As I went to get lunch at the Arby's across the street today, I happened to glance out the window and did a double-take. The Caribou Coffee next door, the one I often get morning white chocolate mochas and afternoon Caramel Coolers at, had a hole in it. A car-shaped hole. Seems someone last night mistook drive for reverse and hit the gas, and ended up partially indoors.
I couldn't help wondering if the accident was due to too much coffee.
Some habitual daylog readers may have previously read about my attempts to crawl out of a hole of debt. The crawl continues, slowly but steadily. New laws increasing minimum payments on credit cards are going to hurt us badly; while these laws are beneficial to society in theory, as they make sure people pay down principal on revolving credit much faster, they screw up my debt plan in which we pay down the highest-interest things first and then move on to balances with lower rates. Now we have to pay more toward all of the balances, which ends up being less efficient.
If you could plot our life on an oscilloscope, it would look more or less like a series of pulses that decay exponentially. Every two weeks I get paid, and in the next three days a good 75 percent of that pay goes toward purchases we desperately needed over the last week, as well as a bit of overindulgence in Dairy Queen and Nancy's pizza (best in Chicago). The subsequent week and a half consists of getting by with whatever is left, or often not, as another email from the bank signifies an overdraft transfer of $50 from credit because we didn't track our expenses well enough.
It's amazing how easily one's principles can fly out the window in these situations. I pride myself on being generous, treating friends to dinner or dessert or a party or a movie or whatever. Now I have to ask for money up front. Parties are potlucks. I stopped downloading copyrighted music over the Internet back in college, not because it is illegal, but because I want to support the artists I like. Now I'm back grabbing music off P2P networks because I simply can't afford $10 to $15 per CD.
I was Catholic once, but gave that up when I married my wife. I was not about to make her sign a dispensation form promising any kids would be raised Catholic, just so they would let us marry in a Lutheran church. I had been disillusioned with Catholicism for quite a while, so it wasn't exactly a big sacrifice.
My belief in a god these days hovers somewhere around agnosticism and deism, these days. I believe that either (a) there is no God, (b) there is a God but s/he doesn't give a damned about us here on Earth, or (c) there is a God but s/he is either unable or unwilling to help us out. "God helps those who help themselves" is just a polite way of saying "you'd better work it all out yourself 'cause God ain't gonna do shit". I used to believe in karma to some extent, but I've scrapped that too. "What goes around comes around" is utter bullshit; if it were true, we wouldn't have Halliburton and George W. Bush and Phil Hartman and Hurricane Katrina, all the good things happening to bad people and vice-versa. The universe owes you jack. The universe may deal you garbage hands for fifty years, and on the fifty-first it'll still deal you garbage, because you're not "due" for a winning hand at all. It doesn't work that way. After all, if you flip a coin and it lands tails-up a hundred times in a row, the chances of it landing tails-up the 101st time is still 50/50.
I was a goddamned child prodigy growing up. That's what everybody said, anyway. I was reading newspapers at five, playing piano at seven, doing algebra at eight. Somewhere along the line I started to believe it. I could do no wrong. I skipped homework. Homework was for people who weren't geniuses. Studying was for losers. I was better than all of them. I was a social outcast because I made myself one, hating others preemptively. They were all just jealous! You should never fight back, just ignore them! Bad advice from folks who meant well.
I don't think I was ever a genius. My learning curve was just a bit more curved than others, fast in the beginning, slowing down over time. The whiz man doesn't fit like the whiz kid did. Whatever idealism and creativity I once had died with my ego.
Coming to grips with the fact that I, too, am just another human, has been a slow process over years and years. I wish it could've been learned at less of a price, quite literally. I dug the hole we're in now with false hope: "Ah, it's fine to throw this stuff on credit, I'm sure I'll get a new job any day now." "We don't have to put the house on the market yet, I'm sure this next interview will pan out!" All of this happened over three years ago, and we're still paying for it now! Amortized retribution.
Entropy seems to be some sort of beast that stalks me. Everything gets dirtier, more cluttered, more disorganized. Everything breaks down, and I have neither the time nor the money to battle the foe. The cat box needs cleaning. Carpet is stained, tile is cracked, walls are gouged. The furnace needs replacing and the air conditioner barely works any more. The back deck is rotting, the garage door opener is broken, and the driveway is pitted, grass growing up through its cracks. House paint is peeling and screens have holes in them. Neighbors move out and I wonder if they're just trying to get away from me. I know it's just paranoia, probably because I missed my daily antidepressant for a little while (we couldn't afford it) but that knowledge doesn't help.
And let's take a step back, to a wider view. Gas prices are rising, electricity is going up. Mother Nature delivers us droughts or floods and has seemed to forget how to work the middle. Bird flu is going to kill us all Any Day Now, or so the evening news says. That is, if the terrorists don't get us first. Or the weather, the way things have been going.
Eventually my neurotransmitter levels will smooth out again, and I'll go back to that sweet flatness of drifting between being vaguely unsettled and vaguely content. Panic is replaced by apathy. I guess that's an improvement. I can go back to drifting through life, instead of bobbing up and down. I'm too snippy, cynical, and volatile this way, anyway.