My Life. . . In Ruins

It's seems so long since I left my life and home.  Oh, I go to my house every day, but only for a minute.  After my mother's cast came off, I felt I could leave her for a bit longer, so I tore my living room apart to make a "studio."  Yesterday, I spent the day tearing down the studio and making back the house. I had to.  The cleaning crew comes today.  I was a week off on my calendar.  It took hours to put things right.  Many trips back and forth from the house to the garage

I miss my life and home.  

My drinking life began again with a happy hour trip with the boys.  I drank lightly.  It accelerated on my birthday, or probably the day before.  By Valentine's Day, I was back at it.  

I am either depressed or have gone insane.  O.K.  I understand that they are not mutually exclusive.  

"I would have thought you already knew about crazy," one witty interlocutor said yesterday.

"Sure.  Now I know the difference between crazy and insane."  

My head is a bucket of writhing snakes that, once started, can't be stopped.  They will settle down on their own from time to time, but I can't control when they become active again.  

"Coffee is the most important meal of the day," I say.  It is true.  It is when the horror of the night before settles down and I regain a smidge of control.  That doesn't mean I'm happy.  Not by a long shot.  But for the moment, I am released from the python's grip.

Later, when I see people I know, I don't want to speak.  Conversation is just too difficult.  As the old poem goes, I cannot unfrown myself.  

And then there was the disastrous weekend.  I enjoyed the attention of a young woman, but eventually you run into the wall.  

Yesterday, I was able to get into the dentist in the afternoon.  I just wanted him to reattach my crown.  

Nope.  

"I don't think the ceramic will hold.  I'd rather put a gold crown on it." 

This came as a shock since once he replaced a gold crown with a ceramic one.  The fucker hates me, I know.  

I made an appointment at the reception desk.  That little bit of news cost me $100.  The gold crown trip will be $2,000.  I think I need to get out of the expensive part of town, drive to the southern regions of the county in Area 13, and find a dentist who will just put the old crown back on.  

I'll be broke before Trump leaves office.  If I even make it that far.  

Last night, I'd had it with "The Rifleman" and "Gunsmoke."  I was sure I was going to do something regretful.  My mother said she wasn't hungry, that shed eaten a bunch of cottage cheese and fruit before I got back, so I made myself the same meal I'd had the night before, scrambled eggs, chicken soup, and sliced tomatoes.  I threw in some potato chips for fun.  And wine.  I liked the wine.  A lot.  I liked a lot of wine.  

And when dinner was done, I poured a big scotch and sat with my mother to watch the news.  Another accident with an airplane.  For half an hour, CNN kept showing the same video footage and having different commentators say the same thing over and over and over with the promise of an upcoming update.  

"We need to know the condition of the infant," one expert opined.  

"Why?" I yelled.  "Why do we need to know?  I don't need to know.  You may want to know, but you have no need you fat fucking. . . . "

Where did that come from?  Fortunately, my mother can't hear me most of the time.  I got up to clean the kitchen of my dinner mess and the rest of the plates and pots and dishes my mother had left for me to clean from her day at home alone.  That is when the t.v. channel changed to cowboys.  So, after the dishes were done and the counters and table wiped clean and after I'd taken out the garbage and closed up the garage for the night. . . I poured another drink.  

I sat in the living room and checked my email.  I checked my texts.  I needn't have.  I sat alone in my mother's living room and looked at the framed pictures on various coffee tables. . . the lamps, the carpet, a million degrees different from the mood of my own home.  No bookshelves.  No artifacts.  No frangipani burning in stone oil lamps.  

I picked up Cormac McCarthy's "The Passenger," and began.  In a little while my mother came shuffling through the room.  

"I'm going to bed.  You can have the t.v. if you want." 

"Thanks.  Goodnight."

I read a little more.  I woke up at 11:30.  I'd fallen asleep in the recliner.  Did I?  Or had I just passed out?  

"I need a mind eraser before I sleep," I thought.  "What do I have that would work?"

I woke at five.  I got up, went to the restroom, and went back to bed.  I lay there, but I only thought things I couldn't control, despairing things.  How do people do it, I wondered?  How does my mother?  I look at people and can't believe they go on.  They exist, and that seems to be enough.  I've never wanted to merely exist.  

I don't feel I'm truly living at the moment, and I'm failing when I try to.  

I think my life has just been too fucking good.  I've had too much fortune, too much excitement, too many rich experiences, too great a journey.  I was born in a shack without an indoor bathroom on the banks of a river in Southern Ohio .  If it had not been for river overflowing the banks and flooding our house, I would have lived with the hillbillies and overdosed on heroin like the rest of them.  Rather, my life has been a bildungsroman.  

People tell me that this is life, that I'm a good son.  I'm not.  I'm an asshole.  

"Forgive me father, for I have sinned."  

I cry into the night's sky and ask what this means.  And all I get back in answer is, "the cold twinkling of a distant star."

Yesterday, after the dentist, I took a little time to myself to work up some of the pictures I've taken.  Oh, fuck. . . it was fun.  And there was the music.  A song that I love came on, a version I had never heard before.  I sent it to my new friend who says she likes jazz.  

I'm foolish that way.  And you know what they say.