Down in a Hole - Feeling So Low

Hole:  A hollow place or cavity; a pit; an opening in or through a solid body; a rent; a fissure.

I'm on Day 4 with no coffee.

I suspect that very few people know exactly what this means.  The importance of this would be hard for a non-hole person to grasp.  I could say, as a fairly accurate approximation, to any queries: "Hey, I'm on Day 4 of not breathing.  How do you think I'm feeling?"  Seriously, if you gave me the option of quitting coffee or quitting the intake of oxygen into my body I would have to find a quiet place so that I could think about it for a while.  Death from asphyxiation or no coffee?  Hmmmm.  Let me get back to you on that.

(I apologize for a brief digression . . . As a baseball guy I have to point out that "hole" can also mean "the rear portion of the defensive team between the third baseman and the shortstop."  I wonder why that came to be known as a hole.)

So the whole point of the hole is that I am full of them, and they are bottomless.  I cannot throw in enough stuff to fill them up.  Trust me - I've tried.  I am trying.  I have a history of throwing in things that are clearly bad for me, like alcohol and drugs and cigarettes.  I try to fill them with things that are not, in their essence, bad for me, like exercise and sex and coffee and work.  I have no Halfway setting.  I'm all in or I abstain.  I'm stopped or I have the accelerator mashed to the floor, and I'm holding on for dear life as the car careens just on the brink of disaster.  This would be alarming for most people - it's a comfortable state of equilibrium for me.

If you could manage to only smoke a couple of cigarettes a day your body would be fine.  How wild is that?  I haven't puffed on a butt for 33 years but if I had one this morning I'd smoke a pack by the time I crawled into bed.  How wild is that?

My friend who committed suicide has been on my mind.  He had some big holes, too.  One day the size of his holes overwhelmed him.  I don't know if he finally decided it was too big or if he got tired of shoveling shit into it.

The thing with me and caffeine is that it doesn't even make me feel good - it makes me feel worse.  But the thing with filling holes is that it's not about feeling good or feeling better - it's about feeling different.  I don't want to feel the way I feel.  I want to feel something else.  Something is missing so I chuck shit at it, willy-nilly.

I'm having a cup of off-brand Orange Pekoe Black Tea right now.  I can't definitively say where it came from - we have a box of all kinds of teas snagged from hotels all over the world - but I bet it came from my mother's kitchen.  This tea is probably 47 years old if that's the case.

Yummm.   Delicious.