Hover

BB’s current therapy: The Search by Son Volt.

***

1986, and this thing is hovering over me. I’m parked in the ditch outside a cinderblock dance club, but I shake too much to go in. I chug a couple beers, throw up in the weeds, and go in.

***

Last night I had a dream from that time. It was mostly emotions and sounds. I was listening to “Can’t Hardly Wait” by the Replacements, a glorious, horn-soaked rumination on the comfort of the covers and “the lights that flash in the evening.”

And in the dream I cried for something lost, some piece of glory in the music that had slipped away, maybe forever. I vowed to find it again, or to find more like it.

***

I am at the memorial service, speaking to a few dozen folks in an unplanned moment. I’m talking about a man I cursed last July, and talking about Steinbeck’s loss of Ed Ricketts, and how one of the greatest writers of our time struggled to make sense of the tragic loss of his drinking buddy, how we all struggle to make sense of it.

***

I am in the dark, under the covers, reveling in the sensations. Sometimes it hovers, sometimes it relents.

***

We searched all day, yes we did. Son Volt, with their photo of an obscured Buddha on the jewel box, sang of The Grapes of Wrath as we worried ourselves over dollar signs.

Ours is not the life of the Joads.

***

They gave me pills for this thing, pills that are supposed to jigger with my brain chemistry.

I’ve got two settings on the anxiety meter: 0 and 100.

The pills screw with my sleep, make my fine motor skills a little twitchy too. But the anxiety is cushioned in some ways. Some.

***

I’m standing at the sink last night, about to pour out a bottle of wine that’s been taking up room in the fridge since New Year’s Eve.

No one is anywhere around. I pull out the cork, put the bottle to my face, and take several deep breaths. My nerves spark at the familiar old smell, and my head swims. I’m tempting temptation, but honestly, it doesn’t come.

I pour it out.

***

The covers feel good, and I lie there, hoping the world will just pass me by. No one will notice that I’m just lying here, swimming in semi-conscious thoughts, memories, sensations.

Recurring first voices, sounds.

***

And this thing hovers still, even as the pills remove me one generation from real time. I walk, I talk, I laugh, but I see it all through tint.