"35 Days in 35 Minutes," Writing and Drawing by Matt S.

Given the prompt, here, the subtitle, you get seven minutes to write whatever. There are five sequential pieces, unedited, hence 35 minutes. The Epilogue is just what couldn’t come out in time.

35 Days in 35 Minutes

– 1 –

The Light is Getting Brighter

12/22/20

Fall is my favorite time, leaves change, time changes, decay of matter, decay of time. I’ve always lived in this time, this season, this mood, maroon. Marooned in the melancholy of autumn.

The snow comes, it goes, so what, who cares? Well, all those that forsake a New England upbringing and clog Florida. Me care? Not really. Snow is an inconvenience, a necessity, an essential cycle.

Years ago, at the cabin of my college literature professor (we were only friends, though he may have had other aspirations). Charles said to me in the middle of the night, “Let’s go for a snowshoe!” in his marble-filled mouth voice. So we did. It was cloudy and feet of snow were on the ground.

We walked through an old lane lined with magnificent sugar maples. The scene was lit by a strange residual light in the snow – like light trapped.

I asked myself a strange question. ‘If there are fairies here, I wonder how I’d know.’ And just then balls of fire like Roman candles shot over our heads. Charles exclaimed, “What was that?!” And I said, “Don’t worry. I know.

– 2 –

In the Middle of It All

12/29/20

There’s a fall, that happens in the middle of it all, when you think you’ve got it figured out. And then, the out, the rout, the pout, then wow.

In the middle of it all, you can fall from tree top to dell, from crown, knowledge, to hell.

Gravity takes us all, sometimes to the bottom of the well, where we drink from old things, dead things, like a dead snake that fell in there. Or the piece of ice I ate on a walk yesterday that tasted of snow, that minerally bite of carbon dioxide trapped in ice.

In the middle of it all, I realize there’s no start or end, just complexity and purgatory. That’s my lot in life, living in the middle of it all, and wanting an end, a completion, a moment that isn’t in the middle.

– 3 –

That Wasn’t the End of It

1/5/21

Postponement derangement self-flagulation mutilation distortion – me. When there was a time, a clarity, a purpose – so much to do, so much done. Shame, self-doubt, embarrassment. Why do I return to these? ‘Cause coffee and vitamins only take you so far.

Neighbor Dave called me this morning, only more hermit-ish person I know than me. We shared video links of inspirational speakers who seem to have beaten this disease. They might have. We haven’t. He mentioned “Covid winter.” A new phrase for a new phase. I asked the docs if there was a honeymoon period in sobriety. No one admitted to it, ‘cause they knew all too well, there was, and then the mighty fall that is all too inevitable. Should they have told me the truth?

Lapse, relapse, prolapse, collapse.

At least I have help coming and advice, because the last thing you EVER want to do is go back to the ER and tremble and get jacked up on saline solution and anti this and anti that meds.

If it was the end of it, then, well, the cemetery. But we’ve got friends and helpers, maybe even family, for some people. The statistics, the experts, the nauseating facts. But we have hands and feet and stand back up and right our gyroscope and set a course and go forth to those things that make sense and don’t pause or look askance at things that aren’t part of the solution, the mind pollution that drives us mad with brain chemistry, bad reactions, exothermic or entropy.

Getting up is how we assure it’s not the end of it.

– 4 –

Let Me Show You

1/12/21

How do we learn, how do we learn to be smart or wise or loved? Learn to make a worthwhile garden, a household, a pot of tea, be considerate or mean, be gracious or violent?

Nature or nurture and hence the conversation is about nurture – a beautiful way to absorb all of life’s negative messages, of ego, avarice, malice, nurtured into a soldier’s uniform, nurtured into a life of crime, and at first, learn to drink or smoke or inhale a whippet?

You know the answer – from each other, from heroes and the powerful, and from the desperate. It’s true what they say about misery. Like begets like. And the contrary, all this is all true – that beauty begets beauty, love returns love, and politeness and discourse, and I want to be shown, like those who care for me and show me empathy by example.

– 5 –

I’m Looking into It

1/19/21

There are things in life we ignore. I always think about the root word of ignorance: ignore. We think to claim ignorance is a fair excuse that something happened out of our control, but no, it happened because we ourselves ignored. Have to learn to own up, bone up, be a grownup.

Somewhere between 40 years ago and just now I began to own my ignoring, passing off, putting off, showing off, delaying, denying where I had found – no – put myself. Like a snowboarder who’s broken so many bones that one day they wake and know they’re done, that they need to stop and find something more… suitable.

That “snap” of bones or spirit or agility, ability, fragility is when ignorance ends. It isn’t fun. It is watershed change in your watery eyes, when you look into the mirror and see, truly see into your foibles, habits and self-told lies and you see something honest about yourself and look into it.

– EPILOGUE –

1/20/21

My Dad said, “It takes two to tango.” Mine is “I try everything twice,” reasoning that, you know, on any given day it might not be great, so try it again. Twice might keep you from making a snap judgment. Twice might let you find something out… about yourself.

I’ve been bitten by vicious dogs twice in my life.

I’ve caught girlfriends with other men twice. Embarrassing for me, emboldening for the hims. You question yourself.

I’ve been rescued from almost drowning twice, once by a sister, the other by the neighborhood bully. Well, three times really, if you count the time I was snorkeling well off by myself, off the shore of Isla de Mujeres in Mexico. But no one was there to rescue me that time – life threatening, swallowing seawater, caught in currents, my corpse would have been washed out to sea and no one would ever have known what happened to me. Lucky to be here, or am I?

I’ve eaten uni twice and never got the hang of it. Looks like baby shit and tastes like salty mud.

I’ve eaten natto twice, the nastiest looking fermented food ever, tan soybeans caught in a mucilaginous, stringy, rubber cement kind of, dunno, some kind of microorganism. The first time I hurled, but… since I try everything twice, and I really do try to live up to that aphorism, I went back, found it from a different producer, and… wow! Those are some goooood rubber cement beans!

I’ve been through alcohol detox twice. Once in the hospital, then next time, on my own, alone with my own tormented soul without whatever it is they give you to shutter the shudders. A single room hall of horrors, where, by design I put myself there and then had only myself to find my way out of the maze. Not exactly true, I have understanding friends, and a daughter, and a particular sister, and a cell phone. Before I did this thing, I made arrangements. “If I run into trouble, I’m going to call you guys, and maybe one of you can take me to the hospital.” Roger agreed. His adult twin brothers are recovering alcoholics, something like, since 1984. He matter-of-factly told me it takes a couple times, but “You’ll get it, man.” He’s a kinda famous punk rocker from the eighties. He can have a couple of beers and he’s good. Not me. I’m wondering if a couple of times through this hell will be enough to teach me.

I was told by a doc, I am in the deep end of the pool. But a pool is a pool. It’s all the same except it’s deeper on one end. My pool is like that beach in Mexico. You could walk out and keep walking and the sand was soft and water just got incrementally deeper and the sun was blazing and the water felt good. But there comes a point where the waves lap up to your face and a few more steps and there’s no bottom and the current is persuasive and the clarity is gone and seaweed and sea creatures wash upon you and you think “I got this.” Do I?

My second time, for two days I could barely walk. Fuck! I could barely stand up. My hands trembled so violently I could not type. It took both hands for a glass of water. I forced myself to drink water and eat something, a slice of bread, and take vitamins and pills.

I heard songs repeating in my head for the two days and nights. “Why the fuck is Camptown Races playing over and over and over?” “What dark shit is in your brain that THAT is what bubbles up?”

For two hours it was an ancient refrain from some long obliterated monastery. For two hours I heard a folk song in some Eastern European tongue. For a while it was some electronic dance beat. That part was okay.

You should have seen me, walking around putting my ear to every speaker or computer to see which was emitting faint tunes, reasoning a short circuit or the fillings in my teeth, or soundwaves caught in the wind suddenly falling out of the sky, like a kite in dead air.

I chased the sound into a corner and put my ear there, my left ear, that’s where the sound was coming in, and put that ear to the corner and… nothing.

When I was a young man, I knew this guy who would lumber about and put the palms of his hands on the sides of his head and push. He was so unhappy. He asked me if I ever felt my head would explode, or if I felt like there was a hole in my head and brains were leaking out. I chalked it up to one too many acid trips, but it is a real thing, the exploding head thing. It has a diagnosis and everything.

By Wednesday, I walked outside and became convinced the treetops were crowded with a cacophony of tree frogs chirping as loud as a murmuration of starlings. It was winter, no tree frogs.

So for the next two days I heard bird songs. Summer songs in winter. That was the moment… did I have a stroke? Have I uncovered a hidden schizoid state? Am I a psychopath now?

I’d wake up from dreams so lucid they were in four dimensions, wake up during some discourse only to find myself speaking outloud and continuing the conversation with someone in the dream. I was caught between two realities: the dream state and the conscious state. Or was it the descent state versus the intent state? Or was it all one in the same – the specters I long ago planted in the creases of my brain, wriggling free like nightcrawlers after a storm, to remind me my universe is still almost entirely unknown to me? I would have written things down, but I could barely hold a pen.

Shit like that will drive you to empathize with people who hear voices all the time. Our stereotype of the town drunk, whiskered, gaunt, stumbling, mumbling, trembling, asking for a little something. I’ve now been inside him.

On the sixth day the sound hallucinations stopped. Just tinitis, lingering, like when you flush the toilet and the refill is still shitty.

It took two more days for me to begin to feel normalish, in my own skin again. The old Matt. The me who was the most awesome teenager, before dope and alcohol and bad sexual experiences and college knee injuries and marriage fucked me up, meaning, before I allowed them to. Because I didn’t know any better. Oh Big Sandy, sing it, “If I knew now, what I knew then.”

Today, at 2 pm, I went for a constitutional swim at the Y. It isn’t really a swim – it is a maximum of six old farts, each relegated to a portion of the pool so we don’t get the plague upon each other. My corner is in the deep end of the pool.

Remember the near drowning episodes? In a Herculean effort entirely of my own design, I took a swimming class. Still don’t know how anyone relaxes when you’re about to go under, but I did it, then I did it again. Now I am comfortable with just floating on my back, my knees bending some, so that my feet are below the water. I inhale deeply and bob up to the surface. I exhale and I sink. I sink until just my nose and eyes are above water, but it is enough. I have had to learn it is enough, and that if I struggle, I can’t maintain the delicate balance between bob up and just survive.

I listen to my breathing. I am comfortable, for now, with the idea that I am doing something impossible. Floating where before I sank. Swimming where before I flailed. I think of the pool water around me versus the solvent that was inside me.

I begin to let go, let go of worry, my surroundings. Transfixed on the square ceiling tiles, each with hundreds of perfectly organized little divots. Bob up, sink down a little. Bob up, sink down a little. Bob up, disappear, sink down a little, reappear.

I am aware of the ceiling and the water and my breathing. Nothing else is here. I feel as if I’m on a ceiling looking down at a tiled floor. My whole world is upside down. I’m loosely attached to a liquid ceiling, floating above everything. Seeing things differently and feeling things differently. How long can I remain here? Is this the destination? Or am to stay here for a couple of hours, a couple of days until whatever is next.

Tune in. Two-n-in.