The Problem of Homelessness
Published by SLCC Folio
Homelessness is a seemingly never-ending problem. The numbers only multiplied during the recession. People were pushed out of their homes during the housing crisis as they were unable to pay their mortgages. There are approximately 600,000 to 800,000 on the streets on any given night, and about 2 to 3.5 million who experience homelessness at some point within a year. Then there are the chronically homeless, whose numbers are tallied at about 155,000. Most of them have psychological disorders; many have drug addictions. No matter what the cause behind their absence of shelter, it is distressing to see them roaming the streets, lost and forlorn. Many of us automatically avert our eyes and spring to the other side of the sidewalk when we encounter them. When ambushed and forced to make contact, we thrust money at them in terror before they can force us look at them directly for more than five seconds, or feel any guilt for walking into a local fine diner and sharing $100 meals and $18 martinis with our significant others. Cynics may see this as a problem too complex and arduous to have a solution, but they simply are not thinking out of the box. I have considered this issue for some time, and have come up with several thorough and tidy solutions. All of these add up to my main objective: making homeless visibility to the general public illegal.
The first step is to stop feeding the homeless. How are they going to learn their lesson if we keep allowing them to sustain their lives? It is like feeding pigeons in the park, they will just keep coming back for more. Why not put up signs like we do for the other animals? If certain “do-gooders” want to ignore these recommendations, we may need to step it up and make it illegal to feed them in public, like twenty-one U.S. cities already have since 2013, and twelve others are considering pending legislation on as we speak. This will take care of public nuisances such as Arnold Abbott of Ft. Lauderdale, FL. Abbott is a 90 year old man who has been feeding the homeless for 23 years. He has been arrested for this act multiple times, and could face two months in jail or a $500 fine. Can you imagine how many of the homeless he must have been not only sustaining, but breeding with his hand outs? How many of us look at these free meals and think, “hey, why should I be breaking my back every day at work when I could be getting free food and plenty of sunshine by living in the streets?” Disallowing the homeless to be fed in public places such as parks or beaches, along with banning people from sleeping in public spaces, another luxury that is being accosted by several state legislatures, is aimed at making it so wretched for the homeless to stay in certain cities, they are forced to leave. Thank the good Lord we have put an end to such charities. In the words of the good Lord himself, “But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind...to shove off,” or something like that. (Luke 14:13)
As mentioned before, most of the chronically homeless have preexisting psychological conditions, which are most often Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder, and, not too uncommonly, PTSD. Approximately 250,000 mentally ill are homeless, and this number is growing. This is about a quarter to a third of the total homeless population, and close to the same population of Salt Lake City, Utah. At any given time, there are more than twice as many of schizophrenics and severe bipolars living on the streets than there are in hospitals receiving treatment and therapy. There are also more in jails and prisons than in hospitals. With numbers like these, it is easy to believe that many of these are feigning psychological conditions, much like the fools studied in Monty Python’s documentary, “Village Idiots.” It seems more than suspicious that there would be that many out there with no one doing anything about it if those numbers were not in fact inflated due to their fraudulence! The government even went so far as to cut $4.35 billion dollars in public mental health spending from 2009 to 2012. If it was such a problem, why would the government be cutting back spending instead of increasing it? Particularly when 62,619 red-blooded veterans, many of whom suffer from life shattering PTSD, were counted in 2012. Who would let that happen? I’m sure not you or I, and certainly not our virtuous political leaders, or the philanthropic lobbyists that back them!
It seems particularly unbelievable when it ends up costing the government more to NOT take care of the homeless than it does to ignore them. With two of his collegues, Dennis Culhane, a researcher from University of Pennsylvania, kept track of the costs of 4,600 mentally ill homeless in New York From 2002 to 2011. It cost the city and state an average of $40,451 a year to have the homeless play the musical chairs game between jail, emergency rooms, and the streets. Those placed in supportive housing cost $17,277 to house, and they tended to stay off the streets. Of course, if they are feigning it, as I quite assuredly suspect, we diligent, hard-working, tax paying Americans should not bare any weight of such costs! The approximated $20 billion dollars needed to eradicate homelessness in America in five year entirely needs to continue going toward far more important areas, such as the equivalent costing subsidies for the oil industry, the $60 billion in corporate meal and entertainment write offs, and $70 billion capital gains tax cuts. It costs us that much to decorate our homes for Christmas every year, and what could be more Christ-like than celebrating his birth by buying 6 foot blow up snowmen for our front yards instead of helping the needy? And liberals, do not even start up that tired argument about the $4 to $6 trillion that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are estimated to cost us that could have this problem eradicated 75 times over. No one listened before, and no one is about to now. Besides, now we have to deal with the additional threat of ISIL, also known as ISIS. The threats to this country and our liberty is neverending, as terrorist group after terrorist group continue to breed under our war on terror. How else would we keep America safe, and with America, the American dream...the dream that must keep all these homeless warm at night; the dream that gives them hope for a better future. These wars are just as much in their favor as everyone elses, and it is our job to keep voting in the politicians that have found these to be some of the best allocations of our tax dollars since we know what is best for them.
Drug and alcohol addictions are other major contributors to homelessness. Many of the aforementioned homeless with psychiatric illnesses attempt to self medicate with street drugs. These vagrants obviously did not listen to their mommy’s and daddy’s, or pay attention in D.A.R.E. Even if they cannot control their own addictions or actions caused by them without counseling, and most likely psychiatric treatment and meds that they cannot afford, they were the ones to make the decision to take the drugs in the first place, and they should be made to pay for that mistake for the rest of their lives. There has been quite the controversy over which of three things we should do with the money used to fund the “war on drugs.” The first is to continue pouring over $100 billion of our nations funds into this war. The second is to reassess the allocation of those funds and put the money toward housing, medical attention and psychiatric support, so that the addicted and mentally unstable are able to start new lives and stay away from drugs, the streets, our court systems, jails, and hospitals. The third being to simply throw it into a giant pit and burning it.
The War on Drugs has worked, punishing those with drug addictions, getting them out of the public’s sight, and probably even killing these criminals and deceptive child demoralizers. Undoubtedly, they learn their lesson after being thrown into jail for the 17th time, particularly if he or she is one of the mentally ill that are vulnerable and several times more likely to be abused by a cops and assaulted, attacked, raped, or even murdered on the streets by violent offenders. If that does not work, the “war on drugs” is so inadequate at actually getting people off of drugs and halting the trafficking over the border that costs tens of thousands of lives by the hands of the cartels, that if jail time does not teach them a lesson, they will take care of their own deaths when they overdose! The perfect system to weed out these debasers without having to be labeled inhumane for lethally injecting them. Any other solution would be far less costly, but would take far too much work and actual thinking to bring about. Besides, why fix a system that is not broken?
Sometimes these eyesores are truly impossible to get rid of, continually coming back to their same haunts and lingering around like flies. It is like they feel like they need to be around humans, or something. If none of these solutions succeed and you find yourself still looking at that same, unpleasant old man who is always shrieking at the bridge he sleeps under and pulling leftovers out of the KFC trash can, why not consider trashing your local homeless person? If even a small portion of the population pitched in to do his or her part and picked up just one homeless person to throw into a trash can to be carried off to the dump, we would have the streets clean in no time. Worried about the weight? You could always ask a friend for a helping hand, but in all reality, they probably only weigh about as much as the bag of trash in your kitchen anyway. The especially unwilling? Well they will end up digging through the trash eventually. If we pick up the trash more often, I am sure they will end up at the dump just by chance and probability.
Bringing the homeless to the dump would take care of several problems. The homeless would be out of sight, out of mind, and they would have all the trash they could dream of. They would still have it as a food source, and they would not be guilting us into giving them our fresh food. They could even build homes out of it all the consumer products we never really needed and threw out! It is the best of both worlds: we do not have to feel guilt about our over-consumption, and the homeless get all that “shit we don’t want anymore anyway.” Recycling at its best!
Now I know what you are thinking, how are they ever going to learn their lessons and be encouraged to become upstanding citizens if no one has their eye on them? Of course we will not have them thrown in the dump simply to be forgotten forever. The same law enforcers who continually accost and jail the homeless, particularly those who are mentally unstable and do not understand what is happening to them in the first place, can come by every so often and round them up for his or her usual time in the slammer. A few months here, a few months there, they will not even know the difference. We might as well make it a little more tidy and turn it into a more literal game of “musical chairs.” It seems only fair and humane to give them equal time in and out of the jails if no one can be bothered with paying attention to their civil liberties either way.
Trying to understand immense, underlying social issues is quite obviously out of our Nation’s depths. Having legitimate compassion for people whose lives we do not care to know about, let alone understand, is an even larger hurdle. It is best to continue protecting our delicate egos. The easiest solution to this goliath of a problem is to pretend it is not a problem. Like the timeless axiom says: ignore it and it will go away.
The first step is to stop feeding the homeless. How are they going to learn their lesson if we keep allowing them to sustain their lives? It is like feeding pigeons in the park, they will just keep coming back for more. Why not put up signs like we do for the other animals? If certain “do-gooders” want to ignore these recommendations, we may need to step it up and make it illegal to feed them in public, like twenty-one U.S. cities already have since 2013, and twelve others are considering pending legislation on as we speak. This will take care of public nuisances such as Arnold Abbott of Ft. Lauderdale, FL. Abbott is a 90 year old man who has been feeding the homeless for 23 years. He has been arrested for this act multiple times, and could face two months in jail or a $500 fine. Can you imagine how many of the homeless he must have been not only sustaining, but breeding with his hand outs? How many of us look at these free meals and think, “hey, why should I be breaking my back every day at work when I could be getting free food and plenty of sunshine by living in the streets?” Disallowing the homeless to be fed in public places such as parks or beaches, along with banning people from sleeping in public spaces, another luxury that is being accosted by several state legislatures, is aimed at making it so wretched for the homeless to stay in certain cities, they are forced to leave. Thank the good Lord we have put an end to such charities. In the words of the good Lord himself, “But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind...to shove off,” or something like that. (Luke 14:13)
As mentioned before, most of the chronically homeless have preexisting psychological conditions, which are most often Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder, and, not too uncommonly, PTSD. Approximately 250,000 mentally ill are homeless, and this number is growing. This is about a quarter to a third of the total homeless population, and close to the same population of Salt Lake City, Utah. At any given time, there are more than twice as many of schizophrenics and severe bipolars living on the streets than there are in hospitals receiving treatment and therapy. There are also more in jails and prisons than in hospitals. With numbers like these, it is easy to believe that many of these are feigning psychological conditions, much like the fools studied in Monty Python’s documentary, “Village Idiots.” It seems more than suspicious that there would be that many out there with no one doing anything about it if those numbers were not in fact inflated due to their fraudulence! The government even went so far as to cut $4.35 billion dollars in public mental health spending from 2009 to 2012. If it was such a problem, why would the government be cutting back spending instead of increasing it? Particularly when 62,619 red-blooded veterans, many of whom suffer from life shattering PTSD, were counted in 2012. Who would let that happen? I’m sure not you or I, and certainly not our virtuous political leaders, or the philanthropic lobbyists that back them!
It seems particularly unbelievable when it ends up costing the government more to NOT take care of the homeless than it does to ignore them. With two of his collegues, Dennis Culhane, a researcher from University of Pennsylvania, kept track of the costs of 4,600 mentally ill homeless in New York From 2002 to 2011. It cost the city and state an average of $40,451 a year to have the homeless play the musical chairs game between jail, emergency rooms, and the streets. Those placed in supportive housing cost $17,277 to house, and they tended to stay off the streets. Of course, if they are feigning it, as I quite assuredly suspect, we diligent, hard-working, tax paying Americans should not bare any weight of such costs! The approximated $20 billion dollars needed to eradicate homelessness in America in five year entirely needs to continue going toward far more important areas, such as the equivalent costing subsidies for the oil industry, the $60 billion in corporate meal and entertainment write offs, and $70 billion capital gains tax cuts. It costs us that much to decorate our homes for Christmas every year, and what could be more Christ-like than celebrating his birth by buying 6 foot blow up snowmen for our front yards instead of helping the needy? And liberals, do not even start up that tired argument about the $4 to $6 trillion that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are estimated to cost us that could have this problem eradicated 75 times over. No one listened before, and no one is about to now. Besides, now we have to deal with the additional threat of ISIL, also known as ISIS. The threats to this country and our liberty is neverending, as terrorist group after terrorist group continue to breed under our war on terror. How else would we keep America safe, and with America, the American dream...the dream that must keep all these homeless warm at night; the dream that gives them hope for a better future. These wars are just as much in their favor as everyone elses, and it is our job to keep voting in the politicians that have found these to be some of the best allocations of our tax dollars since we know what is best for them.
Drug and alcohol addictions are other major contributors to homelessness. Many of the aforementioned homeless with psychiatric illnesses attempt to self medicate with street drugs. These vagrants obviously did not listen to their mommy’s and daddy’s, or pay attention in D.A.R.E. Even if they cannot control their own addictions or actions caused by them without counseling, and most likely psychiatric treatment and meds that they cannot afford, they were the ones to make the decision to take the drugs in the first place, and they should be made to pay for that mistake for the rest of their lives. There has been quite the controversy over which of three things we should do with the money used to fund the “war on drugs.” The first is to continue pouring over $100 billion of our nations funds into this war. The second is to reassess the allocation of those funds and put the money toward housing, medical attention and psychiatric support, so that the addicted and mentally unstable are able to start new lives and stay away from drugs, the streets, our court systems, jails, and hospitals. The third being to simply throw it into a giant pit and burning it.
The War on Drugs has worked, punishing those with drug addictions, getting them out of the public’s sight, and probably even killing these criminals and deceptive child demoralizers. Undoubtedly, they learn their lesson after being thrown into jail for the 17th time, particularly if he or she is one of the mentally ill that are vulnerable and several times more likely to be abused by a cops and assaulted, attacked, raped, or even murdered on the streets by violent offenders. If that does not work, the “war on drugs” is so inadequate at actually getting people off of drugs and halting the trafficking over the border that costs tens of thousands of lives by the hands of the cartels, that if jail time does not teach them a lesson, they will take care of their own deaths when they overdose! The perfect system to weed out these debasers without having to be labeled inhumane for lethally injecting them. Any other solution would be far less costly, but would take far too much work and actual thinking to bring about. Besides, why fix a system that is not broken?
Sometimes these eyesores are truly impossible to get rid of, continually coming back to their same haunts and lingering around like flies. It is like they feel like they need to be around humans, or something. If none of these solutions succeed and you find yourself still looking at that same, unpleasant old man who is always shrieking at the bridge he sleeps under and pulling leftovers out of the KFC trash can, why not consider trashing your local homeless person? If even a small portion of the population pitched in to do his or her part and picked up just one homeless person to throw into a trash can to be carried off to the dump, we would have the streets clean in no time. Worried about the weight? You could always ask a friend for a helping hand, but in all reality, they probably only weigh about as much as the bag of trash in your kitchen anyway. The especially unwilling? Well they will end up digging through the trash eventually. If we pick up the trash more often, I am sure they will end up at the dump just by chance and probability.
Bringing the homeless to the dump would take care of several problems. The homeless would be out of sight, out of mind, and they would have all the trash they could dream of. They would still have it as a food source, and they would not be guilting us into giving them our fresh food. They could even build homes out of it all the consumer products we never really needed and threw out! It is the best of both worlds: we do not have to feel guilt about our over-consumption, and the homeless get all that “shit we don’t want anymore anyway.” Recycling at its best!
Now I know what you are thinking, how are they ever going to learn their lessons and be encouraged to become upstanding citizens if no one has their eye on them? Of course we will not have them thrown in the dump simply to be forgotten forever. The same law enforcers who continually accost and jail the homeless, particularly those who are mentally unstable and do not understand what is happening to them in the first place, can come by every so often and round them up for his or her usual time in the slammer. A few months here, a few months there, they will not even know the difference. We might as well make it a little more tidy and turn it into a more literal game of “musical chairs.” It seems only fair and humane to give them equal time in and out of the jails if no one can be bothered with paying attention to their civil liberties either way.
Trying to understand immense, underlying social issues is quite obviously out of our Nation’s depths. Having legitimate compassion for people whose lives we do not care to know about, let alone understand, is an even larger hurdle. It is best to continue protecting our delicate egos. The easiest solution to this goliath of a problem is to pretend it is not a problem. Like the timeless axiom says: ignore it and it will go away.
The Rebound
Published by SLCC Folio
At the time, it seemed like love at first plight. I was behind the counter, donning a chiseled grin and explaining to a customer for the fourth time that a medium, skinny-vanilla latte in a large cup with extra steamed milk is in fact a large, skinny vanilla latte. He was sitting in the lobby of the Starbucks I worked at, reading some ostentatious, “la-di-da” something or other book. Being the 20-something, try-hard intellectual I can be, seeing someone actually reading a book in the age of the internet is an instant turn on for me; seeing someone read something like Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer could turn me into a drooling lap dog. Unfortunately, the timing was unbelievably wrong. We met shortly after his girlfriend had left him for her yoga instructor. Sure, maybe I should have seen the red flags, but I was diagnosed as color blind in the fourth grade after a horrific Rainbow Road accident on Mario Kart.
It seemed as though we would always have those cherished nights of reading Leaves of Grass atop his starlit roof, making last second decisions to drive to a ghost town or bordering state, or stumbling beneath Fremont’s neon signs (signs that seemed to glow only for the sake of lost nostalgia and illuminating our transgressions). As we walked through the casinos, we’d pass old women hooked up to respirators, still puffing away at cigarettes. We could hardly hear ourselves over the “clank, clank, clank” of coins against metal as we attempted to impress each other with our knowledge of Melville’s Moby Dick (which I had of course read at a record pace so that I could hold his attention that much longer). I truly thought these divine summer nights would never end, until they did in September, when autumn started.
From the casinos, we would quickly make our way to our favorite bars. If we made it to the last bar on our usual list, we knew we were in trouble. It was a cowboy themed biker bar where the beer was cheap and the photo-booth always ended in a laugh. We would play pool and shout over the dancing cowgirls as they screamed into megaphones to mock the patrons, asked girls to dance on the bar, and patronized the other customers if they didn’t buy the ladies drinks. Needless to say, I danced on that bar…on more than one occasion. This was a superb setting in which to drink until sloppy enough to feign ignorance to the fact that we were about to make love.
There’s really nothing quite like getting two self-deprecating, manic-depressive existentialists together in the same bed. It usually started like a race to the finish line and ended with one of us dribbling out some incoherent comment about how the climax is just as meaningless or meaningful as the foreplay. This helped to extinguish our post-coital drop in serotonin and prolactin levels, but really put a damper on the whole sex bit. Of course, whenever I did that with someone who wasn’t in a similar state of mind, I typically woke up the next morning with an empty bed and a vague recollection of the person I had been with the night before darting out the door after tripping over my waist high pile of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton compendiums.
It took me so long to figure out what was going on, I missed an entire season of Doctor Who as I twittered half of my time away with him and the other half making excuses for why he always called me “Rachel” in the middle of sex. I would have occasional moments of clarity, but they usually ended with me getting a 40 of Pabst into my system and forgetting what I was thinking about ten minutes prior. Five beers, two shots and a pack of cigarettes later and I would wake up the next morning in bed with him (and occasionally someone I had thought was him the night before). My friends all pointed out the warning signs, but my oxytocin levels, unconscious desire to create offspring, self-doubt, and deep seated adoration for anyone who quoted Allen Ginsberg in inappropriate settings wouldn’t allow room for any kind of rational thinking.
After approximately one year of frantically attempting to win over his affection, the thin foundation that held up my play pretend kingdom by the sea was nevermore after a surreal night out on the town. As I sat back and listened to him describe all the little things that made his ex-lover the perfectly consistency of frosting on his cupcake, I discovered what it was like to be a rebound (and apparently a foul frosting). Picture this: you throw on your favorite Spice Girls album and are dancing and singing in the shower with your eyes closed, but then open your eyes to realize that you aren’t in the shower at all. Instead of a shower, you find you’re in a circus where you’re the main act, your shower curtain is the audience, and the sound of water falling their guffaws. I don’t take humiliation or heartbreak well, so I of course tried to retreat behind the curtain, but ended up falling off the stage because I'd (once again) had too many tequila shots. Every time this happens, I end up finding myself in some sort of quantum leap accelerator that only leads to my bathroom floor. It’s difficult to not laugh yourself into nihilistic mania when you take a step back from the absurdity of such situations. My friends would always look at me sleepwalking through work the next day and say, “Jane, you’re killing yourself. Slow down, man.” My response was typically along the lines of, “Sure I’m killing myself, but at least I’m not doing it all at once!” I found this hilarious, but they were always embarrassing me by jumping out behind the supply shelves; trying to throw a straitjacket over my chai-encrusted apron. Fortunately I played a lot of League of Legends at the time, so I found it fairly unproblematic to escape these superfluous ambushes.
In attempt to heal and find peace, I took to the woods, took up self-subsistent farming, bathed myself in bogs, and ate a woodchuck for good measure. When this didn’t work and the dejection finally waned, a fury rivaling Howard Beale’s surfaced like The Elder Things emerging from the Mountains of Madness. Unsure of what to do with such a high volume of pent up rage in a 100 pound body, I began running ten miles a day with the melodies of great composers like the vegan hardcore artists Cattle Decapitation to accompany me. (Yes, this band actually exists. I saw them on a date with another guy in case you were wondering. But that is a story for another day.) I would then head home to fanatically paint six foot oil portrayals of Dante’s Inferno. These portraits sold for several hundred a piece when I left town for a liberal arts college full of yuppie intellectuals trying to impress their own sadistic companions.
Okay, so maybe I didn’t do anything quite so dramatic, but I did begin putting time into art and writing again, hit the gym a few times a week, spent my summers in the mountains, started a meditation habit, and delved into school in a manner that would have made Margaret Fuller’s father proud. As an added bonus, I was in the best shape of my life between running and discontinuing the habit of getting sloshed and pulling into the Del Taco drive-through through the exit every other night.
Well, “I heard a fly buzz,” but I made it out alive. It’s strange how a single person out of 7 billion can come crashing into your life like a bull in a bong shop and shatter everything you’ve built your foundations on; how you have to try to pick up the pieces that you never realized were so fragile. And of course, the pieces never quite fit back together in the same way. Yet it seems this is a good thing. There are worse things to lose than one’s ego. I’m still not entirely over the chain of events that led to the implosion of a relationship I feebly hoped would last forever (or at least until I met a six foot, dark haired Yale graduate that has a penchant for giving foot rubs), but I have undoubtedly taken a few tidbits away from the experience.
Emerson wrote, “The soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives the existence of truth and right and calms itself with knowing that all things go well.” It isn’t the bumps in the road that define me. The entire highway and how I react to trials determine the outcome of my life narrative. A painless life is inertia, and inertia is not worth my time. Fortunately, every time I have a lesson to learn, I am given a relationship to teach it. This particular relationship showed me how to break myself open to see the depths of the darkness inside me, but it also taught me to turn that darkness back into light. When confronted with hardship, we can internalize pain, and paint it on the world around us, we can shut ourselves off from existence and hoard our love for no one, or we can take our pain and turn it into something more beautiful than we could have imagined existed before we experienced the it. Now I understand that unbroken silence is diseased existence. Comfortable complacency is not love. My soul definitely needed some raising “over passion.” Most importantly though, I needed to love myself before I could be loved by someone else.
In a great flash of insight that probably should have come 12 months earlier, I realized how my great aunt Tabitha’s tabby cat must have felt when it fell out of that jumbo jet over Malibu last summer: I may have fallen off the stage that night, but I accomplished notoriety and a roaring round of applause among the crowd when I somersaulted and landed on my feet. I may be young, but I still have only so many birthday cakes left to eat and it would be an awful waste of time crying at my own party because that one person in 7 billion doesn’t love me in the way so many others will and already do. Now that I can love myself, love has found me. I continue to create my own reality and project my own destiny. My future has been inside me all along; never in someone else.
It seemed as though we would always have those cherished nights of reading Leaves of Grass atop his starlit roof, making last second decisions to drive to a ghost town or bordering state, or stumbling beneath Fremont’s neon signs (signs that seemed to glow only for the sake of lost nostalgia and illuminating our transgressions). As we walked through the casinos, we’d pass old women hooked up to respirators, still puffing away at cigarettes. We could hardly hear ourselves over the “clank, clank, clank” of coins against metal as we attempted to impress each other with our knowledge of Melville’s Moby Dick (which I had of course read at a record pace so that I could hold his attention that much longer). I truly thought these divine summer nights would never end, until they did in September, when autumn started.
From the casinos, we would quickly make our way to our favorite bars. If we made it to the last bar on our usual list, we knew we were in trouble. It was a cowboy themed biker bar where the beer was cheap and the photo-booth always ended in a laugh. We would play pool and shout over the dancing cowgirls as they screamed into megaphones to mock the patrons, asked girls to dance on the bar, and patronized the other customers if they didn’t buy the ladies drinks. Needless to say, I danced on that bar…on more than one occasion. This was a superb setting in which to drink until sloppy enough to feign ignorance to the fact that we were about to make love.
There’s really nothing quite like getting two self-deprecating, manic-depressive existentialists together in the same bed. It usually started like a race to the finish line and ended with one of us dribbling out some incoherent comment about how the climax is just as meaningless or meaningful as the foreplay. This helped to extinguish our post-coital drop in serotonin and prolactin levels, but really put a damper on the whole sex bit. Of course, whenever I did that with someone who wasn’t in a similar state of mind, I typically woke up the next morning with an empty bed and a vague recollection of the person I had been with the night before darting out the door after tripping over my waist high pile of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton compendiums.
It took me so long to figure out what was going on, I missed an entire season of Doctor Who as I twittered half of my time away with him and the other half making excuses for why he always called me “Rachel” in the middle of sex. I would have occasional moments of clarity, but they usually ended with me getting a 40 of Pabst into my system and forgetting what I was thinking about ten minutes prior. Five beers, two shots and a pack of cigarettes later and I would wake up the next morning in bed with him (and occasionally someone I had thought was him the night before). My friends all pointed out the warning signs, but my oxytocin levels, unconscious desire to create offspring, self-doubt, and deep seated adoration for anyone who quoted Allen Ginsberg in inappropriate settings wouldn’t allow room for any kind of rational thinking.
After approximately one year of frantically attempting to win over his affection, the thin foundation that held up my play pretend kingdom by the sea was nevermore after a surreal night out on the town. As I sat back and listened to him describe all the little things that made his ex-lover the perfectly consistency of frosting on his cupcake, I discovered what it was like to be a rebound (and apparently a foul frosting). Picture this: you throw on your favorite Spice Girls album and are dancing and singing in the shower with your eyes closed, but then open your eyes to realize that you aren’t in the shower at all. Instead of a shower, you find you’re in a circus where you’re the main act, your shower curtain is the audience, and the sound of water falling their guffaws. I don’t take humiliation or heartbreak well, so I of course tried to retreat behind the curtain, but ended up falling off the stage because I'd (once again) had too many tequila shots. Every time this happens, I end up finding myself in some sort of quantum leap accelerator that only leads to my bathroom floor. It’s difficult to not laugh yourself into nihilistic mania when you take a step back from the absurdity of such situations. My friends would always look at me sleepwalking through work the next day and say, “Jane, you’re killing yourself. Slow down, man.” My response was typically along the lines of, “Sure I’m killing myself, but at least I’m not doing it all at once!” I found this hilarious, but they were always embarrassing me by jumping out behind the supply shelves; trying to throw a straitjacket over my chai-encrusted apron. Fortunately I played a lot of League of Legends at the time, so I found it fairly unproblematic to escape these superfluous ambushes.
In attempt to heal and find peace, I took to the woods, took up self-subsistent farming, bathed myself in bogs, and ate a woodchuck for good measure. When this didn’t work and the dejection finally waned, a fury rivaling Howard Beale’s surfaced like The Elder Things emerging from the Mountains of Madness. Unsure of what to do with such a high volume of pent up rage in a 100 pound body, I began running ten miles a day with the melodies of great composers like the vegan hardcore artists Cattle Decapitation to accompany me. (Yes, this band actually exists. I saw them on a date with another guy in case you were wondering. But that is a story for another day.) I would then head home to fanatically paint six foot oil portrayals of Dante’s Inferno. These portraits sold for several hundred a piece when I left town for a liberal arts college full of yuppie intellectuals trying to impress their own sadistic companions.
Okay, so maybe I didn’t do anything quite so dramatic, but I did begin putting time into art and writing again, hit the gym a few times a week, spent my summers in the mountains, started a meditation habit, and delved into school in a manner that would have made Margaret Fuller’s father proud. As an added bonus, I was in the best shape of my life between running and discontinuing the habit of getting sloshed and pulling into the Del Taco drive-through through the exit every other night.
Well, “I heard a fly buzz,” but I made it out alive. It’s strange how a single person out of 7 billion can come crashing into your life like a bull in a bong shop and shatter everything you’ve built your foundations on; how you have to try to pick up the pieces that you never realized were so fragile. And of course, the pieces never quite fit back together in the same way. Yet it seems this is a good thing. There are worse things to lose than one’s ego. I’m still not entirely over the chain of events that led to the implosion of a relationship I feebly hoped would last forever (or at least until I met a six foot, dark haired Yale graduate that has a penchant for giving foot rubs), but I have undoubtedly taken a few tidbits away from the experience.
Emerson wrote, “The soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives the existence of truth and right and calms itself with knowing that all things go well.” It isn’t the bumps in the road that define me. The entire highway and how I react to trials determine the outcome of my life narrative. A painless life is inertia, and inertia is not worth my time. Fortunately, every time I have a lesson to learn, I am given a relationship to teach it. This particular relationship showed me how to break myself open to see the depths of the darkness inside me, but it also taught me to turn that darkness back into light. When confronted with hardship, we can internalize pain, and paint it on the world around us, we can shut ourselves off from existence and hoard our love for no one, or we can take our pain and turn it into something more beautiful than we could have imagined existed before we experienced the it. Now I understand that unbroken silence is diseased existence. Comfortable complacency is not love. My soul definitely needed some raising “over passion.” Most importantly though, I needed to love myself before I could be loved by someone else.
In a great flash of insight that probably should have come 12 months earlier, I realized how my great aunt Tabitha’s tabby cat must have felt when it fell out of that jumbo jet over Malibu last summer: I may have fallen off the stage that night, but I accomplished notoriety and a roaring round of applause among the crowd when I somersaulted and landed on my feet. I may be young, but I still have only so many birthday cakes left to eat and it would be an awful waste of time crying at my own party because that one person in 7 billion doesn’t love me in the way so many others will and already do. Now that I can love myself, love has found me. I continue to create my own reality and project my own destiny. My future has been inside me all along; never in someone else.