Drugs and Confused Brains
Nine days ago, I went under the knife for a lengthy operation which involved cracking my head open, meandering around my brain with pretty toys and brutally scraping a blood vessel off of my poor little trigeminal nerve. Want a picture? Sure you do. So, at the end of this random post, I’ll post a picture where I’m imitating finely dressed veal. Yum!
For 12 years I’ve suffered from trigeminal neuralgia, which has shaped every moment of my life. It is fair to say that every misstep is related to the pain. Every mistake I’ve made has been dictated by how I, or others, react to my pain. When the pain wasn’t ramped up to white hot, I was spending every waking minute catering to the ever-present background hum, side stepping simple tasks that induced flare-ups – brushing my teeth, showering, breathing, turning on my right side while I slept, blinking, living. And if the pain had been pushed back enough to allow me to live, it was only because I was on a cocktail of mind and mood altering drugs.
So now the pain is gone. I think. I hope. But, thanks to all the work they did inside my head, half my face is numb and I’m deaf in one ear. But that’ll go away in a few months. Then: Back to normal! Oh, and it’ll take six weeks to get off of the drugs I’ve been taking, during which I’ll suffer from insomnia, profuse sweating, and acute paranoia. All things that I suffer from anyway, so my coping mechanisms are all in place. Except I might just kill the gay guys next door, because they fight an awful lot and this apartment building was made using tissue paper for walls. Sometimes, late at night, I watch their silhouettes, lit by the warm, flickering glow of candles, as they…
No! I kid. The walls are thinker than that. And I don’t press my ear to the wall to listen for gayboy make-up sex. I have better things to do like download porn and shuffle around my own apartment in glow-in-the-dark boxers and bunny slippers, watching happier, wealthier people pass on the street below and pretending that, somehow, I’m involved in their beautiful lives.
I’ll be 33 on May 10th. So I’ve suffered from this pain thing since I was 21. That’s my entire adult life wasted on pain and horror and drugs. But, now I can enjoy the fullness of life and become what I wanted to be before 1995: An astronaut. Then I can go explore that new earth-like planet that they found. Have you heard about that? It’s only 20 light years away and it’s teeming with millions of really angry cannibals who are constructing a giant, interstellar ark aimed for us. No kidding. I read about it on the BBC.
But 33 might be too old to start astronaut training. Plus, becoming an astronaut is, like, hard and stuff. I think. It can’t be that hard if diaper-wearing maniacs can pass the grade. So maybe I should sign up.
I also wanted to be an assassin when I was a kid. Like Storm Shadow from GI Joe. I strongly feel that I’m capable of this task as I have no strong attachments and no scruples. Which lines me up as more of a Cobra Commander sort. Which would be better. Of course, Cobra Commander was a real fag in the cartoon. And he was pretty retarded in the comics, too. So he had a son he didn’t know about. Boo-hoo. Who cares? Why’s it matter? You’re the most successful international terrorist ever known. Kill the kid and live happily ever after picking off the Joes one by one.
I wanted to be a cop, as well. It was more glamorous when I was in high school. I now realize that the only joy of being a cop will be when I get to say, “Sir, we found your semen on body. You’re under arrest.”
While that would go pretty far towards making the day all that much more humorous, I think I’d get bored of it after a while. I’d start to obsess over finding the semen in strange places. In the ear, in the neck of the decapitated head…anything. Just to break up the monotony of yet another killer judge masturbating over the body of his secret homosexual lover.
So it all comes back to the job I could do with or without trigeminal pain – night watchman. One of those jobs I’ve long lusted after. Walking around dark hallways in a tight, polyester uniform, swinging my flashlight and whistling tunelessly to myself. The perfect job for a sociopath.
Not that I’m a sociopath. Just that, well, you know how it is. I’m sitting here, housebound, on a beautiful spring day, recovering from brain surgery, watching old Doctor Who on DVD, and I’m happy as a clam. Except that I lose all my energy in the afternoon and I’m strung together by the grace of oxycodone. Which is probably why I’m happy as a clam. Oh, yeah, two more little pills. Zonk! Normally I’d be awake and alive all day and strung together by the grace of alcohol, absent from my life this long week and a half. Oxy has more of a kick, though. Booze on a spring day always makes me feel like a British landowner in the 1920’s. I say, shall we walk down to the stables and solve a murder, pip-pip? Oxy? Yeah, that’s a different sort of drug. Take those, let them settle, and, well, I feel more like a parakeet. How’s the pain? I don’t know…chirp chirp. No! don’t touch me! Hollow bones! Floating in space!
I had intended, in the days leading up to this surgery that would reshape my life, to brutally attack all of the people in my life who judged me or abandoned me. Instead, I spent those days having a long series of miniature nervous breakdowns. I suppose that means I should use the next six weeks of disability to bitterly run around and be a meanie. Instead, I’ve been encouraged to write 100 word posts about my state of mind. A perfect idea, really. I’m at about 950 words right now and, between the painkillers and my numb face and general post-op freak-out, I have no idea what I’ve written. Stringing sentences and ideas together is like
Last night was the first time I’ve truly slept properly for more than two hours. No drug dreams, no pain, no waking up with a wooden block for a neck. So I’m not much in the mood for writing. I want more happy sleep. Lots more. A week’s worth. So, if I do have enough discipline to actually pull away from Doctor Who and write, the hundred words will take the form of poems to oxycodone and other tiny white pills of love and happiness. Or endless praise for people who go to pick up my prescriptions. I need one now, by the way. Any volunteers? I need you to go pick up schedule two drugs and have all the counter people at the Giant pharmacy look at you with hatred and accusation in their eyes, then go through the whole thing where they say in a loud voice so everyone in line behind you hears: “Because this is a schedule two narcotic I need to turn around and walk one foot to the pharmacist and get it from them you fucking druggie pedophile rapist!”
Um…thanks. I’m glad you’re going to inform me about every step you take today. What did you have for lunch? When was your last bathroom break? Holy shit, please, motherfucker, give me the drugs before I kill another eight year old girl.
And, now, the veal shot:
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