nice to know that someone else goes on a rant every now and then—but what if we blow up? “that’s a chance i’m willing to take for love.” then somebody said, and it sounded kind of like my Dad’s voice, “we appreciate the prompt response.” that was probably Mozart talking; i don’t know—maybe it was just my Dad talking. I suppose that’s possible. but if it were my Dad talking I might expect to see Mozart in my mind’s eye, for example, since my Dad represents Mozart and Mozart represents my Dad. How is the music going, anyhow?” “Well, I’m trying to talk myself out of it, but I’m thinking of recording another song today.” And the instrumental pieces—the work that, given the size of your brain, people expect from you? Good point.
But i’d been feeling a little dizzy of late—and, since it had been that way yesterday too, I suspected it might have something to do with the Lexapro leaving my body. For the last couple days—of note, constipation has not been a problem—unless constipation includes having to go a few times over several hours instead of once. “How are you feeling Ursula?” i don’t know—i was feeling a little light headed—a little dizzy. What was happening? It was a little difficult to speak in Ursula’s voice on a steady basis. I got sucked in to the vertigo. I guess something (temporarily) like this was bound to happen since I’d been taking the stuff for so long. What are you up to? “I’m just drinking a bunch of sparkling water after a few Dr. Peppers. I guess I’m cheating the drugs by stimulating the production of dopamine.” But where did things stand . . . how is your condition? Well, I can say with almost absolute certainty that the Lexapro had been keeping me from getting or keeping an erection (on my own) and the tamulosin was keeping me from ejaculating. I wasn’t 100 percent—the risperidone and the benztropine both, I believe, were working against me, but, yeah. I had good reason to feel a little more confidence and to feel hopeful about what I might discover with my newfangled brainpower and the dopamine that goes with it.
wonderful! i could tell she was pleased. I wondered if she was getting some secret high out of this since basically she had taken a man that was completely sexually shut down and she (both her beauty and her person) were waking that man up. now i kind of wanted to see my normal doctor so I could talk to him about how i felt when I told him I read that tamulosin could make you ejaculate into your bladder. Ah, this vertigo is annoying. I was still upset, and, for things to go forward in the way that I was hoping, i wanted to see how he’d handle my frustration with him. so i just looked it up and it said that stopping tamulosin can cause a little dizziness. Since I was taking two pills for it, I probably should have dropped down to one and then dropped off after that, but I was so frustrated by the side-effects (now that I researched it) and also the fact that it wasn’t doing that much for me, that I just had to get off of it.
Somebody said “I love you, John.” Was that my daughter, Gwen, that lived in the future? In my last book I got the idea that I had a daughter that was trying to talk to me and i got the idea that her name was Gwen. But this voice belonged, a little, to the voice I associated with a radiologist and artist from Norway—older than me. Could this be my Ursula? The person behind Ocasio-Cortez? Or was this person actually a closer approximation of the Ursula I had in mind—the one that was represented by Ocasio-Cortez? I don’t know—given the vertigo, I had to be careful about making too many assumptions. Also—I had to use Ursula’s code name sparingly because my Dad didn’t want me to use it, and because, although I am from the future, hateful people (and there are lot of them out there) may not react that well when confronted with someone that has many ideas that could be considered strange or unhealthy if you didn’t know anything about me (and most people don’t).
So i tuned to Ocasio-Cortez as best I could. I don’t know if Gwen was trying to reach me or not—but she might’ve been. And she might have been using Ursula’s voice to do it—she, from what I can gather, is not only clever but innocent or curious enough to pursue life in the “metronome zone.” I wondered, too, if the effect of a few back to back doses of Miralax (a laxative) had built up in my system: the past two days I’d been making several trips to the toilet to pass my stool. But I wanted to get all that stool out of me, for sure. In that way it was rewarding to have a bowel movement. It meant I was making progress—and, also, getting some water retention and or weight gain out of my system. Now that I think about it, I probably should have just gone down to one tamulosin pill for real. this is a little disorienting. But the progress i made is reassuring.
You can be what you want to be that was Gwen, i think, because i was thinking about her and I heard a different voice than Ursula’s—not exactly this quasi-Norwegian voice. I have to admit I was a little reluctant to talk to Gwen because she probably didn’t have the same abilities that Ursula had—and yet, because of the shared DNA, she might have had a lot of access power—and she might be inadvertently dumping her back on me. But I guess she could say the same about me. I’m clearly going through a transition period and, given all thee drinks, trying to manage something that is beyond my control—even if it’s simply the excitement I feel as I move forward with my math books. Strange to say it. “My math books.” I never would have imagined that I would be able to write a serious math book. Much less three of them.
Then there was a hint of nausea I was feeling—and green tea, like hot tea, makes me nauseous, and I was drinking a bottle of room temperature green tea on the side—that might have had something to do with it. The other green tea I’m used to drinking doesn’t taste so much like the hot tea kind. I was just a little off my game today. What did Gwen want, I wonder? Did she have anything meaningful (to me) to say? Or was she simply goofing around? Anyhow she was in my head right now. I tried to listen for Ursula instead. talk to Gwen Ursula said. But I didn’t want to. I didn’t feel like it. I wanted to talk to someone that I could have sex with—i wanted to move toward Gwen’s mother so that Gwen, in fact, would become a reality. Right now—minus Gwen’s mother—Gwen’s life was kind of hanging in the balance.
You make a good point, Gwen said. “thanks.” what are you and my mother talking about? And, well, all I could think about right now was about how the letters on some keys on my keyboard had started to be erased completely and i was trying my best to fix that with a little scotch tape and a little piece of paper with a letter written on it. “What are you doing.” I’m actually saying a prayer. Didn’t expect her to say that. But I didn’t want to talk about religion or life’s greater questions—I didn’t think Gwen knew anything that I hadn’t thought about already, and, even if she did, I had this vertigo right now—and this frustration with the keys on my keyboard, and the feeling that it was simply more important to make sure that Gwen’s mother had sex with me so that Gwen could be born. But, anyhow, this probably wasn’t the heartfelt welcome that Gwen might have been expecting from her father. Never meet your heroes. but of course I care about Gwen. She was like a walking microphone—she meant access to the future; she just felt a little too good to be true—I didn’t want to be let down. Because if Gwen was real than Ursula was also real. That was bound to happen. I didn’t want to be let down, anyhow. I didn’t want to invest all this time and energy into someone that could completely disappear on me. But let me ask you this,” Gwen said. “How do you know i don’t represent Ursula in asymptotic form—I could represent my mother—I could even represent the updated address of the woman you love right where you are on your path, right now.” Maybe she was right. I knew she was. So I thought, is this Cortez talking to me—updating the address? Is that why everything is strange right now? But I have to admit—if it was Gwen, then, well, Ursula, or at least Gwen’s mother, was a given, and that thought made me so happy that, well, I realized—I have to stop this right now—it’s time to paint—using Ursula’s voice while doing that—not just my voice, or no voice.