Walked into town. Went to the clinic, picked up Prozac, Topomax, a discount script for trazadone, and an appointment card to get my klonopin filled, basically. This week is my fourth and final stint on the so-called 'learning curve' at work; I actually 'made rate'--speeding on ephedra and green tea--last Saturday night into morning, so if I can maintain same and keep the errors on the low side, I'll be able to reserve this gig for six months, after which school will definitely be on.

These things never work out. I don't want to lose the job, though: I've lost a lot of weight, humping about ten miles a night in that overheated warehouse, sweating like a teenage racehorse and driving heavy-laden pick carts as though they were wheelbarrows across mountainous terrain. Have had a host of curious physical complaints these last four weeks--heat rash where the sun don't ever shine was the most fearsome of those. Had on cut-off sweats and my cheeks were chafing madly; all of a sudden, this itch, a real crotch-grabber, and then the burn kicked in. Said to myself, aw shiiiiiiiit: my milennially-acquired little buddy is back in the house after a four-year layoff, and I don't have the time to go see the doctor to write me the script for the round white tablets that will cost more money than I have/had at that time, but will make the bastard go away.

Turned out that this was just--and this is a big "just", b/c heat rash goes away when the precipitating conditions subside, as opposed to my elusive milennial friend--heat rash, and that about thirty female employees in my department had reported it during the last couple of weeks. Discussed this with someone who is paid to know about such things. We agreed that the actual number of ppl with the rash is probably a lot higher, b/c consider the embarrassment--the damn thing presents like herpes! All of this is classified information--nobody in power wants this kind of news to get out, you know--Work at Company X! Get blisters and something that looks and feels like herpes! There is an investigation going on. Could be something in the air, like anthrax.

I have one hundred bucks on me--rent on the purple room, payable today. I'm holding my breath on this situation,b/c the landlady is, as ppl say around here, "sometimey": she could decide that my serious affect and apparent lack of others in my life are grounds to put me out. Bad karma, something like that. Damn, I just can't help myself on this one: if matters of a certain nature--say, roommate deals--have a history of not working out, why the fuck should I expect this one to be hunky-dory, or at the least benign? To do so would be kind of delusional, I think. And there is the matter of the burst pipe coming from the tub in "my" bathroom--apparently, the landlady's ceiling almost collapsed a few days back while she was out of town and I was bathing. She came back to this suspicious herniation.

She engaged her long-term handyman, a fellow as abrasive as my father is capable of being, only black and possibly drunk. He engineered a fearsome gap in the hallway adjacent to the bath, the bad pipe runs through it, and yesterday, I stepped on one of the chunks of old wood he had displaced there. Walking back to the bedroom, I wondered why it was adhering so stubbornly to my shoe. I got to the room and had a look--the thing was neatly nailed to the sole of my left clog. 'Tetanus' is what my brain was screaming--but it didn't get that far, I didn't say a thing, but rather placed the offending matter on the little table in the charming breakfast nook.

I see the med doc in a couple of days, and will get Antabuse, for I did get into the roommate's stuff on a couple of occasions when I'd been drinking beer. He's this gorgeous fag--could easily model. I'm so glad he is gay; otherwise, the fat old woman blues would be bad upon me, even though I'm not actually that fat today. (This lady to the left of me is giving her keyboard hell. Looks like an e-mail. Pity the recipient. Thud!) He said that I could eat whatever was in the fridge, and, well, I did. Would not have done that had I not been drinking. And it is for that very reason that I plan on going through with the Antabuse. I want to keep things as they were when I left out today--unusually, threateningly comfortable. Again, I have a lot to lose, only I'm more aware of that sum than I've been in the past.

Also, I may have alluded to a serious fracture between myself and much of this town's 12-step community, namely that not one floor or couch was available to me when I was going to be legally definable as undomiciled--homeless. At that time, I had three jobs lined up, was planning to take the one I have now and just needed shelter to sleep in. Everything else was hackable. But--I may have alluded to this as well, or come out and said it--the ppl around here consider the offer of shelter to be "enabling" the person who is trying to rid themselves of alcohol and get up and off the ground, if not entirely, and holographically, it would seem, together.

How the fuck am I--a lone woman--going to work the job that will allow me to save the money that will allow me to obtain the most minimal of shelter when I have no place to stay? Lexington, Kentucky is probably one of the worst places in the US a single woman could wind up homeless. I fell through every crack I could fit through; not much bad behavior was needed; and where I landed was not a place from which I could easily get up again.

I am a safe harbor for anger. It rests in me, ships heaving easily on my surface. I haven't been back to ...Anonymous for three weeks because of this 'enabling' revelation. This, from one of its elder stateswomen, multiple health and vocational problems last I heard, but still with an SUV and roof, in the form of a house, over her head. She had/has assets, I mean, still she could't be bothered to let me curl up in the back of her vehicle until I had a downpayment on a place in hand. So I can't be around those ppl, can't risk allowing the anger they evoke to show itself and then turn its low sucking tide back on me. I am 'isolating'--their vocabulary is stuck right dead on stupid--in my purple room, enthralled with the TV and its six hundred something stations, with the little cat and her entourage of fleas, with a cell phone whose minutes number three and I don't feel like taking the bus to Wal-Mart to buy the phone card to put more minutes on the thing, so I can call ppl with it. I call ppl, I wonder why I bother. they never sound glad to see me.