My mood is fluctuating semi-wildly. One minute I'll be in a good mood, thankful to be alive, thankful for all that I have, thankful for all that has been given to me in this existence and the next minute, I am bitchy, insecure, angry, riddled with jealous over what I perceive that I don t have. You can't blame the fact that you are a jr. high school teacher who slept with one of her students on the fact that you might be bi-polar. You just can't. It's an injustice to all the bi-polar Americansplaces we ve never beenby mikel k you only know what i ve toldyoui only see what i see stranglers operatenearly in solitudebank robbers run the risk of getting their picture taken.
you need to takea vacationi ve never been tothe deep sea.of crimes or near crimes against kids. I drank like a madman for twenty years and never once tried to come onto a kindergarten boy or girl. I've been swallowing lithium since I put down the bottle fifteen years ago and...

STOP.

I certainly don t mean to be standing on a soapbox here, I just think that bi-polar disorder and
alcoholism should not be used as excuses for behavior. If you are suffering from either of them,
get help. Don't try to use either to evade responsibility.

"Well, Ed, she killed her three kids. What should we do?"

"Well. Fred, she's bi-polar and was drunk at the time so
it's not really her fault."

None of us are immortal. If anyone was going to live forever, it would have been Steve. Steve stayed with the party. He didn't stay with the kids, but it's not really my place to judge now is it. I call John Lennon and the beatniks useless assholes because they blew off kids to follow the beat, man. Steve's daughter just climbed in a nearly twenty year old car to drive two and a half hours to be at Steve's bedside. Steve just had triple bi-pass surgery for clogged arteries. Has the party caught up with him?

My Kidneys Are Damaged
by mikel k

"Diabetes is weird," she said,
setting me up, "we don t detect it
sometimes until five years after
its onset and by the time we do
there is often already damage."

"You do know that your kidneys
are damaged, don t you?"
she then asked me.

"No," I said. " That is news to me."

It is funny, if that is the word,
I thought to myself, that with all the
drinking that I did in the first 34
years of my life that I emerged into a
sobriety that will celebrate 15 years
in February with a clean liver.

And it is funny, if that is the word,
that my lungs are clear, after smoking
from the age of 18 to age 36, and yet
there is this insidious, hereditarialy-induced
thing stalking me, that wants to steal
my toes, take my feet, destroy my kidneys
and rob me of my eyesight, not to mention, it
is seriously fucking with my love of sweets:
brownies, cookies home-made and storebought,
sodas, milkshakes, cakes, etc.

Dr. Kevorkian is getting out in June
and he has promised, as part of his parole,
to assist noone to die with dignity, which
sucks at several levels I'm thinking as I sit
here tonight writing this as my toes tingle.