July 21-27 Hell is a broken down air conditioner

Monday July 21st
Went to the heart clinic today, surprise of surprises I've lost 5 pounds and even more astonishing is that my sodium levels were right where they should be (with all the cheap food I've been eating.)?!? Afterward I bought a head of red cabbage, shredded lettuce and carrots and I'm planning to eat nothing but salads for a week.

I'm getting more and more paranoid,edgy and impatient. My shoulders and face are beginning to spontaneously bleed again (from nerves) and the night sweats have come back.

I keep telling myself things have to get better.

...Even though I've stopped believing that long ago. Like a tease holding a piece of candy just outside the reach of a toddler's hand, fate waits for me to reach for hope, and laughs as it's pulled away when I almost have it in my grasp... I've stopped reaching for it.

11:04PM... I think I just figured out why losing my car is hitting me so hard. When I'm in that car-I'm free, the car and I are one, and I'm my old self again. I get into it and the horsepower of the car, the great looks of that car, the freedom of that car embodies me the way I was in my carefree days before the attack. When I didn't have a care in the world, and I had the money, the looks, the talent, and the business savvy to take on the world.

That's all gone now and I feel like I'll never-ever get it back. The acceleration makes up for my mangled and beaten leg. The "Inferno Red" paint and the styling represent the body I once had that turned heads and earned compliments wherever I went. The envious stares of other drivers at that beautiful red convertible with the top down represented the confidence and the drive I once had, but now I've lost it. I think that if I lose that car, that part of me (the best part of me) will be lost with it.

Family members that once discarded me years ago as a pervert or worse, never even saw the best years of my life, and if I told them about them, they wouldn't believe me. Sometimes I have trouble believing it myself. Judge Judy says on the subject of lying, that if you tell the truth, you don't have to have a good memory. My problem is I don't remember half the lies I've told to an already judgmental and dismissive family to cover what my real life was actually like.

On my quarterly visits to San Diego, I would've loved to visit my brother at the naval base, just to see his astonishment at what a year's worth of gym training and a few unnamed and unmentioned injections did. Can you imagine going within half a mile of your brother and knowing you weren't welcome to visit? Unfortunately that muscled body didn't come with a warning label that said that if I didn't become a slave to it, it'd turn into a grotesque lump of blubber in revenge...

I shake my head that they never questioned where it came from when I'd send a thousand here or a thousand there at the mere hint that they needed it, or sent lavish Christmas and birthday gifts. Oh I'd hint at it every once in a while with photos of the penthouse, or the customized British Sports cars, and luxury convertibles, but they didn't catch on or wonder. They'd discard the evidence of their own eyes and then shake their heads and turn their backs... poor Jet is making up his ridiculous stories again... Now I regret being so camera shy in those days, preferring to be on the other side of the shutter of that Nikon I'd carry with me wherever I went.

The very thought that I'd have to prove it to them, is telling of what they think of me.

I don't think I can deal with that anymore, or the loss of my beloved car; and as the days dwindle down to a precious few and I have to give that car back and know that it (like my pride)is going to be sold at some auto auction for a fraction of its value... I don't think I can bear to think about it... and it scares me to think that... God, I'd sell my soul if I could find the strength to cry-to experience that grief and the release it'd bring.

Everything that once said I was here on this earth is disappearing right before my eyes. Two houses where I grew up (one across from the Air Force base, the other across the parkway from the airport where I got my nick name) have been torn down decades ago. The airport where my mother worked as a waitress in the coffee shop, where I playfully ran freely up and down the halls day in and day out, and spent hours watching the planes and then jets take off and land has been torn down too.

The Moon High School class ring that never left my finger for as long as I can remember was lost uncountable months ago; My brain so numbed by this ordeal and by Cymbalta that I don't even mourn its loss. It's like if I look behind me, I see a wave of erasers trying to engulf me, getting ever closer, and someday soon they'll catch up to me, and like some nondescript factory worker who lived in the 1890s, the only evidence that I was here will be some weathered tombstone that no one could read, even if they could figure out who I was... and I'll be as nonexistant as I was before I was born, in limbo.

And what of my art? The pieces that started my career, were beautiful portraits of civil leaders and common folk, and landscapes of homes long gone on the walls of two non-descript McDonald's. Both of which have been torn down and replaced, leaving no evidence that they'd ever existed there, like Illustrations of obsolete refrigerator compressors and VCR components for long-forgotten appliances that also are long discarded, along with the repair manuals that serviced them. Those line drawings were the bread and butter of an unnoteworthy art career.

The movies I did the camera work on, have all been re-edited and renamed, so that the new owners wouldn't have to pay me royalties for them. Like a deer in oncoming headlights, I see that wave of erasers catching up to me, careening headlong at me and I feel nothing... I'm too numb from everything I've lived through to feel anything... everything that I once was has almost all ceased to exist...

My writing at BlogCritics still exists, telling people I was here... but so do the snide remarks, derogatory and cutting, that my loyal readers also see that were left by those who would discredit my point of view, but never write articles of their own so others just as ignorant can do the same to them.

I can't sleep tonight because of the heat
I can't sleep because of the fear of nightmares
I can't sleep because of the flashbacks.

I'll stay awake until I fall asleep finally from exhaustion...
...then I'll wake up screaming... again.


Tuesday July 22nd-Heaven is a quickly repaired air conditioner.
All my central a/c stuff is on the roof and I was awakened to the sound of footsteps on my ceiling... Santa Clause? The air coming out of those vents is almost as good as an orgasm... I said almost!

We had one hell of a storm at 4 this morning. I woke to the sound of cannons and to Mischief poking my face with her declawed paws. I swear she looked like she'd just pleaded, "I'm scared-hide me!" You know it's bad when bright light flashes through closed window blinds. With all the office buildings around here equiped with lightning rods on their roofs, it isn't any wonder that storms are an event around here.

I was going to delete all of yesterdays ramblings, but then it wouldn't be an honest blog. I discovered this morning I'd missed my dosage of Cymbalts... oy

Thursday July 24th Dr. Heart cleared me for surgery yesterday, GB called this morning to see if I went to his office and if I got clearance. I guess I'll make a bunch of phone calls on Monday

Saturday July 26th The bulk of the last couple of days have been spent reorganizing my web pages, not much else, except to go out and drive around and puck up supplies here and there. In the last two days my vision has clouded and I felt like I was going to faint. It scared the hell out of me.

Sunday July 27th I have a big-screen TV-the tube type that weighs a ton. It's a 42 inch Sony that I bought in 1996. It's got 5.1 surround sound. It sits in a custom shelving unit about five feet off the floor over my 80 gallon aquarium.

Tonight Mischief decided to play with all the speaker cords back behind it. Two speaker lines got crossed from their push-in connections and blew something out, and I had to rush and find the power cord as the smell of wire insulation smoke billowed out. It wouldn't turn back on for a while, I just tried it, picture but no sound.

Just great-just fucking great. It's built into the custom shelving unit, and too high and heavy to get out. Even if I could, I can't afford to repair it, or buy a new one-since the HDTVs are all hundreds to thousands of dollars... even if it was only $50 I'd have to cust back $50 worth of food or prescriptions.

I've just lost a major source of entertainment and news.

I can't take much more of this.

God-why won't you stop torturing me?