Well Bottom Blues

My first wake-up-to-anxiety attack in more than a month, since I started changing medications to get the hell off Prozac which aggravated my REM sleep disorder. Personal stress meets the Big Bastardly Bill, the realization as Independence Day approaches at the constitutional United States is now a failed state, that everything I was raised to believe in and expect in this country is being crushed.

I’m trying to decide between half a clonazepam (0.25 mg) or an ounce plus of whiskey to start my day, the way Harry Truman did (whiskey then a brisk walk). given the health impacts of both, I think whiskey is actually a healthier choice but the people who expect you to swallow your clonazepam or your Prozac so you can show up for life really don’t care about your health.

I haven’t been to the old growth stand of live oaks in the park along Bayou Metairie or into Couterie Forest for four days. That is the true solution: pack a full water bottle, a book of poetry with a pencil and post-it flags to mark the most interesting ones, either one of my emergency. cigarettes or a small cigar, and bug out with my phone on do not disturb.

I have a poem about the people who used to live on the Mississippi River batture with these lines—when you understand why/a man goes out for cigarettes/and doesn’t stop until/he hits Beaumont for gas—but I’m not trying to get away from the truelove of my life. Just everything else.

Time to tune in to Radio Silence and go see the trees,

# Truelove was a typo but I’m keeping it as a portmanteau word sort of the way Germans built words because I like it.