Moving Target
Relocation's mauling my mojo
Fuck Medicare. Screw the Tennessee DMV. Best Buy’s unitelligible offshore operators can go to Hell. And join American Van Lines in the lake of fire.
Relocating to Knoxville be like that.
Mortgage. HOA payment. Utility bill. Tax filing. Parking permit. Car insurance. Health insurance. Home insurance. Carry permit. License pates. And the painted ponies go up and down, if you know what I mean.
If someone asks me what I do for a living, I tell them I don’t have a life. I have a to-do list that metatastizes like The Andromeda Strain.
Meanwhile, where do I put my shit? Where DID I put my shit? Hang on! A kitchen without an extractor fan? As an eternally frustrated Charlie Brown remarked, AAUGH!
After relocating eight times over 45 years – including two countries – you’d think I could navigate billious bureaucratic BS and corporate ineptitude without courting a coronary. If so, wrong.
I don’t think time has turned me into a cranky old man. Then again, I feel the occasional urge to yell GET OFF MY LAWN!
Note: I don’t have a lawn.
What I Do Have
A new hypnosis client with MPD. A woman with three separate personalies. A unique challenge, to say the least. To say the most, sorting out her internal conflict(s) is a mondo-bizarre mission that scares the shit out of my inner child.
Speaking of which, my client’s tripart tribulations force me to confront two questions that’ve occupied my mind since I was knee-high to a grasshooper. What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be me?
The latter concern is leaving me overwhelmed, in a way that even daily Vyvance can’t ameliorate. I’m bedeviled by the constant feeling I should be somewhere else doing something else.
Aside from dealing with my MPD client(s), my identity is subsumed by mundane tasks that have nothing to do with who I am.
Quantum Solace
As I fight to impose order on a suddenly chaotic life, I take comfort in the wider world’s farcical efforts to calm the general public’s fevered brow.
Check this out from nypostcom.
An uber-woke, $65K-a-year New York City private school will allow “emotionally distressed” students to skip class the day after the election next week…
Kids will also be allowed “excused absences” on Wednesday or whenever the election results are announced if they feel unable to “fully engage in classes,” according to the note, first reported by The New York Times.
Psychologists would be available during the week to provide counseling.
The article doesn’t tell us which election outcome Ethical Culture Fieldston School‘a coddling educators believe will cause the greater emotional turmoil. No prizes for guessing.
I wonder if ECFS students are educated enough to discern the diference between being fully and partially engaged in class. And ethical enough not to use the presidential election as a “get out of ethical geometry free” card.
If ECFS offered their young charges a binary post-election choice – go to class or see a shrink – it would eliminate the possibility of skiving students.
Where’s the fun in that? But it’s fun to think about. Which reminds me…
Fun
That’s it. That’s the answer to my cantankerous conundrum. Fun.
I’ve neglected the activities that put a smile on my face: writing, motorcycling, busting caps at the gun range and cigar bar schmoozing.
All of them call to me like a spurned lover.
Which is why I’m sitting here writing this polemic – instead of dealing with 731 unopened emails and a paperwork pile as high as an elephant’s eye.
Why I bought a Triumph Speed Twin (above). A realiable around-town conveyance built in Thailand for mechanically disinclined Boomer bikers who are glad nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.
Why I’m about to take the new bike to a storage unit: to reacquaint myself with the joys of traversing the serpentine Foothills Parkway atop a German motorcycle weighing more than a grand piano.
Right after I find a licensed gun dealer who can send Jon Wayne Taylor my Benelli shotgun. And… no! No if’s, ands or buts!
Other than if Best Buy’s Geek Squad shows up before the TV their non-Geek co-workers were supposed to deliver last week. If they do, I’m going to be glad I sent Jon the scattergun. Just sayin’….
I’ll take efficiency over safety any day. Except the day someone tried to mug me.
After moving to Oregon, we found out that Lane county has no truancy officers. So of course kids do whatever the hell they want. My solution was to call the cops every time I saw teenagers selling drugs at the skatepark across the street. Eventually, the kids realized that the old guy across the street hated their guts, just like in the movie Gran Torino. My other way of de stressing is reading Krishnamurti. Heard him speak in Ojai years ago, really down to earth guy for a Roshi.