So I saw my old rheumatologist today who seems to have a bead on what's causing my health troubles. Phew. He even gave me medicine to take down the swelling and pain in my neck. It's only been a few hours and the problem's reduced by about half. Amazing.

In other news, I was looking back through all my writing and poetry, and I'm realizing that I haven't written anything good (I'm talking prose, now, and poems, not reportage or my articles) since I quit drinking.

I remember Paul and Jaylinn and I hanging out, all reading a poem by Bukowski. We'd been going through his books. There was this one poem he wrote sober. As he wrote it, he analyzed it. He noted it had no soul. That he doubted anyone'd really want to read it. It didn't suck, it just...dissappeared into the ether. It wasn't anything. No substance.

I wonder if some day, far in the future, I will dose myself methodically with whiskey, four ounces per two hours, perhaps, to let the words come out.

To deal with the pain from this neck thing, I'm having to take vicodin every four or five hours. I hate it. It makes me feel like my soul's left my body for warmer lands, leaving me cold and disassociated, vague and unfocused.

I fucking hate this.

Yay! Comments! Success!!!

You'd think I'd learn

This is how it works, without fail, almost every time I attempt to [legitimately] acquire music:

1. I hear music I like.
2. I say, "Hey, that's great! Who is it?"
3. They say, "It's blah blah blah." (This weekend, it was Haiku d'etat, from Splat's show on theoryradio.)
4. I decide to buy the music, rather than limewiring it (which is, um, ethically ambiguous).
5. I peruse the available albums. I do not know the song titles of the music I heard, but I attempt to logically deduce which album likely holds the particular songs I liked.
6. I pay money for this album, of which I have very, very little right now.
7. I am completely fucking WRONG about which album I should have bought and end up totally pissed off that I spent the money.

aaaaaaaaargh. fucking fuckity fuck fucking fuck. FUCK.

I don't have ten bucks to throw at music and be wrong about it every god damn time. I have about $100 to get thru the next week.

Maybe I shouldn't have bought *anything*, given my tight budget this week. I am a fucking idiot, and a broke-ass one at that.

I am just getting more and more annoyed with myself. I feel like a total fucking loser. Yikes, talk about a downward spiral. Watch her go!!!!

I'm liking this new design. The comments are weird: For some reason, when I look at the template code, there appears to be commenting stuff built into it. However, there is no place visible on the page for comments.

I'm having trouble with my haloscan account right now and may have to just create a new one--of course, I'd lose all the comments on all the old posts.

Any recommendations for free commenting code?

Um, since you cannot comment, e-mail them to me: lucinda_michele@hotmail.com.

So yes, I'm sure you've noticed--I have changed the layout. I'll have comments up again shortly, sorry about that. I'm going to tinker with this for a while. The old look no longer suited me, really, and I'm ready for something new. I'm less gloomy these days, so all grey-on-grey wasn't really quite right.

TJ and I in San Fran:



and the mariachi rampage:



Boo yah.

Still sick, but feeling better. Coff coff.

I am a magnet for weird ailments. After returning from a trip to Monterey with the boy (which included a side trip for a mariachi rampage thru San Fran for Normal's birthday), I came down with food poisoning. Immediately after that settled down, my neck swelled up and all my joints began to ache. For two days the doctors didn't know what it was, but now things are beginning to look as though it's some wacko immune reaction to medication I was on for asthma. I've been given vicodin for the splitting pain that results when your neck is being blown up from the inside, antibitoics to keep down any risk of infection, and black shades to place over my mirrors, because when I see my reflection and observe the giant human toe I've transformed into, I want to cry. Ugh. I look freakish. But the drugs are nice. It's kinda a nice doctor-recommended vacation from my clean-livin' lifestyle.

Still, bleah. It's not like Vicodin is some instant party in a pill. It usually just makes me pukey. I only have negative experiences to associate with it, bad memories of being sick as a kid.

I love my new impulse buy



It's a white ceramic vase shaped like three 9mm handguns, balanced with the barrels together. It came with some really well-made realistic red roses.

I got it from this store called F*art on Colorado Blvd. in Eagle Rock. I walked in to talk to the owner about something related to the paper, and I saw this and HAD to purchase it immediately. $45 later, I was a happy woman.

I should prolly start looking for a place of my own to live in, so that when I buy stuff like this, I don't have to leave it at work for lack of space in my little room here in Le Valley du San Fernando.

I look like I have no lips in that picture.

Maybe I Am More Of A Room Service Gal




I might not like camping.

I wrote my bitchiness and whininess off at Burning Man as the result of having all my posessions reduced to cinders in our lovely flaming trailer, but after going camping at Twigsville, even for one night over New Year's, I'm beginning to think it's simply that unless I'm blotto drunk, I don't actually like roughing it.

It's so easy to ignore freezing temperatures, no showers, gross bathrooms that you have to share, people in your cabin fucking right next to you or snoring really loud, dead flies in your coffee, not being sure if your car is gonna make it, and stuffing you and your not-tiny boyfriend into a bed about two and a half feet wide, when you're loaded.

When I'm not, it's all a massive pain in the ass and I end up being a high-maintenance whiny buzzkilling bitch. And I don't like being that way any more than I like having to put of six layers of clothes to go to the effing bathroom at three a.m.

There were a few times when I was comfortable and happy, and once at night after finally trekking to the bathroom and back in the freezing* cold and snuggling into my 1.2 feet of space, I heard the river outside, and for a minute I was able to forget the fact that I'd have to ford it with my low-slung car in the morning, and it was a nice sound, and I was happy and content. But between feeling uncomfortable because everyone was high or drunk or both and I wasn't, and I wanted to be, but couldn't--and with the various challenges to comfiness that the whole "camping" experience presented, well, I was glad to leave when I did.

I want so much to be a certain kind of rough-and-ready, anything-goes kind of person, and for many years I was able to create myself in that image, but the bottom line may be that without the prop of some sort of drug or drink or other thing that makes everything else kinda fade away, I just might not be that person. And it's sad, because I wanted to be that person: cool, calm, collected, leap-in-the-car-thru-the-window-and-hit-the-road, footloose and fancy-free, wild and fascinating.

But maybe I'm just a boring person deep down, who's been trying all her life to amass a resume of interesting and fascinating exploits, just so I can point to it and say I'm better than everyone else.

I dunno.

Dammit, now I'm depressed.

I hope this year goes well.

* It was actually freezing. There was ice on everything.