Friday, June 30, 2006

Captivity
or
Long Walk Off A Short Pier

I'll kick this off by saying that I am OK now. I'm alive. Alright. And plan on being so for quite some time. No intention of harming myself in the near future. I'M COOL. Leave me alone.

Anyhow, believe it or not, gentle readers, I didn't fail to post over the last few days because I was lazy, or even because I was having a good time. No. I failed to post, gentle readers, because I was detained.

It will not come as a surprise, to some I'm sure, that as of 4:00AM on Monday, June 26th, I belonged to a "Mental Health Treatment Facility" in central Texas. No, I won't say which. No pictures, please. Nobody here knows I'm a rock star.

I met a lot of nice gals in there - people with problems far more intricate than mine, though you wouldn't know it by the gaping stigmata on my wrists. (EDITOR'S NOTE: I'm not a religious nut. In this case, the use of "stigmata" reflects a stylistic word choice, not to be taken literally.)

No self-agrandizing third-person accounts of my untimely near-demise. I'll leave it to say that the first thing the paramedics said upon entering my sepulcher (the upstairs bathroom) was: "OH SHIT!" I spent 8 hours in the ER, only some of which I recall at all. I do remember a woman announcing that she was going to give me a catheter, to which I replied:

"Does that mean I can pee whenever I want?"
"Yes."
"WOW. That's the best thing since . . . since sliced bread!"

I was soused. Five times the legal limit. I was trying to thin my blood.

Once they'd glued my forearms back together, the docs took me to the Nut Haus as fast as they could. I signed myself in. What can I say? It wasn't half bad, though. They let you have all the cake you want.

I'm now diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. Whoo. Like we hadn't guessed at that already. Somehow I don't find this distressing. If history is any use, I'm following in the tradition of all the greatest writers ever known. Now if I can just avoid absinthe . . .

shiny objects