Easy Pickings

"But it was mango season. The mangoes were cheap. They were cool, and sloppy with sweet spicy juice. To a throat rubbed raw by dust, by heat, by the choking soot of traffic, they were perfect. I was slowly beginning to realize that Afghanistan is a 1 percent country. The ninety-nine bad things are what make the one remaining thing so indescribably good.

"... That's Afghanistan. You eat a mango in a mine field. Things that are easy have no flavor."
Excerpt from The Kabul express by Patrick Symmes, c. 2003. From Outside magazine and The best American travel writing, 2004.

A bottle of about 32 sleeping pills will last me quite some time. I'd say about 3/4ths of a year, easily. However, I feel every time I walk into the drug store to re-up, there's less of a deal. I usually get the store brand because what do I care about quality? They could be made in China for all I know. I'm only using the damned things to self medicate. I usually swallow it down with a beer. When times get tough, I start building a tolerance to it. Today I paid 8 bucks for 32 doses. Which is more like 24 doses when I start doubling up in due time. I used to get the same amount, roughly, for half that. The other day I swallowed a dose and slept for 2 and a half hours, the only sleep I had in maybe a 54 hour stretch. But I'm far from sleepy. I'm functioning, doing push ups like madness and doing it without eating anything outside of nectarines too!

This human body is such a trip. It's all subject to the mind. I bet if amputees could train their brains, they could regrow their lost limbs. Then prosthetics would sell only to the weak minded. We'd have an amputee social stratification problem on Earth. Like Robert Frost declared how way leads on to way, the same could be said about problems. In this paragraph alone I've described how emotional problems could lead to drug problems and how physical problems could lead to societal problems. If I'm not a nectarine gone bad, then I must be fermenting.

"you know I gotta get away
fuck that, never let a nigga take me out my zone/
if he try then blow him/
and go 'ooohooooohooohoooo'"
Mobb Deep on Get away

Today I'm feeling:

nickeled, dime and quartered