Open letter to all marriage celebrants:
Some alternate wedding vows. Perhaps to be written on plastic food trays from Wimpys and held by the preacher for all the madding crowd to see.
"Whatever I thought you were, you are not.
Howsoever I thought we would be in a decade, I know it will not pass
Whoever I thought I was marrying, I know I am not marrying that person
Wherever I think we will go together, we will never visit."
These new vows have the potential to lower divorce rates and at the same time curb population growth. I suggest they are implemented immediately. I can be contacted on my Parallel-o-phone for further discussion.
***
I ran into a co-tenant recently who told me of a man who committed suicide. His family were having his PC forensically investigated for clues. He had been share trading online not long before ending it. They hoped to find something in his series of key strokes that would explain his actions. I guess they are hoping for some big loss on the sharemarket, so at weddings twenty years hence he can be described as the one that killed himself after losing big on the Dow Jones. And then the conversation will move on to what Jenny is doing with resin. And someone will spill a drink on their best shirt, and years after that wedding the faint outlines of the stain will still be there. But the sharemarket suicide will have never been mentioned again after that wedding.
I hope they found something in all those zeroes and ones that helped them feel better.
***
i just drank my methadone in a way I have not done so for a long time. Regardless of future. I read an old handwritten letter from Josephine from January 2001. And from there, nine years ago, words reached across to me and I reached across for my methadone. Drank the bottle dry, I did not think of getting to sleep tonight, or awaking tomorrow. There is always gabo for those times. And credit.
It felt good to empty the bottle thoughtlessly, to empty my head of thoughts.
****
The time around 27 hours after your last shot, when you're coming off a minor binge, when your metro dose is low, is such a fragile time, such an unlikely product of so many variables, that it's no wonder it is so special.
I walked down the shop before to buy some pearl barley - an ingredient I discovered and grew very fond of six months ago. I walked down the driveway of my apartment complex like a babe. Hands open palmed to the sky, my head tilting back and forth marvelling at the trees interacting with the sky. It was a feeling similar to acid, but similar in the wasy an ape is similar to a man. No order of similarity stood between them, rather a gulf. No cocaine, no amphetamine no LSD has ever come close to the clarity of mind I experienced on that walk. I breathed in deeply of the world and slowly expelled the air, conscious it was expelling toxins I had been building up for two decades.
I was instantly and totally aware that my dabblings and readings recently of oxytocin, of my various infatuations with apomorphines, rauwolfina serpentinas, all these chemicals held up as a grail to the addiction to opiates, I knew they were all false. There was no cure to addiction but long walks and time. Everything else was as false as gabos original promise of a life without pain. A promise it can only deliver on if it extinguishes the users life in the first two years of using.
I would not find any respite from addiction in a Mims or other pharmacology. I had to be patient, breathe in, breathe out. And I knew at the same time I would forget all this, that one day I would stand before the altar of false gods and choose a new chemical to be my salvation. To know and not know at the same time. Orwell knew of these times and understood perfectly.