Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Taking Inventory: February '14

So, I haven't been active blogging for the past few weeks because work, and the possibility of not having work in the near future, have been occupying my time and head-space. My head-space, I realize is not a big room. Or perhaps it's stuffed with a lot of bullshit that I've hoarded over the years. This is what it's all about I guess. Maybe when I shovel all the garbage out I'll find out how big of a room it is. That worries me. If my head-space is a small room I'll be disappointed. If it's too big, then I'll wonder why I shoveled out all the shit. Maybe it was perfectly fine where it was.

That said, following the criteria of good days and great days ("good"being where I spend my workday not wanting to be compulsively drinking, eating, smoking, sleeping, or suicidal ideating, ideationalizing or whatever the verb is. "great" being I'm excited with the day enough to not want to pass out in bed), I would rate one day as being good and no days being great. The good day was my birthday--I had a very pleasant day getting drunk with my parents and eating a fancy burger.

However, there was one day that was absolutely horrendous. On the 12th, we got a winter advisory warning so I moved my counselor appointment to an earlier time and left work early. After talking with my counselor, she tells me that I really need to consider a psych evaluation because the Celexa I'm taking isn't working enough. To this, I disagreed since I felt much better than I did before I started taking the drug. However, apparently, three months into the medication, I should be happy or whatever-the-fuck. So I leave the place in about two inches of snow and in what should be a fifteen-minute drive from the shrink's office to the highway was a two-hour long ordeal. At the end of these two hours, I saw a three-car spin-out that looked pretty bad, but not bad enough to justify the wait. Two inches of snow. This shit wouldn't fly anywhere north of Richmond, VA. Then when I hit the bottleneck from the highway to the road leading up to my parent's neighborhood, with no exits and flashing police lights up ahead the traffic was at a halt. For four more hours. I was standing outside my car, chain-smoking, looking at the woods, saying to myself "I can walk through these woods and be home in thirty minutes." At the end of this horror, I learned that the reason for it was a semi-truck jack-knifed in the intersection. Nobody was dead. Nobody was hurt. And I was furious.

What I learned that being stuck in traffic because the cops and firemen couldn't deal with a semi-truck jack-knifed in an intersection is that there's nothing to learn. Being stuck in traffic is a purely nihilistic experience. When you are alone in your car for four hours without moving, you go through all the stages of grief except for acceptance. You might bargain, but that's usually ruined when you see the cops allow the opposite lane to proceed every thirty minutes and you end up yelling "Fuck you, you hillbilly cunts" and flicking off each one as they drive by. Then you see their faces, like they wonder why they were the ones chosen to go home, like a low-stakes version of survival guilt and you feel bad for telling them to fuck off. But what are you gonna do? You can't leave and you can't abandon your car, because you're forced into this system. You have to trust the person ahead of you and the person behind you has to trust you, but for what end? So you can all go home to your miserable lives? What are you gonna do when you get home anyway? Watch TV? Play video games? Go to bed angry?

So that day basically undid whatever good days I might have in the coming month. It was a day that could be valued as negative good days. I don't know how much damage was actually done but I guess we'll see...

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