Decided to go where I am wanted. MySpace.com just isn't doing the trick. I don't know if I could shock 'em--the puny, faint-of-heart and decidedly unwilling to travel Lexingtonians around that venue--of if trying would even be wise. So here I am, and my situation has, predictably, changed. Not so much for the better, either. MAAAANNNnnn, I'm tired of eating shit. It must have a lot of calories, too--the weight lost during the three weeks I was employed at that little factory job had some play in an acceptable loss at an acceptable rate, but when I was fired (by phone, two weeks ago this Sunday--how's that for the annals of cowardly bosses?), the weight-loss machinery put the brakes to the floor, and I'm back in the flab again, even though I don't break 1,500 kCals/day.

That goes to show that I've remained abstinent from alcohol--forty-eight days, now. No medical test has verified this, but I feel that I came very close to liver failure for any combinations of valid reasons: I'm female, I've been at this a long time (for the last two years, I don't think I've been sober more than five days straight, which had entirely to do with my living situation--they could have caught me and forced me into rehab. I mean, I was a raging drunk! I didn't have what it takes, apparently, to tell on myself and get some kind of help--the kind of help that would have kept me dry, if not exactly sober.), my liver has a lot of other stuff to deal with, has for years, and so on. I am not a doctor, nor do I play one anywhere at any time. I need to see one pretty bad, though. Since I've pretty much made up my mind about what's going to happen during the next ten days, I have a good shot at this.

I wanna challenge here, for a second, what I'm sure is ADD-whether present from childhood or the result of a life of chemical alteration is not relevant--is hanging around waiting to derail me. There are parts to this little drama. Perhaps I should try to list them, so that I, at least, may see where they are going:

1) Had been evicted from the dungeon in Beastland with little time to make preparations, little help from my evictors, and less money, as I suddenly had to scramble for temporary employment.

2) Toned down the drinking enough to hit, by bus, two or three temporary spots a day.

     a) Was working with Adult/Tenant Services, who also insisted on the job part.

3 )With nothing happening quickly enough to meet this deadline, I asked, and was allowed to, share the floor of my friend and co-evictee, who is on permanent disability and had gotten a decent apartment on the bus line.

4) A job came through: electronics manufacturing at a place that made boards for an internationally known company, and who had contracted with same for an unreasonably large amount of gewgaws by an equally unreasonablyshort deadline. The international outfit had provided the equipment. The equipment sucked.
The boss was, in short, a liar.

5) The work hours were extreme--6 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.. Had to be up at 4:30 a.m. in order to be there. For someone such as me, this was extremely hard, and may have contributed to the criticisms made at my termination.

6) But I did it. Had this sense I was too something--kept getting moved around, but no one would explain what I was doing wrong. Was never given a discrete production goal either.

7) And I'm staying with my friend, a woman with issues like myself. I respect her need for privacy. I pay her eighty bucks and help with groceries, as I have food stamp benefits. Her smoking got to me, and continues to get to me. I have learned something about biting feeding hands, so I try to lay low.

8) Until my final week at this job--I had been told by a F/T worker that, 'If you show up sober, you won't get fired.' When I heard that, I thought fist in air. I was, despite the limitations on my time--on my counseling sessions, to be precise-feeling pretty good, good enough, in fact to think about going F/T with the outfit.

9) This was, alas, not to be. I became nauseous on the final Tuesday, finished out there but called out sick Wednesday. Thursday was a cluster fuck; ditto Friday. Many mental lapses. I can go on about exactly what later on. Took the bus back to my neighbor's place afterward, and on the way had a neat conversation with this guy who looked like a young Harry Hamlin and seemed to have Asperger's Syndrome. He was doing very well, I thought. How commodious of me.

I got fired, by phone, on Sunday. Went ahead, answering to my indignant and wounded little ego, struggling through that familiar pile of elephant shit as it were, and contacted the international company and informed them that the gadgets that they'd contracted this company to manufacture might not be made on time, b/c three testing machines critical to the process kept on breaking down, often as long as four hours a shift, which fucked up basically everything. I also included my insights on scheduling, going to a 4X12 hour workday, so that there would be one day free for both day and night shift to get things done, and also so those workers who were bus-dependent and therefore got there a bit late in the mornings would be on the floor for the whole shift.

Didn't fly. Was badly hectored by  Recruiter Bwai while in the nearest Kroger,how bad I'd been--about six times' worth--and how unhireable I now was. This exchange motivated me to contact the big dawgs again and apologising for hacking the food chain and inserting my own ideas about things I know nothing of, such as scheduling.

Got a call the next day--Recruiter Bwai appreciated the effort, and had reinstated me, decided that I was not a spiteful old bag who could no longer work as a nurse, and apparently didn't have what it took to assemble small electric motherboards EITHER.

And now, I am real fuckin depressed. I can't evaluate how real and how disabling this depression might be. Ten days! Jesus Joseph and Mary, I simply cannot move this fast, fat as I am with no clothes, and on the bus, in weather that would choke a horse! The degree of difficulty here is simply off the charts. And I am so very violently pissed at that slob of an apartment manager, who lies more egregiously about her age--29???---pthan I ever DREAMED of doing. See, since I am not declared disabled--tried thrice--I asked my counselor to write a letter speaking to my difficulty with social things, which do include employment, and she did, and this was shown to the manager, Fat Holly. Fat Holly accepted it, as well as proof that I was working at that time. And the staggering thing--for once, not I--was that I enjoyed seeing how I could actually take care of some--not a lot, but a lot more than I am used to--business, while working killer hours. I was in shock, if not exactly awe.

And now the fuck what? I have a small but persistent suspicion that my host/friend may have either made up, or got the landlord to say, the shit about me having to be out by the seventeenth of this month. Summers have sucked since I was about twenty-six.  If I could convey how intensely I felt that, the circumstances, the heaviness of the air, looking from behind prescription shades at other ppl and feeling the cut that divides the Possibly Happy from the You're Fucked/No Deal for You, meaning me, bunch (I was drinking only about two beers a night and taking the much-missed l-tryptophan and half a .5 Xanax to sleep then. How things change.), if I could get that across to some imaginable degree that would compel others to go (back) there with me and lay down at night in a small, hot apartment with a box fan at my side--would I be rich, would my face be slapped on the insides of trade paperbacks, would I be speargunned with horse tranks and dragged to book signings and held up as the next in a never-ending line (at least til robots start writing, that it) of Hot New Writers? I'd try it. I'd be interested to see how long I could hang with that. I don't have the brains to merit a Pynchon act; those rare gems have been drunk to slough and spent in endless toilets in dirty places.

Yeah, somebody would know I didn't die drunk, with 48 cats and a dog carcass in my basement apartment in Philadelphia, where I must return. I don't think I'll get to do the Green Girl thing. It's tempting, it calls, but it cannot be done alone.

FUCK THAT MANAGER BITCH.