Just when you thought it was safe to go the toilet

I woke up and took a black dump in the toilet today.  Most of the time the dumps I take end up in my underwear, or rubbed into the bedspread.  Something must be wrong with my ass because it leaks, or maybe something is wrong with my stomach to make my ass leak.

I have no idea.  Like you I am not a doctor, nurse, or even  a pharmacist.  I am just a high school dropout.  So far my only accomplishment in life has been graduating from the 8th grade, even though I am smarter than most of the people you know.  It turns out you don't have to be smart to get by in this world.  Most of your lives are evidence of that. 

So I have no idea why I am shitting black for 5 straight days since my birthday, though I blame the alcohol.

I keep thinking about going to the doctor, but going to the doctor will just enable me to live another 20 or 30 years and with my back going out on me yesterday and leaving me incapacitated and surviving on bottles of generic ibuprofen I think you can understand my hesitancy about getting better. 

I say fuck getting better, but I swear off beer and drinking anyway. At least for a few weeks as my liver repairs itself.   I guess I am just a complicated bitch and you will have to understand that and accept me and stop worrying about me, because the kinda broke I am has nothing to do with money it has all to do with a man's soul.

It comes from years of neglect by parental units chomping on lucky stripe cigarettes and soaking themselves in bottles of Dr. Pepper so as to strip away the loneliness and guilt they carry around them like one of those girls who lives in the rain forest who carry baskets on their heads.  A basket on the head feels so natural to half naked girls trudging through make shift paths in the rain forest, but all I can see is 75 pounds of pressure distorting their necks.

As I write this I can hear my roommate's muzzled computer blast The Daily Show in the background.  It's a repeat of a show taped on November 18, 2009.

My finger tips are cold as I type.   I squeeze and flex my toes together in hopes of generating enough heat to warm me up on this bitter cool Arizona mid afternoon.  High temps somewhere in the low 60's today.

I left my bedroom window open last night and now it is chilly 69 degrees in my room.  My computer hums without the fan having to kick on.  The monitor I stare at 6 hours a day is slowly dying.  Down to 75 percent of the screen.  Colors fade out and in.  Mostly black and white.  A bag of opened sunflower seeds rests against the tower.

I am going to go to work now.  Going to work and praying that my back only screams at me today instead of the stabs and makeshift surgery without anesthesia I normally get. 

When I get to work all the young people I know ask me how old I am now that my birthday passed.  I tell them the truth "that I am 39."  Even though I feel older and younger than that at the same time. 

I avoid the full length mirrors decorate the breakroom because they tell a truth I don't need to hear.  That avoiding cola is not making me skinny.  I guess I need to give up the cookies I eat.  One package of cookies every three or four days.  Enough to keep me at 200 pounds.

And 200 pounds is enough to keep me from the good life of going to college and meeting a girl and getting her pregnant, and moving in with her, and getting behind on the mortgage so that I move in to a 2 bedroom apartment without heat, so that makes her leave me, and I am stuck with child support payments, and the white collar job I got just got axed, so the recession is real, which only makes me not understand remember how the recession is just how ordinary people always live. Paycheck to paycheck.

But I already got all that without the hard work of going back to school and without all the additional pain of a broken heart, other than the heart break my momma has to live with every day-seeing her big boy suffering in the desert without a truck and without a college degree- because he's so smart and special even the world went on by without him.

But living this way I get to stay here in my two bedroom apartment with a 15% government surtax.  The tax taking all my money away from me.  Money that I would have used to buy a Motorola Droid (or at least a Env Touch) with.

In the breakroom right before work I am typing corrections  and editing all this on the mousy keyboard of an Env3 like I am the hero. Like you are worthy audiences.  Like all this means something, when we both know that I should just shut up and get on with it, and of course getting on with it has nothing to do with searching for Miley Cyrus pictures.  Especially pictures of her adjusting her bra straps, but fuck it I say, "Those pictures are making me feel horny."

And being horny is the first sign of being alive.  And I love being alive.