This morning in a joint effort at a full trifecta of stupid my Dad and I had our laptops stolen from the apartment while he was dropping me at the Metro station. I believe that between us we left nothing undone to ensure that it would happen.
The one time when I would rather like having Misha be a big fat belligerent hysterical German shepherd menace she was not on the scene. She was with us, in the car, barking at pedestrians, which is worse than useless.
I was just arriving at work when my Dad called and told me the news. I spent the rest of the day feeling slightly but persistently nauseated, my appetite quite gone. I felt like I'd been punched in the head.
It's strange but towards the end of the day (I was putting off coming home as long as I could) it seemed to me that this little burglary felt worse than after the attack in St. Kitts. I suppose it is possible that I felt as punch-drunk then as I felt most of the day: I remember that I missed a flight to Jamaica and ended up spending two nights in Antigua instead, alone in this kooky old hotel on a beach far out of town, it was the one my therapist used for workshops so she and her husband parked me there when I told them what had happened.
Perhaps because in the various Life Catastrophically Going To Hell Scenarios that I mentally rehearse on a regular basis, the first instruction to self is always "Pack up the dogs and the laptop..." usually in the car, where we are going to live when the bottom falls out of the universe or the sky falls in or whatever is the scary prospect I think up in the middle of the night.
And in the middle of the night was when I and my stolen laptop had our best good times.
I believe the chances of recovering it are negligible, and luckily I had backed up most of what was on it and saved what was irretrievable except for a couple dozen iTunes. Could have been worse. Well, no, the stupidity could hardly have been worse, really.
You won't mind if I don't tell you about the stupidity, do you?
At least not today. It's just so embarrassing.
The new desktop I bought, with the big screen for editing, was too big for the burglar to take away, so I'm writing this post on it and it will be HQ for a while. But until I get a new laptop there will be no editing while watching bad TV and good movies.
I shall miss that. Over the next few weeks I'll think about replacing it. I could take this event as an opportunity to change my habits I guess. I am such a slave to routine!
I never know whether that's because I'm getting older or because I'm still
bracing myself against the crazy from a long time ago. I spent six years in one of these crazymaking personal relationships. If you ever hear someone say "I don't know why he/she stays with him/her when he's so abusive," you could read that piece, or you could ask me. I was only dealing with verbal abuse and I can tell you I spent three years just disoriented, simply unable to make any kind of rational sense out of what was happening. That was because only one of the two of us was allowed to make any sense out of anything, and it wasn't me. I believed that I was horribly messed up in my head, dishonest; I had an "agenda" though I could not understand what the agenda was, only he could; I talked bullshit regularly without knowing it and I was too phony to understand why it was bullshit; that was why it didn't matter that I gave up my bullshit career, and why it didn't matter how I felt about it; that was why he had no plan for any kind of future, because we couldn't even think about something like that until I got myself straightened out and stopped being such a mess and he'd tell me when, because (it goes without saying) only he could be trusted to make a plan. But of course he was never going to tell me I was OK. Never.
Anyway right about the time when I discovered, years later, freedom as something to look forward to even more than looking forward to "not being hegged and harrassed right out of my goddam mind," but as something for me to make something with, that's when I got that laptop. And what I wanted to make was writing. Now there was nothing between me and writing.
Do you remember the Horrible Job that was the reason why I moved to the Tick Ranch? OK that job behaved like that ex. Everybody was working way more than 40 hours. Management were going to fix it but first everybody had to give 150 percent and if they weren't giving 150 percent then they wouldn't deserve all the good things that would come eventually when management fixed it and we were all going to be shitting gold doubloons and it was our fault if we weren't there yet. We weren't trying hard enough...
I have never hated a job so much as I hated that one. I knew what was happening. At night, out at the Tick Ranch, I was really alone, which I needed and wanted. When I quit the job and had to commute nearly two hours each way to work in DC again I was happy, it was like this actual happiness that I had made by my choice and not expected from anybody else (see? maybe that was me not them). I am a slow learner at choosing for myself. But I felt myself to be coming along, and I know that one reason was because of that laptop. I was alone but I wasn't lonely. It was a lifeline to the people that I care about.
Now, this is sort of silly. I mean, I should have known better than to get attached to a piece of office equipment. Moreover I have all the work, sitting here on my desk in the little hard drive. And eventually that dependable little machine was going to give out anyway. Have I really lost anything valuable? I have lost a bit of history, I guess--as if there isn't enough history choking up this apartment. I don't know, maybe I have been liberated from something.
Well, I suppose over the next few weeks I'll see.
Update: I should clarify: when I said "
Now there was nothing between me and writing," I don't mean to suggest that this person tried to keep me from writing. He actually encouraged me to write, but without understanding any better than I did why I was so demoralized. And I probably would never have allowed myself to try drawing and painting without his encouragement. That was one of many things I'm grateful to him for. I know that people who act like that are not necessarily evil, even though what they do can really hurt other people. I say this, and I still occasionally get mad sometimes, mostly at myself, for not understanding sooner just how screwed up the whole relationship was. But I was afraid to. So when I say that nothing got between me and writing I mean that I finally got desperate enough, I finally got to the point where I could believe that I, unassisted, might manage my life better, including writing. I gave up the belief that a whole bunch of other stuff had to be in place before I could write or live as me: that I needed to be securely attached to some guy I was in love with, that I needed to live somewhere else, I needed different space, more time, more money,
before writing could happen. I mean, it would be nice to have more money, more time, a bigger apartment, less goofiness of dogs, etc. In my past belief that all these things had to be in place first, you can maybe see how I was running a "sick system" all by myself and the relationship disasters were just sort of supplementary assistance.
My feeling about time changed. The big change was beginning to believe that I had everything I needed (dog, laptop, books, art supplies). What I mean is that if these things (plus of course friends and you, my small and select readers) were all I had, then what I had was what I wouldneed to begin with. I sort of gave up the past, the expectations I had brought forward out of the past--well, it would be more accurate to say I forgot them. The future was easier to forget, as I am temperamentally disposed to the darkest pessimism. Anyway I hope I've made the difference clear.
