Spinning

I’m writing this from the backseat of a cab, heading back home. I’ll probably get motion sick before I finish. I can’t read in car. I can barely tolerate looking at my phone, not even to send a text or scroll through Instagram or get directions. I feel like I’m going to puke in under a minute. It’s remarkable, if I think about it, how much my life has been shaped by this predisposition toward motion sickness. That’s what it is, I found out: a genetic predisposition. I found out from one of those 23andMe DNA tests. Anyway, some my most unpleasant, most humiliating, most unpleasant experiences have involved motion sickness. There was the time I broke my toe in college and couldn’t walk across campus so I tried to take the school shuttle from campus health to my dorm and it should have taken ten minutes max but I didn’t know the route and it was over 100 degrees outside (I went to college in the desert) and I’d been up all night high on opiates and finishing an essay and now I was in excruciating pain and lost and dehydrated and the bus was just making me ill. Another rider took pity on me and offered me water. He must have seen how sick I was. Or maybe I begged him for a drink. The plastic bottle he handed me was clearly used, refilled, with warm water that was tinged with brown, like maybe it had been used for coffee or tea before. I drank it down. I was so grateful. Another time I got so overheated and sick on the CTA I had to get off like six stops early and strip off my winter layers and just stand there underdressed on the platform in the cold until I’d recovered enough to reboard. That’s actually happened a bunch of times. Now when I take a slow train line, I try to remember to bring ginger chews or some hard candy to suck on. Snacks and water. I am like a baby. It’s sort of pathetic. And then there were all the times I drank too much. Puking in other people’s houses, cars. Puking in my own house, my own car. Puking in the gutter. In the end, it was the hangovers that took me out of the game. They were just so epically bad. Spinning on bed. Head in the toilet. Weak stomach for days. I wonder if I even would have ended up in AA if I could hold my booze better, physically, I mean. If I wasn’t such a lightweight. I guess we’ll never know.

Well, I made it home. I feel okay. I’m feeling like a dummy for ordering oysters at the airport for dinner, but I guess I never learn.