The Blind

If there were ever a blind man forced to live in my house, they'd find injury and humiliation.  There are steps where there shouldn't be, furniture turned on end, and clutter everywhere.  It's amazing how inhospitable it is.  I don't think I could make it moreso if I set out to.

Sometimes I hear the voices of the other men that live in my house.  They're blurred, smashed voices, twisted and cracking voices that reveal the shattered hearts of the men they belong to.  They can't articulate much, other than grunted needs and wants.  Most of the time, they want a cigarette, but occasionally they'll throw a curveball and try to ask for a lightbulb or something.  That sort of thing isn't easy or as small a thing as it should be.  It takes ages, if not minutes, and really I don't carry lightbulbs around with me so it's all for naught.  

Every time they want my attention I feel a dread.  Whatever it is, it won't be easy.  They're taxing, no matter what.  Still, I brace myself and try to cover up my body language so that I won't flail about with rage.  Even when I go to bed, my poor roommate always wants to listen to the same freaking CD, the latest Radiohead album.  I'm too disheartened to tell him no, because this small imposition is actually a gift in that it doesn't steal all the love from my heart.  I can still fall asleep.  It's just surreal and not what I want to think about.

When I overhear them trying to resolve some irrelevant dispute, or find whatever they've decided they need, whatever it is about, at best I'm amused.  Then I feel guilty for being amused at what feels like men as animals trying to inaptly to live as men.  Really, though, it takes many breaths and a period of not being disturbed to recover from the tide of seething rage when they catch me out unawares.  

I love expressions.  Sometimes the old adages annoy me, though, and I want to slap the shit out of their authors and do worse to their parroters.  They mock me, and sometimes it's just disgusting.  To wit, "No rest for the wicked."  That particular expression, it would appear, is from Isaiah 57:20 YLT, "And the wicked 'are' as the driven out sea, For to rest it is not able, And its waters cast out filth and mire."  I would like to slap Isaiah or his writer.  I confess.

We're all wicked one day or another, in one way or another.  That much I know.  So often I have to remind people that I'm wrong at least once a day, and I'm not spending the effort to inform them but to inform them that I know myself.  There is a karmic debt where I spent my time and soul to ends that frustrated others, and surely I'm paying it off.  Once I went into a boulangerie and asked them for a cup of flour.  This was in France.

My French is bad enough, and it was a bizarre request.  I didn't have any neighbors, so they seemed an obvious choice.  I figured out the word for flour was "farine" or something that sounds like it, which made sense because of the cereal "farina".    The girl ended up just wanting me to go away, but because I didn't understand much and pretended like I didn't understand what I didn't want to hear... and because I was so animated about it all I think she just gave me a bag of flour.  I've been similarly simpleminded and selfishly focused on one appetite or another in much less savory circumstances than a desperate need for flour.  

Is that what this is about?  It's hard for me to live life thinking that it's all just randomness and the result in the energy world of our little twists and curls of effort and mistaking.  As such I ascribe sometimes more meaning than should lie in something.  What is worse, I look for meaning and context to make sense of life when it hurts and seems to hurt for no reason.  I can endure pain so long as I understand why.  When that becomes obfuscated I am overwhelmed with anger.

The men I live with work through their dramas with the greatest unease.  I endure my own humiliating days and enjoy the taunting of their shared lifes.    My bed isn't my own, and I have a growing fear that I'm sharing it with very small creatures, bedbugs.  When I wake up I have mysterious bites, too small to be from any of my roommates and far too itchy.  I am a hypochondriac, but I think I'm going insane.  I should sigh though, and remind myself that I've been here before.