It's the early hours of pacific daylight time. I'm in the bedroom I grew up where as a teenager I was mostly rigorous when not smoking weed on the balcony from a homemade pipe i'd engineered of baked polymer clay and a filter pulled off the tap of our family kitchen sink. Four days of no pager, no lorries encroaching the bike lanes of central london, and not a single decibel paying homage to ambulance or addict shouting to be heard beyond the seals of my earplugs, and I am almost back to being a tolerable human being.
Every time i'm home I am reminded of the nature and degree to which my mother is a savage. Yesterday whilst taking a short video of us on a hike, she ordered me to put my device away because had I fallen to the point of immovable injury, the only way her tiny body could have saved me would be to "drag me down the mountain by my hair". O this supreme window into the thoughts that occupy her gorgeous mind! The same person whose response to an inspirational story I sent (in effort to uplift her spirit) about a terminally ill patient taking a long lusted-after cruise in spite of the fear and risk of a world writhe with covid was: 'cruises are stupid and a hotbed of norovirus'. This same mother also carefully details my panties with a toothbrush when doing the laundry and still does not own a cell phone. We have much to learn from her.
I have been flailing through life since I last wrote this spring, spending any time not hospital resident revising for a series of specialty licensing exams. This imposes extreme limits on how a person in such a career track can access a rare molecule of serotonin, and I have found myself doing sometimes an odd thing in search of a dopamine hit. This has mostly involved impulse purchases proved highly relevant thanks to those http cookies that shed more light onto the nature of one's needs and character than any eat, pray, love or psychoanalysis ever could. So I ask, what does it say about a person who spends 150 quid on vitamins from a company touting the cognitive benefits of omega 3's but also spells cognitive 'congitive'? Whatever. The answer is YES I'll try this one. I'll try anything. Especially if it tastes like mango shampoo.
I have been doubling my vibrator as a back massager due to the record tension in my shoulders and outrageous cost of a professional rub. I have also developed a near daily habit of dried shitake mushroom consumption, which in the valley of despair is totally worth the £4 price tag. Those nut butter filled chocolate bars for a fiver are also as good as they are extortionate.
Life has continued to be met with catastrophe after catastrophe and I have come to understand that this earthly existence is just a series of mishaps of varying degree with brief and fleeting moments free from incident that give an illusion of an occasional good time. I am not sure if I am getting demented early or just too devoid of concentration to proof check my efforts to navigate this life. At times I have taken to my mobile phone's calculator rather than the recommended dial pad to make a phone call. And I am angry when it does not go through. I am often too apathetic to bend over to manage the hazard of an untied shoelace. My camera reel is a series of accidental screenshots of the morning alarm as I fumble to try and silence it by pressing any button so that I might snooze for a period that will invariably make me late for work again. My baseball hat blows off my head every time I cycle through the wind tunnel on bishopsgate and I don't have the will to chase after it anymore. Everything is under relentless attack of gravity. I hurt my back lifting weights and had to walk in the shape of a number 7 for a week and take diazepams just to get vertical. Lucky number 7. My expensive eye cream smells of poo which I think puts me one degree away from Kim Kardashian who has gone on the record to say she'd eat shit if it would make her look younger. I have been criticized by my friends for putting a space between the final word of a sentence and the punctuation mark in text messages. I don't know why I do that but I can't seem to stop ! I brushed my teeth with deep heat. I cannot understand the complexities behind why my mouth has to be open in order to apply or remove eye makeup. The last gift my father gave me was a packet of anusol. There is an occupation of intractable fruit flies in my kitchen. I don't even flinch anymore when accidentally traversing my shakti mat en route to the toilet at night, and it's definitely not because I've reached the intended level of zen. I very professionally spent an entire stretch of hospital nights using my own recycled clinical note template before realizing all of my entries had been indelibly titled "Night Shit" rather than "Night Shift". And not that I feel entitled, but the last man to give me flowers was a patient who had absconded from the hospital and returned with daisies and an illegal high. The last compliment I received was from a friend who crashed her car into a parking lot pylon whilst zooming in on a photo of my butt on instagram. Everything is wrapped in disaster.
In a final word I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize to my father who I left dejected after he inquired about the bruise on my forehead which I had to admit was down to botox so he wouldn't worry it was consequence of something more sinister. But even still, he looked the way I must have done when I learned santa wasn't real. I'm sorry dad.
Now I'm off to go try and find that old artisanal polymer pipe as a tribute to that world where our resourcefulness once led the way of resistance to a cookie-led consumer driven congitive disaster.
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| Lucky number 7 |
