I don’t mean for this to be the second consecutive entry to sound like Fred Sanford and "I’m comin’, ‘Lizabeth," but I managed to stay at work for four hours today. When I got home last night, I bummed a Darvocet from Steph (her heart doctor prescribed them in April, but they’ve sat untouched in her vanity drawer) and fell asleep. I woke up in the morning, and I won’t say that I felt fine, but I definitely felt better, so I saddled up and went to work.
It may have been a good thing that the workload was light to non-existent today. It turned out the Darvocet was only masking the symptoms, not curing them. At 11, I took sick leave, went home, took another Darvocet, and slept until late afternoon. Steph and Susie are at their respective choir practices at the Unitarian Church, so I’m at the Panera on the Ohio State campus (across from Barnes and Noble), complete with my bottomless cup of Diet Pepsi and the laptop.
Should this back pain persist much longer, I think I am going to see a doctor about it. I’m reluctant to take any strong medications for it, because my experiences with alcohol and caffeine show that I’m hard-wired for substance misuse, but I don’t like walking around like the Hunchback of Notre Dame either. When I lived in Cincinnati, in the days when I was single, un- or underemployed, and without health insurance, I took a pretty nasty spill on an icy sidewalk one night. At first, I thought I had injured nothing more than my pride, but when I got up, I realized differently. I walked with a rather noticeable limp for quite awhile after that, and I realize that I should have gone to a chiropractor or a masseur the next day.
Right now, I’m kicking myself for not bringing any of my breast-pocket notebooks with me. I was asleep until about 4:30 or 5, while Steph and Susie were at the doctor’s office, and I had to hurry to get them their food "to go" (chicken pot pies) before they had to leave for choir practice. As soon as they were gone, I caught the bus to downtown and from there to campus. It wasn’t until I was on the bus that I realized that I hadn’t brought my notebooks. I had a few lines of a poem already on paper, and was hoping that I could continue, if not finish, it tonight, but the furthering of early 21st-century American poetry will have to wait until tomorrow. I’m sure I have some other notebooks or scrap paper in my knapsack right now, but I don’t feel sufficiently motivated to dig through all the flotsam and jetsam I carry around. (I do have the staples–my journal, a few ballpoint pens, address book, etc. Otherwise my knapsack is a portable junkyard.)
Melville at the Customs-House 