The Ativan Ghost Game

No drug I've know of creates such a sense of having people milling about you.  If you a reading a book, or on the comupter, you can sense very clearly people sitting beside you, walking and talking audibly behind you, touching you, or reading over your shoulder.  But with a turn of the head it instantly dissapears; you never really see them.  It's entirely nonthreatening

So twelve artists decide that it would be cool if they could agree with an Ativan taker to allow them to also move in the periphery, but this time as real people.  Their point would be to act just like these ephemeral ones.  To stay out of sight, but actually to be seen if looked at.  They then allowed the vaguest communication, calling it a haunting, or making vague answers.  It's like a seance, trying to decide who is imaginary and who is alive.

The local cops are not so impressed.

Life waiving the 4th Amendment

My new life, under the watchful eye of the United States Army, has me regularly submitting myself to car searches, breathalyzers, urinalyses, and blood tests.  They know that I am clean, in perfect health, and not trying to bring explosives onto a military installation.  I suspect that the recruiters will be contacting me any day now.

The guy whose job it is to watch men piss into a cup is concerned about being unemployed because his contract runs out in a few months. I suppose his particular skill is transferable into the private sector and that there will be little competition from those who would be overemployed.

Phase shift completed--but what is this new phase?

Time has obviously passed, and much of the waiting has resolved itself.  That is a good thing.  Much has happened.  Sobriety seems to have taken hold, and while it brings clarity, I am by no means out of the woods, as they say.  There is ongoing tumult, and much is still unknown, including the job prospects, but it is certainly a new circumstance.

I'll start writing here again to explore the question in the heading and to amuse myself.

Martin Amis

I finished "The Information."  He is a master of the language and has a dark, dark sense of humor and irony.  Like most excellent writers, it takes some reading to get what the style is, but once you are on his wavelength, it will have you laughing and groaning.  The ending felt like a blow to the stomach.

One nice quote:  Analogizing thoughts during insomnia: " On the beach the waves [grow more persistant and more persuasive] ceaselessly, gathering mass and body, climbing until they break and are then resummoned into the generality with a sound like breath sucked in between the teeth."

It is the only Amis book available in this town, so I've moved on to Ian McEwan.

Civilization calls.  I will soon be one train ride away from a slightly better library.

Phase-Change Gestation

All of a sudden all of that waiting I mentioned below seems to be near an end, the steps now under my control.  It turns out the gestation period for the mid-life phase change is approximately twenty months.  Within another month, my wife and I should be finally situated as we planned back in July 2009.  We had talked constantly to each other for months, and within a day or two after meeting in person, we felt married and already knew what we wanted.  People would ask us how long we had been together, and all we could do was laugh.  We knew each other better than anyone else knew either of us.  We felt like newlyweds on a honeymoon despite the fact that we only had a couple of weeks together while she prepared for deployment to Iraq.  (Luckily they shipped her to training at Fort Benning before she deployed.  Otherwise we would have had to wait through the deployment having never held hands).  I bought her ring the third day together.  But we couldn't possibly say that we had been together for just a couple of days.  People would think we were crazy.  And maybe we were.  We certainly didn't know how much effort it would take, but we knew we wanted a new life together.

There was an episode in a restaurant.  We had another soldier with us, and the three of us were eating and innocently chatting..  At some point, with her napkin, she wiped some food or something off of my lip and I just kept talking.  It was nothing.  But this waitress saw it and decided to come sit with us.  She said she watched couples all the time and could tell the ones that would last.  She sat there explaining this for twenty minutes or so.  We tipped her over 100%.

I'm knocking on wood.  Cautiously optimistic, as they say.  But happy.

Waiting

Here's a list of things I have been waiting for over the last couple of years that were/are beyond my control. 

Waiting to meet my wife - 4 months.  Soon afterward, waiting for her to return from war- 10 months.  Waiting for her to then move to the US - 4 months.  Waiting to complete the move - 3 months.  Waiting  to get out of the psyche ward - 6 days.  Waiting for my psyche meds to kick in - 3 weeks.  Waiting for the movers to get my stuff - 3 months and counting.  Waiting to get proof of my driver's license - 1 month.  Waiting for the chance to start a job search - 5 months and counting.  Waiting for my wife's leave to arrive -  10 days and counting.  Waiting to have my next household to be set up - 3 months and counting.

What this all adds up to is that I've been waiting for at least a year and a half to begin Phase Two, and I'm still counting.

I'm a patient man, and all of these things are things WORTH WAITING FOR.  But it has a cummulative effect on the psyche, and given that I haven't even been able to look for a job yet, I'm sure it will continue.  Meanwhile, I'm waiting for a reduction in the waiting.

Poetry Time

There's a poem rattling around in my head.  Ode to abandonment or some such thing.  The image is of a well, but I don't know if I've been thrown down it or am looking down.  The words well, yell, and hell all rhyme.  But a couplet surely seems inapposite.  Meter out of whack.  The sense of talking into silence.  Not knowing and frustrated.  A fresh visciousness seared into the mind to call up later when needed.  Like a bad smell.