“It’s the end of a era!” she exclaimed, and she was right.
The end of an era, indeed. We’d been discussing the amazing incident of the week and how I handled it. I’m just not letting anyone play that game any more, I know it inside out. The funny thing is, it wasn’t hard for me to take control. In the larger scheme of things, neither of us is wasting any more effort being nice to hurt the cause.
Here’s another sign: today I got a note from Capital One, the evilest of evil American credit card companies, telling me that my current nine percent interest rate was going up to 18 percent in April, 2010! I’ve never missed a payment. We have golden credit, and this is what they do? I just charged a new computer on the card, too — owed $5K on it last year, paid the whole thing off, and then decided to buy the iMac. Try to save America, and this is the thanks I get. To me, this symbolizes everything that’s pulling the temple down.
Because they invested foolishly in the bubble, the bankers have to bleed the sheep, only we’re not going to stand in line and wait to have our throats slit. One credit card is all I need, and the other dirty lying swine can go to fiscal hell. If I haven’t paid the balance off (again!) by this time next year, I don’t deserve to walk around without a keeper. But I feel good. That’s the thing, I feel good, underneath the the surface agitation. This doesn’t have to do with money but with being whole, and what do actualized screaming genius art gods do in the face of onrushing doom?
We punt on third down, that’s what, and no more living with dysfunction, either. (The wags are saying, “What, you’re leaving Taos?” Har-har-hee. But no, we’re not.) No more personal dysfunction, no more dysfunctional friends, no more dysfunctional house, no more dysfunctional country. No more dysfunctional state of being, you might say. It only served to get attention anyway, and now that the camposanto is just over the hill, the only antidote is creativity. No more flinching. No regrets. I feel better than I have in years, and one of the reasons is that I’ve given up all hope in traditional approaches to health, survival, and growing older. That’s the dirty little secret: if you abandon all hope of saving the sinking ship you’re on, you’ll immediately feel better, even though the waves have grabbed away your shoes.
I know what she meant by “era.” I hear the humid clank of wet steel doors closing on everything that doesn’t work.
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