I wasn’t really that good at it. Who wouldn’t turn to potions? Though I tried other solutions in tandem; built Feng Shui bagua maps, star charts, makeshift orreries, complicated Math sums about my circadian rhythms.  

I would reverse engineer with fantastic pseudo-scientific hypotheses, declared by an “if/then” construction:  

“If I want to maximize my lecturing power, then I need to start drinking by X, so I will assuredly be down for the count by Y and therefore up by Z because, you know it takes me a while to get going in the morning, and I need to balance my nicotine intake and my caffeine…”   

Told the red wine had not only melatonin, but also this magical property for helping in the construction and maintenance of the telomeres. Believed that my mixed-tape-from-a-mixed-tape aging process was being circumvented by my pickling process at the end of my chromatids; those wiggly-worm-helices at the very tip were not breaking off, or dying, or whatever happened (in those with less precisely engineered bodies) because I was strengthening them, revitalizing them with a red-wine-muscle car-vehicle melatonin.  

They teach you this stuff in school after all: the Shangri La monks in Lost Horizon I read in seventh grade and subsequently made every seventh-grade class read, the William S[eward] Burroughs live-forever recipe opium bowls. Drugs and alcohol were vitamins in many primers. 

The clockwork broke down. The times went out of sync. The wasband would find me nodding off by the fire, or actually step over me on the way to the kitchen, where I had, on a school night, opened two to three bottles speaking in drunk German to screenwriter in LA goading me, encouraging me, and calling me, “Intelektuelerin” .”  

I couldn’t sleep and had a plan to race to the end of the day daily. Tunneling to the black out. 

You cannot give me this bottle, I pleaded, “I am going to use it, I am not sober enough to take melatonin.”   

“Go ahead and try to use it,” said the sober blonde woman, ten years my junior. She’d just popped into the coop to get me the gift.  “I dare you.”