my cartoon vacation

When you don't know if it's stress or MS that's making you shake and then your girlfriend's schizophrenic son walks in the house saying something about East German women drinking gin and building rockets... you know it's time for a tropical island, the kind with the cartoon fish that talk to you and the cartoon guys with dreads who drape coral necklaces on you and can make alcoholic drinks that don't interact with your blood pressure medicine (this paragraph contains fictional details, believe it or not). Or, you sit down to write a blog entry as a way of ignoring the schizophrenic son and the creepy feelings in your head which your girlfriend says are weather-related --- no, you're not about to explode. You wish you hadn't treated your mentor to a play-by-play of your Space-Invaders-type-shoot-em-up-competition with a list of physical symptoms all of which probably were related to anxiety. You wish you hadn't let all the bloggers and blog-readers know the extent of your malaise but now it's too late, not really too late because after all there's a backspace key and a delete key but you throw your hands in the air, this blog is called Actual Nuthouse so you might as well tell the truth (and throw in a few fictional details to keep em guessing).

Enter puppy. Yap yap. Turns out this puppy is part Doberman, even though he's all black. He comes bouncing in, licky licky licky.

What I like about blogging is it doesn't have to be all about poetry, though maybe it should be. Today I wheezed out a few pages of ECE, struggling with the sensation of knives in my head and an urge to smoke. Meanwhile my girlfriend was buried in Harry Potter, purchased at last night's bookstore party which was blessed by a certain red SUV that kept circling the block, its passengers shouting obscenities, finally mooning the Potter-ites --- I recreationally wondered: why do they hate us??? --- a question asked on nine eleven by more than one of my clients at the halfway house (and plenty of Americans who did not suffer from mental illness as well). Today, a friend remarked: "Anyone who doesn't like Harry Potter fans is un-American." I reminded her that it's a British phenomenon. "Selling books is an American phenomenon," she reminded me.