The Glamor and the Terror

The glamor of owning your own home--a broken chair and shuttered sunlight is symbolic.  There is beauty and horror in it.  Things get old.  They break.  And still, there is such beauty around you.  

Wait.  That's me, all broken beauty.  Well, not the beauty so much, maybe, but yesterday I got beautified.  I had forgotten about the appointment until the last minute.  I got there just in time.  And for the next couple hours, I sat in front of mirrors.  I had to watch myself get up out of chairs on my own broken leg.  I've f'ed up my right knee badly.  I thought I was young again, I guess, or wanted to be, and tried running on the treadmill.  It's a torn meniscus, I know, having had the other leg operated on for the same injury.  It is the same pain exactly.  After sitting, I can barely stand.  I walk with a limp as a long stride is painful.  The knee throbs during the night while I try to sleep.  Still, I am probably less bloated than I was now that I am not drinking every day.  There may still be some of that shuttered sunlight in me.  

O.K.  That was a very strained trope.  How about this one. 

A messy dinner tray in light of the fading day.  I could write another bad trope here about aging.  What is really concerning me, though, is the cost of fixing things.  I'm still trying to find an alternative to the $3,500 window.  Is it really that much, or is that the price they give in this zip code?  I always think that every job costs more if you live in it.  

"What's your zip code?  Oh, sure. . . yea, we'll have someone out right away." 

There is a real terror in owning your own home, especially when you don't work.  You watch your savings ripped away.  I'm going to need more.  My rich republican friend says to invest in the oil companies.  He says the world is going to go oil mad with the war in the Ukraine and climate change.  Alternative energy sources are decades away, he says.  Even Biden is going to allow more oil production.  

He's probably right because I think it is so wrong.  Of course, I tell him I could sink the whole industry if I put my money into it.  I could crash it in a day.  

It's turning out that I am unlucky in both love and money.  I wasn't so lucky with the Vespa, either.  

I think I'll join a commune.  One that has drum circles.  

But that may not be the life one expects, either.  Look at Burning Man.  It must have been awful.  We lost our correspondent somewhere in the disaster.  She never made contact, never sent word.  I don't actually think that these are my people, though.  There are far too many of them.  Some are attracted by a crowd.  I am not one of them.  People get rich so that they don't have to trouble themselves with crowds.  They buy ranches in Montana and New Mexico and have everything flown in.  Oh to have a personal yoga instructor and a chef.  

Or you can eat dirt in a massive sea of humanity.  

I'm going to go to the mountains and swim naked in the river with my Cali friends.  The cold glacial water will be good for my knee.  I will be washed clean.  We will laugh and dry on the rocks like seals in the warm sun.  That is what appeals to me.  

I'm a domestic man with a wild cat I can't get close to.  You can see the wildness in her yellow eyes.  But look at that mess.  My deck looks like something from the Tennessee Clampett's here.  Maybe playing with the Leica around the house will pay some benefits.  It depicts a life in disarray, a mess that is otherwise invisible to me.  

"First you shape the environment, then the environment shapes you."

Something like that.  It must be true.  I'm a broken mess right now.  I need to take care of things starting with that window.  There is both glamor and the terror of owning your own home.  

That ends my extended trope.