Introduction &

 Years spent without writing on here. Not sure what it was… not wanting to give energy to anything big enough to displace my addiction, distract me from my false goals? A damn shame, whenever I've been in the zone of writing a Joe story, no matter how cringeworthy, it's felt good.

I spent years with no tomorrows, or at best tomorrow as Lou Reed's "just another day." Never brushing my teeth, never stopping smoking until it happily did become just too much, never learning any new skills. All had to be sacrificed before the fire. And the fire had to burn because there was no tomorrow. Round and round it goes.

But there is another side. ADHD sucks, both acutely and chronically. So does depression. Helping with the acute helps with the chronic. Therapy helps. Good therapy is fucking expensive even in quote Eastern Europe unquote, but it helps. For years I couldn't get over the hump of contacting a neurologist to set up meds. Fear. Anxiety. Lack of faith. Amazingly she got me fired up and past that. Atomoxetine, slowly ramped up to 100mg. (Fuck amphetamines; coffee, sugar, booze, nicotine, games, masturbation, and dope and whatever else I'm forgetting have been quite enough addictions of various forms and degrees over the years for me.) It slows down the whirlwind. I'm not magically cured of it all but that's not the point.

Poverty helps. Having no choice helps. I mean, there's always a choice. You can fall out onto the street and die. Then I guess there's no choice. But while you're alive there's a choice. One marriage counselor we had liked to say, "The only thing you HAVE to do is die." (It sounds milder in Czech.) But realistically and with the assumed condition of "in order to not suffer the unbearable," yeah no, sometimes you have no choice.

Stumbling along all these decades I never really trained any skills except customer service, which nobody values, and translation, of which suddenly nobody now accepts the value. Sucks to be me. Editing is still valued, ish. Nothing is really valued in the freelance world unless you know how to sell yourself. Har dee har, yeah, no, fuck you. Anyway, I don't. Also I feel like I'm too old to pick up new salable skills in time. I'm scared. But it's not like not doing Joe is gonna help.

Three years without any Joe is pretty sad. Yeah, let's get back to it.