well…

Things look and feel sort of hopeless, dammit.

This isn’t too surprising; in many ways it is the story of my life: One step forward, two back. I’ll never get ahead that way. Maybe I’m not meant to. I used to think this life was one long series of losses, but I dropped that idea after 2003, when I finally got back to work after the brain injury.

I had to relearn almost everything, even my name. I knew I wasn’t Mr. Smith, as they called me when I first woke up, nearly six weeks after the car wreck, but I wasn’t real sure WHAT my name was, it was only later, when people kept calling me Kurt that I felt like that really was my name.

I hadn’t lost all of my memories; some or most of them came back, eventually, maybe because I went back to college in 1999, giving my brain some real exercise and rebuilding it, neuron by neuron. My brain, they told me, was split into three pieces, inside my skull, and if the wreck had happened in 1988 instead of 1998, I would not be here now in any recognizable form, or at all.

That changed my face, my "default" expression. I smile a lot, even if I don’t particularly feel like smiling; it is my "normal" expression these days. While I was finishing the last year of college (and TG I had done almost all of "the hard stuff" before the wreck), I was focused on graduating, and, when I did, the economy here had slipped into recession (Oregon was hit very badly in 2000 -2002) and there were no jobs that I could do.

By 2002, I had become deeply depressed and was thinking more than half seriously, about how fate had fucked up; I thought maybe I should have died in that wreck. I got scared, of myself, and of the hundred foot jump off my balcony, seriously scared, and I reached out for any help that I could get then. Which, sigh, there wasn’t much of. The Oregon Health Plan, which hadn’t yet kicked me off of it, only supplied me with mental health through one of the outfits that does Diversion for drunk driving. I had already completed that – I was drunk when I crashed the car, and lost my license for three years – but Diversion wasn’t what I needed, I needed some therapy and some perspective, and a lot of Zoloft, which I did find there, after I told a few exaggerated stories so that they would let me in the program.

Those lies came back to haunt me; Social Security took one look at those records, THOSE records, not the brain injury stuff, and said "fuck you" to any kind of Disability. I didn’t have much before the wreck; I was poor then too, but I lost pretty much everything after that, and have spent the last 15 years trying to restart from below zero. I maybe haven’t done a good job at it, but I think it is nearly impossible anyway, and the only reason I’m still here – I lost my last job in 2011, working six months after two years of unemployment, and my former wife has been helping me. It is, I feel, no exaggeration for me to say that without her help, I would not be here, and might not be alive. She can’t help me anymore. her teaching hours were cut 40% this year, and she’s looking at not being a teacher much longer.

I bought the Dodge Caliber I have now – the second, really, because I traded the first, simple car on the one I have now, loaded with nearly every option and the car I want, really WANT, in 2009, when I had what I thought was a secure job, driving a school bus. I lost that job, like I have 5 out of the 6 I’ve had since the wreck, and that house of cards fell down. Or would have, if it hadn’t been for my former wife.

(Why, I said, one summer when she came to visit, do you still help me? We’ve been divorced for ten years now – why are you helping me? She said, no lie, that she had promised my mother, when I took her to mom’s grave in 1985, before we went to Japan the first time. What? I said, but remembering distinctly, at that moment, her standing at the foot of mom’s grave and telling her -it – that she would take care of me. She said, "a promise is a promise is a promise. That didn’t end when we got divorced". I tell you, I found it hard to believe that anyone would help me. I have felt abandoned ever since my parents died in 1977. Why was this woman, this Japanese woman, helping me more and caring about me more than my own "family"? It still amazes me, because I feel unworthy. My birth mother didn’t want me and put me up for adoption. I have never wondered what my adoptive parents thought of me; they both told me on the last days of their lives, that I was "a good son". No question at all how they felt – they told me before they died how they felt. But that Japanese woman, whom I was married to for nearly 12 years? What did she feel she owed me? Why did she keep helping me, me, who was feeling like such a loser? A promise, she says. A promise to a grave. I still feel unworthy, a user, a pitiful straggled cat who had no real home, who had no real loved ones, who wasn’t probably worth anyone’s time. I certainly wasn’t worth any of the family’s time; I was an outsider, adopted. Shit to scrape off their shoes)

I’m taking Zoloft again, and have been since January. I quit drinking then, and wish I had bought some more bourbon tonight, before the liquor store closed. I was right across the street from it, getting cigarettes, and I did think about it, and decided not to get any, to keep up with my Not Drinking, but now, at nearly 1 am, I wish I had bought at least one or two airline bottles of bourbon, luscious bourbon.

I probably wouldn’t be writing this right now, if I had, or it would have been more of a sob-fest. I should feel hopeless and abandoned again, a lost cat with no one to love him and care for him, straggled and scarred and not pretty. it’s really only because of the Zoloft that I’m not "down there". in the dark, depressed, hopeless, uncared for.

I’ll make some calls tomorrow and… well, this cat does not beg, but I’ll tell them the truth, my truth, which is that I have a new job and am just experiencing a cash-flow problem. They don’t need to know about the Unemployment running out two weeks before this job started, about how I have used up all of my scant saving, about how, for a couple of years I have lived off Unemployment and my ex-wife’s help. How fucking pathetic. I don’t want to be pathetic.

I guess I am, though, too pathetic to make my own way through this life without help.

I thought my life experiences gave me a unique look, and understanding of the things my Developmentally Disabled clients felt and had experienced. Since June 16, my official hire date, I’ve had three days of work and three of training. Shit all for "work"

The winds are blowing and my house of cards is, again, falling down around me. This life does look like a long series of losses, after all.

***

I am sort

of surprised to have any readers at all.  9 years – over nine years, writing here, and some of my Favs have been along for the ride nearly all that time.  Either I have something to say, write, that others can relate to, or people are reading me and saying, "There but for the grace of God go I!".  Or something.

One of the few bright spots in my life, this place is, and OMG about that too.

***

A lot of my entries have ended with "Onwards".  I can’t write that tonight.  I don’t know what’s going to happen, whether this house of cards is out for the count, or what.

Fuck it, I’m going to sleep.  I wanna say tomorrow’s another day, but I’m afraid of what kind of day it will be.

It feels windy.

 

*****