Don't do as Hunter does.
Yeah, this merry-go-round sucks, but the alternatives are usually worse.
I'm sort-of-avoiding my own doctor at the moment, but I'm certain he and my wife will be conspiring soon to reel me in if I don't make the appointment myself.
Last night I had the stupid locker dream again. I can't push it out of my head. Yep, OCD.
You see, once upon a time, for a little over five years, I had this locker in a rarely used hallway in the old building of the university English department, the last five years of the nine it took me to graduate. Basically that locker and my university P.O. box were my permanent address, my anchor in a world of chaos, most especially whenever I was homeless, sleeping in empty apartments, a crazy Vietnam war vet's garden shed, or my car and such.
By the time I was forced to graduate I was doing well enough and visiting my locker less and less. (The Dean had told me flat out "I think you should go to graduate school, Hunter, BUT NOT HERE!" and he'd pencil whipped me through the final hurdles of graduation requirements and written me a nice letter of recommendation as well.)
I soon had a job in another city, then another job where I met my wife, and I never went back to that locker, which contained some dirty laundry, food of questionable origins, a few books, football field lengths of computer printouts on sixteen inch green-and-white fan-fold paper, and a flaky nine track computer tape.
My rational self tells me the janitorial staff eventually cut my lock off, exclaimed EEEEEEUUUUUUWWWW!, put on their disposable rubber gloves and threw everything in the trash. End of story.
My paranoid self says the contents of the locker were handed over to some mysterious government agency, probably the one my twisted girlfriend of the time had sold my work to. The selling my work part is painful, but that's not why we broke up, me jumping out of her moving car, my blood, skin, and tears smeared upon the streets of Berkeley.
When my kids were looking at colleges and universities we visited my alma mater and I was compelled to visit my old locker. My lock was long gone and the locker was empty as were most of the lockers in that abandoned hallway. And last I visited the lockers were all gone.
This isn't a "look at me!" post. I find it helpful to tell my stories. Otherwise I suffer a world where nothing makes sense and I become indifferent about the value of my own existence.
Stories are good.
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