So I took my (ill-used) toys to the attic and waited inside to see who wanted to ask me to come out and play.

Nobody, as it emerged, like it was, back in the day: my ball, my bike, my mastectomised Barbie, my Johnny West collection. Nobody was interested, so I retreated to my room, then as I  have now, and waited, mildly curious, for the next blow to my developing personality, and took out and examined the dirty magazine that this  kid in my third grade class had found while playing in a model home, and then lent to me. My first taste of contraband. I didn't know what I was reading exactly, but I had to hide it under my mattress. That in itself made the experience worthwhile.

It's sorta like that now, except that I have no library priveleges. I have an eleven-dollar fine, and no money to pay it down to the requisite five. My parents harassed me then: You need to get out of your room. You need to exercise. And now, the handler Ingrid, in her boot-black hair amd knobby knees, playing the executioner with a startling lack of guile, she comes late at the godawful hour of ten a.m. and lays it on me. The folks over at Section Eight have decided to audit me (and I thought I was demonstrating independence, dadgummit, when I rode the miserable bus to the housing department and filled out my voucher and somehow managed to thumb a ride back to my stinking ghetto hole. I'm not disabled. (I was supposed to go to my hearing on this subject on February 15. I was clean. I was dressed, somewhat oddly, on purpose, and this Johnny Cash-looking cunt shows up an hour early and accuses me of being fucked up. I was not fucked up. I'd taken precisely the amount of Klonopin prescribed me in any given 24-hour period.

Then--then--she informs me, arch and cold as she can be, that she must inform her handler that I am too 'altered' to make a good show at this hearing. And she refused to take me. And all of this was much too late for me to catch the two buses to some administrative building on the other goddamn side of town. I coulda been a contendah. I had to call the place, humble pie dripping from my chin, and tell them that my ride, this Ingrid woman, had abruptly refused to drive me to this hearing. To get disability, with which to pay the fucking landlord and not much else.

So I had to provide a written statement as to why I was unable to attend this meeting that had been scheduled for over three months.  And I did that, and mailed it at the last possible minute. I think I'm being responsible. Doing what must be done, albeit a bit late. And I don't even get a pat on the head for doing what 99% of this landlord's clients cannot, or will not, do.

It's coming to a thirty day notice. I know how to play that game, how to caress it, milk its teat. I must get a job, regardless of the fact that a lot of ppl just do not like me, and are perfectly free to use whatever negative impression of me that they receive in their hiring decision. I doubt that putting a gun to the head of my next interviewer would help much. And I heard a funny joke today: Bjork (of the Sugar Cubes, I think) was supposed to be a presenter at the Oscars--which  I never watch--but couldn't make it because Dick Cheney accidentally shot her. That was clever. There is shock and there is awe, and a fire under my fat ass that I don't know if I can deal with.)

That was a long-ass parenthetical. Who cares; who cares. I have these thoughts like, you love horses, you can't help that you write, you do it all the time, even in your sleep when you get any. so why. the FUCK. don't you WRITE about HORSES.

I dunno. It's true, though--I do write in my sleep. My cocktail--200 mgs of the dreaded Seroquel, 300 of the trazadone, and 1 mg of Klonopin, all of this sometimes with beer--puts me out, and by the time most ppl have begun to get up and address their routine, I begin, sometimes violently, to dream. I dream of writing, of being in workshops, of Parker and Capote and Richard Price and Rick Moody and Heather Lewis. I daydream of the moment when the 'Neuromancer'-esque microchip will be implanted in my head, to receive my 'writing' and allow me to jack into it at some later point and get it ll down, slice and dice and rearrange and expand and think about it and not think at all and just let it rock and roll. I loved 'Neuromancer'. I had to sell it though, and the rest of that trilogy.

Anyway, the only life I seem to have is in the dreams that come to me when the livid east fades to a headache brightness that cannot, will not, be ignored. Gaaa, I hate the mornings.

II inquired by phone if this nursing home on my bus route to town would consider a shitwipe--no, I didn't use that term--with a couple of old public intoxes on her record. The person I spoke with said, Sure, as long as you don't come to work drunk.  That was encouraging, I guess, so I donned my creepy long fat-smushing girdle, the dress jeans I've been wearing for about a month, a decent sweater, glass beads in bright different colours, my cross and my mangled hair, and set out for the place. It took a long time to fill out the app, some of which was an exercise in creative writing. Maybe I should start doing that for fun--'employing' myself in different capacities, like 'equine journalist'. Then I would have to invent my publications.

All of this sucks. I feel very sorry for myself, very sorry indeed. The last AA meeting I attended, there was this old guy with a gut, who identified himself properly and went on to say that he had two months to live. Cirrhosis. I tried to catch that once, in '03. Guess it got away. But now, I'm kinda wishing for something like that, something that would incapacitate me, shackle me to tubes and IVs, left alone in my hospital room with cable TV and volunteers carting romance novels around, and the incessant circus outside my door. A pastor I barely know would visit me, ask me if I was right with the Lord.

I guess I'd say to him that I'm tired of trying. Tired of doing everything wrong. Tired of running blind into corners that demand lies and violence to escape. I'd ask him to pray for me. Of course he would. And I'd ring the nurse for another shot of Demerol with Ativan on the side, and fade away, and fade away, and go, finally, to the goddamn light.

I think  this is the worst I've been since I began posting here. Richard Gunderson, an authority on borderline personality configurations, said--said--oh, yes: Often the borderline makes seemingly paranoid observations. However, such observations are usually congruent with the person's reality, the person in question having been rejected and hounded and distorted into something barely recognisable as human.

I love  ya, God, but fuck this. Lemme, guiltlessly, out of this word.

c h, fuckj the typos.