Money's Worth

Somewhere in the night, everything unravels.  In the wee hours, I am terrified.  At dawn, I'm exhausted.  By eight, I am patching the old psyche back together again as best I can for another working day.

Sometimes I am asked out for the evening.  Mostly I don't go.  The more I sequester myself, the more I fall apart.  I am not as brave as I used to be.

But kids have as much fun as ever.  They are enthusiastic and beautiful and just as brilliant and dumb as everyone else has been, as brilliant and dumb as we have made them.  They still like the world.  They want to go into it.  And like everyone else, the things they desire most will undo them.

Not everyone is beautiful and brilliant, of course.  Not all of them are having fun.  They are mostly imagined (or live in the big houses of the rich who surround me).

The cat is sad because recently I find her need for attention irritating.  The more I shun her, the more she comes around, and the more irritated I become.  This, I'm afraid, is the closest thing to an emotional life I have.

Last night or early this morning while I was lying in the cold dark thinking/dreaming, it occurred to me that I would probably be happier if I quit trying to make things.  It is maddening and it skews my vision.  I am making things that don't exist, perfecting the frame, the color, the light.  I try to find new ways to do it.  It costs me money that I could be using to have someone take care of me.  I would no longer have to live between anxiety and depression.  I wouldn't need to feel the failing.

I dreamed/thought about a colleague just a couple years older than I whose health has failed him.  He has been on family medical leave all year.  There are many things that went wrong all of the sudden.  Now he spends his time in doctors' offices.  His thoughts are of survival.  He and his wife are both ill.  They have two grandchildren, one just born.  This is what they have.

I want to write something happier than this, something less personal.  I may stop posting on days like these.  There is no beauty, no enlightenment.

Hemingway had it right most of the time when he talked about "the world."  It is a fine place, and if you are careful, you can get your money's worth.