Author’s note: This is from a series based on my journal. Unconventional and idiosyncratic punctuation and formatting are intentional.
This morning I woke up an hour before my alarm and hoped to go back to sleep because I was dreaming of watching dinosaurs graze in the yard through a screenshot of the square in Letter Boxed. They moved as if in slow motion replay, back and forth, their heads on long necks going up and down. So that’s why the yard has bare spots, I said, the dinosaurs have stomped it! In the paper I read about new illicit synthetic drugs more potent and deadlier than fentanyl being sprayed onto the pages of books, letters, documents, and even photographs, transforming the illegal drug market and confounding scientists and law enforcement. Many of the drugs are so new that they are not even illegal yet and one page may be worth thousands of dollars and contain a mix of drugs. The pages are torn into strips and smoked, causing users to go into exorcistic fits. It’s not uncommon at the shelter to have men coming in who have been smoking a synthetic cannabinoid called Spice. It is a short high that leaves their eyes vacant and sometimes their arms and legs paralyzed and does not respond to Narcan. In Philadelphia someone tried to sit on a food delivery robot and someone else wrote destroy me plz on it. No one tried to take the food inside it. It still made its delivery. I sent Judith a link to a story about birds including cigarette butts in their nests. I thought of her interest in and affinity for birds and how the story might find its way into one of hers. It seems that what addicts people to cigarettes protects birds from pests that may harm them. One of the forecasters on the local news has four pet turtles and the name of one is Mishell.
At the shelter today I signed men in at the front desk and a new volunteer named Pamela answered the phone and handed out supplies. We met about a month ago soon after she started. She wears leopard-print head wraps and smokes cigars on the front steps when she takes a break and uses a cane. She said she was hit by a car five years ago. My foot came off, she said, I wish I could show you. That’s okay, I said. She learned about the shelter and volunteering there through a program she is doing with Goodwill. I love it, she said of her time at the shelter. She has two young sons and called the youngest to check on him. He asked her to bring him some candy from the volunteer room. Give me kisses, Little Man, she said when they said good-bye. The man who droops with sorrow came to the counter and motioned as if he were drinking. Wah-tuh, he whispered. I gave him a bottle from a shrink-wrapped case on the floor. I just got out of jail, said another man when I could not find him in the roster. He had done an intake right when the shelter opened today and was not yet in the online system but I found his name on the intake sheet. He wore a white t-shirt and a wooden cross on a beaded necklace and studded leather rings on all of the fingers of his left hand. Cuban, Egyptian, Arabic, said another man when I asked him about his unusual name. Bruce announced his Bible study group when he finished his shift in the toiletries room. Take notes for me, okay? Pamela said. Okay, he said. Ty drew a heart with a feather shading into its left side. He said he has been drawing since elementary school and keeps meaning to bring his sketchbook to the shelter because he would like to sketch some of the men. When the shelter opened 40 years ago a painter friend of Dad and Gray’s painted portraits of some men. They were collected into a book and some of them hang in the offices in the back.
On my way home I went down the street lined with pear trees. From a blizzard of white flowers to brown and withering petals they are now filling out with bright green leaves. I passed a man from the shelter wearing a red tank top and jeans and walking his terrier-mix dog. Its name is Cupcake. Sometimes the man pushes Cupcake in a baby stroller. At Speedway the customer in front of me wore a t-shirt that said I Like My Bourbon Without ICE. Hi, Shug, said the man to the cashier at the register next to me. He bought two hard seltzer tall boys and four lottery tickets. At home I cleaned the mold from two more vent covers from the third floor with more of the gel I got a few weeks ago. Last time the gel bleached a spot on my shirt as white as bone. This time it bleached the sink and it is so shiny in places I can almost see my reflection. I nested the covers into the branches of the viburnum by the deck to dry. Jenny and Chris next door are having their patio and outdoor furniture cleaned. The work started yesterday and the power-washer’s chuddering hum has been nearly constant.
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A street drug called spice. How interesting. Spice is produced by sand worms in Frank Herbert's Dune. It is consumed by space guild navigators to enable them to fold space.
I would love to see the paintings! And I love your shelter stories.