There are people who are always anticipating trouble, and in this way they manage to enjoy many sorrows that never really happen.---Josh Billings
The notice arrived in my mailbox Monday afternoon: drug test. I was scheduled for a drug test by my veterans transitional housing landlord for Tuesday between one and nine p.m. Failure to report would result in severe administrative action. I'd be kicked out. There are no makeup tests. Pack your shit and get the hell out.
Thump, thump, thumpety thump. My heart fluttered. My butt puckered up. My right arm started to ache. Heart attack. I'm having a heart attack. I'm light headed, dizzy. I drop the notice to the floor and clutch my chest.
I have too much crap now to move out easily. Even with my pickup truck's spacious payload capacity, I'd still have to leave some stuff behind (especially if I expected to sleep in it). FUGG!
I'd still have to have a quick fire sale of some of the larger items. The dorm refrigerator would have to go. I could get $20 for the 20 inch color TV Anthony sold me. The big Ionic Breeze air cleaner would have to go. I won't need an air cleaner out on the street. SHITONASTICK. Fugg me. I'm screwed.
Groan. The books. I can't take all these beautiful books I've accumulated. Boxes and boxes and boxes of books. I'll have to leave them out in the hallway. That's where I got them anyway: from other veterans making a hasty retreat back to the street. Ashes to ashes, books to hallway; we all return from whence we came, eventually. GUDDAMMIT!
The computer equipment goes with me. My computer houses my history. Can't erase my history. Not again. I gotta remember to keep the right USB chords with its corresponding peripheral this time. Unraveling the mysteries of the chords, dozens and dozens of chords, was a bear of an enterprise last time.
It took me months to get everything plugged back in again and still I have the nagging suspicion that I've left something behind in my many moves, some large chunk of my online life, some database, lost and gone forever.
Things I need will get lost again. My shaving gear will wind up at the bottom of one of my storage milk crates and I'll have to buy more razors I don't need. I won't be able to shampoo for weeks until I find my Neutrogena under a stack of income tax return copies in the fifth milk crate. And my vitamins? Forget about taking those for a while.
The Playstation will have to go. Don't need to watch movies or play games out on the street. Nope. The street is serious business. No fooling around. You don't organize your descension into the street and you find yourself pushing a shopping cart over broken chunks of sidewalk pretty damned quick.
ARE THEY TRYING TO KILL ME!!??
I picture Mikey sleeping in the back seat of my Buick out in the shelter parking lot because he tested dirty on the same test. I start hearing Aimee Mann's "Save Me" in my head. The chest pain is getting worse.
Friggin' drug test. Just when I'm starting to really scratch the surface of getting my life together, up pops the devil. Why they gotta pick on me? Scurrilous bastards. DON'T THEY KNOW I ALMOST DIED OUT THERE LAST TIME!!?? DO THEY CARE?
Hell no, uncaring, bloated, dead-eyed bureaucratic, semi-civil service fascist Nazi mutherfuggers, they're just making room for----
Wait. I don't take drugs.
Let the urine flow!
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