A Way to Survive

Originally Posted Wednesday, August 7, 2013

It has happened again.  My gas has been turned off.  When I got up this morning to make coffee, the water from the tap was lukewarm.  Uh-oh.  I tried to light the stove, but it wouldn't.  Son of a bitch!  I will have to pay a big reconnection fee and spend half a day waiting for a "technician." 

I am alternately pissed off and defeated.  I hate the gas company.  They are the worst for shutting off service.  But why-oh-why can't I keep up with my bills?  I don't get it at all.  I just let them pile up on the floor under the mail slot where they fall day after day without looking at them.  Week after week, apparently.  Month after month.  It is a psychological flaw that I don't understand. That pile of envelopes makes me anxious.  I avoid even glancing that way unless I am waiting for something to be shipped to me.  Truly. . . I need fixin'. 

I woke this morning not feeling right otherwise, too.  I don't know what it is, really, just a general dead anxiety.  Much is weighing on me, I guess.  But I can't put my finger on it.  My unconscious knows, however, that something is amiss.  There is something in the works.  I am afflicted with low-grade dread. 

But I read about the terror gripping the people of the Central African Republic where rebels have taken over the country, and I think of what real dread and real horror are.  Imagine, rather.  I can only try to imagine it. 

After that, I imagine trading places with one of them.  I think about that and feel better.  You wonder at that, I am sure, but I think of them in my house in my neighborhood and I can imagine that they would be bigger assholes than I am.  We are infinitely weird, we people.  Our psyches are not steady or stable.  They are adaptive.  Trouble is always trouble.  And it doesn't make us better.  Only weirder. 

I don't understand the word "rebel" any longer, either.  These terrorists are not "rebels" in the sense that I know the word.  They are brutal thugs, savage miscreants.  I grew up with their cousins.  They are psychopaths, not rebels. 

By now the gas company is surely open.  I will make my call and arrange for things to be turned back on.  I will suppress whatever I am feeling--anger. . . self-loathing--and take an existential stance.  It is placing value on this occurrence that makes it difficult.  I must strip the entire thing of meaning. 

Except for. . . you guessed it. . . the comedy of the thing.