Keep Me Warm

Oh, I got up....

It was another day, but at least I won't be spending it in my room. I got dressed early and packed up two bags full of gear, and weighed down like a packhorse, I headed out early, at 9:00am. Yes, this was going to be an early day, because I met up with Bryan at the New York Port Authority. Well, I got there first. Bryan always has trouble with the buses and subways getting to a meeting with me. It's seldom, no matter how late I get to the port, he will be there. It's like he's coming from the armpit of outer Mongolia to get to me. You know, by dog driven snow sled, helicopter, ship, seaplane, train, bus, and then subway. Not that I give a shit. I just come later and later myself. Shit, coming from the upper East side, it's feels like I'm doing the same motherfucking thing.

I get on the Way at 96th street and find that there is MAD CONSTRUCTION. The place is rocking and rolling with cranes and torch cutters, and moving I beams and raising the fucking roof of the place. It's fucking crazy! There is no express downtown, only the local. I DON'T GIVE A FUCK. I'm just going to the Port Authority, and I can arrive there as late as I want. Fuck the Way today. I'm not hurrying down to the West Side to the SHOUT OUT this early in the morning.

Bryan treats me to a nice lunch at the Olive Garden, a restaurant with an Italian motif. Nice service and equally nice food. We bullshit for hours, talking about computers and administrators and shit like that until I have to take a piss. I walk down the aisle of tables only to find, no more than about seven to eight tables down, to my left, is my old PSYCHOTIC BOSS, Hillary Neumans from eighteen years ago!!! What the Fuck??!! This bitch is so crazy that her hair is still a frizzy mess atop her head. She made Bryan and my life so miserable that we wanted to....well, I can't say what we wanted to do to her, but it was bad, really bad.

I was less than ten man lengths away from her, and I dove behind a bar to my right, ducking her sight. I hurriedly used the bathroom so that I can warn Bryan, just in case he followed behind me and got stopped by her. The last thing that I wanted to be caught doing is bullshitting around with her, and trying to make nice. While talking I might grab for her salad spoon and gouge her heart out like the soft, gelatinous thing that her entire torso is.

I head back, on hands and knees, crawling around the bar, being stepped over by patrons, as I round the corner and down the aisle towards my table. No...I wasn't that bad...but I was motherfucking close. I couldn't help but tell Bryan that she was sitting down there. And he had to go to the john too. At least he was forewarned. She didn't notice him at all.

While at lunch, I had two glasses of wine.

Bryan and I said goodbye at Three O'clock and I headed to the SHOUT OUT , getting there a half hour early. I went around the corner, bought a bottle of water and a pint of vodka. This is how this shit works: You pour out a half a bottle of water, pour in all the vodka and then walk around with a bottle of water. It doesn't fool everyone, but it fools most people.

I get to the front of Otto's and who walks up but TF ALREADY. He greets me as another poet shows up before 4:00 and then TF ALREADY leans over to me, whispering. "You want a one hitter?" A toke of a joint, in a miraculous device that is like a brass cigarette, packed with one 'HIT' of weed. A miracle of god. Of course, thank you TF ALREADY. I walk off, into the shelter of a doorway, and took that fucking hit. Almost immediately it bent the world around those two glasses of wine, and shots of vodka that I was riding on.

It took awhile to set up the stage, largely because I was confused easily, but upon finishing it, and looking down at my watch, I found that that was the fastest I had ever set up the stage. Wow, that Halfling's weed was stronger than I had thought! It is early to start the SHOUT OUT, and there were only five or six people in the audience. But I have come to learn that the audience builds to a respectable number quickly until the end. WE START NOW.

I feel this way because the stage does not frighten me now. I have no inhibitions. I nearly leap like a ballet dancer onto the stage and throw it at the audience. Later, OBSIDIAN would say that I never connected with the audience, and he may be right, but this was WAAAAAY better than I was doing before. OBSIDIAN did arrive a half our into the show, missing a large part of my Em Cee-ing so that bears into the comment actually. As for me...I told bad jokes, I made comments other than telling people to come up on the stage, I was not even afraid to kick a woman off the stage when she went waaaay overtime. Which is hard, because you hate to stop a reader.

But, what I am trying to say is that I was not frightened or fearful, or so afraid that I wanted the pain to end right away. Instead, I was ready to take the entire show on my own. I was that much into MY OWN SKIN. I really don't care if the audience doesn't connect with me. I don't blame them...they do not even know me! I'VE never been on that stage so that they could connect with me. It's not their fault. Today I was a new organism, something different. Something foreign from the shaking, trembling, motherfucker that they are all so used to dealing with .

Not that I'm saying that I feel good, therefore this is what I'm going to do for now own. I just have a baseline now, and with it, I'll proceed from there. Easy. I was also running back and forth to the bar for beers. I think I was as fucked up as I could get. I had a plateau effect, and I know that many of you will say that it's because of the NALTREXONE. My only response to that is that I stopped taking my NALTREXONE. Ha ha ha ha. I'm free to make my own decisions now. I don't need them to be chemically governed. Chemicals only beget more chemicals.

I come skipping out of the SHOUT OUT at it's closing. Happy, because D2theL lent me the large covered paperback of THE WATCHMEN. Fuck, I'm happy. I stash that shit into one of my bags.
Now, I am nice, and walk into Kennedy's Fried Chicken with my brother and get chicken, fries and pies and we, meaning my brother and I, commiserate. I eat the chicken and fries. The pies? I stash that shit into one of my bags. We talk and then I wander with my brother to places I can't remember.

Somehow, I got my hands on another pint of vodka. I stash that shit into one of my bags. That was enough for tonight. I go home and crash out on the bed.

In the morning I didn't feel so bad. A lame case of the shakes but that was basically all. I've had worse...much, much worse. I got to blogging and emailing the moment that I awoke after a little forensics work on my night. That's what you have to do, is try to piece your night back together again, from where you blacked out to where you regained consciousness. I didn't black out but there are gray outs. These things happen.

I had one helluvah time. Not to be topped in a long while.

Hbobobob