Can't Take This Shit Back

Missed another WECARE appoint- ment.

Mother- fucker!! I forgot to write that shit down in my calendar. Damn, with all of the fireworks about the Fair Hearing and dealing with WECARE in the first place, this one slipped by. Besides it landed on a Tuesday...I had the bad case of the GOUT on Tuesday, I wasn't going anywhere. The only consolation is that I didn't have the appointment to fret over while I was laid up.

But that's WECARE for you. They overwhelm you with their stupid assed appoint- ments. You go through a blizzard of them before they relax to a monthly regime. I just slipped up one day before the monthly. My bad. Happens. Shit, who's perfect? I don't have scores of computers and hundreds of Orcs running about cranking up the fucking heat now do I? Social Services knows that they have you out gunned, outnumbered, and out flanked. What more can you do but roll with the punches.

Now, if I know WECARE, they'll be sending me another notice to appear in three days. I just have to get the notice. I'll look for it today. Today is another big day. My therapist in the morning, which seeing her every week is mandatory since WECARE wants weekly status reports from Dr. L; the testing lab for a blood test. My doctor told me that my kidney functions didn't look like they were mine. They looked like they belonged to an old man. He wants a retest done by yesterday...oh well. I had my Fair Hearing yesterday. It'll just have to be done today; I have to get a money order to keep my Internet connection up...which, surprisingly, today there is an outage. I'm doing everything offline. Well, I always do my blog offline, so no biggie there. I guess this is just a fore gleam of life once again without it. Well, you know what that means? Mornings back downstairs at Starbucks. No biggie once again...Hey, that sounds like a good fucking idea. Naaaah, fuck it. I'll stay offline. It's good not to have the Internet, because that's a big fucking distraction. I'll be able to catch up with everything that I'm falling behind on now without it.

I have to go downtown to The Box to pick up the stupid letter from the Supreme Court. Easy. Just pick it up, fill it out, send it back. Several painless steps, unless you have a boat load of painless steps for the day.

I'm not happy. WECARE was my biggest fuck up. Now I'm behind the Eight Ball again. AGAIN. Shit.

It's times like this that I wish I still smoked like a fucking chimney and drank like a fish. I would be too stoned to care. Those were the days, being comfortably numb as my world came crashing all around me. You would have never known me to be this catastrophizing jellyfish of a man if you'd met me then. I was so fearless at one point that I was insane, and this crash was inevitable. Now I'm trying to negotiate life without the bottle, without the smokes, without the cheap women and song. I'm trying to relearn to live life on its terms, and do it without chemical substitutes for coping mechanisms.

I'm trying to cope. I'm just trying to make it. Notice how all of my life these past couple of days has been focused on stupid shit and not living? Running to appointments but not writing? Not breathing life into anything. My brother has all of his cylinders firing on the SHOUT OUT and bringing poetry to the masses. What am I doing? Well...I'm not the poet that he is. This is his dream. I'm just dreaming. I'm trying to keep my head above water there too. But that's also hard when you're swimming with sharks.

Tomorrow we have our Feature at the Wyoming Theater. How about that? Talk about more stress. But I'm not going to let it get me because I no longer care about stress. If I don't get a handle on it, I'll just return back to drinking to cope, and who needs that, especially when you have an ass packed with NALTRAXONE. You know, the wonder drug that takes the craving for alcohol away? And I have WECARE monitoring my alcohol monitoring. That's another thing. Do I tell Dr. L. that I had that little fuckfest with a bottle of Jack on Monday? That'll be hard, because she'll have to report that. I'll just stay shut up tight about that and see if I can sneak by. My toxicology might not give me away.

Like shit it won't. But that'll be just one more week before they catch me. Fucking WECARE will send me to another therapist, probably send my ass to a TC (Therapeutic Community) to take care of me all of a sudden. They can do silly shit like that with your life if they feel like it. I'll give the excuse that I had to deal with WECARE shit for the week and blow a little steam. That's not a lie.

Yeah, my Feature at the Wyoming, followed by the one at the Green Pavillion. Suddenly I'm in demand. I'm both flattered and fearful, but who isn't? What poet doesn't feel fear, except for Charles Bukowski, because he showed up drunk everywhere. Well, I suppose that's just another way of handling fear now isn't it? He tells of a funny story through poem where he walked onto the stage of a university, lifted off the top of their grand piano and puked into it before starting his reading. It was hilarious. I should excerpt the poem here but I know you are probably tired of my Bukowski worship.

On the night I was reading at the Night- ingale, when I got up to read and announced that I was about to read two poems, one by Bukowski, one by myself, someone in the audience shouted: "What's the difference?!" Wow. What a compliment. I felt both honored and ashamed. To be placed anywhere near Bukowski is praise, even if I'm a poor imitation.

But I'll not need alcohol to cope any longer. Sorry Buk, that's where we part.

But now in parting, where to blaze the trail?

At WECARE.

Hobobob