(Phaysis)

For what it’s worth, I’m heading to Texarkana for the Labor Day weekend. 3-ish days of living la vida familia. I plan to do a lot of distracted hanging out while a TV is on, do a bunch of drowsy driving around town feeling bummed because everything has changed so much and nothing has changed and I’ve changed and my friends haven’t changed and so on. Also on the agenda is sitting at IHOP for burnt coffee and journal time. Hard couch.

Actually, I’d like to spend actual time with the family, like at my sister’s house with her kids, and my mother, and some pick-a-nick happenings. Maybe I’ll cook something. Dunno.

What I do know is that I have a few days to get ready for the trip. Car’s up and running, got new tires, alignment, got the SRS light issue figured out. Picked up some new music for the road. Got the laptop jukebox problem hammered out. Looks like I’m all set. Hopefully the drive will be smooth and problem-free. That’s the worst part about visiting because I spend 12 hours round-trip behind the wheel. Driving used to be fun, now it’s just a transport that can’t legally go fast enough.

I went out for a high-speed drive across town for a sense of perspective. Needed to get myself outside of myself for a while because I’m really, really in the middle of it. Right now, I’m a dog in a corner, and I’m ready to bite.

Today, I got a bomb dropped on me in the form of two envelopes from my health insurance carrier. Inside is a pair of Explanation of Benefits (EOB). Remember back in March and April when I saw the chiropractor because my back was messed up and I needed help in a bad way? Well, I finally got the insurance statements from all those visits. The end result is that my insurance carrier won’t pay for a single thing; their rejection reason is that the chiropractor isn’t in network. That’s Bullshit with a capital B.

When I was looking for help, I called the clinic; I’ve been to this clinic for 7 years…my general practitioner is there. And, for a while, so was the chiropractor. So I called the office to check, to see if I would be covered if I saw her for my back. The operator said she’d have to pass on the question to the billing department. They called me back and confirmed to the positive that I would have coverage, so I made the first of a series of appointments.

The first visit was nothing but a consultation on Monday. She then sent me for X-rays which I took that day. Then, since she didn’t show up to the office for my appointment on Wednesday, I had to come in Thursday to look over the X-rays and come up with a treatment plan. THEN, finally, had a visit Friday to pop my back into shape…two weeks after injury. She wanted me to visit three times the next week (office visits are $30 copay each time), but I whittled it down to two visits. By the end of that week, it was revealed that she was no longer a member of the clinic and that she would start her own practice elsewhere. So, I didn’t visit her again.

I had been waiting on the EOBs from the visit, but suspected something was dreadfully wrong. All my other EOBs from all the other visits to the various doctors I see produce an EOB from my insurer in short time. Something had to be wrong, and fucking hell, it was very wrong. I tallied up the charges from those five visits and the X-rays: $1270. You read that correctly.

My blood is boiling; I haven’t felt this level of rage in years. It’s an impotent rage because in the wash of corporate displacement and beaurocratic process, I have no target. No one is to blame. Nobody is at fault, and my only recourse is to play the game. I was provided an address to submit a written appeal; you can damn-well believe I’ll appeal. This is Bullshit. If I had known that the chiropractor was out of network, I would not have fucking gone for the first visit, let alone all five. I was lied to. I believed the lie. The one who lied to me didn’t know they were lying. Misinformation happened.

My teeth are grinding. Whatever it was I was doing in my life, whatever I had planned for the weekend, it’s fucked. My teeth are grinding. I’m in a corner, and I am ready to bite.

For the most part, the trip home was ok. Saw my family. Drove for 13 hours total. The drive up was wet; when it wasn’t raining, it was foggy. The return trip was faster than expected (ssssh), but I was heading straight into the heart of the sun for most of the voyage. Saturday was soggy, but we still had a cookout at my mother’s place; grilled hot dogs with saurkraut, pasta salad, potato salad, baked beans. Good eats.

Headed out for a drive around town Saturday night; seems the construction progress has slowed down a bit. Saw only two brand new churches. God Boxes. Cruised by the houses where a few of my best friends in high school lived; it was strange to see the houses without the original families inside. Things change, I guess. People move on. I have; I’m nowhere near where I was, or who I was, back then.

As agnostic (and as atheistic) as I have been in the past 2 decades, I’ve been thinking more about the supernatural, about higher levels of existence. The Big Thoughts, the kind of stuff that used to keep me drunk in the 80′s. I haven’t asked questions of faith in a decade. Three weeks ago, ABC’s Nightline program hosted a panel about Satan, and the four panelists presented four completely different views on the Red One.

The most notable panelist was author and philosopher Deepak Chopra. Of the four, I agreed with him the most. His point is that the existence of Satan is an extension of our desire to push off blame for our actions onto an outside party, and that it takes an amount of self-delusion to believe such an entity exists. I agree with this. After my fall from faith in ’93, the one realization I found that hit me the hardest was that once I take God out of the equation, the entire Devil complex falls flat like a cardboard box. Poof, gone.

What the show did, eventually, was get me thinking about the invisible again. Since then, I’ve looked at notes on Gnosticism, Buddhism, stuff about spiritual awakening. I don’t believe anything…yet. But it’s got me thinking, and remembering back to a time when I felt something higher and bigger than myself. It was a fire that kept me warm. It was a wind that drove me. And I pushed, and produced, and felt something. I haven’t done that in years, and now, after this spark, I’m burning to write again.

So I’m getting ready to begin the start of my prepping for my departure to Texarkana tomorrow. I would already be all packed and loaded, but this coffee won’t drink itself. Besides, it’s my life, it’s my time.

Not really. It’s work, coffee, Ruby on Rails. Sleep. Rinse and repeat.

I really should’ve had this Ruby on Rails project finished long before now. It’s supposed to be simple with RoR. Shit simple. But I keep making it difficult. Keep adding stuff like “secure database queries” and “input validation”…and I’m not even started on the Posts models yet! One of these days, I’ll do a proper writeup of my RoR experiences, but there’s no time for that, what with my staring dumbfaced at code and drifting off to play minesweeper for 3 hours before bed.

I need a break. Really, I need a break. I guess part of my fascination with the latest U2 album is that the band sequestered themselves to a villa in Fez, Morocco while they wrote the album. It’s the idea of being someplace else for a while and finding my voice again that appeals to me. I don’t travel, and I typically don’t make plans to leave town for the weekend. So I end up being here, doing the same ol’, for months on end, with little variations in the pattern. It’s no wonder I’ve grown old and inflexible.

I feel like leaving for a while, but going to Texarkana this weekend for 48 hours will have to do, I guess. I won’t have the time, energy, or space to throw myself to the muses; trips home aren’t for that. Travel isn’t for me; that’s my feeling. Travel is for people who have accrued vacation time and have managerial approval to spend it. Travel is for the unemployed who have friends in distant cities. Travel is for people who don’t have to worry about supporting themselves or paying rent on a place to store their stuff. Working stiff contractors like me can’t travel. Time worked is time paid, and I am running broke.

Maybe I should just sell all my stuff and roam. Eh, I’m too old for that. At my age, that kind of behavior is just two steps away from being a homeless bum. I dunno, maybe it’ll be therapeutic, or maybe if I throw myself at the bottom hard enough I’ll bounce up higher than I am now. Maybe I actually flourish in the face of change. Who’s to know?

Tonight, after some coffee, I took a drive around town. Decided to avoid the big streets and thoroughfares I always take. Investigated some of the little neighborhoods I never see, the stuff in-between the high streets. The nooks and crannies.

I had the windows rolled down; radio off. Vent fan was turned off. All I heard was the engine, the tires, and the surrounding street. Ambient, peaceful. The midnight city was my music.

On West Lynn and 6th, I overheard three pedestrians talking about the song “Disgustipated” by Tool. One of them was quoting lines. It woke up a distant memory in me of a guy I used to know when I was 23. He was optimistic. Weathered, but ever-watching, ever-listening. He hungered for experience and thirsted for expression. He would watch documentaries like “Baraka” because they blew his mind. He drank to friendship because it blew his heart. He wrote poetry because it blew his load. All was life, death, pain, joy, suffering, art.

I haven’t been that guy in a long, long time. I used to think that I was one of the residents of bohemia, an enlightened, energized and empowered free-thinker who, with the stroke of his pen and a swish of philosophy, could create his own world.

That song, that album, I discovered it in my last year in school, and it informed me of a bigger world. One where the ugly beasts were beautiful; monsters and mind-expansion held hands and penned words like, “there was goo all over your hands; you wiped them on your grass, now your color was green.” That made sense to me. Bang.

And during that time I ran with people who understood, who knew, who had ideas, thoughts. Still in the twilight between youth and adulthood. We smoked, and talked, and drank until the lights went down and the sun came up.

That. That’s the distant memory. I’m reminded of that guy I was and I get a chill in my heart when I compare that guy to who I am now. I’m experienced, but with less hope. Weathered, but beaten. I don’t write poetry anymore. Music, the rhythm and melody has overshadowed any lyrical importance. “Baraka” doesn’t hit me as hard. My artistic drive has diminished, and tonight, I caught a glimpse of a reason why.

Back then, I could write my future. And I attempted. And passed, and failed, and failed, and passed, and failed. And I didn’t care one iota what was thought of me. It wasn’t important. We had our own society away from, yet within, the society of the world at-large. We were connected with a dim idea of something bigger Out There, that somewhere somebody was thinking the same Really Deep Thoughts that we were. So the eyes and ears of the people on the periphery of that world had no sway. I saw my friends, and my nonfriends be damned.

But that changed after I moved here. I started caring. And the voices of those around me carried with me as I walked. Suddenly, my thoughts and desires and drives had an audience. They told me every side of the story. They ooh’ed when I felt like striking out and aah’ed when I placated them by doing nothing. And as my world got smaller, they got bigger.

And that, that is my failure. I started listening to the idea that people, with whom I no longer associated, had something to say about the things I did. I let the faceless They With a Thousand Faces bear weight on my decisions to express myself. And it had a serious chilling effect.

I’m not sure if I can resurrect the dead. I don’t know if, during the course of the day, I can have him speak my voice again. I know his ghost haunts me in the night, but the scorching light of day overpowers him and I have to be a grownup again. His Eros, his Pathos, hides in the cool and the shade of the tomb. Wake up, dead man.