What's Happening

At 7:30, something in the morning shifts, the pleasantness of Monday and unemployment curdling into a sort of personnel meeting with Robespierre in the Revolution's conference room.  Guillotine?  It's in the next apartment.  The simplest morning tasks have, for the second day in a row, spun out of control and grown monstrously.  I am chained to the toilet.  I cannot leave.  Nothing is wrong, no gastrointestinal problem, just alimentary business as usual for the quadriplegic.  Abdominal muscles are handy for all sorts of things, and in their absence one has to just, well, wait.  Yes, things are on the move, but they are moving slowly, like the German army at the outskirts of Moscow.  Things will advance, but in a good time.  And there is no good time, only bad time, for I have to be on the 8:39 train to San Francisco...and for the second incredible day...I am fucked.  Incompetent.  Cursed.  Although there was plenty of time...but now and then even plenty is not enough.  I'm cursing myself, and the more I curse, the more objects spring from their resting places.  I drop washcloths.  Bath brushes.  Towels.  Mouthwash bottles.  Razor cords.  And this is my life.  It is an accursed life, and it is getting worse, and 8:00 is approaching.  And Caltrain waits for no man.

And by the time I get to the station, in plenty of time I must add, my life is no better.  If anyone asked me what would make it better, I would have no answers.  I am in a state, in a mood, and this condition seems to feed on itself.

Which is precisely what a San Francisco friend explains to me.  These self-defeating rages are not just patterns, but chemical events, neuropeptide festivals.  And when you've got a bad act on stage, do what you can to pull the amplifier plug.  Which is obvious advice to many, but not to me.  Doubtless there are reasons, but for the moment they don't matter.  This is a time to listen to the friend, open up and go home to the suburbs sadder but wiser.  

There are things to do, of course.  My fingernails.  Back in Menlo Park, I roll into Sky Nails, present my ragged fingers for inspection, and Mai plops them into the bowl with the mystery fluid.  She chatters in Vietnamese to her colleagues.  I wonder what she is saying.  Once, apropos of nothing, she looks up and tells me I am looking thin...maybe I am not eating since Marlou died.  For this alone, I decide she deserves an enormous tip.  I let her do the forearm lotion massage thing.  No, she does not need to wipe the stuff off.  You never know when you might need a little forearm lotion.

What is going on?  In my few sane moments, I ask this question.  What is happening?  My mood swings wildly, hourly.  At the heart of it is some working out of the mortal condition.  How we are here making the husband's coffee latte, foam hissing in the kitchen, and the next moment we are reduced to a small cold box on a shelf in the pantry.  How someone can be opening their heart and yours, then vanish.  I know all this, or my mind does, but everything else rejects the facts.  All these strange unsupportable thoughts...that I might have done something to keep Marlou alive...that I don't deserve a life...and did I deserve a wife?

It keeps coming at me, particularly in sidewalk-bouncing trips, especially the ones headed home.  We are mortal.  Love and security can slip out the door.  I am moving along the south side of Roble Ave., steering clear of familiar sidewalk cracks and tilted sections of concrete.  Getting used to dying.  Getting used to love going.  And somewhere in the distant future there may be the other thing.  Getting used to living...however long.  And love arriving.