Ah, Suxington--the little town that wants to, but is having a hard time. Growing, I mean. Many larger-than-need-be vehicles around here, as well as super-expensive sports cars, crow from their bumpers that "Growth is Good!" That saying used to call to mind various tumours--and I have never seen a picture of a pretty tumour--and it still does, I suppose, but within the last eight days, Hexington has been vigorously demonstrating the impossibility of escaping its own limits: an airplane crashed here, a small commuter-type jet bearing forty-seven passengers and three crew. One person survived, the co-pilot, a man who had been shot in the stomach by his wife only four years earlier. (They are still married.)

The craft was on the wrong runway--the one for even smaller planes. One controller was in the tower, and having cleared the plane for takeoff on the correct of the two runways, turned his--he has been identified as male--attention toward something else. The whole place had very recently been repaved, the shorter runway was not lit as, apparently, runways are before dawn, and this was wrong and so was that and it is apparent that a whole lot of human error went down in addition to the ill-fated little plane.

The media will not leave this event alone. In addition to crack and 'ice' and drive-bys and pedophiles and murder rates that top 300 every year, big cities have plane crashes. They don't occur as often as murder numbers in the triple digits, but if your city limits happen to include or abut a busy airfield, you have to be awake to the possibility that a plane crash might happen. And when it does, not rubberneck to the extent that the newspeople around here have been doing. Five-one-nine-one. Five-one-nine-one. Five-one-nine-one (the downed flight's number). Newspeople, newsFLASH: this is NOT Hurricane Katrina, and the people the victims' deaths have most directly impacted need some breathing space, please. 

Then there was the business of three big(ger)-city ambulance-chasers taking out ad space in the local rag: not cool, guys. How else do you say this ? (Rather, how else does someone like me, who can easily set myself off into a wild orbit of rant, rave and bile, approach the subject?)  Wanna bet the air traffic controller on duty at the time of the crash is, right now, a  catatonic mess? I don't gamble, but that's a not-unreasonable assumption, and suing him, suing anybody in this instance is not going to bring one individual back to life.

And Steve Irwin should have left that stinger in chest, and bet on modern medicine to save him. Now, his death was truly shocking. One day, 'Animal Planet' is hyping his new show (and I'm thinking, guiltly now, What a blowhard), and the next, I'm leaving my big purple room to the tune of a blurb saying the guy's dead. Exclamation effing point! What a life he had, though. What a life. Didn't care for the stunt with the baby, but looking back, that was almost forgiveable--the guy died doing what he loved best. I don't think anybody's going to be able to say that about that other baby-dangler Michael Jackson. I suppose I thought Steve Irwin to be both overconfident and utterly foolish if I gave the man any thought at all. However, learning of someone--rich or not rich--dying doing exactly that thing that pleased him most has caused me to set off in several different directions, for I fear dying an unchanged person from the one I am today, mind lumpy from a leftover sleeper that I've been using for the past couple of days, sitting at a public library computer expressing what could reasonably be considered Yet More Bile, two weeks' worth of rent in my pocket, half of that to be delivered today, the other the next, and my next stop to be the Salvation Army's medical clinic to obtain a back-to-work certificate, this on a day when the volunteer docs and med students might not be in.

I have comitted some duplicity which it might not be wise to discuss here, at least not today. You ever hear the term "dooced"? It refers to a blog maintained by a womanN who was fired when her employer read her blog. (Now, I think that's just wrong, although I don't know how wrong I'd think it was if somebody was dithering on-line about buying low-tech cell-phones en masse, cell-phones that have been used to blow things up: yep, that happened too in the Lex. A 'felon', of 'middle-eastern descent', was trolling for Trac-Fones yesterday, and an alert dollar-store manager happened to find this odd and took down the guy's license plate number.) Getting duplicity out of my system is one of the things I was working on in A**holes Anonymous--and I see no reason why I should not continue to work on eliminating duplicity, like I might a colon's worth of decomposing meat, while working on going to work, and working on not drinking. I have been drinking, a little. Saw the doc a few days back; she'll give me Antabuse, but needs to see my liver panel first.

No doubt. Now that I have the prescription (that I believe at heart that I, a person of ever-questionable means, should have been getting for free via one of those prescription assistance plans; I mean, alcoholics are not the world's wealthiest or best-insured people), I need to address myself to this job in a paramilitary fashion. Nothing, not even an extreme lack of sleep superimposed on the familiar if tiresome scaffolding of depression, is to get in the way of me getting to and doing this physically demanding task. I have even reframed it as a fun-nish little competition with myself--let's see how many words and digits we (I) can remember as we carom from aisle to dusty overheated aisle, see how much of the scanner face we can slap into memory (the better to pick things with, me dears, which is my job title, and oh my, I'm verging into Dooce-land, and I'd better be chill about this, don't want to say too much), let's make this like weightlifting or long-distance swimming or semi-pro Sudoku. Despite my performance anxiety, I can compete okay, as long as I believe that I am competing with or against--same difference--myself.

So, I have an Antabuse script. If I don't drink for two weeks, the enzymes, if they are up, should come back down again, or at least down far enough that me taking Antabuse would not pose a problem for my liver. I don't drink at all, I keep this job and work myself silly--after all, the weeks are rolling toward Peak Season, something said in capital letters and entailing five-day workweeks--and manage to get to see my little horse Charger before my mother has to put him down. To hear her tell it, his laminitis is now in all four hooves and his joints have become too arthritic to watch. Really. She said it, I saw it, I knew what she meant. So I want to get out there in a week, give him lots of love and mints. He was born right about the time I moved off from my folks' farm, Howard, and it looks like he'll die close to another time, when I'll be thinking more coherently about exodus than I ever have before, if only I can stop getting in my own way.