What I enjoy most about blogging is not having to stick to a narrative.
Social media posting has unwritten rules—pinning you to topics exclusively related to everyone else’s idea of what your profile should be.
For instance, Pumpers’ Instagram. Few are following it to read my personal shit. Why should they?
The same is true with personal social media accounts. We all feel it. A sort of invisible barrier fencing in our thoughts.
So we post sunsets. Or selfies. Or pics of our kids and friends. With zero context and ambiguous messages. Peacefully absorbing ourselves into the online digestive tract.
Real thoughts give off vulnerability—desperation. And god forbid you’re desperate!
But here—I’m free to write about whatever the fuck I want—feel as desperate as I want.
So let’s talk drugs.
All posts start off as an idea. This one began as a rant. But as I type it out, anger gives way to introspection.
Around 10pm last night, I gave my dad a new drug prescribed to him by his PCP to deal with his chronic post-TBI insomnia.
Mirtazapine—low dose. 7.5mg.
By 4am I wanted to throw myself off the 9th floor of 145 Leavenworth.
Doctors are overwhelmed. Especially shell-shocked Tenderloin primary care physicians. It’s impossible for them to neatly stack every detail and prescribe the perfect medicine for each patient’s situation.
All went well for the first two hours. My dad was finally sleeping.
Two hours in, he woke up looking like death. He had to pee. I believe this is what led to his first fall. Repeatedly waking up in the middle of the night having to pee while taking Trazodone for insomnia.
I escorted him to the bathroom. He walked like he’d just crawled out from under a head-on car crash.
This went on for four hours. Autopilot. Refusing to stay in bed. Stumbling his way to the restroom like an extra in a zombie apocalypse film.
It was the first time I felt outmatched. My noble little attempt to take care of him felt foolish. The restraints they had him in when he was in the hospital—the ones I fiercely advocated to have removed—needed to be back on.
With each lurch to the bathroom, a fantasy of ripping his sheets off the bed and tearing them into strips to fabricate my own restraints grew.
By four am I surrendered and fell asleep, thinking to myself, if he falls he falls.
I woke back up at 5am, saw that he was asleep, grabbed my coat and hit the wet tenderloin streets to buy a $19 pack of cigarettes. I don’t smoke anymore.
I returned to the 2nd floor communal patio and smoked with the same intensity I used to do when I had less than a minute break from the line during a busy kitchen service.
The seagulls mocked me. They must be lost. What are they doing in the tenderloin? Buying crackrock?
I walked back into my dad’s room where he was sitting up in bed. He said, “I feel great. I finally slept.” Followed by, “You know what would be good? Fruit. Fruit would be nice.”
I got him a bowl of raspberries from the fridge and flushed the drugs down the toilet.
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