And to think of every spreadsheet I pulled and every hour of overtime I slaved for this bastard. Every marathon meeting that turned into the Spanish Inquisition. Why was this plane six minutes late? Why four no-shows on this flight? Who the hell approved this yield on the Nashville routes? And when the answers didn’t present themselves, he would just bang on the table like a child. This—POUND—is—POUND—simply—POUND—factually—POUND—wrong—POUND POUND POUND. This one time, he throws his tantrum and tires himself out, so now he’s chain-smoking and sitting there silently in his black suit, suffocating the room with his gray smoke, unable to look at us, just staring at the table in front of him, and ten fucking minutes go by this way before he snaps out of it, and out of nowhere, he starts lecturing us about how we shouldn’t offer bereavement fares. Like going into a department store and asking for a discount on a black dress because your relative died. And then like some bloodless reaper, like Nero at his most dour and fatalistic, he stabs out the cigarette. Nobody lives forever. We’re all just ants on a marble. Meeting over.

February 20

No side effects from the vitamin, but this has to be it for the booze. God help me—I’ve had enough. And what’s the point now—by the time I drink enough to feel it, I make myself sick. No more. Enough.

February 21

Escaping the dreary purview of Anne “The Scowler” Mulligan, I went back to the library today. I looked up MS in the medical encyclopedia. No new information. Not hereditary, possibly environmental. To look at the South Bronx now you’d think I grew up in Beirut, but it wasn’t that bad. We had milk and vitamin D. The sun occasionally shined on Willis Avenue.

Then I looked up dipsomania. A bad business. And I must admit, I have some of the maladies—drinking alone, drinking to forget, maintaining a level of comfort by drinking. So new plan: no alcohol except on the rarest of occasions. No drinking in bars, no stumbling around the house. If I get a new job: one celebratory Johnnie Black. If Dan gets a scholarship to Georgetown, make it a Chivas. Only drink with the good news, not the bad.

February 22