Originally Posted Tuesday, October 28, 2014

I have the terror.  I'll admit it.  It creeps in daily.  Nightly, I should say.  Last night, I fell asleep on the couch just after eating.  It could not have been later than eight-thirty.  I don't remember what time it was when I got up and went to bed.  I do know it was midnight when I woke up again.  I went to the bathroom and drank some water and decided to use one of the sleeping pills I had been given by a friend.  I had taken one before and it had done no good. She told me that I needed to take two, but being prudent and because it was the middle of the night, I once again took one.  More water and bed. 

I lay there tossing in the dark.  I had music on softly playing in the background, but even that couldn't distract me from the horror show inside my head.  An hour later, though, the pill must have had some effect.  I was not as anxious as I had been, my head un-busying itself, and finally, I went back to sleep. 

When I have the horrors, it is always about the things I am powerless against, the march of time, illness and disease and death, the loss of loved ones in some slow and hideous way, the corruption of governments big and small that impact the manner in which I live, the aloneness I have prided myself on living with so marvelously, the impossibility of "forever."  I lie in the bed feeling as tiny and vulnerable and naked as anyone can feel understanding that I am known for my cold bravado, knowing that I will have to stand up to all of this with the expected stoicism, unable to show weakness to anyone for nobody--nobody--wants to take care of you when you get pitiful.  There are people who must, and I have none of those, and there are people who will who mostly will cost you money, but nobody wants to do it.  There is no arguing here.  N-O-B-O-D-Y. 

I woke and looked at the clock and it was six o'clock, a perfectly good time to get up and experience the pain in my back and hips and knees, to shuffle across the floor in a way I never expected to move having aped it in middle age without knowing what it would truly be like, and I turned on the light in the bathroom and avoided looking at myself in the mirror.  Vitamins and herbs and elixirs, then coffee and the computer, the cat complaining that I don't love her enough which I am sure is both true and not true as I am a guilty sort who has a never-ending belief in his own flaws and imperfections, and the eventual coming to believe that I will be O.K. and make it through another day in some lesser way than I did the day or week or month or year before. 

Perhaps all of this was spurred on by running across some old photographs on my computer that I hadn't seen in a long, long time, mirror self-portraits which I have been making for a lot of years, these in particular made some ten or twelve years ago, me looking much younger than I do now, securing within me the fact that I am on the sharp end of the stick now. . . etc.  I even made the mistake of sending the pictures off to someone who inevitably commented on them. 

It is a fear of helplessness, I think now, and nothing more than that, a fear of being unable to deal with life through a force of will and a certainty that you will do something--something--that will turn the odds in your favor, that you might, in Hemingway's words, be beaten but remain undefeated.  If that makes no sense to you, read it again and again until it does.  Or don't.  There is, I promise you, really no advantage in it. 

O.K.  The day is beginning, the emails and texts are coming in.  There is the pull back into the world of light and things that must be done. 

But it is like this.  You are in a small house, unarmed, and there are rebel/terrorists, big, young and mean, outside.  There is no escape but still you wish to fight and win though you know there isn't a chance in the cosmos you will.  You are pissed off that it is this way, that you are not given a fair chance at an equal fight, that these cocksuckers are loving the advantage that makes you nothing.  The best victory you can hope for is that you do not shit your pants, but the odds on that are not worth betting, and you try to remember the Myth of Sisyphus and the moral that even enslaved you have free will and can choose to love or hate your captors, but it seems a silly kind of freedom in the end, and you think that the only real victory is victory.