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your life should have a soundtrack

2004-06-17 - 10:24 p.m.

I've had some requests for some name changes here on dl. Apparently I have some hi pro fi friends. I won't be using any real names tonight.

I spoke at a panel downtown tonight with two guys from the meetings. One guy I know, Rey. Not to be confused with the name Ray. Whenever he asks me to speak he makes me a cd. Tonight he burned me a Cowboy Junkies. He's neurotic and a stickler for details -

"The other speaker should be here in 3 minutes...It's a minute after, I wonder where the speaker is?"

- but he has some great taste in music. The other guy, Poseph, I met once or twice, very nice, says "god dang" a lot. Where did he learn that? I felt like a m***er f***n Crip next to him, and I tried not to utter the word hell, even once. Dang.

Very cool group, in kind of a transition house type thing, mostly 30-50 year olds, I guess when there's no where else to go they come here. Show of hands they were mostly alcoholics, a few undecideds and 2 or three looked really amused for no good reason. Lots of gold teeth.

After the speaking they do a Q and A. Last time I was there they had a lot of questions. Tonight just one guy.

"I'm new. Is it normal that everything is irritating me or is it just the caffeine?"

I told him I was irritated today, even though I stopped caffeine recently but gosh dang had a more perfect answer, straight from his direct line to the heavens I'm sure.

Actually when Poseph told his story tonight he admitted for the first time to anyone that he had just been diagnosed with cancer.

For some surreal reason when we were leaving, this place had an amazing blues band playing in the courtyard, behind a chain link fence. It was just like camp but for big kids! The grounds did look like a prison yard but there were groups of three and four people, women with the women and men with the men, just like a real social. I don't remember my rehab having anything close to that kind of stellar entertainment, except for the gold teeth. We did do a lot of walking with 40 antsy addicts to the YMCA in the freezing cold and yet no one knew how to use the weight machines. Entertaining in retrospect. That and me teaching Lyle how to play Lean On Me on the piano, and he cried. Actually that was nice. I cried too, just not in front of him. He had not one skill and he was 34.

On the way home I spoke with Poe about his diagnosis, because I wanted to know how he was about it. Who, by the way, does not have cancer? He is getting a new procedure that uses a robot scope to take care of it, unless I misunderstood what he was saying, which is extremely likely. Science and mathematics are not friends or even penpals of mine. I think he has a great attitude about the whole thing, and he said his wife is a very supportive force. I don't know her name, or I'd change it to Poesgirl. Rey listened to us, but spoke only to cue up the Allman Bros. Eat A Peach cd, which strangely turned out to be one of the favorites of all three of us.

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