Saturday morning. Clear head. No booze or ciggies making foggy fuzzy edges around all the bubble thoughts in my head. Just a clear crisp morning with a full 8 hours of sleep and a proper morning coffee intake.
I get out of my car, lock the doors, and approach my building. I step up onto the curb and stand over the keypad to clear the doors. Only I can’t remember the passcode. It’s just gone. Gone. I guess at numbers, trying to act casual as if I can trick my brain into just instinctively acting out the code. Just let my fingers remember how to walk across it, and feel it’s way….
They don’t remember either.
I walk back to my car, open the door, and sit down inside the car, hoping to ‘do over’. Back out of the car, lock the doors, walking over the curb and up to the keypad, and…still gone.
I try 2 other entrances to my building, only my memory likes those none the better.

I call the boyfriend with 2 rings, and then decide that this is just way too crazy to admit to him. Although I’m certain it wouldn’t surprise him (like how he handled that locking his keys in his car incident so gallantly), I still think that certain aspects of my lunacy would cause concern. I hang up quickly, and decide to dial up my brother. He used the code when he came over once three months ago, and has a knack for numbers.
‘It’s got a 7 in it I say. And a two 9s’ I say.
Are you sure? He says. I think it starts with a 1.

The good news is, I figured it out. The good news also being that my bubba says it’s not the forgetting that I should be scared of. I should really only fear NOT REMEMBERING that I don’t remember.

This morning my bubba, his wife, and their child-dog fly in for what Central Market has now re-named ‘The Festival of Feasting’. I guess the real reason that the holiday is all about family is because true no-holds-barred gluttony should really be indulged in before members of your own clan, relieved of the complexities of the existential self. That said, my family has rarely appreciated displaced holiday guests around our dinner table…unless they’ve got very thick skin.

Over the years my brothers and I have formed secret sibling pacts and alliances behind my mother’s back in order to maintain a cheerful peaceful atmosphere. These are tried and true disarmament methods, and new amendments are adopted and reviewed prior our meeting sometimes days or weeks in advance of when we all show up. It’s the least we can do after mothers 2-3 days of kitchen servitude.

For instance, my brother, sister-in-law and their child-dog promise to show up for the meal on time, despite the complicated juggling of the holiday amongst in-laws. We thus avoid the fight that happens when mom is trying to keep the food warm, or the fight that happens when we’re all bickering in a semi-delusional state we refer to as ‘crazy hungry’.

My deal is to promise not to show up pissed off with a hangover from bacchanalian pre-Thanksgiving festivities. This is tough when you want to hang out all night with out-of-town guests, but it actually works out for me because then I can drink all throughout the day with a mellow and rather charming buzz. We thus avoid the fight that happens when someone asks a personal question or looks at me funny.

This year, my youngest…my ‘baby-bubba’ has promised not to show up at all, on account of a ‘mistaken’ identity. He is not in a good place, he says. I can respect that, I say. He can’t deal with their shit, he says. They defend you and love you behind your back, I say. They’re never going to accept me, he says. There are going to people that misunderstand and misinterpret you your whole life, I just think that if anyone deserves your intellect and energy to prove them wrong, it’s these people, I say. There’s no way to avoid this fight, and I'm not going, he says. Not even for an hour? I hate it, I say.

So tomorrow afternoon, after I sleep off my tryptophan hangover, I’ll gather up a plate of my mom and brother’s perfect turkey, my grandmother’s stuffing recipe, and a big slice of apple pie, and I’ll take it to my brother’s little apartment up in the suburb of Plano. He’ll ask how the day went, what happened, and how everyone got along, and he’ll be genuinely curious to know. His cell phone will be blowing up from the hundreds of friends he has, trying to catch him and wish him a ‘Happy Thanksgiving’ and make plans to meet up together after they finish dinner at their family’s house.

I feel like I’m visiting an invalid or a shut in rather than my animated, strong-willed, and courageous brother.

I feel like he broke our pact.

Day 9 Detox: Getting back to normal

In two days, I will have a cup of coffee. I spend a lot of time thinking about this…about swimming in a large vat of warm soothing black coffee; of doing laps in the stuff, and sipping it at the same time. I’m choking on my laughter and the dark nectar with all my friends and family there. All of us are playing chicken, and I’m down on the bottom, holding up a big fat man with my superhuman strength, sipping and laughing.

In fact, I may replace my detox, valerian-dandelion bath salt with grounds, just to really make the point. My point being, I’m back in the game.

Day 8 in detox: Partly Cloudy; Full Moon

So, I’ve passed the week milestone, but I’ve promised to give this thing up on Friday. Promised to resume consumption of ‘normal’ quantities of caffine by means of black coffee. I’ve likened the week long practice as being much like PMS in that anything and everything can be ultimately blamed for it: forgotten car keys, traffic violations, spats with mother, confrontations with others regarding personal and/or career goals. All can be attributed to a basic deep human need for a sandwich and a cup of joe.

Last night I lay in bed trying to fall asleap, my mind raced on as it sometimes does, but without the scary wave of heart palpitations beneath it. I began imagining that all of human interaction and reaction was based in cellular physiological conditions influenced by nutrition. If the calm, weird, space-cadet girl I was this week was a result of my dietary shift, then perhaps the silly, hyper, strange, misunderstood woman I am in day-to-day life is also the result of food choices. Maybe the granola diet of my youth was itself responsible for my being ‘misfit’ throughout all my time in the education system.

I heard a staccato exhale from beside me.
‘What’s so funny?” I asked, surprised at the timing.
‘Nothing. Just trying to clear my stopped up nose.’

Waiting for Messiah.

I’m in for the long haul on this detox plan. Not because I’m one to get all hell-bent on a fitness regiment, but because I’ve spent way too much money on non-bovine, non-gluten, non-saccharine, non-tasting perishables. My tongue still calls out for fun-sized candy bars of the holiday past, and ordinarily I would deaden the craving with red wine and cigarettes. The inherit problem with that being that I medicated my anguish all night long, and then STILL woke up in a heap of shredded candy wrappers and chocolate in my sheets and hair.

So I’m two days in. I’ve cut the clandestine coffee and replaced it with detox approved green tea. My head has a dull ache to it from the withdrawls, but I’m so awash with numb lifelessness, that I barely feel it. In fact, last evening as I spend a few quiet moments contemplating this new approach to pain, my boyfriend noted a small smile that had come across my face as my eyes stared out vacantly.

The websites, magazines, and books all say that I’m going to get worse before I get better. That it’s an all important part of getting rid of the demons, and that I am paying for my sins right here and now rather than letting them manifest into cancer, eczema, fat, rabies, or tarrets syndrome. That I’m going to ache, act moody and weird, break out in hives, pee like a racehorse, and get a fever and/or flu-like symptoms.

But when it’s over, I’ll feel like a whole new person. I’ll digest like a teenager, I’ll recover a new found sense of energy and a natural glow will take over my entire body. My meditations will be long and deep, and my intelligence will far surpass the unenlightened ones with dirty pipes.

And the big tar turd will come and set it all free.

If the messiah comes, pictures will post.