I'm Ready For My Breakdown,Mr. DeMille

Shitty days. You know; really shitty days. You wake up just enough to realize you're waking up, and all you want to do is not wake up. You dread what reality has in store for you, and there's more that you can't even imagine about to explode like a burning bag of mysterious contents sitting on your front porch. If you wake up, you're gonna hafta stamp out that fire.

"Who's there? Is that burning poo I smell?"

This is not depression in the classical sense, because there are big piles of shit I have to deal with; not so smelly, but very unhappy things. But (perhaps luckily; I don' t know), each of these bureaucratic things takes days or weeks to take place, so the process feels viscous and remedial. I keep thinking that these people that I'm talking to deal with this stuff every day. But they don't need to possess the death like the survivors do, it is merely there to be processed from papers into computers.

We're coming into the last weeks of work on the chamber directory, and nothing has gelled, although it looks as though it will come together nicely. At this point, I usually start to wish that some process had happened in a different order, but this year, the fact that it happened at all is fortuitous. I really hate working on getting all the advertisers to send in their ads, but I've finally got a layout that will be cohesive in about a week. Just getting all the elements into a 96-page book is time-consuming. The one thing I have to say, it gives me something to look forward to, as does work on the poet's website. That job is on hold, as she is dealing with family crisis at the moment, as well.

But I'm not about to crumble. It's a wimpy alternative, but the world has become too cruel to rely on the kindness of corporate entities to understand your plight: if you don't do the paperwork, you perish. Happily, just enough of it is doable online, that it almost makes it like a video game.

In the real world, I am getting things done slowly, but that is how they like it. On Monday, I got together with a probate attorney to file a petition to waive probate, since there was no will, yet there are no relatives alive to contest my inheritance as his spouse. It's a simple procedure, so it should only take four to eight weeks and $2,000.

Also, I called Social Security and got the voice maze machine; you know, the one that has you speak all your replies and then says, "I'm sorry, would you repeat that?" On the first try, after answering all the questions quite clearly, speaking in clipped, crisp tones, he told me the waiting queue was full, and I should call back later.

This is a technique I use, which works about half the time: I called back immediately and the call slipped through. Even better, once you've escaped the maze, you can give them your phone number, and they will call you back when you get to the front of the line. It took about an hour, but finally Connie called. We set up an appointment at my local office for three weeks from now (the earliest available) to deal with the Social Security and Medicare issues.

The medical bills. The tiny ones are $200-$500. The big ones are $2,000-$4,000. They're from labs and ambulance services and emergency room doctors and anesthesiologists, and the two hospitals. And it doesn't help that we're in the choose-your-Medicare-provider season, as many of those ads masquerade in official-looking envelopes with things like "your immediate attention" and "urgent notice" stamped on them: you know it's a come-on, but you've got to check to make sure it's junk, just in case: everything has the potential these days of being not what it seems.

So I'm putting the medical bills on hold, unless I know they've already charged Medicare and my obligation is a copay.

After a short break from going through Steve's stuff, I have the goal of getting the bedroom cleared out. The closet and the dresser are both done, but there are still a couple boxes I haven't gone through, and a lot of books I want to dump (his mom must have been a fan of those Reader's Digest condensed classics with cheap leather binding and foil-stamped details, because they're everywhere.)

Since I've sold my car to friend Doug, I'm slowly moving everything down into the now-roomy garage (well, not moving slowly, but doing it bits at a time) and will stage the final dispensation of Steve's material artifacts from there. In the end, I shall have a bit more space inside.

I've been going out to dinner with Jessie on Thursday evenings, and that helps a lot. Conversation and getting out of the house. Now's the time to find a job, so I have somewhere to go and people to deal with on a daily basis. Working at home can give you cabin fever, as I am well aware.

Kittie and David will be coming down a week from today to spend another weekend, and I will be going up to Grover Beach for the Thanksgiving weekend. I still haven't decided how I'm going to deal with Christmas this year. Last year we left in in the boxes because we spent the week in Eureka. God, that seems like a decade ago.

Einstein was right: time and space are relative.