Addiction

[tahnan]

(From Semantic Structures, my passworded online journal; the third update in as many days!)

I've just resumed taking a favorite drug, and I'm not sure how it is that I quit it cold turkey, and kept off of it for so long, when I was so addicted. Heck, my apartment is littered with, literally stacked with, my cast-off empties, which I keep around in case I need to go back and drain them a little more. (Heck, I remember a time before I used to do that. I even remember the day, the visit to Boston from Minnesota, when Jessica changed it, when she led me down the path that made my addiction, in some ways, worse.)

How the hell have I gotten by for the past six months without reading?

I suppose I've been reading, really. I must have been. Charles Sheffield's Georgia On My Mind and Other Places is on my nightstand, from when I read the title story. I carried Fellowship of the Ring to Georgia with me, and read much of it on the plane down, and more of it while down there. Certainly I read Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive earlier this week.

But a single short story in a month is not what I used to read. And Tolkien I'm reading, honestly, out of a sort of a sense of obligation, a feeling that I ought to be reading this, not that I want to be. It's not reading for pleasure, it's reading for necessity. (One could say "force of hobbit." Or one could not.) And a play, well, plays read fast; I've read them in the past as between-meal snacks, as a break from the usual fare. And that's a recent read anyway.

Somehow I feel better, having read three short stories in a row. (From Starlight 2, editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden's 1999 anthology. Good stories, too.) I feel, I don't know, back where I belong. Maybe I should watch Trainspotting again. (Or just read the book.)

If only sleep were this easy.

Comments

Trainspotting

[ex-lucianus799.livejournal.com]

If you were on the Left Coast, I'd lend you the book.
It's a good read, though occasionally dense for the brogue.