Did you know? There is a rate at which horror levels up, like the ticking of a Geiger-counter wherein at random times I run across something that just takes my breath away (tick) and I think "This is it, I've been to the worst thing there is. I've bottomed out." Then at some time later there's another (tick), then another (tick), and you realize eventually that the random ticks of escalation, of ramping up, follow no real pattern, can't be predicted. But when viewed overall they have a consistency even in the randomness, a general increasing density in the chaos, if you see what I mean.
I started the week with the usual frog boil (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog), but the Geiger-counter ticks spiked, climbed, and merged into a hiss, the dial pegged out into the red. Can't tell yet if it's just a statistical fluke or if we've entered new territory. We'll see. But after several days of it I just kind of….
….during World War II, the Japanese would occasionally take some random prisoner and with a funnel force him to drink gallons of water, or at least as much water as he could literally hold, enough so he was distended and stretched and screaming in agony for them to stop. Then they took turns jumping on him. None of these human water balloons survived long term, of course, but long enough to provide diversion for the bored troops.
For the first time in years I hit that limit — my brain was full, to quote some humorous TV goofball, and I knew that one single swallow more and I would fall apart and there would be no fixing me. On the upside, I'd be entertaining for awhile. The difference between me and a prisoner of the Japanese was, of course, that I didn't have to swallow that next nasty little bit. I was the one holding the funnel. I stood there for a few minutes with my eyes closed, breathing, trying to center.
I heard one of my crew laughing. He was showing something to the rest, so I went over to see what he had. He'd found a YouTube video of some Russian dude, a weapons freak and who makes videos of various weapons tryouts. On this particular video he was rambling along (he's a funny guy) while he explained the short-barrel 10-gauge semi-auto he'd rounded up somewhere. He finally slung the weapon up to his shoulder, and you could see the hesitation. Finally, he spoke to himself in that thick Russian accent: "Is only gun. Just squeeze trigger. Don' be beech," and squeezed off a quick three rounds which knocked him to the ground and gave him a bloody nose. "Thees gun keecks a lot," he announced as he collected himself.
Funniest friggin' thing I've seen in a long time. From that moment any time someone in my outfit starts whining about something or tries wussing out of some challenge, someone will say "Hey, don' be beech" in thick Russian, which cracks everyone up and ends the impasse. Anyhow, after the video, some random BS and jokes with the troops, a short walk and some diet coke, I was ready to get back to it. Or normally I would be.
That particular day I said "Fuck it, I can't do this anymore," and walked out, got in my car and drove home.
(shrug) It happens. The life I lead is my choice. That means I can stop anytime I want and no one can do anything about it, and more than once I've had to step out for a day or a week or a month and decide whether it's going to happen now. The answer is always, "No, not today. But soon."
I've been to visit shrinks on average every 2 years since the 80s, and occasionally as often as every 6 months. Not my choice — prophylaxis, job requirement, policy, regulation, rule. Stability and longevity in my line is pretty rare, and those of us who stay with it are usually examined now and again to make sure we haven't broken anything too severely. There's never a question as to whether SOMETHING is broken. Spoiler alert: Yes. Frankly, I doubt it can be avoided.
Anyhow, they ask the same pat questions: "How are you sleeping? How's sex? How's your attention span? Any suicidal thoughts? Tell me what you think about your job" and I give the same pat answers: "Good. 6-8 hours a night, like a baby. Terrific. Sex is a great little stress reliever. Can focus as needed for hours at a time. Never. I have never, ever, not for a single time or single second had the barrel of that pistol, that pistol tasting of oil and solvent and cold metal, in my mouth with that gritty crenelated front sight scraping the back of my front teeth. Really. It's just a job. I go to work. I go home or the hotel or the barracks or the — wherever I am that day. The job stays on the job."
Summary: "It's hard work, but everything is just peaches, really."
One year the shrink, a seemingly really young guy who I hadn't met before, wasn't happy with this scripted response and stepped outside the routine. He stared at me for some time, and I could feel him probing for whatever had set off his spidey sense.
"Tell me," he said, "tell me the worst thing you've ever seen or done."
So I did. Only took three or four minutes, which is a lot longer than it sounds when you're in them, for all that they're only a minuscule part of a day. When I was done, he leaned back so hard his chair rolled back from the desk a few inches. He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger as his eyes squeezed shut for a few moments.
"Holy Jesus," he said. Then he put his glasses on and laid his hands flat on his desk and leaned toward me. "And you're OK with that?" he asked.
"No, I'm not. That's the whole point. But I can deal with it."
"Jesus," he said again. "You know all this shit you're packing into your head is coming back out someday, right?"
"Sounds like a bad time," I answered somewhat impatiently, "but right now I'm fine. Right?" Must have been. He signed off on the paperwork. Fucking shrinks just wear me out.
After the 1- or occasionally 2-hour with the shrink, it's usually time for whiskey and a dark room and "Requiem". See https://asbestosdust.blogspot.com/2017/10/maledictus.html for a version of that process.
But after this week, I'm again back in that place, no shrink needed. With perfect timing, I got into an argument with someone I respect who, it turns out, has no respect for me or what I do, and who has me questioning whether have I wasted 40 years of my life. To quote myself,
"I find myself swirling around the irrational black hole of the single question: Am I at least a good man?Of COURSE I got into a fight with the Beneficiary over some minor-league annoyance or another. A mood like that never leads anywhere else. I apologized within moments, tried to explain. Botched it. Of course.
And I wonder what that means.
Or if it matters.
All I know is that here, under the weight of this version of The Dark, it matters; it fucking well DOES matter. And after all these years, all the hard choices, all the horrific things, the slippery, bloody morality of deciding between bad options — I don't know. I don't even really know how to define the terms."
But she knows me — we've done this dance before, probably more than either would be comfortable admitting. It's not frequent by any measure, but still it's an occasional "feature" of us.
She said that mostly what she was able to dig out of all this wreckage is that as I approach the end of all of it I am questioning what I've poured into it, how much I've lost, and the zero difference any of it has made. And that she couldn't answer that for ME, but SHE always thought the answer was "yes" and that she was proud of me. Pretty words, scripted to make me feel better, but needy/selfish bastard that I am, I soaked them up and pretended they were real. Who knows, she may have even meant it.
She came in a bit ago and said she was going to bed and gave me a kiss on the forehead. She saw the whiskey (Glenlivit Nadurra, something north of 120 proof) and picked up the glass and sipped, which was surprising, as she is a hard-core teetotaler.
"Don't know how you drink this shit," she grimaced, putting the glass down and walking away. "Come to bed soon," she said over her shoulder, then stopped at the door. "Oh, yeah, I forgot…" I looked up at her and she flipped me a quick half-smile.
"Don' be beech," she said.
I'm still laughing, and the mood has passed. I'm gathering my Stoic-based mental tools and am back in the present again, focused.
I love being married to someone who knows how to fix me…
It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.Epilogue: Wrote all that a few weeks back, and was going to just trash it, because it describes an anomaly, just a rare bump. Assuming that it's not fiction. Which it probably is. Most stuff I put here is 100% grade-A bullshit. But it's a good excuse to show you what the Beneficiary got me for my birthday, since it's vaguely related to the Stoic ending:
— Epictetus
On ths inside of the band is inscribed "You Could Leave Life Right Now" and, as it's designed to do, that reminds me of the rest of Marcus Arelius' quote: "Let That Determine What You Do And Say And Think.”
It's just a chunk of silver, but every time I glance down at it, I'm reminded: None of it matters, really, so let the stuff I don't control, the stuff from yesterday and before and tomorrow and beyond, fade to nothing, and just live now as well as I can. Cool, ya?
I wrote half a comment and it was no good and so, eh. Something about how I've led a pussy life and a friend of mine who took two tours in Iraq as a Marine has lately been going pretty dark and I worry but there's zero I can do. I don't know. I'm just out here doing cartwheels in the foam on the waves.
ReplyDeleteNaw, you ain't led a pussy life, no more than not driving a spike through your own hand into the bar on a dare makes you a coward. Makes you smarter, in fact, than those who don't know the difference and who will do it out of macho bravado. It's just that some of us seem kinda turned that way in the first place to a greater or lesser degree, and in my experience, we generally know it. It's not hidden from us. And it doesn't keep us from enviously glancing in from the dark through the windows at another, much commoner version of normalcy. That's the version where people are just living their lives, good, bad, or indifferent, and don't know a fucking thing, really. They, not us, are the real people. They make the place go, for better or worse, and that's as it should be. We'd be terrible at running anything and we usually know that, too. We're just tools and are eventually discarded, having worn down to the point we can no longer keep our corner of the structure that the real people live in nailed tight, screwed down, and waterproof. That time's rushing headlong at me now, in fact, and I haven't a clue what's next, if anything. Something interesting, I hope. And as for the real people who live their lives in that normal civilization and who can also turn cartwheels in the foam of the surf without giving it a thought -- well, that's more macho shit right there than I'm capable of. Usual disclaimers: This is all character study, the writer's version of method acting. It's mostly just fictional bullshit, as are most things out here in the world.
ReplyDelete