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The Life And Times of Mote... Chapter 97: SHeeYit... (an excerpt.) (... to which I replied, "Yes, but with beef futures at these levels, where will I keep my salad fork??? Muhahaha..." And of course, everyone laughed. * * * I have managed to drag my ass finally out of North Carolina. It's a great place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. Which is unfortunate, since I lived there basically for basically 16 years. Basically. Out of the goodness of her heart and my promise to do the dishes all the time every time, my sister the Californian has been putting me up for the past half year or so why I drag my ass back into the realm of the living. It's not been easy for her or for me, or even for her two kids, my wonderful niece and nephew, but it has been a good experience. I've managed to go from flat broke and without possession when I got here to having a P.O.S. yet reliable $1000 car, a $250 stereo for said car, a $500 repair job on my formerly deceased computer, and having saved enough to be ready to move into my own place in a month or so. That in itself will probably be about $550 rent, $600 security deposit and maybe another $250 for gas, electric and phone deposits. Not to mention car insurance, my weekly $100 'donation' to the house fund, etc. etc. It doesn't sound like much to people that have money, perhaps, but for a guy that has been basically getting by his entire adult life from paycheck to paycheck, I'm pretty pleased. Saving money is a hard thing. Fortunately, for the moment, I have been making some to save. So what got me into such bad shape to begin with? It's a pretty typical story: Dead end jobs, my own business ventures turn to shit so I end up in more dead end jobs, live paycheck to paycheck always hoping that that one thing that put you behind a bit this time wont become two, then three then four. It doesn't take much. For me it went something like this: July 2002, My Father died suddenly... that, in and of itself has been a source of on again/ off again depression for me since that day just over 2 years ago. But that was just the start, three months later my grandmother died, though it was more peaceful I think, and I got to say goodbye this time, in my own way. the month after that the store I was working in got robbed by three guys who pistol whipped me because they weren't happy with the amount of money in the till. Two months later I got a $10,000 inheritance and a $9,000 car from my father's estate... and there was more coming! Good news? Next month I'm in the hospital for 12 hours to remove a kidney stone: Hospital Bill "KACHING" $4500. Yikes. Well, could be worse... I guess. Hell, the Room I was in was $550 of that, they could have put me up across the street at the Ramada for half a week and let me raid the minibar, but that's ok, I have money, I won't gripe... Wait, what's this? Cardiologist bill? Anesthesiologist Bill? X-Ray Technician bill? A Bill from a guy named Bill? Nurses Union Bill? Phlebotomist bill? Phlebotomist bill??? I didn't have any blood taken! Hospital Bill WITH all the extra crap: over $8,000 for 12 hours of my life. And I didn't even get a reach around? CRAP. That leaves me with... $1,000 and a $9,000 car... but that's ok, remember, I have more money coming as soon as my dad's ol' MCI Worldcom employee stocks come through... thank Goodness. SIGH. Well, at least I have a job. I don't have to spend any of it. Two Days later: Back at work, left the oxycodine pain pills at home because they make me too drowsy. I can get through 8 hours while my dick hurts like hell because of the particular WAY they took out the kidney stone. Think wire with a basket on it. Think from pee hole halfway to my kidneys.. That's it, you got it. But I can make it 8 hours. I think. 7 hours later: second shift calls in sick, manager says she can't cover it because she has "dinner plans." I told her she was going to have to, cause I wasn't gonna be here 16 hours. Manager leaves to take deposit to bank, never comes back. Well, Fuck that job. Bye. Two Months Later: Any day now that additional inheritance will be coming through. I'm kinda down to the last of that $1,000 I had... but the lawyer says it will be any day now! Of course, she's been saying that for 5 months now, but I'm sure it will be soon! Next day: MCI Worldcom pulls an Enron. Stocks at $12.00 a share one month are worth $0.08 a share a few months later. So what would have been basically another nine grand apiece for me and my 2 sisters when my dad passed away @ 8 cents a share before they declared bankruptcy (at which point the stocks were frozen,) it came to $184. Not Each. Total. I'd like to send out a special thanks to Bank of New York (BONY) the transfer agent, for ignoring requests for the transfer of funds from that account (a lawyer said it would not be a 'financially sound' idea to take them to court over that, it's a bank, they can tie you up for years or decades if need be, and no lawyer I found was willing to do it 'for a cut.') and also to the estate lawyer, Maxine Kennedy of High Point, North Carolina, for mailing the forms, or getting her legal aid to do it, once or perhaps twice over the course of 9 months, she wasn't sure, and either calling or getting her aide to call, 3 to 6 times, she wasn't sure, over the course of nine months, to try and get the stocks transferred. I was informed by another lawyer that that kind of slackness 'was not considered criminally negligent in this state.' Anyhow, that was about the first year of the downward spiral. I'm too frustrated to continue. Long story short: there was a good three weeks in December when I was literally sleeping in the back of my broken down van watching the sleet become sheets of ice on the windshield while I shivered in 19 degree weather scrounging through my ashtrays for good cigarette butts. It sounds extreme, but I was actually there. And this fall from grace all without drugs or alcohol. But I had some friends that took me in for Christmas and for a little while after: good friends who did this despite my having done something desperate yet unforgivable to them. Then, through the same friends, my mother and her family discovered my situation (much to my shame) and she, my grandfather and my Uncle John all pitched me some cash which helped enormously and my Californian sister said 'come out here, I'll let you crash here till you get on your feet.' I paid for the bus ticket cross country, non-stop for 70 some hours of Greyhound misery with money my Uncle John had sent me and set out to start over. Things were looking good. Of course, my sister thought I was coming SATURDAY at 7pm, not FRIDAY at 7pm, but otherwise this has been one of the most productive times in my life. And no, I won't let you forget that one, my Californian sister ;) The funny thing, for me, was that brief period of 20 days or so in the cold of December were some of the happiest I remember. I was freezing, I was broke, I had become as low a thing as I could imagine myself becoming and I realized: it's not that bad. There is a freedom to being at the absolute worst place you've ever been, a freedom that comes from knowing that you have nothing left to loose. It's not even a 'fuck it' attitude. It's just an acceptance of where you are and the world around you. I could look at the crystal clear winter stars and appreciate them with a childlike innocence not burdened by the worries of civilized life. I could marvel at the world around me in a way that I had last been able to when I was a boy of three and everything in the world was huge and wonderful. Everything suddenly burst into color, and the world that had been background noise to me for almost as long as I could remember was suddenly a vibrant, shining and living thing and I was a part of it. And that is when I made the most important discovery in years... I finally had an answer to the question I never knew I needed to ask: what do I want? And that time I spent sleeping bundled in a half dozen layers of clothes helped me overcome, to some extent, my biggest failing in life. I had known, since at least the beginning of my teens, that I needed to learn about myself. I needed to know who I was. I spent my teens and a few years of my twenties working on it. That question was finally answered in a roundabout way by someone else, and her name was Shama. She was looking at a painting I did, a collage that encircled a single figure sitting in a small cage. "What is that?" She asked me. I told her it was a guy in a cage, derr. "Is he locked in, or is he locking everyone else out?" She asked. I told her I thought he was probably hiding there from the things going on around him, referring to the other jumbled and busy images in the collage. "What is he afraid of?" she asked me. I blinked and told her I didn't know. For the first time in the conversation she looked at me and said. "I think you do," then walked away. Her simple questioning had led me onto a path of discovery that let me realize what it was I had been afraid of my entire life. I was afraid of failure. Almost pathologically so. For me there was nothing more frightning than the thought that I could put my heart and mind into something fully and completely and it still fall to pieces around me. I didn't know if I could handle that sort of catastrophic, end of my world misery. Because of that fear, I realized, I had half-assed my whole life. My relationships, my work, even as far back as school. I thought that If I didn't really try, it wouldn't bruise so much when It turned to crap. The problem was, without trying, all you get is failure. But knowledge of the problem is easy: resolving it takes work. After my own failures and outside events conspired to grind me down to nothingness, I found it wasn't so bad after-all. Failure still scares me to death, I admit, but it doesn't paralyze me as much anymore, and that lets me focus on what it is I want out of life. So slowly, in stages, I'm discovering about myself and finally working for a goal instead of resigning to shuffle my feet in endless dead-end jobs for the rest of my life. It could be that having the worst few years of my life will make it possible to attain something better and bigger than I have let myself believe I could achieve. And THAT is where things stand at the moment... now let me tell you about the girl I saw at the laundrymat today... talk about HOTTIE. I swear I haven't seen a rack like that since....)
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