Deludia

More darkness than light

I didn’t wake up until 10 o’clock this morning. I went to bed at a bit after 2 am, but only after sleeping on and off for most of the day. I’ve got some kind of bug in my chest again; it’s harder to breathe and I’m tired all the time. I’ve used my albuterol in hopes f it helping me, but I still feel heavy in the chest. I’m thinking about just going back to bed and trying to sleep again. There’s nothing to stay awake for.

Life is becoming a view outside a train window. Everything is speeding by with little stroboscopic moments that sit static and viewable for a second, before being whisked away by time. My friend Bud is coming over sometime today. He’s going to fix my wife’s car. My step-daughter ripped backwards out of the garage in her big-ass Suburban and smacked the little Chevy Cavalier hard enough to put a hole in the radiator, crimp up the hood, and bend the fenders around the headlights giving the car an oriental sloe-eyed look. My fine Ford Taurus is the only car now. Actually, I guess it belongs to the wife now; I just pay for it and wish I was well enough to drive the damn thing. Not like I enjoy it or anything. The Taurus is the epitome of basic transportation with not much more going for it than it usually starts and takes us where we want to go. I got ripped off on that car just as much as life. It was sold to me as a little driven corporate lease return. Come to find out it was a rental car at SeaTac Airport before I bought it. So it suffered a very difficult 30,000 miles before I got it. Now that I have 32,000 miles on it, it wants new tires, brakes, exhaust, engine and transmission work. There’s that caveat emptor thing at work again. All caveat emptor has done is sour me even more about my fellow Americans and their attitudes. No wonder the world hates us so; we’re dishonesty and ego wrapped up in one convenient package.

My next doctor appointment isn’t until next month. The doctors can’t do anything more for me, so they only want to see me every 30 days or so to refill my pain medications. I don’t even have a weekly trip to the VA to look forward to. I just keep sliding farther and father into this tiny corner that defines my life nowadays.

So much sleep is disorienting me. I’m not sure whether it’s day or night. I look out the window at the gray sky and don’t know if it’s dawn or dusk. Television looks the same all day and night, so that’s no help. Only in the wee hours when Paid Programming takes over the vast wasteland of channels can I tell that it’s nighttime. I was looking forward to having new glasses and a mobility scooter to start off the new month. But the VA hosed my glasses up and it will take another three months or so to send them back through the system to be made right. So much for vision. My mobility char was supposed to be delivered after three weeks. It’s been five. Doctors, Physical Therapy, Optometry; all of the VA has pretty much written me off.