September, You Dirty Little Whore

As September cools, and fall begins to awaken, I sit here looking back with a trigger finger gettin' lose and ready on the match.  September, far worse than August, was a surly little chic in too small heels.  Okay, that's a little kind.  She was a surly chick in too small heals needing carbs and a puppy for all the attention she demanded.  Y'all, September needs its own zip code for the love it needs these days.  August might have tried my soul, but damn at least she gave me some breathers and pleasant moments of remiss.  You know, like when the one-time beau met up with me in Denver with a lolli instead of flowers.

Yeah, in an aside, pot is legal in Colorado--if you did not know--and so that lolli was a mango flavored THC laden fairy princess ride.  Of course, what I should also remind you is that when one consumes a lolli one should not partake of the entire thing at once and while alone.  Okay, you can . . . But, ya know, you might still be flyin' like a pilot the next morning when you walk over for a full body massage.  You might still be a little flyin' that afternoon when you find yourself eating an ice cream cone and a cookie from a local bakery, not of the THC kind.  Or, the evening you consume entire said lolli you might get a knock at the front door with a food order you don't fully remember placing, to open it and find fried chicken and cornbread flying into your piehole.  Of course, if you are in the middle of a bought with elephant lady face and cellulitis the lolli will replace the need for, say, a dose of hillbilly heroin . . . Saving you the side effect nightmares and free-wheeling style high that you never understand that others enjoy.  Of course, that is if you do that kind of thing (I look to the left, I look to the right).

See, now September you just couldn't be patient could you? Instead . . . in a month riddled with one of my favorite flowers, that buoy me with hope and happiness every year like an old friend and reminder of the happiness and beauty in the mundane and everyday, I find myself standing--again--in the shock of it all.

A couple of days into my fourth round of prednisone this calendar year, with some napalm strength Motrin to accompany it, I'm sitting here wondering if this is what it feels like to take cocaine.  I've been assured that it is not.  Of course, I'm told that perhaps if I mix a hillbilly heroin with it I might know better.  Yeah, I'm not willing to take a Vicodin tonight to see what kind of fucked up level I can hit next.  Though, if this cyst the size of Alaska doesn't stop knocking I just might pop one.  Just might . . .

That aside, as the stress rolls and days go on this past week in all my classes I've had an array of students looking for ways to feed me.  There have been offers of seasonal flavored coffees (which really aren't coffees but more along the lines of violations of the Genova Conventions), donuts, candy, two girls offered me tacos, and there was a sandwich offered somewhere in there.  Legit, people, I seem to be giving off an appearance of needing to be fed.  In seventeen, or so years, of college teaching, I can count the times I've been offered food and booze on one hand until now.  Now, in the past week, the number has fallen off the count of both hands.  It's sweet, I will say.

So yeah . . . Septemeber you've got some nice moments, but the rest . . .

I began the month leaving the ER after an overnight stay.  I end the month . . . Let's hope this pain doesn't rumble enough to make me go back.  At this point for me to willingly walk into an ER, it would mean that I've got pain greater than the force of life itself.  Seriously, there is only so much a gal can take.  My psyche is largely spent.  My soul is mainly dark.  My resolve is largely down under some bridge in the five boroughs.  Search and rescue should find it at some point, but for the moment it is elusive to me.  Maybe it's hiding up on the Upper East Side, with the fading dream I have of living there.  Maybe it's hanging out haunting a dude I quasi-dated over there, a while back, who--well--redefines the concept of assholes with money.  Yeah.  No amount of money makes up for that kind of malaka.

In the middle of the mix, there's a physician I hope meets some terrible karma.  With one ultrasound and a CT scan proving I have sizeable cysts again, she told me I just had gas.  Then another, more detailed ultrasound gave horrifying measurements of cyst babies hanging out on each ovary, and . . . Well, she can take her bedside manner and wander the seven seas with it.  That's all.  Karma is a bitch, and when it comes back on her, I have no doubt she'll be crying in a corner, alone, without a sucker to console her.  And with that . . . That is how September played me.

In these final hours, I sit here with a prednisone quake inside me, a jitter of alertness deep into the night, and a shudder to wonder.  I wonder, I dare, to say what will unfold next.  2017 seems to be unable to play well with others these days.  Usually, I would say that I'm so glad I live in a world with Octobers, as Anne of Green Gables made me love the concept in my youth and writing about her in my adulthood has only propagated the dream.  Yet, this year, I'm looking to my left and looking to my right for fear there's a roach, centipede, or bomb waiting to explode.  Dear lord, let October be dull and mundane.