What? It’s already most of the way through November and it’s Thanksgiving next week? How did this happen!? CRAZYPANTS. Amazing how time flies when you’re on palliative narcotics. Which I’m currently withdrawing from. Laaaaaaaame. But at least the broken rib is healed enough that I don’t pass out from pain when I sneeze. And breathing hurts only a little. At some point I tried to do a take off on Thomas de Quincey called “Confessions of an American Vicodin-Eater” in which I chronicled all my fevered drug dreams in a posh late eighteenth century voice. I only got two paragraphs in before the enterprise was abandoned because, you know, one’s motivation is not at its peak when on pain-relieving depressants. Bummer because my unconscious was like Exploding Jungian Theater every night. (The nightmares: I am trapped between the living and the dead. I am trespassing on lost places I used to love and getting in trouble with the authorities. I am always losing my teeth, or bleeding from somewhere. I wake up to find that I am still asleep and wake up again to find that I am still asleep, thus in an infinite loop so that when I finally do wake up, I am not entirely certain that I am not still asleep. I dream of babies and wounded birds and tiny fetal animals that fit in the palm of my hand, small vulnerable things that are easily destroyed. The water is so icy and the shock of it when it penetrates my lungs makes me gasp and draw more of it in I am the wreck Titanic the wreck Titanic the wreck Titanic)–yeah, it was like that. I might have also written a couple of ill-advised missives displaying atrocious vulnerability to certain individuals while in the more maudlin throes of chasing the dragon. Seriously, kids, drugs are bad. Don’t do drugs.
Somewhere in there, I wrote a short story about perfume noses that my agent liked, so it will probably be submitted after another round of revision. Must get back to the novel though. Good God, the nights are long all of a sudden.
Elena Mauli Shapiro 