Friday . . . While I wait for work to commence in an hour or so, I’m relaxing at my far north Phoenix Starbucks tonight. I put a $20 Starbucks card on my Visa debit card and earned a free mug of awful coffee from the too-perky, green-aproned barista. How nice. Didn’t know I was going to be here or I would’ve worn a shirt that had all its buttons. Well the missing button on it is below table and gut overhang level, so I ought not to be noticed. Understand, when you work midnights you don’t see too many people, and when you do, the lighting is hardly optimal.

Two darling little five, or six year old ballerinas are scooting and standing and sitting across from me chattering to their white-shirt-and-tied dads. So cute. Certainly just back from a recital. And I’m sure what these little ladies did was so very important to them; but in the scheme of things it really wasn’t. Just like so many of us believe what we’re doing is so damned momentous, but in the scheme of things, we’re about as earth-shattering as that one grain of salt that spilled out of the postage stamp sized tear-open package at McDonald’s and bounced off the hard hamburger of our Double Quarter Pounder® with Cheese and tumbled unnoticed to the floor.

I feel just horrible. I’m certain a lot of it is due to my physical condition, having not exercised in five years and not eaten healthy or dieted in the past twelve months. While I’m not spending money on anything but necessities, my finances are crap and the major media is promoting a recession almost as if they’d welcome it and the Muslims have just murdered ninety-one innocent people using radio-activated bombs attached to Downs Syndrome afflicted girls. Can you imagine anything more peaceful than a Downs Syndrome person and how unbelievably twisted and against heaven and earth it is to use these gentle beings for weapons of war?

I’m not at all excited by the U.S. presidential offerings on my side, and entirely terrified of the other side’s candidates, as they most likely are of mine.

In short I’m near suicidal, but unlike Britney Spears, I’m not oozing mega-bucks, so I doubt I’ll be whisked off to The Meadows treatment facility in Hanna-Maries’s hometown of Wickenburg Arizona, a short sixty miles to the west. I’m on my own. No mother, no father, no wife, no dog, no life. Looking through the glass walls into the beauty parlor next door, the man, who I thought it odd to be getting serviced there, is actually a woman wearing an ass two axe handles wide, so I guess things could be worse. Went to a café in Troon North for lunch (with my benefactor picking up the check) and let two slices of meatloaf so lovely it could be likened to angelfood cake, melt in my undeserving mouth. Their cost was what I could purchase several containers of the oven-fresh, cocaine-infused Safeway meatloaf for. A former client of mine was waiting on us. Even though she is in her fifties, and a tad overweight, but in a way that nicely exaggerates her former hourglass figure, she is still quite pretty. And her breasts, the size of fresh cantaloupes, and I’m certain as soft as the aforementioned angelfood cake, are demanding my attention. So there is hope in my finding a lady my age who isn’t disgusting looking like me. It’s a good thing that my own appearance has nothing to do with my hooking up with a lover <grin>.

In any case, in times like this, when I am so depressed, Wellbutrin-XL’s effects be damned, my heart aches as I recall how it is when someone unconditionally loves you and you love them. Together, you can make it through anything. The freedom of the single life is unbeatable, but, I continue to miss Hanna-Marie and married life a lot. Alot.

At the counter of the far north Starbucks, the patron, or is it guest?, ahead of me insisted on paying in pennies, or was it mills? In any case there might have been five people in front of me vs. the one for the time it took. And then once I got my mug filled with magma hot Sumatra crud, my first daring sip reminded me of a hash pipe that badly needed cleaning.

Divorced for over four years and still having a hard time of it. That’s not right, if ‘right’ even enters into it. My head, my brain has accepted it, almost immediately accepted it. It’s simply my heart.

I’m at the eco-friendly store of the world and I half expected the employee to empty the garbage by grabbing it with her bare hands and pitching it into an ancient rusting wheel barrel hammered out of recycled aluminum cans held together with silver solder. But no, they use planet-killing plastic trash bags just like the rest of us non-Gai worshippers.

The last couple of days I’ve been sad. Not depressed, but simply sad, which I suppose is an improvement. My sadness flows from two fonts 1) the financial-I’ll-never-get-out-of-this-hole-I’ve-dug and 2) I’m still divorced and starting, once again, to get quite lonely. “Boo hoo”, I know.

At Mainio’s apartment this afternoon with Aili and her infant, Kimmo, when she revealed Hanna-Marie was coming to town next week. And I was once again reminded that, with her December 7th, 2003 divorce decree in hand, we are two separated adult people who, any longer, only have our three children in common. It still feels almost rude that she not tell me–even though we e-mail frequently-that she is coming to town. But I’m sure, as the only person who really knows me, she keeps her comings and goings secret to not hurt me even more.

I am so fortunate that her vindictiveness only struck out a few times or I could be in dire emotional straits.

On the financial front I’ve finally dug such a deep hole–although I continue to have many thousands of dollars available credit-wise–that indebtedness would require monthly minimum, MINIMUM payments I could not afford. Which exposes the fact that the ‘credit grantors’ still have no idea, or don’t care, that their customers cannot pay their credit card bills.

I’m to the point where the despised and evil “B” word has raised it’s yellow and college-ruled blue lined head. Yes, it’s time to write out a budget.

Thursday . . . I’ve been moving for the past two weeks. On the job, eight hours, driving one hour to, one hour fro, then working three more hours packing, and then on my two days off I’d been packing, moving and cleaning all day. Now that except for some unpacking, hanging of pictures, building of bookshelves, and getting a hold of a compact entertainment center for the eight pieces of equipment needed to, well, entertain me, I am finally through with my westward migration deeper into Mexizona.

This afternoon, at his apartment in my same complex, Mainio and I were watching a DVD on his new HD flatscreen and we heard a frightful explosion–not on the screen, but outside. Since the ‘ba-boom’ wasn’t accompanied by an earthly rumble, sirens or body parts landing on his second floor balcony we ignored the audio interruption. By the end of the movie (having had intimate experience with floating advertising orbs) he decided, as it was no longer bobbing perilously near the paring-knife-sharp fronds of a forty foot palm tree, it must have been the apartment complex’s helium-filled advertising balloon that burst and freed its contents to escape back to Sol from whence they came.

Everything comes at its appointed time. This move was just ‘a move’. A chance to further whittle down my holdings as I gave away everything from a back-up coffee maker to a seven-foot tall oak entertainment center designed more for homes than apartments.

We probably fetched over forty used boxes from the good folks at Borders bookstore and filled them with, what else but books? As I unpacked boxes not opened since my original divorce-driven move in September of 2003, almost exactly four years prior, I was amazed at the dozens and dozens of titles I had read over the years. I’m needing two more six or seven feet tall bookcases before I can unpack all my books and even then I’ll probably have to slap shelves up on the walls of my RV-sized living quarters. In case you’re wondering why all the books must be shelved, it is so that (once properly organized) they may be referred to and more necessary be seen and touched by the reader bringing back emotions and memories of knowledge gained.

I rented U-Haul vehicles on three separate occasions for the move, which made it needlessly expensive. I’ve arrived at a formula for sizing the moving truck to the move. And that is the square feet of the place you are moving from is the bare minimum of moving truck cubic feet you need.

Now that I’ve finally flushed the Wellbutrin XL from my system, evidenced by the fact my allergies have returned–since it also blocks the histamine receptors in the brain–I feel somewhat alive again. I’ve stopped seeing so many weird things like crouching men who were really bushes and wild pigs who were really u-bent pipes. I’ve begun to clearly think about my future–but still not lift a pen, a foot or a phone to begin to attain it.

And now that it is safe to self-medicate again (for SSRIs and alcohol tend to generate deadly seizures) I’m sitting down with Jose Cuervo at seven in the morning shortly after getting home from work, but I’m not sure why. I’m telling myself its what I need to sleep, since I, like a vampire, sleep during the day. Unlike Nosferatu’s cramped quarters, my bedroom window glows as if I were in a space capsule during re-entry. So today, not having the energy to hang the black-out curtains that Mainio forfeited when he moved out, I simply nailed up white foam poster board over the blazing glass. Still I was able to sleep for only ninety minutes.

Saturday . . . I’ll begin moving into my new apartment today. Quite a difference from my last move four years ago, in September of 2003, only three months distant from the formal declaration of my first divorce. A divorce after twenty-six years of wedded bliss. Well, maybe it wasn’t bliss …

In any case the circumstances are quite different. This time it’s money. After my 20% pay-cut and my 20% cut in hours, my income has plummeted to pre-adult levels. As a matter of fact compared to my 1970 inflation-adjusted pay-stub I am earning 43% dollars less per week. Thirty seven years and I’m earning less, not more. And if this continues, at age 100, I’ll be working full-time to earn absolutely nothing. At that point, I should probably retire, eh?

While I am no longer desperate to re-marry, I just read an article in the Friday Wall Street Journal that in evangelical churches the single sexes are 60% female, 40% male. And, being 100% male, I don’t think it was an accident I read this particular column at this particular time … however, I’m afraid I’m becoming too selfish to suffer the foibles of another person. It’s no wonder people remain single. Once you get over the extreme closeness of marriage … but who am I kidding? Marriage is a part of life–sharing life with someone you love and someone who loves you–for me, that IS life.

Starbucks, Lines & Life

Friday . . . How can everyone be so gawdamned busy and still get nothing done? Or are they getting things done? Going to miss this side of town with all its familiar-looking people who, even when casually clothed are dressed ‘just so’. All the trophy wives–many who defy expectations and are actually married to someone of their own generation. So many attractive women here. I am certain that good looks translate to good income and success in life. What else could explain my own situation? <grin>

All these harried-looking, but exquisitely coiffed housewives stop here after dropping their kids off at (hopefully) private school–heaven forbid that they brew a cup of coffee at home. But, then again, they are not at the Tatum & Shea Starbucks for java, but for elaborately concocted and expensive fructose and calorie infused drinks that will take at least forty-two minutes on the elliptical-trainer to burn off.

It’s so odd. So loud, busy, and chaotic here, and so unlike what I would ever  imagine I would be enjoying. Even though I’ve lived within one mile of this corner for twenty-eight years, I can still sit as an outsider and watch the action, unconnected by any feelings of intimacy or certainly financial brotherhood with any of the participants.

The ‘old’ guy is in and out in a flash. Why? Most likely, he got coffee. No sugar. No cream. 9:31am and ten people in line. Again. Life would be 100% more comprehensible if you could see life through someone else’s eyes. Which maybe, for literate people anyway, is the unstated reason to read books, both novels and biographies. To see life through someone else’s eyes.

Hmmm, I just thought something in that why I don’t like autobiographies is that they are 1) Not written by the person posed on the cover and 2) I don’t trust the author’s version of his own life. So much for wanting to see life through someone else’s eyes, eh?

Tequila, Toads & James Bond

Almost three weeks without my Wellbutrin XL. Two days ago I began drinking alcohol again. At 7:00am in the morning. Which isn’t as bad as it seems since my ‘day’ actually begins twelve hours prior to my imbibing.

However, I am already up to two shots before my 9:00am bout of somnolence. It’s quite odd, because it is not so much the C₂H₅OH buzz, but the particular taste that cannot be had any other way.

Although I understand that licking the skin of our local Sonoran Desert toad (Bufo alvarius) after chasing one for ninety-seven seconds can result in much the same tang as Jose Cuervo Gold, only with a different, more lethal kick. Hell, I wonder how that would show up on the Man’s Drug Test?

Testing Laboratory Technician: “Well, Dr. Malamud. Uh, it appears that you have Bufo alvarius toxin in your blood stream. Care to explain that?”
Dr. Hammurabi Malamud: “Young man, are you accusing me of chasing Sonoran Desert toads for ninety-seven seconds and then licking their skin?”

I love the taste of Tito’s Handmade Vodka (of which I am dependent on client’s purchasing for me) and the tang of Cuervo Gold tequila, which is aged about as long as newspaper ink. But still, regardless, my attraction to these highly regulated beverages, other than the bedroom staying power they engender, cannot really bring anything good into my life. Can it? That’s a hard question …

As I’ve been typing this, I have also been listening to symphonic music, and fighting off the cravings, the call of alcohol, with, first, a huge steaming tumbler of French-Press coffee. Then summer sausage. Then blue cheese that crumbled like an Indonesian town facing an earthquake.

But my avoidance techniques are all for not, as I soon tilt my favorite square shot glass (stolen from a friend’s cabinet) and the warm golden liquid slides out and sears my tongue as it burns its way down my half-century-worn gullet.

I think I’ll slip in my James Bond 1964 “Goldfinger” DVD.

Me a Lineman for the County?

Friday . . . Odd. Went to meet a former co-worker who is moving on with his life. I pulled up twice to the Kierland Starbucks. Twice because apparently ‘important’ people cannot take the time to park correctly. Even though it was 11:00am I found the cafe packed. I began with the word “Odd” because the restaurant next door was founded by and still contains the initials of a former client of mine. The convertible sports car proudly parked in front of the business and sporting a temporary paper permit, was one of the three designed by my nephew.

Inside the Barnes & Noble Starbucks at Kierland, I cannot believe how humid it is. My six packets of Sweet & Low, grasped between my thumb and forefingers that I normally use to raise my coffee to the sweetness level of a grapefruit, only reluctantly released their powder.

Being my former co-worker was now a county employee, our ‘lunchtime’ meeting lasted almost three hours. He said I should get a job with the county.

Left-Brain, Right-Brain, Einstein

Friday . . . It’s been one week since I’ve stopped my Wellbutrin XL prescription, but I can still tell it is in my system because my sinuses are totally clear. My nostril passages are like wide-open doors versus their normally closed and cramped shafts allowing the air flow of a Utah mine cave-in. And unintended allergy relief is a documented side-effect of this quite powerful anti-depressant.

I had a dream about the ex-Mrs.Dr.Malamud, Hanna-Marie, today. In it I was attempting to explain to her why I hadn’t treated her better when we were married, and my dream self thought back to my real self screaming out “I didn’t know! I DIDN’T know!” for day after week after year and responded to her with, “I didn’t know.” In the dream I felt there was a possibility we might re-marry. I awoke feeling warm and hopeful. Of course when The Valley of the Sun has just set a new record of the number of days over 110F degrees anyone is likely to wake up feeling ‘warm’.

I’m reading a challenging book about changing behavior. It’s so challenging that I sometimes shove it aside for days–but it isn’t as challenging as the textbook I’m reading to learn the programming language of all internet blogs.

This psychology book insists that our right brain never matures past the emotions of a three-year old, while our left brain, that analytical fact-storing part, is the adult. The writer is a Ph.D. in psychology and she claims that our right brain is often emotionally damaged during its first thirty-six months of air-breathing life. Injuries that must consciously be so slowly healed and many times be worked around by the goal-seeking left-brain.

Note: if you are right-handed your left-brain is your analytical ‘adult’ half and your right-brain is your emotional-infant half. Persons who have organically chosen to be left handed have the brain halves functions reversed.

My left-brain is actually rebelling at the thought of having to please my three-year old right-brain to get its cooperation in getting anything done. I’m changing the downward-since-1991-slope of my life. I think, not knowing better, because of its reign over my emotions (which explains my multi-year extremely passionate and destructive reactions to my wife’s divorce decision) my infant right-brain has convinced my soul that it is “ME”. All of me. And that’s just not true. Any longer.

Wellbutrin, Withdrawal & Wilson

Where do they come up with the names for these drugs? Lexapro ? In any case it’s been five days since I took my last Wellbutrin XL bupropion HCl extended-release tablets. Other than at times a feeling of nausea, I’ve noticed not many withdrawal effects. I know that with the bupropion HCI’s absence I will soon be suffering from my life-long battle with allergies, including, once again, asthma. Although touted as being very selective in what family of serotonin chemicals these SSRIs inhibit, it does not seem to me that, for depression,  they should also inhibit the Histaminic receptors which are what cause all the sneezing, coughing and wheezing that comes with an allergy attack.

While I can sleep pretty much all the time, I am not longer drop-dead tired after a work day comprising of five and one-half hours of driving and four of sitting. I get home to my soon-to-be-vacated tony Town of Paradise Valley apartment and flop down on the half-empty Malamud mattress simply out of habit. I hope to organically awake ten hours later and then hang out with the civilians after the sun burns the sky red as it sinks into the west. And after the temperatures have dropped below the one-hundred-teens. All this done prior to departing for another much despised work day.

I notice I am quite a bit more easily agitated, as the other morning I screamed and yelled into my rear view mirror at the tailgater who could no longer fill up my rear window as we entered a sweeping turn, as if I were Will Smith yelling at the ET chasing him down the canyon in the movie Independence Day. But I am not feeling so much ‘on edge’ but more like my emotions are filling up to their normal volume.

Listening to the Drudge Report Radio Live tonight, I learned of Owen Wilson’s attempted suicide-after-breaking-up-with-a-woman. I felt it was an entirely predictable event, for his openness on film is not an act and someone that open also leaves his heart open to a so very cruel world. I have a feeling that Mr.Wilson, like Dr.Malamud, looks around him and sees all the sadness and feeling the pain, sighs, shakes his head and wonders why. As I’ve already stated, I was forced into not seeing my psychiatrist for fear that simply mentioning thoughts of suicide would require him to inform the State of Arizona officials who would then collect me and toss me over the razor-wired-topped walls of my 1970s Alma Mater.

Although it was over thirteen months ago, it seems to me that I went on my first SSRI, Lexapro, just the other day–and just like when those chemicals were first flowing into my nerve endings–I noticed that my vision was becoming clearer. My physical eyesight is becoming as if I had just gotten a new and stronger prescription for my eyeglass lenses. My hands are tingling as if they are ‘waking up’ after having their circulation cut-off. As I was typing the other day I felt odd, I felt confused and decided I’d weather my chemical withdrawal while asleep.

I’m not in the best shape financially and facing a move and hopefully a move to a decent job and I am surprised that I am not feeling either depressed or excited or pretty much of anything. It’s as if there is a thinking analytical part of me studying my situation and a wholly separate emotional part that behaves as if its been numbed with an injection of novocaine. Feelings which fit quite well into the known left-hemisphere ‘analytical’ brain and the right-hemisphere ’emotional’ brain.

All in all, my withdrawal from my selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor although I was on the lowest dose, could take up to three weeks. So far the symptoms seem quite bearable.

The Birth, the Move, & the Salmon

Friday . . . Today is my 56th birthday. I checked the weather records for this date in 1951 and it turns out I went from the 98.6F degrees of my mother’s interior to the 104F degrees of a Phoenix summer. And that was about eight years before refrigerated-air came blew into the Valley of the Sun.

How hot does it get here? An example. I park the mighty Peugeot beneath a tree that shades the entire French piece of garbage from the direct rays of the afternoon sun. I keep a d-cell aluminum barrelled electric torch on the floor of the rear seat. When I get in the vehicle at 8:00pm that six-celled tubular monster is still far to hot to hold.

Mainio, my youngest son, finally talked me into moving over to his apartment complex situated in the shadow of a huge Home Depot box store. My 20% pay cut and the 29% cut in my hours had rapidly made my 2-bedroom Town of Paradise Valley place unaffordable.

My concern is the moving itself, especially of the larger pieces of furniture, since my right knee is shot and i couldn’t help much, but he insists he’ll get me moved. The savings could come close to $350 per month and it is very sad that someone like your Dr. Malamud is concerned about that small amount of money. Very sad.

This relocation should put me at the bottom of my financial descent, right when (I pray to Almighty God) that my emotional ascent is beginning, for the only way now is up.

It’s so odd that Sofia, my Burbank-based actress friend, phoned me on my way home from Mainio’s. Odd in that I had earlier mentioned my hope that one day I could move-in with her and her two minor children, pay rent naturally, and go on to be discovered by Hollywood.

I will always remember the time, during my ten-year retirement, when Sofia had an extra ticket to an actor’s convention in Burbank and, being I was then an active actor, she asked that I join her.

In any case, during the various seminars Sofia and I were absolutely astonished at how uptight and so very self-important most, if not all, of our fellow conventioneers were. And to me it indicated that these, mostly younger people, were involved in the movie-arts driven not by love or destiny but by greed.

I popped my final anti-depressant pill twenty four hours ago. While contemplating my first move in four years (my first  prior to that, being my divorce-move after twenty-three years in the same place) and I found my emotions attempting to surface like dead-tired ocean-salmon on their final flip to the fresh-water breeding grounds. Real emotions. They’re back.