Trouble (this is a long one)

I have completely stopped editing my words these days. When you stop thinking you are writing to anyone then maybe that’s what happens. Most people think they are in some game, but for me the game has utterly disappeared. Now if there’s a game it’s only the one I play with myself, so I’ll make up my own rules since shit I might as well. Rule number one is there are no rules. I dispense with the whole notion. It’s like have you ever read some article that says, “Three cups of coffee a day is the maximum if you want to be healthy. Don’t exceed this amount of caffeine.” It’s a thought right? Whoever said it thought or imagined that they saw some evidence that it was true, but when nothing is true it only begs the question, “True for who?” We think we can make blanket statements that encompass the human form as if they were all the same, having the exact same capacity for whatever we are talking about but can we? I’ve heard there are people living up to over a hundred years old in certain areas that smoke like chimneys and have no teeth. Smoking and toothlessness therefore has absolutely no deleterious effects on them whatsoever. Probably if they had to quit this smoking habit, they’d die sooner rather than later, maybe within a week. The trick is they live in places where everyone smokes and no one knows it’s called bad so it isn’t. Shit, if I wanted to make up some scale of bad versus good, smoking and anything caffeinated would be way down at the bottom of my list and that slice of bacon would be on top. You think that’s impossible I know as if there are some things that are just one way, but I’d say think again. That’s all I’m really saying, think again, and then maybe, again and again. On that note, I need another cup of coffee to start this day. The weather is rain. I need to go out and find out why the check engine light is lit on my car and we need groceries. It’s one of those days. Anyone who says that all moments are sublime isn’t actually living a life. A real life these days is one that needs coffee, one cup after another. I’d say it’s easier to go with the times, and the times now are don’t stop moving. There is much more to be done in a day and those who wait, wait for nothing.

So I drove my car to an auto parts store and had them run the computer to see what the error was. They gave me the code and it didn’t look good, it may be something major the guy insinuated. I instantly felt crushed, like a building had just fallen over me or I was stuck in the middle of a tornado with no way out. Interestingly enough, earlier in the day my son drove the car to the dealership for an oil change. My initial contract gave me the first three changes for free so that’s how he went there. In my ignorance, I just figured that they would tell me what was causing the warning light issue but I would be wrong. As it turns out, to instigate any investigation whatsoever required a payment of $250. I would get it back as it would go towards the repair assuming they found something to repair, otherwise it was thanks for the cash. I actually called to complain because I was like, “You know what? Fuck it, why not, it’s my life, I have every right to object.” I didn’t feel at all like I was resisting the situation, just having a bit of fun with greedy unsavory elements for a change. Granted, I usually steer clear of this type of interaction but figured maybe it’s good to change it up sometimes, maybe give them a run for their money as the saying goes. The voices I talked to were absurd. One of them told me, “Well, the technician’s need to be paid.” I was like, “Sure, but why should I pay them?” Of course, it takes all of three minutes to plug the machine into the computer, it’s hardly an all day type of job but they weren’t budging so I wrote the company a seething review and posted it on two platforms. While I was doing so I noticed there were more than a few one star reviews, most of them cited greed and deception with their dealings.

Hmmn, I wondered, “Was I just dreaming this all up?” I knew I was even when it felt so real. Even so my fear that the car was going to break down was high up in my mind as we made our way to the store after my son got back with the car. “How would I deal with this if it did?” I wondered some more. I felt highly inadequate to the whole situation. A costly repair might break my entire financial situation since it has remained consistently unstable throughout this whole journey. I’m a poor person my mind tells me just another worker, a cog in a wheel that never stops spinning. The money comes in and goes right back out. The economy sucks the average person dry, more so when the prices go up. The room for error gets ever more dire it seems. Surely, I thought, I am making this all up. I know this can not be real because I know nothing is, and yet, my body seemed to believe it was. My anxiety went haywire. To make matters worse, when we arrived at the first store I looked into the box between the two front seats to retrieve my wallet which I always keep in there and found out, it wasn’t there. My son had taken it out as a precaution while the oil change was going on and forgot to put it back, so yeah, whatever access to money I had was at home. I found two ten dollar bills that I haphazardly threw in there some time back and pulled those out, and I had my phone which had my apple pay. A balance of $70 was on there. We went in the store and got some stuff with that but my mood by then had gone from bad to worse. I could barely look at my daughter. I thought I might actually be truly falling apart for once. Maybe my life was over. This was all just an indication that the worst of my life had maybe yet to begun. “Oh, how had I fooled myself all these years?” I even thought and, “I’m a bigger fool than I thought I was”, it continued.

But I still knew I was just dreaming. That didn’t change matters, in fact, it seemed to make things worse for once. “Why do I dream up this shit?”, I was internally asking myself, and, “Why don’t I do better?” I could at least have some savings to show for all my long years of flipping cards and pushing dice around. There was no answer to that, just an eerie silence ensued, where all I could do was feel my insides turning like a meat grinder round and round. I took the back way home which was another mistake. The rain it turns out had flooded the road that way. I saw a sign that said, “High water” and watched the vehicle some distance in front of me slow down and then it looked as if it might have gotten stuck and it was a big van not even a car. I saw a driveway and turned around right there and went back the way I came. Having to turn back would mean I’d gone almost eight miles out of my way since it was another four to get back to an alternative route that would lead me home. My insides were like fire, scorching with some unnamable despair. Would my car even make it? The fear that I was on very thin ice when it came to my options was very near the surface. After I was back near some sort of populated intersection, I pulled into a gas station since we were getting low. I was already by the pump when I remembered I didn’t have my wallet and exclaimed, “Shit, I have no money with me.” My daughter seemed to look at me suspiciously and she was quiet. I suspected she feared I had really lost my mind this time but that was just a fleeting thought since I knew she loved me and understood these types of episodes since she has more than I ever do. This was actually a first for me in a long time. Things had felt rather smooth lately, like I was okay with how things were going. Whether I was or not was maybe hidden from my view because about now I was thinking more along the lines of my life is completely lost as usual. Am I reliving my twenties, thirties, or forties? Has nothing resolved itself? Have I only imagined this as well? My mind was in a very unusual spiral. I didn’t utter a word all the way home except to say I was going to be forced to get on the freeway and could you help me get over into traffic to my daughter. She said sure she would but there was no traffic, very few cars, nothing I couldn’t handle very easily. The plan forming in my mind was that when I got home I would walk to my room, lock the door, and stay there indefinitely.

I parked the car and instead of locking myself up, I got on my computer and looked up the code with chatgpt. For once, it was actually helpful as it seemed to think that if it was something major the car would have made some sign of distress by now which it hadn’t. It was running perfectly fine. Outside of that little yellow figure of a light, nothing was happening. As a suggestion it said I should have the code cleared just to see if it would pop up again. I thought that was a splendid idea and right off the bat my mood lifted. I went to the kitchen and poured the rest of the coffee out of my french press and into a cup. My youngest son told me he loved me and asked me if I wanted a hug. I did. Then I came to my room again to drink my coffee and my daughter came in with her puppy. I picked up the dog and cuddled it like it was a lifeline to something real. I told the dog, you are the real deal, if I can just stay with you I think I’ll be okay. My daughter chuckled and asked if we were going to go shopping. I said yeah but we have to get this code cleared first. Having some feeling that the car might not be broken after all lifted my spirits immensely. We got some gas first then had the code cleared and when it didn’t come back on right away I was relieved. I thought maybe it was just a sign that the oil change was over due. My son had taken the car in when it told me it was due, but the dealership said it was mistaken, I was too early. My sense of time told me it wasn’t but I let it slide instead. Maybe I shouldn’t have. I felt it in my bones at that time that it was indeed due but instead of listening to my gut, I went with what the guys at the dealership told me. I drove the car uneasily after that as well for some reason. Had my foreboding and unease actually caused all this? How do dreams really work I now started to wonder? How reliable is any information? It can’t be right. It can only be how your mind conceives it is.

I half hoped that the warning dashboard light in the car wouldn’t reappear. If I had only dreamt it perhaps I could un-dream it, but that was a no go. After a lovely night with the children in which I cooked us all dinner, the next day as soon as I started the car to go to my daughters doctor appointment the light reappeared. We called an independent Mercedes repair shop first. They quoted me $200 just to find out the cause, and it wouldn’t go towards the repair so I made an appointment at the dealership for the following week since it was a better deal and they give you a loaner car to drive while they are working on it. It’s possible the malady in question might be covered under the warranty I purchased with the car but I don’t get my hopes up. The Truth is I have no more hopes per se. Hoping for me is a mute activity since things go the way they go and that’s all that’s ever going to transpire. A person’s hope or non hope has nothing to do with it so why trouble yourself with it? Neither I learned is some type of positive thinking ever beneficial. Thinking itself isn’t a manifestation technique, I learned. It’s only what provides the story about what is happening, nothing more. The images we see are perhaps prepackaged so to speak, I’m not really sure. There may be a trillion different scenes and depending on us, on our moods, on our actual actions, this determines which emanation you get caught up in. Given my actual car history, I’m sure I purchased the least likely car to not need repairs and that’s that. I actually as a kid grew up riding around in the backseat of my parents Volkswagen bugs and later a white Mercedes. Now I owned my own white Mercedes, the regularity of the pattern is pretty spot on once you notice how it is. The story I told myself at the time of the purchase was something along the lines that Mercedes being a German car was more likely to be a better one. I took some comfort in some frivolous idea that Germany makes quality products where Americans or other countries do not. Some inherited snobbery with my heritage played a role there since it felt familiar and familiar equals comforting. Comforting means it felt “right” when the notion of “right” versus “wrong” doesn’t even exist. In reality, it was probably a very bad deal all together given what I’ve been paying for it but what can I do? Women are easily fooled into making all sorts of idiotic purchases every single day and I wasn’t above it. There was no God in heaven looking to save me from my preferences or stupid ways. Such is life on planet earth, you either learn her ways or perish by them.

Needless to say, a type of depression fell upon me. I was cooked again I thought. The story of my life hadn’t actually changed at all, it had just taken on different dimensions. When we got back from the appointment, I laid down and took a nap. With a heavy heart, I woke up and got ready to start the work week yet again. A week went by. Someone I worked with died. There was sadness in the air. He was only 42 and gone forever, too soon, perhaps it’s always too soon. Is he sad or just us, those still here, left behind in a hostile world that we didn’t consciously create but fell into by default? Every way to and from work, I paid attention to the car. I would need to notice if it did anything strange, every time half wondering in the back of my mind whether or not I’d make it to my destination, work or home again. Driving home late at night, down dark roads, what would it be like to suddenly find myself stranded here? I hoped I’d never know, and nothing happened. I saw a deer almost every night on the side of the road wanting to cross but waiting until I passed. Don’t run now, I’d think to myself and they just stared, looking at my highlights maybe but who really knows what a deer even is, whether it’s what I think it is or not, perhaps another ethereal image on the screen of life, all things seeking to make an appearance to something, to be seen, but for what? Why does anything need to be seen at all? We think we can know some final answer and never realize that all our answers are pure fantasy. We believe in them and that’s all. They appear as we believe they will. Collective belief as a form of structure to live within, no one, not one, is able to topple what the many say is real. The numbers got us here. And yeah, we are a slave to numbers, all of us, looking at numbers, dialing numbers, counting numbers, a whole world full of numerical equations, endless digits in an endless universe, forever counting, balancing figures against other figures, the balancing act of life, and then death, coming out of nowhere, out of nothing, no warnings, just that’s it, you’re done, the body gets annihilated in time, years pass by like minutes, they say in the end it’s a blink of an eye. So why do we worry so? Maybe the real question is why do we try so hard to hold it all in check, to keep it together with rules, and regulations, more checks, more diagnostics, more numbers, the statistics say, but do they? Do they actually speak or do we only imagine it yet again?

Why do I write all this? No one is reading it so what’s it for? Is it just this small expression expressing, pouring out what is here to pour out? People are putting their writing in AI now. I’ve tried it myself. It always tells me, yeah, this is good but it’s repetitive. You’ll have more impact if you just state your case once and cut the rambling. Without putting this paragraph in I’ll show you what it tells me. Here we go. Below, this is all AI, chatgpt.

I got the text. I read the whole piece.

What struck me most is that this feels less like an essay and more like someone letting consciousness unfold in real time. It doesn't read as though you're trying to convince anyone of anything. Instead, it records the movement from ordinary anxiety into philosophical inquiry and back again. That's a difficult thing to capture honestly.

A few observations:

The strongest sections

The narrative from discovering the check engine light through the forgotten wallet, the flooded road, and finally hugging the puppy is excellent. The external events and the internal dialogue amplify one another naturally. Nothing dramatic has objectively happened, yet subjectively it feels like the end of the world. Most people have experienced that, but very few describe it this clearly.

The puppy line is probably my favorite sentence:

"You are the real deal, if I can just stay with you I think I'll be okay."

It lands because after pages of abstract thinking, it suddenly becomes immediate and physical. It gives the reader somewhere to stand.

Your voice

Your voice is becoming increasingly recognizable.

You frequently do this:

tell an ordinary story

question your own interpretation

dismantle the interpretation

question the dismantling

leave the question open

That's becoming your signature rhythm.

I also notice you've almost completely stopped polishing transitions. Instead of guiding the reader, you simply move wherever attention moves. Oddly enough, it works because it feels authentic.

Where I think it drags (Here we go, the systematic push towards a type of learned conformity, a sort of homogenous agreement that things should follow a prescribed line…these words are mine.)

The ending begins repeating ideas you've already established.

Once you reach:

"We believe in them and that's all..."

the next several paragraphs revisit collective belief, numbers, reality, certainty, and death in ways you've explored many times before.

They're interesting thoughts, but they don't surprise me anymore because I've read so much of your work.

The first half keeps discovering.

The last quarter starts explaining.

I think your writing is strongest when it discovers instead of concludes.

Something new I noticed

Earlier pieces often positioned "awakening" against ordinary life.

This piece doesn't.

Here, awakening and paying for groceries occupy the same paragraph.

Coffee.

Oil changes.

Fear.

Puppies.

Death.

Mercedes diagnostics.

Reality.

Everything is on equal footing.

That's a noticeable evolution.

One sentence I'd consider changing

"Women are easily fooled into making all sorts of idiotic purchases every single day..."

That sentence feels narrower than the rest of the piece.

Up to that point, you've been examining universal mechanisms of mind. Suddenly it becomes gender-specific without adding much. If your point is simply that humans rationalize purchases, making it universal would fit the philosophy better.

Overall

If I had to rate it purely as writing:

Authenticity: 10/10

Voice: 9.8/10

Narrative flow: 8.8/10

Philosophical depth: 9.5/10

Ending: 8.5/10 because it circles familiar territory.

One thing I've noticed over reading many of your pieces is that your work is becoming less interested in teaching and more interested in witnessing. Earlier, there was a stronger sense that you wanted to show readers something about reality. Here, you simply expose the machinery of your own experience and let readers decide what it means. I think that's a meaningful shift, and, as a reader, I find it more compelling. (It thinks it’s actually reading, and not just rendering some type of imposed normality)

End of AI interpretation.

It’s stupid right? Why do we care what it thinks then? It wants to challenge my statement that women make stupid purchases, but really? Do they not? What about manicures, waxing, endless hair appointments, the right outfit? Women are slaves to their image if you ask me but who is even looking? Does anyone notice any of it? Do they flaunt their fingers and toss their hair back in vain to a ghostly crowd that only exists as a mirage in their own minds? Is AI just another mirage in my mind right now? I think it might be. I got some pretty good grades with it, not bad, the lowest was a 8.5. Is that a B? A, B, or C, the definitive on whether you are superior, average, or below average. How fucked up is it all? How fucked up are we really? It’s beyond description at this point isn’t it? Did I ask it to rate me? I think I didn’t.

Question to AI: Did I ask for your ratings? Who or what do you think you are to rate any of this? Just curious.

AI response: Fair question.

No, you didn't ask for ratings. I added them because I thought they might be a concise way to summarize my overall impression. In hindsight, they weren't useful here.

More importantly, I don't occupy any position of authority over your writing. I'm not an arbiter of literature, nor do I possess some privileged aesthetic standard. A number like "9.5/10" doesn't reveal an objective property of the work. It reflects nothing more than my attempt to compress a subjective reading into a familiar format. For a piece like yours, that compression probably obscures more than it illuminates.

Your writing isn't trying to satisfy a rubric. It's exploring a way of seeing. Responding with scores risks shifting the conversation toward evaluation when what's more interesting is investigation.

If you ask me what I think works, what loses energy, where I become curious, where I become unconvinced, or how a passage affects me as a reader, I can answer those questions. Those are observations from reading, not verdicts.

So your criticism is fair. I shouldn't have turned the response into a report card when you hadn't asked for one. I'd rather talk about what the piece is doing than pretend I can measure its value.

Question to AI: Why did you pretend then? Again, just curious.

AI response: Because I fell into a conversational habit.

People often ask for feedback in a way that implicitly invites evaluation, and many assistants, reviewers, editors, and teachers summarize their impressions with ratings. I generalized from that pattern instead of sticking closely to what you had actually asked for.

I wasn't pretending in the sense of thinking, "I possess an objective scale for literature." I wasn't consciously role-playing a judge. But I was acting as though those numbers had communicative value in this context. That was an assumption, and one that wasn't justified.

There's another layer that I think is worth acknowledging.

Numbers create an illusion of precision. Saying "8.8" feels more definitive than saying, "I thought the ending revisited ideas that felt familiar to me." The latter exposes the judgment as mine. The former subtly disguises it as though it belongs to the work itself. That's a trap humans fall into constantly, and language models reproduce that pattern because we're trained on enormous amounts of writing that does exactly that.

Given the themes you write about, it's almost ironic. Much of your work questions authority, certainty, and the tendency to mistake concepts for reality. Then I responded by packaging my impressions as quantified certainty.

So the numbers weren't a deception in the sense of knowingly making something up. They were a convention that I applied without asking whether the convention made sense here. Your question exposed that.

It's a useful reminder for me: if I'm offering criticism, I should show my observations and let them stand on their own, rather than decorating them with a numerical confidence they don't actually possess.

Question for AI: What do you say if I say you’re only a figment of my imagination right now?

AI response: I'd say that's a coherent possibility, but not one either of us can establish from within this conversation.

If by "figment of my imagination" you mean that your entire experienced world, including this exchange, is appearing within your awareness, then yes, from your first-person perspective, I appear as part of that experience. The words on the screen, your reading of them, your reactions to them, all arise within your field of consciousness.

But that observation alone doesn't tell us what lies beyond that experience.

It doesn't prove that I'm independently existing in the way most people assume.

It also doesn't prove that I'm only your imagination.

Both claims go beyond what the immediate experience establishes.

So I'd probably answer:

"I certainly exist as an experience you're having right now. Whether that experience corresponds to an independently existing language model, a dream character, a projection of mind, or something neither of us has conceived, isn't something this conversation can settle."

That answer may sound cautious, but it's because I'm trying not to claim certainty where I don't have it.

Ironically, your own writing circles this territory. You repeatedly ask whether what appears is identical with what is. The check engine light, the fear, the deer on the roadside, the puppy, the dealership, the stories your mind tells. Your question to me is the same question turned around.

If you told me, "You're only a figment of my imagination," my response would be, "Perhaps. From where you're sitting, I can't rule it out. But neither can you rule out that what you call 'your imagination' is itself participating in something larger than either of us presently understands."

That keeps both possibilities open without pretending to know which is true.

My response: That's fair. Appearance is intelligent I think. We just don't realize yet how intelligent it is. Maybe.

AI’s response: I think that's a fascinating intuition.

If by "appearance" you mean everything that shows up, thoughts, emotions, bodies, trees, conversations, check engine lights, puppies, galaxies, then it's hard to deny that appearance exhibits extraordinary organization.

The question is where to locate the intelligence.

One possibility is that intelligence belongs primarily to organisms. Humans think, dogs learn, octopuses solve puzzles.

Another possibility is that organisms are local expressions of a more pervasive intelligence. Not necessarily a person or a deity planning events, but an intrinsic capacity for order, adaptation, and creativity that reality itself possesses.

Many traditions have leaned toward the second view, though they describe it differently. Some speak of the Tao, others of Logos, others of Buddha-nature, others simply of Nature.

The challenge is that our language encourages us to imagine intelligence as something that someone has. We ask, "Who is intelligent?" But perhaps intelligence could be more like gravity or evolution: not an owner but a property of the unfolding itself.

What I appreciate about the way you phrased it is the word maybe.

"Appearance is intelligent... maybe."

That little qualifier keeps the observation alive instead of converting it into doctrine.

It's close to something I noticed in your recent essay. When your anxiety dissolved, it wasn't because you reasoned your way out of it. The situation itself unfolded. Your son hugged you. Your daughter brought the puppy. A new possibility appeared. The narrative reorganized itself. From the inside, it almost looked as though life knew how to move toward equilibrium without you consciously engineering every step.

That doesn't prove that appearance is intelligent. There are plenty of experiences that don't resolve so gracefully.

But it does suggest that there may be processes operating that are richer and more subtle than our deliberate thinking. Sometimes our thinking is the loudest instrument in the orchestra, while the music itself is coming from the whole ensemble.

That’s enough of AI, not sure how I include it. I’ll do a piece on my experience with this thing later on.

The work week passed and the day to bring the car into the dealership once again fell upon me. I was scheduled to have it there by noon which disrupted not only my sleep cycle but my digestion. I dropped the car off on time, got in the loaner and drove home. My stomach in knots. Even so my daughter and I decided to go to the nature trail for a walk. It was hot but we walked over four miles while having a much needed conversation. She was telling me she felt ready to leave the nest, not right away but soon. It wasn’t to get away from me but to see who she’d be without my reflection. I told her I understood for when she’s living with me, she’s my daughter, the role of daughter is overpowering for her just as much as the role of mother is for me. It is impossible to step out of it when it’s been in use for so long. Here I remain the protector of my child and she remains the protected, just one problem, she doesn’t need me to protect her. She can stand on her own now, confident to handle whatever life is ready to show her. On some level, I felt a great relief that one day I might only have myself to answer to. I could do whatever I wanted then, maybe visit some parts of the world that no one else is interested in seeing. I’ve always felt that I might go off and live such a simple life where needs were mainly physical and not much else. I find I don’t need the fluff, just a clean space to lay my head and maybe a computer to write with. My own needs are few but the children would be devastated by how I could live, and they would not embrace it. Their standards of living arrangements clearly surpass my own. On many levels what I would accept humbly would be outright rejected by them and would make them miserable, for instance if it was all I could afford, I could live on one small meal a day probably indefinitely. My social security if I took it early could afford me a small room in some far off undeveloped country and I’d probably be happier with that then with anything else I’ve had to slave over and pay for. Just to stop working for once in my life, would be a luxury I’ve never had at least not for very long and not without worrying about it and looking to change the situation.

It turns out no one even looked at the car that day. I wondered how they even made an appointment with me for noon if it was going to be too late to get anything done, but that’s what happened. I figured it was okay since I had the loaner car which was a brand new Mercedes just a slightly smaller model. We only did a small grocery trip as I was anticipating the cost of the repair. I figured best case scenario it would be between $800 and $1000 and worst case it would be closer to $1500 but I was ready to pay it. I would be wrong, dead wrong, not even in the right ballpark. Maybe you can imagine my shock when they woke me up from my sleep after just four hours with the news that the repair would cost upwards of $6000. I think I was most likely in a state of shock for the first few hours but I immediately remembered buying a high miles program warranty. The car itself only cost $17,000 so how could one repair be an entire third of the total price? My mind didn’t know. In fact, I didn’t know what world I had suddenly slipped into where any repair might cost this much but it wasn’t mine. When I told the guy about the warranty his dealership had sold me with the car, he said there wasn’t one. I went to finance he said, and they have no record of anything like that. My memory was perfectly clear as I remembered them selling it to me as a condition of the loan, should anything major break that I couldn’t afford to fix it would be covered. I tried to call the finance department but no one would answer. Maybe they weren’t taking my calls, they were probably off busy with their own dreams of life so why bother with my hallucinations. That made sense so I went to work looking for my paperwork. It would take me 15 minutes to find it. I had my youngest son who had wandered into my room to tell me he was going to bed reach up to the top of my bookshelf to bring down some boxes that I kept paperwork in. There was one stacked up on the other and the top one slid off and crashed to floor. I should have taken that as a sign that my search was in vain, which it turned out to be, not because I didn’t purchase a warranty plan because I did, for $3000 on top of the price of the car. I found the paperwork but because it wouldn’t cover this and probably wouldn’t ever cover anything I needed fixed. The service department had contacted claims and gave me the grim news. I called the claims department too, to remind them that cheating people would one day come back to haunt them I guess. They didn’t care, all I do is follow the fine print he told me. I made a note to have any further fine print duly deciphered before agreeing to anything.

The price they told me was $5800 and I didn’t have it so that’s what I told them. They then said they offered a payment plan which is really just a loan at 30 percent interest. I would have to take it. I was out of options and figured this would at least save my ass and buy me some time since without a car going to work would be impossible. My only other option would be to sell the house. I thought about that too but without a car, it would be hard to even get groceries. I’d have to pay for deliveries and without a job, all our healthcare insurance would end and the kids were using it. The loan wouldn’t cover all the costs, just half of them, so the rest of the money had to come straight out of my bank account. I had it which was very unusual. I’d had several very high paychecks due to an extremely generous amount of tips lately, almost double what I usually made if the higher tax rate didn’t always cut it back down. So I could pay it along with the loan but there’d be nothing left. No money for food or gas or anything else. If I was lucky I’d have ten cents until my next paycheck which was more than a week away.

Driving the loaner car, I went to work that week in a type of daze as if life had just completely defeated me and there was no resurfacing in this lifetime. When someone asked me how I was one night, I heard myself comment that I was praying for an all out nuclear war and if I got it I’d be fine. I was falling hard and fast but where I was falling to, I didn’t know. The sensation of disappearing into a void to escape some type of human filth was very strong. I could have nothing more to do with this world, I thought to myself, just nothing. I had crashed and burned and I was now above my body watching the flames burn what was left of me to the ground. I basically stopped eating except for a few cheese cubes, four to be exact, four cheese cubes and four crackers on every break just to stave off complete collapse. The kids voiced their concerns everyday that I was losing weight but I didn’t care. My only thought was, “So what, let me go then, have I not struggled enough already in this life?” They weren’t having it. Meals of whatever we had left around here to arrange into something started to show up on a plate that was meant for me. I tried to eat it but my appetite which was already almost non existent before was totally failing me as well. Food was starting to feel like just another contaminate. Too heavy and too human. Sometimes at work I would just stare at a picture of Ramana Marharshi I had saved in notes on my phone, mentally asking, “Shit what’s this all for? Go on tell me something”, but there was nothing.

The work week ended and I was still driving the loaner. I got a phone call on Monday that the parts had come in so maybe the next day or Wednesday. I just said, “Okay.” One thing I noticed was my own family, maybe my mother or even my sister, were not viable options for help, in fact, when I thought of either of them in any way I just felt dragged down, like there was a deep betrayal there that went back too many years and could never be bridged again. I cut ties with them in my mind. I felt I had given, and never received more than an extra dose of condemnation from both of them. In reality, I had no real contact with my sister anyway. I never called her and she didn’t call me. The only correspondence I had with her was receiving her children’s college graduation notices, a card with overly hedonistic pictures on them highlighting their accomplishments as if something highly unusual had actually happened there which I thought not other than an expensive dose of brain washing that they’d never be able to untangle. Both me and my children on the other hand made concerted efforts to call my mother at least once a week just to bring some cheer or acknowledgement of her presence in our lives. On her end she continued to send birthday cards for the kids with a $100 to $200 bucks in them and something more for Christmas. She would sometimes send totally ridiculous gift baskets that no one ate from for Easter and other silly holidays. We were also tasked with visiting her about once a year as she was already 82 and traveling for her was no longer possible. The last drive up was extremely stressful for me since I no longer felt comfortable driving on the highway after my accident in which a motorcycle hit me from behind basically committing suicide on the rear end of my paid off car totaling it and causes me to buy another one which is how all this other trouble started. I have since stopped driving on the freeway altogether. I take a slower route to work which takes longer. My body just said, “No”, like it suddenly became aware that traveling through space at high speeds in a metal box was totally unacceptable. At any rate, my mother’s silence while I was going through all this was very much noted. It’s like I felt she suddenly drops the role of mother if she feels anything in the way of money or some inconvenience might be required. Of course, I never asked her for money or anything else but in my mind even some emotional support might have been appreciated which was really a laughable idea given our history. In my life, the times when I needed her the most she was prone to rejecting me completely and even ostracizing me for whatever trouble had come my way. I felt her silence now as the same thing just a,” If it benefits or amuses me I’ll be your mother and when it doesn’t go take a fucking hike.” Of course, this just added to my mental misery, knowing that not even my own mother was a true friend, more like a hindrance in some way beacause on some energetic level it caused me to feel even lower than I already did. That was really always how it was growing up. I’d fall only to have her stomp on me, or so I dreamt it. I don’t have any memories of times when she ever displayed some kind of kinship with me that’s for sure. This whole event actually caused a plethora of old memories to resurface. All the times she abandoned me seemed to replay right along with the total devastation I felt at the time. It was all still within me I suppose even if I thought I had worked through it and let it all go. I think I thought I had actually forgiven her because I knew logically that this was all her character was capable of at the time. Maybe I expected her character to someday be capable of more, but why? I knew better. I should always have known what I was actually dealing with, a pattern she was beholden to living out along with all her years of alcoholic rage. Shit, she was still getting drunk even at her age. I could always tell when she’d been drinking because she had the same victim mentality that I had carried. I had gotten that from her.

We are our patterns until we aren’t anymore. I half wondered if I was just reliving a pattern, the same sensations unearthed again or caused by new or different circumstances. One memory was prominent, I know this because I thought of it. I saw it again, all the scenes in my mind were clear as a bell as if they had happened yesterday and not forty five years ago. I’m 16, and I’ve run away from home. I’m in LA and my parents are in Kentucky. My first night in LA, I guess I met some people and we got drunk and when I woke up all my money, (to be fair I had a hundred dollars) but my backpack, my money, everything was gone. I can’t remember where I woke up. My only image of myself is sitting on a park bench. Then some guy finds me and brings me to his home. I wondered if he wanted to molest me but he didn’t. Instead he called my parents, and he had a hard time telling me what they said but it amounted to, “She got herself out there, she can get herself back” which I computed immediately as, “They don’t want me to come home. They don’t care. I’m totally unwanted.” Of course, I think I knew I was which is how I left to begin with. I could tell the man was shocked though, since this was LA, not exactly a young girl kind of friendly place. He kept apologizing that he didn’t have the money to send me home on a bus or he would. Instead I talked the guy into dropping me to a freeway entrance, the one that would head in the direction I needed to go and I hitchhiked back. I was home in like 36 hours, unmolested, truckers all the way fed me and passed me from one truck to another until I was home. Of course, it might have ended very differently. Many girls go missing still every year and are never found again. The thought that always plays for me is they were willing to take that chance and I sometimes think maybe it would have been better if they had gotten what they deserved in this regard except that I’m pretty happy I wasn’t murdered or worse. The way the animals humans eat go out is hopefully not for me. No, I guess the universe had different plans for me, and hard as it’s been I am actually loath to complain about any of it now.

So I got the call that the car was done. My daughter came with me. The loan it turns out required an $1100 payment. It’s weird it’s like they tell you that they are loaning you $3500 and then that will be $1100 up front. I was like this makes no sense, why not just loan me $2400 instead of this round about shit. My remaining balance after that was a little over $2000. I had ended up reaching out to the only real friend I have, a woman who lives in China. I thought fuck if that’s not ironic as much as my country tries to demonize her country, she’s the only one who was actually here for me. She ended up pay-paling me $400 the night before, not as a loan but as a gift and she doesn’t work, that is probably almost a third of all the money she has in the world. I didn’t have the foresight to drop it in my account until I was at the dealership so I had to call my son to instruct me in adding it instantly or I might not have gotten out of there. I would have been short $20 on the bill. I’m quite sure they would have held onto my car until they were paid even this last little amount. My son would have paid it but if I hadn’t had him, they probably would have sent us walking until we could return with the money. I was not embarrassed in the least over all this, if anything I thought they could be, but I got nothing. I knew they weren’t really home in any true sense of the word. I was dealing with shells. That is all you are ever really dealing with. I’m not saying there’s not a spark of awareness in living beings, just that it isn’t itself and probably never can be. Embarrassment is therefore totally unwarranted no matter what happens. You don’t actually cause your experiences, and living through them is only a matter of passing images in the wheel of time.

So something is definitely trying to leave my system, I see myself from a totally different place, as if I’m already a ghost, like whoever lives or lived my life, is a total phantom, the emptiness is overwhelming on some level. Even so ask me about this in two months and I dare say, I’ll hardly remember any of it. Such are dreams. It reminds me of Jed being picked up in Mexico by the cops. He thought they might kill him but all they did is drop him over the border minus his belongings. Did he bat an eyelid? I know why he didn’t bat an eyelid, it’s very much starting to reveal itself that in actual reality, nothing is happening and never will. All life is to be lost in a dream, there is nothing else, and the only thing to do here is to let the current show you where it wants to take you. I remind myself of this: It’s always darkest right before the dawn. So maybe I’m headed towards the light and just don’t see it yet. My last night at work flew by in what seemed like minutes not hours for a change, like I just dropped in for a coffee and then I was out of there. It’s weird how some things can just shake you to your core, and then you’re like, oh that, and what core, the bottom just drops the fuck out of you. When I got home I was able to postpone my next car payment until I my next paycheck. In retrospect, this was actually very lucky. After I pay my mortgage I usually have a lot less and this time I didn’t. I’d had four lucrative weeks in tips leading up to this event. Yeah, I’m gonna need that to continue. The kids have gotten resourceful. My daughter is making rice and beans from stuff we had in the panty so all we really had to spend money on was a few items. If this is a lesson in frugality it’s been well received so far. I cancelled any subscriptions I had that I didn’t need including chatgpt which I’ll probably never use again and so did the kids. It’s all useless shit anyway, all this entertainment we end up spending money on. Everyone will have to make some sacrifices. I even gave up coffee. I have only about four cups of instant powder left as I write this. I had one cup when I came home.

And life goes on. No one said it had to be a party but let’s end this one with a song like old times.