I write this very late, as usual lately. My hours keep skewing away from the rest of the world's, maybe because I have too much energy to burn off, though that isn't how it feels most of the time; maybe because I feel like I've given up on something, though I'm not exactly certain what. Maybe I just feel like I'm getting away with something, still: 33 years old and I still keep an undergrad's hours, or a privileged teenager's. Yesterday I went to bed around 11 a.m. and woke up about 5 p.m. That isn't doing me any good, and I've attempted to rectify it, but without much luck.

I used to think doing lots of drugs would help. Stay awake for a couple days and then crash, sleep it all off, go back to normal. Well, it doesn't help--it just makes me more wired than usual after I wake up, a live wire running through me since I more or less haven't eaten in a couple days. Or smoke tons of weed and live my life as a sloth--a sillier sloth than usual, I definitely like the way it improves my mood, but when you can't even feel it anymore it's not as if there's much in the trade-off. I still enjoy getting high sometimes, but don't think they help anything, per se.

Actually they do help one thing: ignoring everything. I remember when I realized I wanted to do them all the time: four years ago, living in Eastlake with a cool roommate since moved to San Francisco. 2004 was a year when I had a kidney stone, a root canal, and a pilonidal cyst; it was also the year my teenage sister got pregnant. I had a lot to ignore. I also had money for the first (and probably last) time in my adult life and I wanted to get away from it all. The roommate could get weed, another colleague could get me cocaine, my frequent hospitalizations had gotten me an overabundance of Vicodin and Percocet. That was the beginning: access. Eventually I had, or got, too much of it. Lately I've been talking to another, very good friend and we've come to agree that we're too old for this shit at the rate we could, and occasionally have, indulge(d). This will probably sound silly, but sometimes you wonder. Why mention it here? To keep myself honest. It's the least I can do.