The Existential Crisis that Wasn't

This morning I decided that I would have an existential crisis.  So I researched it on-line and then I changed my mind.  It seemed too painful a thing.

Too painful and even selfish to get stuck in a loop of Bawah! My life has no meaning.  I've wasted so much time.  I better go running off to therapy.  Poor little insignificant me.

I read the news while I was investigating existential crises.  Two toddlers-- one in Ohio and the other in Massachusetts-- were body-slammed into permanent brain damaged existence.  One pioneer of treatment for the hopeless among the brain-injured died.  His obit says he was well-educated, accomplished, upbeat, and confident.  A few of the men accused of the gang rape in India that made the mainstream news are crying because the cops beat on them a bit.  An existential crisis is a luxury.  Dead people and toddlers in states of permanently altered consciousness don't get to have one of those.  Poor folks don't have the luxury of bitching that their H.M.O.s cover "only" six sessions of therapy at a time.

I read Sartre in college for kicks along with Thomas A. Merton.  Strange choice of reading material to be carting around campus.  I thought I was being defiant with a touch of philosophy.  I didn't really know what either term meant.  The things I was invested in never really panned out.

After many years of working too hard for not enough, it was scraped away by one motor vehicle accident.  After many years of working too hard for not enough, the insurance companies began fighting over who would pay for my brain damage treatment.  After many years of working too hard for not enough, I discovered that the human servitude agency that I had worked for-- a place that offered treatment to the brain-injured-- had no clue what to do with me.  They called me-- no, actually it was one person, a Mz. Blackhead-- at the most inopportune moments.  I was sleeping twenty two hours a day, waking up to eat and drink a pot of coffee.  Mz. Blackhead never called me when I was awake.  This pissed me off.  She sent me a paper to fill out for their Safety Committee.  I remember one of the questions: How could this accident have been avoided?  I scrawled on it, Shoot all the pot smokers? and sent it back.  The man who caused my car to go careening into a house claimed he had smoked "one joint" before getting into his car "for the first time evah."  Must have been some weed.

Some collection agency dude called me.  This was after a year and a half of me refusing to pay my co-pay for the emergency room bill.  The emergency room that took x-rays of my ribs and my back.  But forgot that I had banged my head repeatedly on the ceiling of the car and whipped it back and forth quite a bit.  Forgot to tell me that I might have a concussion, never mind brain damage.  Some hospital person had called me repeatedly.  I kept telling her, "You want to see that fifty bucks, here is my lawyer's phone number.  I am not paying it."

So by time the collection agency dude got to me, I was ready to fight some more.  "Do you understand that this bill is your responsibility?" the guy asked me.  "This bill is the responsibility of the guy who did this to me."  I was getting testy.  "Are you working?" he pried.  Had he listened to anything I had told him? "NO, I'M NOT WORKING.  I HAVE A BRAIN INJURY FROM THIS CAR ACCIDENT."  Mate looked up from the television in time to hear me scream the f-bomb+you into the phone.  I hung up noisily.  Not having had enough, I used caller i.d. to redial and screamed the f-bomb+you again into the phone and slammed the receiver down.  The house shook. 

Mate should have been used to these outbursts by now.  I had become a world-class curser.  Oh, I was pretty good at it before.  But now I excelled.  Additionally, I was an encyclopedia of absolutely filthy jokes.  Including the one I had told his ancient Englishwoman mother over dinner at an elegant restaurant one night.  Mate was not used to it.  Mate was shaken.  Mate panicked.

Mate confiscated the phone and called the collection agency dude back.  "sapphoq is not feeling well," was muttered apologetically.  "Cripes," I yelled.  "F-bomb.  F-bomb.  F-bomb.  Dude is from a collection agency.  Why the hell are you being nice to him?"  The next day, my lawyer added, "talking to the collection agency on the phone" to the list of things I was not to do.  The list also included, "filling out forms for your last place of employment."

I had to convince the woman from my last place of employment that she too should go through my lawyer for anything.  "We aren't allowed--" she tried feebly to explain.  "I'm instructing you to talk to my attorney," I carefully explained to Mz. Blackhead.  That wasn't her name but it was what I called her.  Her last name sounded like "Blackhead" to my addled brain.  Later on, a hearing eval at the brain injury hospital would reveal that I was on the borderline range of needing a hearing aid for my left ear.  A couple years later, the audiologist was unable to find the lesion that the first one found.  And my hearing had improved back to my pre-accident supersonic levels.

I feed the birds in my back yard.  There is a regular crew of juncos and chickadees, a lone fox sparrow, some house finches and a few purple finches that always show up.  This winter, one junco has taken to clutching one particular branch and sunning herself for around three hours every day.  It is always the same branch.  She does not do that when it is cloudy or raining.  Now that's a bird who deserves to have an existential crisis.  What am I doing here?  What is the meaning of branch?  Tree?  Why couldn't I have been born to a more southerly bunch of juncos?  Who is this fox sparrow and why does he hang around with us? 

We aren't exactly rich.  My car is a rust bucket with two more months of life left before the brake lines rust out or the floor drops out.  My brain damage made a huge dent in our financial resources.
Yet I am here, sitting in front of a computer typing a blog entry.  I am sitting in a warm enough house.  We have streets, sidewalks, stores.  If I want something to eat or drink, I merely have to open the refrigerator or reach for a snack out of the snack basket.  The water that comes out of the faucet is potable.  I buy my clothes from thrift shops by choice because the stiffness of new bothers me.  No one has gang-raped me today.  I am not dead in a morgue in Indonesia or on life support in Ohio or Massachusetts.  I am not living in the Rust Belt and having to confront the aftermath of a Friday night that went horrible wrong.  I don't get off on other peoples' pain.  This is not a hideous gratitude list, counting my "blessings" and feeling good because there is "always someone worse off than I am."  This is an acknowledgement.

An existential crisis is a luxury.  Bullshit.  Let the upper crust and the worried well wallow in it if they wish to.  I don't have the time.
I make plans to go to Steubenville.

sapphoq healing t.b.i.