Nilknarf Journal

14 NOVEMBER 1997

Friday, 14 November, 1997

...really really late at night...

OK, so I got tired of both While you were sleeping and In the middle of the night... and this is the best that I can do with my feeble mind right now.

I did not get a good day's sleep again... the city decided to tear up the water line, and they needed two catterpillars to do the digging. And these were not your quiet catterpillars, either. Why do they have to have that goddamn beep when they back up? Don't they know how irritating that is? I would like to find the guy that decided that was necessary, and beep-beep-beep in front of his house all night long. I'm sure it was a lawyer. And yeah, I would get arrested and thrown in jail. So I won't do it, I got bills to pay and shit like that.

Another poem along the same lines as yesterday's:

Anti-entropic endeavors make me tired
And the cold wind blows
Striving for equality with the sun

The heat from the sun
Does little
To warm my heart.

Tiresome, even
The effort required
To think.

And the abyss yearns to become
A valley
A plain
A mountain
A planet

And the rain
Would be snow
Would rather
Be air

And the air admires
The substanciality
Of the earth.

The atoms will mix and mingle
The molecules will return
To the basest
Of substance.

And my mind will be
The equal of them all:
All the same:
All the same.

I haven't been feeling very poetic lately, and I mentioned this to Steve last night. I think that maybe just bringing the subject up had something to do with my poetic output; I've written five or six since then. So now I'll probably dry up again, noy that I've mentioned it...

This has not been a night full of excitement yet, but I still have hopes. Maybe I will actually get to do something fun tonight, like maybe take an x-ray!

-----08:16----- I'm going to meet an old friend for coffee this morning, assuming that she shows up. I've been friends with this girl for about twenty-five years, and she is a schitzophrenic. The last several years she has been drinking and off of her medication, and I've only talked briefly with her; the last time we talked, in April or May, she was drunk and really read me off. I had hoped to hear from her again, and she finally called this week. It took me a while to decide to call her back, but I'm glad that I did. She has stopped drinking and is back under a physician's care, and she sounded really good.

I was very unhappy the last time I talked to her... I felt that I had lost a good friend... like she had died. The person that I have known is gone, swallowed by the disease.

Schitzophrenia by itself is bad enough, of course, but it can be reasonably controlled with medication. However, combined with the drinking, it is often fatal. Even sober schitzophrenics tend go feel good and go off their medications, and drunk ones invariably do.

A full report tomorrow....