SICK

In Uncategorized on September 17, 2020 at 2:43 pm

I’ve been sick for years. Trauma is a motherfucker. When I struck out on my own in ’17 I had to confront a post-crash market with the same lack of skills or degree. I’d since thrown out my serving blacks and swore I’d never go back. Alas, while delivering hundreds of cold lunches to elementary schools in W. San Antone, I’d get overcome with uncontrollable bowel movements–well, I could control them if I held the cheeks of my ass together and punched the roof of the cab with my free hand as I drove. When I finally got to where I was going it’d only be wet gas. It got worse the worse my employment situation became. I left the lunch delivery gig and signed on as an electrical supply courier. I had to be in Round Rock every day by 4AM. I was usually done 12 hours later, making about $140 a day. I’d be hauling tons of copper from Waco on an 18′ stake bed and with it shimmying in the wind the whole time behind me. I’d deliver massive comp reels and great long lengths of lead and fixture. I’d pull in to the job site and off the wet road and sink into the endless black mud or stand around in the Samsung lot in the cold pre-dawn dark and have to shit the whole fucking time. No quarter until the drop was made and I could whip around to the Exxon at Grand Park off 35, a heinous and horrible super 7-11, with shit food and never-cleaned bathrooms without toilet paper. I’d squat over the bowl clutching a handful of wet paper towels from the sinks but nothing would come out. My diet was pretty bad then. Could’ve been worse but Turkey burgers and vegan cheese snacks, whole wheat bread and carrots, gas station coffee and convenience store donuts isn’t the food regimen for optimal gut health. Not to mention the stress.

My roommate was a freeloading ponce and toad into me for $1,750 by the time I moved out. He never bought food or toilet paper but was quick to ask for the rent. It was hard then, one of the worst times of my life but I’d done some groudwork. Progress might not have much to do with the externals ain’t it, just that when the shit hits you know better how to flinch and anyway get on and through with it without it taking too much of your pride. Which doesn’t say anything about my guts. My guts were gone and have been ever since. I’m fucked up, Good Reader, though I took some good turns after after my stint as a blue-collar truck driver. It’s getting better though it’s still not great. I mean to say I’m still sick.

I made my way back into the food service industry. That didn’t help with the anxiety or my angry and upset bowels–and there isn’t anything to eat on a catering job when you’ve got IBD. The reason I held on to these jobs at all was due to a bad trauma I suffer from being homeless at 20. Ought to explain why though it says nothing of how little I knew I could do, behind a desk working for a non profit which is what I find myself doing today.

I thank the lucky Gods too, and my Boss, for giving me a chance. I’ve got insurance. My colonoscopy will end up costing me two grand, scripts and all. We think it’s ulcerative colitis. I spent the weekend horizontal, unable to shit but feeling like I had to go the whole time. Monday I must’ve released 50 straight feet of shit. It was solid, there was no blood but it hurt coming out. It always does. I’m sick Good Reader. Damn near incontinent. What do you think about that? There were things I should’ve done by now and don’t you know I really wish I had, before the cashout and Oligarchy came calling and home to roost, before Bin Laden and Putin’s wet dreams came true for this country but, the truth is…even with all the ruin and tyranny that’s here and getting closer irrefutably, I might’ve could’ve done something–at least saved some money or got out of country for awhile. Can’t do that now, I know. Of course what would I do when I got there, if I got there at all without my sigmoid colon blown out on some bad road between here and Guadalajara?

Time comes for us all I guess. The phone stops ringing, you’re stuck with the life you were living when you were too cool for the other. You get old. Even then, with all my diminishing libido and bedtime blues, the fact that I can’t-shit or have to shit-all-the-time, can’t read or drink and otherwise haven’t had any real fun in years–how could I possibly go about changing now? It’s probably too late for that old life which is a sadness that lays on the lungs like a sack of lead. It’s the Final Century Good Reader, though we’ll be lucky to get through the 20s. The bell curve of history look like a tidal wave. The coast is on fire and our elections are rigged. I don’t see a future for the middle class, entertainers have less to say to me and the working poor than they ever did, at the street level the music industry is dead, which means, we’re stuck with the dead generations’ greatest hits, spinning blindly from our prosthetic technologies as methane levels lock us in and border crossings close. Grim shakes it’s true all around. I just hope I don’t shit my pants today.