On behalf of the College Governing Board and Administration, I am reaching out to assure you that your health and safety remain our highest priority
. . .
The college has decided to extend spring break for one week for students only. . .

I read this to mean that everybody’s health and saftey are of the highest priority, but some healthy-safeties are a more-highest priority than others.

Anyway–there’s a whole lot going on, and that’s about the least interesting part right there.

I interviewed this afternoon with deep plausibility and charisma and more than the ordinary dose of truth about who I really am.

I believe they will make me an offer.

I don’t believe it will be a good one, financially. Even if it is …

It’s not a job of the north mountain, where hers is now.

It’s not a job where I could only pay the mortgage–it’s a job that would require paying the mortgage plus southern rent on top of it.

But in this strange strange corona cholera week, where there is no hand sanitizer, much less test kits, much less free test kits–it would be a scrofulous bird in the hand come August.

To restart at the beginning, I woke to an alarm at five thirty this morning in an apartment in Scottsdale. I put in an hour’s work on the teaching demo, and then drove to my third and final session in the hyperbaric oxygen capsule. These inner space adventures last sixty to eighty minutes and are characterized by strangely hyperaware bodily sensations, vivid colors behind the eyes, and something very like waking lucid dream imagery. For example, today in this state I met a Frenchwoman named Rémi, even though it turns out that for it to be a femme name, you have to be Japanese.

Then I came back, finished off the demo prep, packed, drove a circuitous route south to the interview, did it, and drove home.

I know some of you are wondering about whether the treatment worked.

The original promise, that it would take away all addictive craving, turned out to be half true at best. I still crave, and that’s with a patch on most of the time.

It did slice the craving by some fraction.

On the first day, she talked me into giving her the partial pack I had left, except for one stick, which I smoked all of the same evening.

Yesterday, without any supply, I walked to the store and got one. I’m used to the very best organics. I bought exactly the opposite, the cheapest, nastiest shit they had. I don’t like them.

Today, I lit two of them very early and two of them very late, without any during the long middle of the day. By lit, I don’t mean I smoked four sticks. I mean that I had eight icky sips of the vile crap before tossing them aside in honest disgust, accompanied by equally honest self-loathing.

Letting the toxin touch my cleaned lungs hurts, noticeably, which also turns me off, so some of those sips are just … mouthed.

The ashtray remains outside in the rain.

I chew most of the time on tea tree oil infused toothpicks.

I’m sure I wouldn’t even be doing this well, without the patches.

I believe that the treatments, as an addiction cure, are a fail.

But.

I also believe that they got me over a certain mental hump, and that I am not going to go back to being an addict.

I believe that I can make it to quit now from here on my own, and I would be surprised if I backslid back down into the choking hole.