Thanks for your comments, guys. I'm coming off a mini-depression of maybe a week--unwashed sheets, yeasty odor of spilled beer, profound guilt at having spent my parents' meagre gift to me of $75.00 within four days of receiving it, and on nothing lasting or good--and may possibly be hired by a temp agency that doesn't do background checks to drive cars at the local auction place, which operates seven days a week. I haven't driven in a coon's age, save on those occasions when I was the soberest of several drivers. Not designated, exactly, but rather unlucky.

Still, I have a license to drive. Might as well use it, until I hit something or someone and fire myself, again.

Interviewed last week at UPS for a position I really didn't think I could do--load trailers full of heavy objects with zip codes to be sorted, which would add the element of concentration to the business of throwing bulky boxes about. The unloading job looked much easier: the people doing it had nothing to concentrate on except getting boxes out of trailers and placing them on a conveyor belt. This was a case of false advertising, and also the first instance of getting some truth out of the interviewer. She was bony, hyper, smiled a lot, and twice expressed the opinion that she had concerns about my ability to remain employed. I told her that understood her reservations, and took my big self out into a withering cold. Long story shorter, I managed to secure a ride to my apartment from a driver I encountered in the security shack outside the facility. I'd tried to thumb. Which might have gone better had I been twenty pounds lighter.

Twenty pounds lighter: the visit with my family had resulted in looser-fitting jeans and jacket, but when I returned--was returned, rather--to the Lex, I was beset by a spate of irritable depression, and so began eating, drinking some--not enough to get me drunk; enough, however, to lade on the pounds it was clear that I had lost--and lying in my stinking bed. (Part of why it smells so is because I don't care to do laundry upstairs, in the group home I sometimes reference here. I don't have the time to dissect why, and don't think it really matters anyway.) The sink took on a life of dishes; hairballs sprung up in the corners of my tiny bathroom, so hard to remove from the floor. I binged some; overate, definitely. But I did not purge. Haven't done so for a month. Admitting this much in a public forum may well jinx my efforts to remain at least "abstinent", as they say at OA. (Haven't actually gone to one of these, but have read the book, which belongs to my therapist Lisa.) If one has never slow-danced with pathologies such as mine, one might cringe away to read this; I certainly do not mean to offend anyone, but rather to defang the conditions that have birthed them, or to masturbate the only way I know how these days--with words. I truly don't know the ratio on that. Again, time constraints in effect, I choose to leave them alone now, while I murderise the two loudmouthed teenage girls to my left.)

I'm sick of sickness. My life is half over; I can't escape the cattle prod of others' expectations charged and hot at my backside, and the raft of things I could have, or should have, or should not have, done to date creep about the margins of what is mainly mindless internal babble, interjecting themselves all too often , and sometimes causing breathtaking realisations like this one, which I had last night while trying, despite the pharmaceuticals, to sleep. It had much to do with the degree to which I have revised my own past. I've rearranged the configuration of my personal timeline, still a linear phenomonon, to delete the years spent in a poisonous suburb of Philadelphia, a town I don't feel like naming right now. There's where I was broken; by moving around items such as when I first went to college, the number of years it took me to graduate, birthdates and such; a '5' is easily squiggled into a '9' on applications where a birthdate is requested, I've managed to drop four years from my chronological age (40), to a more acceptable, less damning 36. By omitting that town and the time I spent there, it as though I am screwing it like, perhaps, the way in which it screwed me.

I recognise this allusion as a stretch; it is nothing I have ever put into words before, and I know that when 'when' stops lurking and actually gets here, I will sit down and, first thing, rip the place to shreds. There have been dreams of it lately, one that sat me up in my bed, drenched in sweat; I may have awakened myself by screaming.

I was in a house not unlike the one I lived in then--think I was eleven or twelve when I did, but I was of ambiguous age in the dream, maybe 20, maybe 39. All of my brothers' family was there, and also my best friend from high school. She looked like a fat Molly Ringwald, was tricked out in a bad perm and huge glasses, and wore a yellow sweater so bright I had to turn away from it. I didn't want to face her; she was grown, with children, and I was neither, and, well, in dream I felt bad.

When I tried to talk to her, I couldn't get the words out. I forget what she had to say, but it was enough to drive me outside, away from an apparent family/friends holiday fakefest, and into the dark. It was rainy and warm. I was wearing a skirt, and had lost my glasses. A famous crush, who comes to me in dream too often, lived close by, and I pedaled to his house, bicycle feeling increasingly loose and jangly beneath me. A wind had kicked up. Streetlights were guttering like candle flame. Continuing to ride, and getting lost, I felt rain, heard thunder. I rode into a neighborhood whose contours I couldn't make out--was literally driving blind--and in the radiant spray of lightning that followed, I looked down to see that my front wheel had continued to and beyond the lip of a cliff. That was when I woke up, popped from beneath the duvet to life, and popped one more trazadone to encourage something like a post-ictal state, something akin to deep sleep black as what lay beyond the cliff in my dream.

There are literal interpretations: I have no idea what I'm doing (driving blind); I desire to return to and make peace with that town and its residents but lack what it takes to rewrite my life to date; I would be struck dumb to encounter a real live person from that miserable era, having nothing in the way of accomplishments or trophy husbands to throw back in (her) face. Since I didn't really sleep again until about 5 a.m., I chewed on the edges of personal failure. God, I need to go to school. Play catch-up, starting yesterday.

Got my warning. Time to go re-up.