Therapeutic late night ramblings 12/20-21 Please ignor

Therapeutic late night ramblings.....

Dreams lay strewn about my life
like the wreckage of a vandalized home.
I live like the dispirited tenant,
heartbroken and violated,
sad and shattered.
More than a bit confused,
overwhelmed by the task
of putting his home back together again.

“Nobody understands that some people expend a tremendous amount of energy just to be normal.”
--Camus

The necessities he borrowed or bought at the now familiar pawnshop and placed in a small, windowless, colorless room, previously unused, thus left undamaged by the vandal. The bed, the birthplace of dreams, is not his own. His was totally devastated by the interloper, savagely slashed, shredded, its stuffing bled randomly about the entire house, had to be swept up hauled away. Remnants he found in odd places long after the disaster. This one, a loaner, is pressed into a corner, unlike the former, which had stood in the middle of the large bedroom downstairs where it had been always just the right temperature, cool in the summer, warm in the winter, the walls a beautiful, pale blue. Savage, vulgar graffiti now desecrates the sky blue walls, the golden carpet that always felt so good on his feet, now slashed as well and urinated upon. It is much smaller, emptier, than the bed he once had, ill fitted by the much too large, once carefully chosen, now stained, bedclothes of the other.
The small night table had been in his art studio/gallery downtown he had run during his off hours, acting as the only once used cash drawer (a friend had bought his best abstract). Soon after he opened it he had gotten sick, a bad reaction to a new anti-psychotic, so the free advertising he got from the nice little article in the paper had went to waste as the shop was not open for the two weeks following the soon forgotten press. Not being one to collect fond memories, he had no copy of the paper, a teaser picture in the upper left corner of the front page and a half page article in the business section. He closed up shop after the disaster, calling his seven artists to pick up their freely hung work. His were stored but then auctioned off by the storage place when he couldn’t pay his rent.
On it sits an $8.99 clock radio, single alarm, randomly set, the radio never used, it might be too comforting to go to sleep with an old song in his ear, to wake to something less jarring than the staccato beep beep of the buzzer. Next to it sits a $34.99 “home stereo system.” A little green light always on, it collects dust while his collection of vintage rock and pop sits in a black binder somewhere amid the clutter as it had been in his car (which had been in the shop, the bill for which he had to make payments on to get back, which promptly broke down to an unrepairable status, soon after his truck was stolen, leaving him on foot until his church gave him a wrecked but drivable, donated car four months later) that fateful day. He had learned the lyrics of many of those classic tunes and bought a guitar he fancied he could play without lessons, but that dirty look from a coffee house patron, and the uncomfortable silence the night he played and sang sent the guitar to the pawn shop and the tunes from his memory. The vandal had found the empty jewel cases and seemed to delight in smashing them one by one in the middle of the living room, leaving the jackets still readable, in order: James Taylor, Van Morrison, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Neil Young, (a very ironic vandal), Carol King, Bob Dillon, Bad Finger (yes, Straight Up), Simon and Garfunkle, CCR…
Across the room is a old wood file cabinet, donated by a friend, it is largely empty, the delinquent bills sent to an as yet unpaid lawyer for the as yet unfiled bankruptcy, while new bills pile up on the desk on the other wall. He hopes the soon to be filed for income tax return will be enough to pay the lawyer and the credit counseling service who had told him the best thing to do until the bankruptcy was to not make enough money to have his wages garnished. The bankruptcy should improve his credit.
The vandal had stolen his pick up and all his brand new tools, which were in the custom-made (by him) truck bed tool box (Insurance? Self employed carpenters don’t have insurance!). He lost $5000 dollars on the job he had to pay someone else to finish. Gone was the collection of classic country, given him by his mistress, he had in the cab of his truck, along with the thousand dollar stereo system. The vandal had left the little satellite radio receiver unit, with six more months subscription already paid, sitting in the driveway. His livelihood stolen, he went into winter with only his disability income.
In the file cabinet are his two college diplomas, BS Psychology, BS Philosophy. He had made the mistake of graduating after being turned down for the Masters Counseling program (He had made no secret of his madness, thought it an advantage. He had, after all, completed a tough double major. They claimed he needed to improve his communication skills), but the university had kept the diplomas for unpaid pharmacy bills, hence they were not in the house to be trashed. They kept them for three years while he struggled along, too honest in his resume to get a psychology job with just a BS and no experience. He received them only because he had gotten a job as a carpenter with his former university, not long after the disaster, and they had taken the unpaid bills out of his wages. Not one to bolster his self esteem, reward himself or show any semblance of self-love or pride, the diplomas lay stashed away.
The job had been full time but after six months of being terrified to go to work, anxiety ridden all day, depressed all night, under medicated by his reactionary nurse practitioner (She had decided, after being treated for seventeen years for schizoaffective disorder and half a dozen psychotic or manic episodes, he merely had a personality disorder and did not need medication.) yet producing volumes of exemplary work, he took a part time position before he lost his disability permanently and his mind, again, or his wages got garnished, or he lost his disability deferment on his $48,000 worth of student loans. Yes, it appears he could have been gold bricking, if it weren’t for the fact that he was truly about to lose it, again, that he truly was suffering terribly and that he has had a voice in his head telling him to do all sorts of odd, irresponsible things as well as feeding him a near constant stream of surrealistic stories about himself for the past twenty years.

Well, time to go to bed, its 12:01, I’ve got the day off tomorrow, but have plans to get up rather early, read the daily scriptures, pray for protection from evil spirits (that’s another story), visit a friend, entertain my (former, step) grandkids and clean up the mess of broken dreams around this place (there are lots more I haven’t mentioned yet). If you haven’t guessed, the vandal is poetic license, a metaphor for the illness, a device to move things along a little smoother, without the complex, rather surreal, real details.