You’re just relapsing to fifteen-years-old. You’re trite.

Someday they will find you burst and oozing, but you won’t be oozing blood or black goo or inner filth or anything at all: the liquid (it will seem to be liquid) will be the color of the world behind you and around you, and you will be painted over by a brush with indifferent strokes. You will be the color of everything else, become something else.

They will find your tongue not fading, next to your body and still corporeal. On your tongue will be printed the manual of your life: the beginnings and the middle and the end. They will see the most honest parts about you spread out on taste buds. They will see your love of steak and Yoo-hoo. They will see how you couldn’t stop eating and you burst. They will see your desires–your lust. They will see your writing. They will page past that.

“Does no one understand me?”

They’ll say, “Been there, done that.”

In fifteen minutes’ time you’ll be forgotten, and you’ll want to scream from your spot inside an atom that “I didn’t even LIVE my fifteen minutes!” Burt Reynolds will be there with you. He’ll laugh.

Before I left my back never hurt and I might have lamented some sad fate that befell me THAT day, but regrets didn’t collect like sediment (detritus) and love didn’t seem like it was doing so bad. Now I think the Euro might be doing better…

I’m proud of this.

You want to know how she was going to end the story. She’d written it in serial form, and the end was nowhere in sight (and nowhere in time–it would never be finished) but the first part was so GOOD. You’ve always admired genius like this. You think it’s a rarity–you told the other girl you slept with that genius–like goodness–was rare and rarer in college. You told her and you felt like crying but you restrained yourself, because you just-don’t-cry here. You feel like there would be clucking and patting of hands and awful attempts at sympathy–real, honest attempts that count for honesty because these people delude themselves–and somehow, with all the pain of what you think is probably depression but you’d never have it diagnosed because your father wouldn’t and anyway, you’ve read all about these drugs and overprescriptions and the dangers of losing yourself through a severing of something vital in your brain…

With all your struggle you think it would be the hand-patting that put you over the edge.

You want to know the end to your story: how she imagined it. You want to know about the middle and the conflicts and (the best of all) the resolutions. You want to know about the make-up-sex and the growing up, and how you’d have improved throughout the course of the story and you both would have been the better for it.

You’ve constructed the world yourself. You’ve built up the fantasy from recycled bits of dreams and memories, weak clods of crumbling plaster and something that could have been love; but the world doesn’t stick.

The memories escape out the window broken from the dream that flew out too fast because the mind could no longer contain it. And where an avalanche of snow would take on form and feeling, becoming a vast destructive force, this doesn’t. The snow collects in a vortex and swirls through the broken hole in the window and the mass of snow, before you never see it again, dissolves into powder and assimilates into every other molecule in existence.

All in all…

I’ve never written drunk before, and I don’t know that I can make the claim to, now. I’m not drunk anymore–not really. My motor functions are still impaired, and writing without misspelling is difficult…Microsoft Word will come in handy, there. Still, there’s a frankness about me that I can recognize, and I know I can say without shame that sadness is a part of me as surely as my feeling and my BRAIN is. I’m not yet “me” again, but I don’t know when I ever was.