Trump In The Afterlife Chapter Two: Orientation

     After leaving the front desk, Marty escorted Trump over to a door set in the clouds. The door actually wasn’t there a moment ago; angels have the power to conjure up portals to most anywhere, and make them look like whatever they want them to look like. Even a lower level angel like Marty. He didn’t think of himself as a lower level angel, but he had to accept that was what he was. He had never moved up the ranks, even though he was a lot smarter than a lot of the other heavenly beings bouncing around up here. He got by doing the bare minimum.
     He was okay with that. Being better got you noticed, and while it might get you more respect, it also got you more work. Marty was what you would call a slacker, and while down on earth that might hold you back, up here it didn’t really matter much, at least not to him. What was he missing out on? This was heaven. It really didn’t matter if you worked yourself to death or not, the worst you could achieve was being an angel in the eternity of paradise. The best day on earth couldn’t come close to the worst day in heaven. Come to think of it, there weren’t really any bad days in heaven, up until now.
     There just wasn’t really a lot of incentive to get ahead. Maybe you might get to bask a little more in the adoration of God, but that was kind of overrated. To Marty, it seemed like a meaningless title, or gift certificate for lunch at Applebees you might get for being employee of the month, something that didn’t really cost the corporation much of anything, or do you much good.
     No, Marty didn’t care at all. True, he didn’t have a lot of fun hanging out with the other angels in his social strata, but he didn’t really have to hang out with them that much at all. Being smart and fun and conversational meant that he was accepted by a lot of angels that didn’t really associate with the lower ranks. He got to be friends with a lot of the higher ups, even if he did frustrate them.
     Peter, for example. Peter was always trying to get him to apply himself more. He thought Peter might even envision him as his replacement someday, even though the thought of an eternal being needing to retire was ridiculous. Peter wasn’t going anywhere, you don’t give up plum positions like that. He wasn’t even a real angel, he was a human who was made into an angel. The other upper crust angels never completely accepted him. Maybe that’s why he liked Marty. Marty didn’t care at all about any of that. He wasn’t some angel snob, he wasn’t defensive or slighted that God had placed a human/angel hybrid at the gates of heaven. At any rate, Peter wasn’t going to retire, not a chance. As long as he was the keeper of the keys to paradise, no other angel could truly look down their nose at him or challenge him. More likely, he was probably just bored and lonely, and Marty provided some relief from that. There was no room for advancement up here, not with Peter, not with anyone.
     And that just proved Marty’s point, actually. So many poor suckers all over the world and in heaven working themselves so hard for opportunities that didn’t really exist. It was bad enough that he had to escort this loser through the next few or weeks, or however long it took. Time wasn’t the same thing for an immortal being. He had been alive for all eternity, so a week or a year or a millennia was pretty much the same to him. He just hoped it didn’t take too long, because no matter how immortal you were, hanging out with morons was tedious all the same.
     Once through the door/portal, they arrived in a room with a couch and some chairs. The walls were blank, at least as far as Trump could make out. They didn’t even look like walls, but there was a feeling that there were walls there all the same. Trump plopped himself down on the couch without being asked, and just sat there, staring at Marty.
     Marty sat in one of the chairs facing him, and wondered where to begin. This wasn’t going to be an easy task, explaining what was going to happen here. He was still going over in his mind just how he wanted to start, when Donald spoke up.
     “Okay, whatever we’re going to do here, can we just get it over with?” He said brusquely. “I deserve some special treatment here. I’m rich, I’m powerful, I’m the fucking president, goddammit.”
     “Ex-president,” Marty quickly reminded him, completely ignoring the blasphemy.
     “Bullshit!” Trump exploded. “I didn’t concede anything! There’s no way I lost that election.”
     “Yeah,” said Marty, “simple math seems to contradict that. But I’m not here to discuss any of that stuff Mr. Trump, I just want to get this over with.”
     “Get this over with?” Trump seemed to have trouble understanding that concept. “Isn’t this my immortal life hanging in the balance? Aren’t you like my personal assistant or valet that is going to take care of this for me? Again, I am a very important person, in case you aren’t aware.”
     “Look Mr. Trump, if there is one thing you have to learn, and learn quickly, is that up here, you are like every other mortal soul. You are no better than anyone else on any social scale. You aren’t surrounded by sycophants.”
     “Of course not, we’re not even near the circus!” Trump replied.
     “What … the circus …” Marty stuttered in confusion.
     “Why the hell would there be elephants in heaven?”
     Marty sighed, the first of many exasperated sighs that would escape him during this tale.
     “Sycophants!” He spat out the word. “Not elephants.”
     “What the hell is a sycophant? A sick elephant?”
     “No, a sycophant is someone who just blindly agrees with you to make you happy. An enabler. Someone who lets you believe whatever you want rather than disagree with you, in the hopes that they might get ahead.”
     “Oh,” Trump said, in a sudden burst of understanding. “You mean friends.”
     “No, I don’t mean friends. I mean people who just tell you what you want to hear.”
     “Yes, friends. Like Rudy and Bill and Lindsey. Like my servants or employees.”
     “Those weren’t your friends,” Marty explained. They were just people who used you, or people who you paid to work for you.”
     “Aha!” Trump exclaimed. “I hardly paid any of them! That’s one of my secrets to getting rich. You might have known that if you read a little book that I totally wrote called The Art of the Deal. Amazing book, maybe one of the greatest books ever written. Stiff as many people as you can, then beat them in court, that’s my motto!”
     “Yes, I realize that. That’s one of the many reasons that this is a huge waste of time. You have no chance of getting into heaven.”
     “We’ll see about that,” Trump told him. “I am used to getting what I want, Mikey.”
     “It’s Marty, and …”
     “Whatever, I don’t really care,” Trump interrupted. “You’ll see, I’ll be fine, I always am.”
     “I don’t think things will work out up here the way you’re used to them working out.”
     “Then I’ll just complain and make such a scene that they’ll let me have my own way. Works every time.”
     “Tell me, do you know what being ‘smited' means?” Marty inquired.
     “I think so. It was something a Russian prostitute did to me once. It was pretty good, even if it was really weird and dirty. It was fun. I’ll always be up for a smiting.”
     “I’m glad you think so,” Marty replied, chuckling. “We’ll see how it feels for you when heaven gets through smiting you.”
     “Wow, I can’t believe they would even have that particular kink up here in heaven.”
     “It is not a sex act!” Marty yelled. “Let’s just move on, shall we?”
     Marty motioned towards the walls that may or may not have been there, and suddenly there was a large screen, showing a whole bunch of scenes taking place all over the world. Scenes of people experiencing wars, famine, death, loneliness, loss, and despair. All kinds of heartbreaking scenarios, playing out over the screen that now seemed to not just take up the wall, but stretch onto infinity.
     “This is humanity,” Marty explained. “So many moments filled with horror and pain, or sadness and fear. It will be your job to go down to earth in the present day and help people in crisis.”
     “Why in the world would I want to help people?” Trump asked, incredulously. “I don’t want to help people.”
     “You don’t want to help people? You were a public servant. You were the president. I mean, didn’t you lead the nation and take an oath to protect all the ideals put forth in the Constitution, and serve the country and the American people?”
     “Yeah, something like that. Why?”
     “No reason,” Marty replied, and yet another sigh heaved out of him. “So anyway, you’re going to try to help people in some of their darkest moments. Kind of like an angel would.”
     “Is this the kind of thing you do?”
     “Me?” Marty asked, taken aback. “Goodness, no. I don’t really care for people. Vile, dirty little things.”
     “Me neither!” Trump said happily. “You get it. See, we’re alike, you and me.”
     “Ah, no,” Marty replied. “I am nothing like you. You are one of the most vile, dirty little people I have ever seen.”
     “Well you’re just a nasty person!” Trump said.
     “I’m not a person at all, actually,” Marty corrected him.
     “You know what I mean!” Trump was agitated now. “You’re just trying to confuse me! You're worse than the lame stream media!”
     “I don’t think I need to try to do that, you seem pretty confused all the time anyway. And please don’t say things like “lame stream media.” It’s not nearly as clever as you think it is.”
     Trump just stared at him angrily.
     “Aren’t angels supposed to be nicer than you?” He asked.
     “Again, if you had read your bible, you would know that angels are not really that nice. We are God’s warriors, after all. We destroy cities and kill firstborns and all kinds of stuff.”
     “I could get into that,” Trump said thoughtfully.
     “Ugh,” was all Marty could manage as a reply.
     “Still,” Trump continued. “Aren’t you supposed to help people also? I mean, I couldn’t have gotten that completely wrong. I definitely remember angels helping people and doing good deeds.”
     “Maybe some of them do, but I’m not really interested in that stuff. I’m not really interested in most of the stuff angels spend their time doing.”
     “Great,” Trump said, “I get stuck with some loser angel that won’t even do his job. How is that fair?”
     “I’ll do my stupid job, don’t worry,” Marty told him. “I got Peter keeping an eye on me here, so I don’t have much of a choice now, do I?”
     Trump’s words actually stung a little. He was nothing like this idiot, and he resented the fact that Trump thought for even a second that they had something in common. Trump was evil and narcissistic. He was most likely a psychopath. Marty was just a little lazy, and was that even his fault? The whole system was set up to disenfranchise angels, that wasn’t on him.
     “Okay, so like I said,” Marty went on to explain, “and you’re going to go down to earth with me, and you’re going to help people, and prove that you belong in heaven.”
     “Yeah, I gotta say, that doesn’t really sound like me. I’m more into making things harder for people.”
     “And that’s why you’ll wind up in hell.” Marty reaffirmed. “Still, like everything else in your existence, you are getting an opportunity you don’t deserve. This is your chance to prove otherwise. Kind of like in It’s A Wonderful Life.”
     “What’s that?” Trump asked.
     “It’s a movie,” Marty said, “Like one of the most popular and beloved movies ever made. They play it every year at Christmas.”
     “Oh, fucking Christmas,” Trump replied. “I can’t stand Christmas. Or movies. Unless it’s like a mafia picture, I like those. Did you ever see Goodfellas? Now that's a movie! Well, and porn, of course. That’s how I met my wife.”
     "Okay, let's stay focused," Marty said. "It's A Wonderful Life is about a man who feels like he's reached the end of his rope, and falls into despair. He wishes he had never been born, and an angel appears to show him the way, that he has friends and is loved and has had a full and rich life. He learns how he's touched so many people, and has made the world better in so many ways."
     "Big deal," said Trump, unimpressed. "I helped so many people in my time. Just in the last four years. Big tax cuts for my rich friends, giving all my rich friends jobs, making things easier for my rich friends to control workers and citizens and take protected lands for business…"
     "Just stop!" Marty interrupted. "Helping rich people rob and steal and oppress people is not a good thing! You're supposed to help the poor, not the wealthy."
     "Eww, the poor? Those people are gross. A bunch of losers. Why would I help them? I really don't want to have anything to do with them."
     "You are a fucking horrorshow," Marty said. "How is it that you have no compassion at all for poor people?"
     "Because they deserve it," Trump replied. "They're lazy, and just want to sponge off others. They don't want to work for what they need, they would rather have it given to them."
     "That's not true at all! They just weren't born with the same advantages as you."
     "Nonsense!" Trump argued, "I was self made man, I had to go out and work my way up."
     "You were born into wealth! You went to the best schools! Your father gave you hundreds of millions of dollars to start your businesses! How can you believe the things you say?"
     "It's easy," replied Trump. "You just say it, and ignore anyone who disagrees with you. Life would be horrible if you let yourself get bogged down by other people's facts and opinions. So many people think that they're so smart, but if you just contradict or ignore them enough, they get tired of it and go away."
     Marty just stared at him, dumbstruck.
     "I don't even know where to start explaining to you how wrong that is," he finally said. "Regardless, facts don't care whether you acknowledge or agree with them, they are facts, and you can't change them with wishful thinking."
     "I disagree."
     "Oh my God, just shut up!"
     Marty wasn't sure how he was going to get through this. He was starting to think that maybe disintegration wasn't so bad.
     "Look, there are rules for getting into heaven, and no matter what you choose to believe, you are going to have to play by those rules."
     "Can't I just change the rules with an executive order? I am the president…"
     "Former president… "
     "... And I have the power to dictate the rules."
     "Not up here, you don't," Marty explained. "Up here, God makes the rules."
     "But God chose me!" Trump exclaimed. "That's my point! Some of the richest evangelical leaders on Earth told me that I was chosen by God to lead the nation. Churches full of people, dopey as they may have been, sang my praises and said I was like Jesus."
     "Yeah, those were more sycophants and users, and people who were disturbed and sick."
     "You mean sick elephants, remember?" Said Trump. "I thought we figured that out."
     For the first time in his eternal existence, Marty facepalmed.
     "The fact remains, God wants you to help the poor. It's all over the Bible. ‘Whoever is kind to the poor lends to the Lord, and he will reward them for what they have done.’ ‘The one who oppresses the poor person insults his Maker, but one who is kind to the needy honors him.’ It was one of Jesus's main talking points."
     "Yeah," said Trump," that doesn't really sound like much fun. I mean, what's in all that for me?"
     "I don't think that there's any reaching you." Marty said, dejectedly. "It's like your head's full of squirrels or something."
     "Yeah, speaking of which, where's that little kid with the wings and the Adderall? I could use a booster."
     "I think that was a one time thing," Marty started to say, but just then a cherub appeared out of the clouds and floated over, and jabbed another hypo into his arm. Peter must have been watching and felt pity on Marty.
     "See?" Trump was saying now. "I told you, I always get what I want, because I'm always right."
     "I think that was more of a case of them just wanting to shut you up because you're an asshole."
     "Exactly!" Trump beamed triumphantly. "Because I'm successful, and I am because I know that it only matters if you win, not how you win! That's why everyone respects me."
     Marty knew how wrong that was, but honestly, he didn't have the energy to fight anymore. Besides, he reminded himself in his head, I don't care at all about this mission or his idiot. I don't want to do a good job or get ahead. I just want it to be over. On that note, he decided that it was pointless to try to explain the rules any more than he already had, and he should just throw this douchebag into it and let him flounder and fail.
     "Follow me, Mr Trump," he finally said, "Orientation is over."
     "I'm not Oriental," Trump protested. "That's bullshit! In fact, I can't even stand the Chinese! I'm just thankful they're not allowed in heaven"
     Marty raised his finger and was about to explain the many things wrong with that, then remembered his resolve to not care at all, and pushed the urge down inside him.
     "Let's just go get this shitshow over with," he said as he got up and motioned for Trump to follow.
     "That's what I've been saying!" Said Trump. "See, you wound up agreeing with me too. Everyone does."
     As they walked through another portal, you could hear another one of Marty's frequent signs drifting back from the clouds, where the door had just disappeared.

Trump In The Afterlife Chapter One: Arrival

     It was a miserable November day, but it was even more miserable for Donald Trump as he sat in the presidential bathroom, glaring at his phone. He had already spent the last thirty minutes sitting here, tweeting out his anger and disdain for democracy, and railing against all of his enemies. Even here, in his sanctuary, designed to his specifications of the grandest and most tasteful decor and amenities, he did not find comfort. The fine marble pillars that held up the sink, itself covered in 24 karat gold, like all the fixtures. The gold wallpaper, dotted with pictures of silver dollar signs and women’s breasts, of all shapes and sizes. The giant painting on black velvet that covered one whole wall, a portrait of him, shirtless and his muscles rippling as he strangled a terrorist(or a Mexican guy, he wasn’t sure) with one hand, and held the three-breasted prostitute from Total Recall with the other. He had of course asked for more breasts be added once it was unveiled to him, but it had never gotten done.
     It wasn’t likely to be altered at all now, everything was falling apart.
     How could I have possibly lost this election? He thought to himself. There was no way to deny it any longer; he was going to have to admit that he lost. He had asked his generals, the FBI, the CIA, and a few clandestine departments no one outside of the top circles of government even knew existed to kill Joe Biden and that horrible woman he was married to. Or maybe she was his vice president. He wasn’t really sure who she was, only that she was female and not white, and he hated both those things. They had all refused though. What was the point of being president if you couldn’t have people killed?

     He started to get angry all over again. No amount of gold fixtures or breasts could soothe him these days. He went back to his phone, preparing to post another tweet about how unfairly he was being treated. Suddenly, he was sure that he tasted copper, and before he could feel the entitled disgust that it wasn’t a more precious metal, his heart gave out, and Donald Trump, 45th president of the United States, died of a heart attack while sitting on his gold toilet.

     Up at the main desk for intakes into the afterlife, Marty the angel smiled gleefully and accepted his twenty dollars from Saint Peter. They had both been watching the scene unfold in the bathroom.
     “How in the world did you know he would die that way?” Peter asked. “That was just blind luck!”
     “Actually,” Marty replied, “If you had been paying attention, you would have known that there really was no chance of it happening any other way.”
     "Fine, fine,” said Peter, perturbed. “Just get ready, he’ll be here any minute. We’re going to have to explain a lot to him, and I don’t think he’s that bright.”
     Marty sighed and went back to his binder of notes. He had been put in charge of keeping a file on Mr. Trump for the last three years. Usually, you got assigned to someone for life, but he was now the twelfth angel to be put on this bloated idiot. The eleven that came before him just couldn’t take it, and had all resigned or gone crazy. The ones who had gone crazy were locked away somewhere, and they were pitied, because it was really no fault of their own. They had just finally cracked under the pressure of witnessing this moron day in and day out.
     The ones who resigned … well, no one had ever resigned from the job of monitoring humans before. This was the afterlife, and it was eternal, so “resigning” meant ending your existence completely. You were scattered to the winds, your immortal soul dissipated and lost forever. The fact that so many of his coworkers chose that over simply watching Donald Trump and recording his actions said a lot. Marty had skimmed over the notes when he took over. Some of the entries were nearly indecipherable, because of the angels who had gone insane. They made no sense. They were the ravings of madmen, yet even they were slightly more coherent than the concise notes that described the actual behavior of this man.
     Marty had been worried about taking over, and hoped that he wouldn’t also go crazy or just lose the will to live. He was mostly worried about self preservation. To that extent, he actually did a real half-assed job of writing it all down. Truth be told, there were long stretches where he simply looked away and played games on his phone. Why torture yourself with the frustration of watching some idiot fuck up his life and the country when you could play Candy Crush instead?
     Whatever the case, Marty had survived, and now there was just the formality of assigning Trump to heaven(yeah, right!) or hell, or maybe reincarnating him into a stink bug or dung beetle a few times, just for laughs. Yes, in a few moments, he would hand over this accursed notebook to Peter, and he would be free to float around the clouds and perform some other mundane heavenly task.
     A few minutes later, the clouds parted, and Donald Trump floated up into view, and settled in front of the desk. He looked the same as he appeared on Earth, moments earlier when he died, and appeared to be just as angry.
     This struck Marty. Most of the people who appeared here after shuffling off their mortal coil would gaze around in wonder. They would find some inner peace, or their spirits would fill with joy and contentment. Trump just glared, a petulant look on his face. You could tell he was not impressed.
     “Just what the hell is going on here?” He demanded. “Where am I? Where’s Rudy?”
     “If you’ll just calm down, Mr. Trump,” Peter was telling him now, “All will be revealed in due time. Marty, the book of Mr. Trump’s life?”
     Marty handed the book over, glad to be free of it once and for all, and took out his phone and opened Candy Crush,and began to play. He heard Peter clear his throat, and he looked up to find him staring at him sternly. He put his phone back in his pocket.
     “Okay,” Peter continued, opening the book. “Let’s see what we have here.”
     Marty watched as he turned each page, and noticed his expression turning from interest, to bewilderment , and then to worry.
     “Well, what does it say?” Trump asked impatiently. “Do I go to heaven now?”
     A burst of laughter escaped Marty’s mouth, and he quickly stifled it. Peter glared over at him, and closed the book.
     “Marty, could I see you in the back for a moment?” He asked.
     “Oh no!” Bellowed Trump, “I demand to know what’s going on here! I demand to talk to the big guy! I should go straight to heaven. No one was more beloved than me down on Earth. No one ever did more for his country than I did!”
     Peter just regarded him with a look of amusement on his face.
     “Oh, Mr. Trump,” he said, “Lying might work down there sometimes, but up here no one is going to believe that bullshit.”
      Donald stood there silent for once in his life. Peter was a saint, and he had a way of imparting such a grievous tone, especially when he used words you wouldn’t expect like “bullshit,” that it could even make Donald Trump shut up and take notice.
      “We’ll be right back.”

     There was no actual “in the back” at the intake desk. Peter simply waved his hand and he and Marty and the book were whisked to another dimension, which was in fact only a few nanometers away from the desk, but invisible to anyone standing there.
     “Marty, what is this?” He asked, holding up the book.
     “It’s the book of his life, of course.”
     “Is it?” Peter replied, putting a lot of emphasis on the question, “because I can’t make heads or tales of it. There’s a lot of gibberish, there are whole portions of his life missing …”
     “Well, you know some of the other angles went a little … you know …” Marty twirled his finger beside his head, making the international sign for crazy. Peter did not seem impressed. To drive the point home, he started making the cuckoo noise.
     “I know what it means!” shouted Peter. “Your entries don’t make much more sense though. There are times when whole weeks or months are missing. This book is incomplete!”
      “Well,” Marty tried to explain, “it was excruciating watching it most of the time. I felt like I was going to go crazy myself. I mean, this guy was nuts! And they elected him president, for crying out loud! Honestly, Peter, it was terrifying. There is no way that any of this was part of His plan!”
     “Oh, now we’re going to start assuming we know what His plan is?” Peter asked. “Do you really want to start with blasphemy when you’re already in hot water?”
     “Blasphemy? Really, Peter? You mean to tell me that you don’t wonder sometimes just what the hell He’s thinking these days?”
     “Of course not!” Peter replied, trying his best to appear sincere. He saw that Marty wasn’t buying it.
     “Yeah, okay, I’ll let that one go, but the fact remains that I don’t have enough here to judge him on.”
     “But look at him!” Marty protested. “You know more than enough to just send him off to hell and move on. You know he’s one of the most horrible human beings who ever lived. Just kick him down there and let’s go have lunch. My treat!”
     Peter Sighed.
     “You know that’s not how this works. Rules are rules. In these instances, the clause kicks in, and as his official bookkeeper, the responsibility falls on you.”
     “No!” Marty was horrified. “You cannot be serious!”
     “Oh well,” Peter smiled, “At least you won twenty bucks.”

     Then they were back at the desk, and Trump looked even more annoyed than when they had left, which was odd, because due to the whole different dimension thing, no time had actually passed. He stood there with his arms folded and his lips pursed, glaring at all he surveyed.
     “So do I get to go to heaven now?” He asked petulantly.
     “Well, you see, Mr. Trump,” Peter explained, “I can’t rightly send you to either place because I don’t have enough of your earthly record to judge you accurately.”
     “What the hell does that mean?”
     “It means that we have to figure out a way to decide where you belong.”
     “I’m sure if you just let me talk to God, he’ll be very understanding and let me into heaven.” Trump said.
     Peter and Marty laughed heartily at that.
     “Mr. Trump,” Peter said, “I don’t know if you’ve ever actually read the bible...:”
     “Of course not!” Interrupted Donald, “What am I, one of those stupid evangelicals I duped into voting for me?”
     “Yes, yes, they are pretty horrible, Mr. Trump,” Peter continued, “but if you had read the bible you would know that He isn’t really that into the whole understanding or being reasonable thing. No, I think it’s best that we just follow the rules and see how that goes.”
     “Okay, so what are the stupid rules?” Trump asked. “Do I get any special treatment because I’m the president?”
     “Former president,” Peter reminded him. “Nope. You are just like anybody else. Well, let me correct that, you are not like anybody else, thank Him, but you will be judged just the same.
     “Marty here will accompany you while we give you chances to redeem yourself and prove that you are worthy, of either destination. When we have enough information, we will decide.”
     “Marty?” Trump asked, “Who the fuck is Marty?”
     “Uh, I’m Marty,” the angel clarified. “I’m the angel who was in charge of keeping track of everything you did down there.”
     “Oh, you were my guardian angel?”
     “Oh, no no no, that poor guy quit some time ago.” Marty said. “ And by quit, I mean vaporized himself into the ether. Can’t say I blamed him.”
     “So you’re saying I beat Covid all on my own!” Trump exclaimed triumphantly. “I knew it! I knew I was strong!”
     “Not exactly, Mr. Trump,” Peter explained hesitantly. “If you recall, you had access to first rate medical care. Anyone else in your position would have died.”
     “Yeah, because they’re losers!” Donald beamed triumphantly. “Just like all those suckers buried in Arlington.”
     Peter looked horrified. He waved his hand, and he was back with Marty in the other dimension.
     “What the fuck?!” He exclaimed. “What the actual fuck?”
     “This is what I’m trying to tell you!” Marty said. “He’s absolutely horrible!”
     “Well, I had gathered that, but … but … this is just some deplorable shit right here. I mean, Manson didn’t even say anything this crazy when he got here.”
     “And you want to saddle me with this abomination?” Marty asked. “Can’t you please just send him to hell and let us move on?”
     “I have to say I’m tempted,” Peter replied, “But we have to do what’s right.”
     He waved again, and they were back, and now Trump was really ranting and raving, about the election, about fraud, about conspiracies.
     “Do you get Fox News up here?” He asked. “Is there a TV somewhere?”
     “No, Mr. Trump,” Peter said, “Fox News is only broadcast in hell. Could you please try to focus on the matter at hand.”
     “Well,” Trump replied, “focus isn’t really my long suit.”
     “That’s true,” Marty confirmed, “he’s really all over the place a lot of the time. Can we get him some Adderall?”
     “We do not use drugs here, Marty!” Peter replied sternly, much to Marty’s dismay.
     “No bother,” Trump was saying now, “I’m going to need lawyers, and I’m going to need someone to handle the press. I’m also going to need some whores, the younger the better!”
     Peter stood there with his jaw dropped open, not sure what he was seeing.
     “Did any of you see my phone anywhere? I need to tweet about this. I’m sure the democrats had something to do with all this. Does Obama have cameras here as well? I bet Hillary is behind it!”
     “Peter, seriously, how am I going to work with this?” Marty implored. “You have to do something.”
     Peter sighed, and waved his hand resignedly. A small, winged cherub appeared from the clouds, and flew over to Donald. It produced a hypodermic needle, and shot 50 mg or so of liquid Adderall into Trump’s arm. Trump sighed contentedly, then shook his head and looked on with renewed focus.
     “I’m ready to kill this, whatever it is!” Trump exclaimed.
     “Okay, Mr. Trump,” Peter was telling him, “you’ve killed enough. If you’ll just go along with Marty, we can get underway.”
     Marty moved from behind the desk, and started off, and Trump followed him, moving awkwardly.
     Peter sighed heavily, and called after him: “Mr. Trump, could you please pull up your pants …”

This Is A Story About A Bed

1

     This is a story about a bed. Or maybe it’s a story about a couch, it could go either way. It's a story about a man and a woman, and I guess about people from their past. I'm the man in the story, let's clear that up right off the bat. This is brutal non-fiction. It’s also a story about mental health and heartbreak and danger. So it's a story about a bunch of things, and it starts with a bear eating my finger.
     I'm aware that most of you know about my finger being eaten by a bear. You can find out about it in another story amongst all the stories on this blog, in a story that's not actually about a bear. It comes up fairly often, although I don't see it as a defining moment in my life.
     Which is weird. Because it certainly must be a defining moment. What's the point of having a bear eat a body part, no matter how small, if it's not going to be some big moment in your existence? I don't know, I mostly view it as a great story to tell at dinner parties, not that I really get to many dinner parties in my life.
     So anyway, the bear ate my finger, and after they stitched up what was left, I was sent home to heal. I had to sleep on my side, so as not to roll onto my hand and rip the stitches or damage the hand any further.
     Initially, they wanted to remove more of the finger than I was willing to give up. They told me how having one segment or two segments or no segments really made no difference. They even wanted to take part of my hand, so my ring finger had a smooth line back to my wrist, because they thought it would look more normal.
     "In what world where I'm not a cartoon character or an alien does that look normal?" I asked, hoping I was adequately conveying the incredulity I was feeling. Besides, I had this strange notion that I had some magical regenerative powers. I suppose that was an offshoot of how we all feel like we're immortal, until one day we grow up and realize that's not true. I hadn't arrived at that point yet, and I was firmly convinced that my finger would grow back.
     It did not.
     In fact, it did the opposite. It turned black and gangrenous, and started to smell like rotting flesh, mostly because it was indeed rotting flesh. I had to return to the hospital, where they cut off the part of my finger that they had wanted to cut off in the first place. That is how I discovered that I'm not immortal, or at least not part lizard.
     Again, I had to make sure to sleep on my side, so as not to damage my finger any more than the bear and my own reptilian pipe dreams had already.
     Why is this even important? What does it have to do with a bed or a couch? Well, I'll tell you.
     The easiest way to ensure that I stayed on my side while I slept was for me to sleep on my couch. On my side, with my back pressed against the back of the couch, I wasn't going anywhere. It was no big deal, I had a comfortable couch. I was single, so no one missed me if I wasn't sleeping in a bed at night.
     Due to the original injury, and then the subsequent amputation, I wound up sleeping on my couch for well over a month. I got used to it, which wasn't so strange. Soldiers get used to sleeping in foxholes, so this wasn't much of a stretch. I liked the security of the back of the couch up against me. I found that I much preferred sleeping on my side than my back.
     In fact, I snored when I slept on my back, and I'm a fidgety sleeper, so I often wound up like that when I slept in a bed. The couch seemed better. I felt safe and secure there. I liked the extra contact I got from sleeping with my back against it.
     More than that, I found that I didn't like my bed as much anymore. I have a pretty nice queen size bed. It's very comfortable. After the relative cocoon of the couch for six weeks though, the bed felt huge and empty. It felt lonely, and it almost seemed to mock me. I didn't want to go back to the bed.
     I have had a lot of relationships in my lifetime. The problem is, they haven't really been adult relationships. I lived at home until I was almost 30, so up until then, I didn't really share a bed with anyone for more than a night or two. After I got my own place, I was dating women who were also in their 30's. They had their own places as well, or children or pets at home. They didn't want to sleep over all the time. I was kind of okay with it, because I was enjoying my first real experience of having my own space.
     And so it went. The years rolled by, and I wasn't avoiding commitment or anything, I was just going with the flow. I happened to date a bunch of women who actively avoided commitment, which was probably an unconscious choice on my part. I would lament about how no woman wanted to get serious, but I apparently avoided dating any woman who seemed stable or who wanted to live together or get married.
     Which is strange, because I really did want to get married for a lot of my life. My parents have a very successful marriage, over 60 years, and that appealed to me. The problem was, every woman I wanted to settle down with didn't want to settle down, and the ones who seemed like they might just bored me to tears.
     Yeah, I know. I see it, just like you do.
     I guess I'm just like a bunch of other annoying men who drive women crazy. I found the messed up ones exciting and sexy, and saw the dependable and responsible ones as uninteresting. I really did want long term, committed relationships with the women I loved, but they weren't really having any of that, and I must have been okay with that on some level. Still, I would make them out to be the bad guy, and blame them for not wanting to settle down. If one of them had ever done an about face and said yes to marriage or cohabitation, I probably wouldn’t have known what to do.
     At any rate, it was fall of 2004 when I lost my finger and was relegated to the couch. I never went back to my bed. Once in awhile I would have women stay overnight, and I slept in the bed with them, because it would have been really weird to have sex, and then leave them to go sleep on a couch. Sadly, that did happen a few times. Sometimes, they weren't used to sleeping with someone, or I would snore, or they had intimacy issues, and I would wind up sleeping on the couch by myself while they slept in the other room. Ah, romance!
     Mostly, though, it was just me in my apartment at night. The women in my life kind of liked having a part time boyfriend. It was easier for them. Some of them were just selfish, but as long as it made things easier for me to be lazy about everything, I didn’t mind. One woman I dated told me how her perfect man would be someone she could turn off and put in a closet, and take him out once or twice a week when she felt like it, and not have to deal with their needs or wants. She told me that’s why she liked me so much, she only had to see me once or twice a week. For some reason, this sounded reasonable to me! I had a fairly long term relationship during that time with a woman who had a kid and her own place, so we didn't have many sleepovers, and I was okay with that. I told you, I liked my couch.
     So for ten years, I only slept in my bed about 15 times, and never alone. The thought of sleeping in my bed alone was starting to fill me with anxiety and dread. It made me feel pathetic, which was ironic, because sleeping on a fucking couch for ten years is kind of the definition of pathetic. The only other times I slept in a bed was when I stayed in a hotel.
     I was happy with that, or so I thought.
     Then I met a woman, and I fell in love. For the first time, it felt like an adult relationship. We were together all the time. She had been with someone for a couple of years up until a few months before we met, and had moved back with her father while she looked for a new place. Thing was, she could do that because she had never given up her room at her father’s house. She always had it as a safety net, at 37 years old, but I didn’t find that odd at the time.
     So we met, and soon we were spending all our time with each other. She was really together, but exciting and interesting and funny and cool. I mean, she was really cool. She was a musician, she was artistic, she knew as much about music as I did, maybe more. She was beautiful, she partied, she had a bunch of interesting friends. She had traveled, she knew good food and liked to eat. She was an adult, and she was badass! My parents loved her, my friends loved her, I loved her.
     She slept at my place six out of seven nights a week, occasionally spending a night here or there at her father's house. He lived alone, and she liked to stay there for a night now and then, to cook for him and clean and do her laundry. It gave us a little time to miss each other as well.
     The thing is, I now loved sleeping in my bed with her. We slept completely entwined with each other, wrapped up tight in each other's arms. We couldn't get close enough, or have too much skin on skin. That was something new for each of us, and we couldn't believe how right it felt. In the rare night she didn't sleep at my place, I went back to the couch. The bed seemed especially empty without her there. I say that like it’s a reasonable thing, that I shouldn’t ever sleep in our bed if she wasn’t there. That’s how much that part of me was still broken.
     It really felt like an adult relationship, and the way she loved me really did wonders for me. She made me feel loved and inspired me. She made me feel attractive and desired. She gave me confidence and security, and with her, I could actually live in the moment, something I hadn't been able to do in a long time. She loved me as much as I loved her, and that was an equality I never experienced with anyone until she came along.
     I did that for her as well. She was astounded that she felt happier than she ever had in her life. We used to talk about how it felt as if we saved each other's lives, and that was not much of an exaggeration. We were talking about getting married, and I, along with everyone else, thought that this was finally it.
     So you're probably thinking that she moved in with me. I mean, she was there almost every night, and it all seemed like a fairytale romance, so why wouldn't she? We talked about it, and I was all for it, but we just didn't seem to get around to it. Part of it was because things were so great the way they were, so if neither of us was going to push it, why bother? Let things stay perfect.
     Only they weren't perfect.
     The closer we got to getting engaged, the more she started to seem distant. Her parents marriage had been troubled and turbulent, and now her mother and stepfather had recently split up. There was a history of mental illness, her mother and her aunt, and she was always afraid that she might fall victim to it. I soon found out that her fears were well founded.
     She had a history of abusive relationships before I came along. She would tell me stories that broke my heart. Some of the things she told me about that had happened to her were truly horrific. I was proud of her, because she seemed to be handling it all so well. She wasn't, though.
     She had ptsd, and I had to be careful not to get excited about anything and raise my voice at all, even if it wasn't angry. Any loud voice or noise affected her. She would panic. I had to be careful not to stand between her and any exit out of a room, or the anxiety of feeling trapped overwhelmed her. I had to relearn a lot of things so as not to trigger her.
     And still, it happened anyway. After the first six months, I started to notice how she looked for anything as a sign that I might suddenly change, and become angry or abusive. If you've spent time around women who have been abused, or even a lot who haven't, you'll notice that they apologize for so many things that really need no apology. They do it automatically, because they would never know what might set some asshole off and get them yelled at or hit. My girlfriend would tell me stories about how she would get punched for saying she liked a certain band or musician. She would get hit for dressing too nice or not nice enough. She got punched in the face once for taking a French fry off of her boyfriend's plate.
     So she lived in constant fear that I would one day start doing that, and she started to resent me for it, even though I wasn’t doing anything wrong. No matter how nice I was and how hard I tried to be calm and gentle and kind, she would see it as some sort of trick, meant to fool her, until one day I would show my true colors.
      She started to accuse me of ridiculous things; not even tangible things that had happened. Things that she thought I might be thinking, or planned to do. They were sometimes completely irrational and ridiculous thoughts, but to her, they seemed plausible.
     One of the first things I should have paid more attention to was that one day about three months into the relationship, she suddenly started telling me that my bedroom furniture was arranged the same way one of her most abusive exe's bedroom furniture was arranged. She told me how it terrified her sometimes, yet she somehow hadn't noticed it the first three months we were together. I offered to rearrange it, but she insisted it was fine, and then it passed. Everything was okay again.
     Then a month or so later, she informed me that my sheets and bedspread and curtains were the exact same pattern as his were, and it freaked her out! I was taken aback, as you can imagine. How could that be? And how could she just now be noticing that? She also told me how my furniture was not only arranged the same way, it was the same exact style furniture as this guy had years ago. It made no sense. Still, she would tell me it was okay when I offered to rearrange everything or get new sheets and curtains.
     Now, I collect old newspapers, and have some particularly nice ones framed and hanging in my room. One day, she informed me that her ex also collected them, and had them hanging in the same places as I did. Now I knew for sure that something was wrong. I asked her how that could be, and she flipped out, saying I was accusing her of lying.
     All this was happening over the course of months, and in between these outbursts and telling how my room was a carbon copy of her abusive ex, she was perfectly fine, and would apologize for thinking it. But the cracks were really beginning to show. So after almost a year together, a few weeks before I was going to give her an engagement ring, she completely lost it. The girl I loved so much, my first real adult relationship, imploded. It got very scary and ugly, and I didn't know what to do.
     And then she was gone.
     Of course, I went back to my couch. If you think it was hard sleeping in my bed alone before, now it was torture.

2

     I’m not someone who sits around and has a lot of regrets. I had gotten a lot of good things out of my relationship with her. It was the first time I felt truly loved. I felt supported and cared for, and like someone really wanted to spend time with me. She wasn't a horrible person, quite the opposite. She was damaged, but she was kind and loving and sweet when she wasn't being completely irrational, especially that first year.
     I have always had a very bad self image. I have some pretty severe body dysmorphia stuff going on. I think I'm hideously ugly, and much heavier than I am. I know it's not reality, but I can't help it. It’s a defect in my thinking, brought on by years of abuse, and it shapes my reality.
     I hate the sight of me. If I see myself in a mirror when I'm out at a bar or restaurant or store, I sometimes go into a full blown panic attack, that's how much I hate it. I’ve had incidents when I went to the restroom in a bar or restaurant, saw myself in the bathroom mirror at a bad angle or light, and it took everything I had to walk back out there and function like a normal human being. I’ve looked at myself in a mirror in a dressing room at the store, and been so repulsed by myself that I just dropped everything and fled the store, not able to catch my breath until I was in the car.
      It's embarrassing, and I feel foolish and pathetic when it happens. It's irrational, and it's infuriating that I know better, but still can't always get a handle on it. It makes no sense that something you know isn't real can still have that kind of effect on you. We make our own realities, and we don't usually create them by ourselves. We have plenty of help along the way from bullies and manipulators and abusers, and even by well meaning family and friends. People don’t understand the power of words, and how much damage they can do.
     My ex had really helped me with my self esteem. She honestly found me attractive, and while I assume all of the women who have dated me must have found me attractive as well, none of them made me feel that way. Whereas I used to have to sit in my car in the store parking lot for a few moments to give myself a pep talk and remind myself that I was no more hideous than anyone else out there, now I would find myself thinking that if she found me attractive, who cares what anyone else thinks? It kind of freed me from the anxiety and insecurity.
     The thing is, it wasn’t really a fix. I still thought I looked like a troll, I just didn’t care as long as she loved me and thought I was good looking. That’s pretty much the opposite of good mental health and self esteem. Still, it allowed me to function and breathe, and it felt better than the way I usually felt. It was one less voice in my head jockeying for position to make me feel bad about myself.
     Out of the many things that devastated me when she left, one that really frightened me was losing that feeling and that security, even if it was flawed. I had spent so much of my life so anxiety ridden about just being seen that I couldn’t bear the thought of giving that up. I had gotten used to not being repulsed by myself as intensely as usual. The thought of going back to it terrified me.
     So I determined that I was going to hold onto as much of the good things she brought to my life as I could. I would still remind myself how much she had loved me. Even though it broke my heart, I would read letters and notes she had written, and think about all the good times and good things. On one hand, it was excruciating, poking at that wound everyday. With the pain came wisdom and strength, and I managed to hold onto some of what she had given me. I still thought I looked horrible, but I still didn’t care that much, because she had loved me.
     A couple of months after she left, I got up one morning(off the couch, of course!) and stumbled into the bathroom. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, which I still usually tried to avoid. But this time, I couldn't help but stare at what I saw in the mirror. I didn't look like me at all! I looked normal, almost a little handsome. My face wasn't misshapen or troll like, my body wasn't immense and bulging in weird places. I was actually frightened, because I didn't really look like me, at least not the version of me that I had been seeing all these years. I was actually seeing me the way I really looked. I didn’t look like Brad Pitt or anything, but I looked tolerable.
     The difference was so startling that I really feared for my sanity. I thought maybe something was really wrong. I can’t even describe how bizarre and jarring it was. It was like I was looking out of some alternate reality version of me, like my mirror was actually a portal to a different dimension, one where I wasn’t gross. It took me a week or so of seeing my own real reflection until I finally accepted it. I could finally see myself the way the rest of the world saw me. That was because of her. Even though she was gone, the effect she had on me was still here.
      So I decided to hold onto as much of that as I could. I started to get my life in order. I was eating healthier, getting out and riding my bike and playing golf. I was really figuring it all out, even contemplating sleeping in my bed again.
     Then, about four months later, she returned.
     What followed was about two and a half years of sheer hell. I was determined not to give up on her, I wanted so badly to save her, but I didn't stand a chance. The woman I loved, who loved me, wasn't there anymore. It was paranoid schizophrenia, and some of those personalities really wanted to make me pay for all the hurt anyone had ever caused her. She was hearing voices and hallucinating. She told me that she knew I was telekinetic and was moving things around behind her back, and that I had a giant magnet hidden under the bed to control her and mess up her cell phone.
     There were fights and drugs and arrests and psychologists and more horrible things that I can't even write down to this day. It's too hard and it's too painful. Finally, she was so far gone and became so dangerous and abusive that I had to walk away. There was nothing else I could do, I had tried everything.
     So back to the bed and the couch.
     At several points during the two and a half years, she would move in with me. It would only last a month or two before she would leave, living in her car or on the street, or in some flophouse apartment. At one point when she was living with me though, I came home from work to find that her friend had come over, and they rearranged my bedroom. She had finally done it.
     It looked ridiculous. If you've ever had an apartment with a corner bedroom with two windows, a full bedroom set, and electric baseboard heat, you know that there is really only one optimal way of positioning everything. She had things all over the place. Nothing made sense, you couldn't get around, but if it made her feel better, I would go along with it.
      We didn't sleep in the bed anyway. If you've had any experience with bipolar people, you have probably seen them stay up for days. It's like they're afraid to sleep. Then they sleep for 20 hour stretches. I would sleep on the couch, what little sleep I got, while she would pace around the apartment, or spend hours on her phone messing with the settings because she was sure someone was spying on her or tracking her.
     The terrible thing about damaged and broken people is that they damage and break the things around them as well. You don’t even notice it while it is happening. She had been so haunted by ghosts of the past that she could never be free. I watched them torment her for years. I saw them appear out of nowhere. I saw them trailing behind her. I saw them touch her so lightly at times, whispering in her ear like a faint breeze. I saw them swirl around her, beating her down and screaming like banshees.
     All that time, I could do nothing. I tried, but it's not easy to grapple with a spectre. There's no real form to make out half the time, and no way to drag it off someone and banish it to the shadows. I'm not an exorcist or necromancer, I cannot command the dead. I could only watch them torment her, and see the anguish and terror they caused. My pale words and reassurances meant very little. The people she needed to hear apologize or explain, or even just admit to what they'd done, would never give her that peace and satisfaction.
     That's why denying your victims the simple act of confessing to your crimes is almost as bad as the crime itself. They are doomed to a half life, never getting any resolution. Never getting any confirmation that they didn't deserve whatever was done to them. There will always be people around them wondering if they are telling the truth, doubting their stories and looking to blame them. They live never getting an answer that only the perpetrator of something so terrible can give them. So they look to you, and hate you because you can't give them solace or satisfaction. You are just one more person who can never understand, who can never make it stop, who can never drive the ghosts away once and for all.
     When she was finally gone for good, I discovered all the ghosts she had left behind for me. There was the pain, obviously. It was more than just losing her and the light she had brought me. It was the same thing that she was dealing with in some ways.
      I had no answers, and she wasn't going to give me any. She couldn't. She wasn't even capable of seeing how hurt I was. She was sick, and she couldn't even help herself. The jagged pieces of her mind no longer fit together, so there would never be resolution for me. The woman I loved, the one I held so tightly while we slept, the one who finally somehow left me feel as if the world made sense… she didn't exist anymore.
      It’s a cruel trick life plays on you when you want so badly to help someone you love, but helping them only enables them and makes it worse. It is a test with no right answers. In some cases, you can let them hit bottom, and that might make them see what they are doing, to themselves and to the people around them. Sadly, most people don’t hit bottom, or when they do, they can’t even recognize it. When you try to help them and it slows their descent, it has the effect of making it a gradual transition that takes away the big moment of clarity. If you fall fast and hit hard, and awake one day to find that your life is unbearable, it is a great motivator. If you fall softly, and your life has been deteriorating slowly due to the fact that people have been cushioning that fall all along, you barely even notice. You think to yourself well, it could always get a little worse, it has before and it hasn’t killed me, and on you go, sinking slowly. Kind of the same way it wound up seeming perfectly fine for me to sleep on my couch for 15 years. I had to accept that there was nothing I could do, and that was something that I had to try to convince myself of every single day.
       She was good looking enough and manipulative enough to find other people willing to enable her when I wasn’t there to do it. I watched as she lost more and more, but it still didn’t shock her into seeing just how bad things had gotten. She lost her job, she lost her car. She lost family, she lost pets. She lost her self respect. She would actually sit with me and lament about how bad her life was and how much she hated being the way she was, and then turn around and tell me how she could actually sink deeper, so it wasn’t all that bad! She would cry about the things she lost, and then just make up her mind that she could still go on. So when she finally lost me, that didn’t matter either. Nothing I said or did made any difference, other than to be enable her more. You can’t win a fight with delusion.
     I couldn't even have the petty satisfaction of being angry or hating her. It wasn't her fault. Brain chemistry and genetics made her susceptible, and predators and abusers and addiction did the rest.
     Even as I understood all that, while friends and family assured me I had done all that I could, I still felt like I failed her. I still knew she was out there, afraid and traumatized, hearing voices and sinking lower. It was like someone else was now inhabiting her skin, a ghost in the machine, destroying her from within. I had to remind myself all the time that it wasn’t my fault, and tell myself that in the end, I had to preserve myself. I wasn’t helping her at all, I was just enabling her and helping to destroy us both.
     That’s hard to do. There is a difference between knowing something and feeling something. There is a difference between forcing yourself to live with something that eats away at you every day and actually accepting it. Most of the time, we never truly accept things or let them go, we just put a band-aid on it, and self medicate or otherwise distract ourselves from the pain. Meanwhile, we find ourselves prodding it, poking at it, and giving it attention anyway.
     That’s where I found myself; accepting it, but not accepting it at all. I was broken and scared and raging inside, but I had to keep it together on the outside. I had too many other responsibilities; to work and family and other people, to give up and collapse. That was okay, I would tell myself, that’s what I did. I was the person people go to with their problems. I was the together one, who helped everyone else. I would be fine.
     Life is full of weird bullshit instances where your brain shoehorns you into some stupid box as it constantly tries to make sense of a nonsensical world. One of those bullshit things is that if you're a person who helps others with their problems, if you're a giver… well, your brain assigns you a fucked up set of rules and parameters to guide you along. You're given a role, and your brain tries to make you play it like some crazed and power-mad community theater director who thinks he's on Broadway. Unfortunately, those rules mess up other huge aspects of your life, because we are complex, and need committees and debate and nuance to navigate life, not one dictatorial brain with a hammer.
     One of the biggest bullshit rules your brain gives you is that if you're a helper and a giver, it stands to reason that you cannot ask for help or be a taker. You need to stay within the bounds of your rigidly defined role. What that means is you wind up feeling guilty or a failure or a burden if you have a problem. In your head, you have failed at your prime directive.
     I’m a helper and a giver, so I have to constantly remind myself that my brain is full of shit, and its rules are too simplistic and rigid. So I do try to talk to my friends about my problems on occasion. You’ll find that people want to help, even if they don’t see themselves as helpers. Takers aren’t monsters, they might just be a little more self absorbed or needy or melodramatic than helpers. So they try their best, but their own brains are not really comfortable with the role reversal, and to be honest, neither is mine. You see them as needing comfort, so it seems like you are burdening an already fragile person with your issues. That’s not even a fair view of them, but your brain doesn’t care, the roles demand it. Even when I do talk to them about my problems, I hold back, and I keep it simple, and I’m very conscious about how much I’m whining.
     “Whining.”
     That’s my brain with its bullshit again. It is invalidating my problems and pain, even as I look for help and guidance. While I have truly spent a good portion of my life listening to some people whine about really trivial shit, even then I don’t tell them that they are whining. I don’t make them feel like they are wasting my time, because even the drama queens have legitimate pain and misery at the core of their drama. You have to listen to the whining to get to the root. Still, my brain tries to make me feel like I’m a loser and a mess for talking about my problems.
     I do have helpers in my life as well, but again, when you ask a helper for help but they identify you as another helper, their brain won’t let it all line up properly. You are still out of your role, and helpers are programmed to help takers, not givers. It is all very complex and ridiculous, but human beings excel at making their lives needlessly hard and dysfunctional.
     So I wind up downplaying my own stuff, and even when I do talk about it to someone, I soon make myself stop because I think I am boring them or making them feel uncomfortable out of their roles. As a result, I internalize a lot of stuff.
     I ended up with ptsd myself. I would panic if I thought I saw her on the street, and everyone looked like her from a distance. I would see a car that looked like her car, a car that she hadn’t even owned for over a year, and my mind would instantly flood with apprehension. Even though I knew she no longer drove that car, it would still be a trigger. It seemed familiar though, because she would see her past abusers everywhere, even when it wasn’t possible. They were nowhere around; two were in jail, and one died about a year and a half after I had first started seeing her. Still, every couple of days I had to hear about how she was sure she saw one of them, or heard their voices outside her window. We would be driving down the street and she would panic and point out one of them, only to get closer and find that it was not them at all. Sometimes it wasn’t even close. It was a woman, or elderly person, or a bush. I would marvel about how she could be so wrong all the time, how she could be so irrational, yet here I was freaking out just the same because I thought I saw a car that she once owned. I was sent into a panic when the phone rang, afraid it would be her raving and screaming at me, or texting me hateful and nasty screeds that made little sense. I would sit in my living room, and jump at every noise in the hallway, thinking it might be her back at my door.
     It never was.
     I had blocked her number, and told her never to come back, and it worked. Still, I lived in fear for so long that she would. Not because she would do something violent or dangerous, although I knew she was capable of that. She had told me so herself, that she had fantasies about killing me. She had already tried to hurt me, hitting me or throwing heavy and sharp objects at my head.
     She used to hide anything with a point or a sharp edge in the house. I would find all kinds of things squirreled away in the linen closet or the back of a drawer, sometimes wrapped in a sock or washcloth. I used to think that she did that because she was afraid that one day I would snap and try to kill her, but it slowly dawned on me that she didn't trust herself not to hurt me. One night, she sat here in my living room, and told me that, in a voice I barely recognized, with a look in her eyes of cold, calculated hate. Schizophrenia is a very scary thing to witness.
     I was just afraid to have to face her again. To open up all the old wounds again, to try to reason with an unreasonable person. It would hurt me so much, and I would have nothing to gain. I feared that I would wind up taking her back, and open myself up to more months of abuse and misery. I really felt like it would kill me if I ever went back there again.
     So here I was, damaged and broken and terrified. Instead of helping her, I was inflicted with some of the very things I tried to help her overcome. That's the danger of trying to deal with things you don't understand. That's why you need professionals. That’s why there needs to be separation and professional detachment. If you're not a psychologist or psychiatrist, you're just going to fuck up your life and theirs. The things you think are helping are actually hurting. While you may think you're strong and holding onto your sanity, it might be slipping away and you don't even see it.
     Crazy people don't think that they're crazy, right?

3

     So now, here I was, broken hearted, confused, estranged, completely shattered. I felt like a failure in many ways. I had a whole bunch of conflicting emotions raging inside me. The rest of my life was stressful and crazy as well. In trying to help her and keep her out of jail and the poor house, I had really screwed myself up financially.
     I built a ton of credit card debt, wiped out any savings I had, and really put myself in a tough spot. I started the long climb back to solvency and good credit, and I'm still not there yet. It’s been a rough couple of years, but rough in a completely different way than the three years that preceded them. It’s amazing the multitude of ways that life can knock you down, from small things that feel like a thousand little cuts each day; to huge, overlapping arcs that play out and set the tone over years or decades or a lifetime.
     I haven't really thought about dating or moving on. Who would want to date me right now? I'm sort of broke, I'm damaged, and I sleep each night on an old, ratty couch. I certainly couldn't bring a woman home to my ridiculous bedroom! I hate it at this point. I am surrounded by reminders of how badly I failed and how monumentally I fucked up nearly every aspect of my life for a time. The biggest reminder, the one that seems to encompass everything bad, is my bedroom, and that goddamn bed sitting in the middle of it.
     So for about two years now, I have hardly even gone in my bedroom. I kept meaning to put everything back in its correct place, but just like the way she would put off changing it, I have been putting off changing it back. I even got new sheets and a bedspread a year ago, and never took them out of the packaging. It's hilarious, actually. I pay for a two bedroom apartment, and don't use either bedroom.
      My couch isn't comfortable anymore either. It's old and lumpy, and should have been replaced years ago. I was starting to stall before she came along, and even though I really made some strides when I was with her that first year, I've fallen even further back in many ways. Sure, my mirror image isn’t as horrible as it once was, but I still don’t have much motivation or drive. I don’t think in terms of a bright and shining future, I don’t feel anticipation, I feel dread. Inertia has completely engulfed me, and I'm not sure how to get moving again. It's killing me, but I just can't seem to do anything about it.
     That’s not to say that I don’t do anything. Other parts of my life are busy and stressed, but most of them are not fulfilling in the least. I have responsibilities to friends and family and work, and I take care of those. Some are even kind of gargantuan. Then I find I myself at home, with no motivation, no real purpose, and nobody, and just taking the trash out seems like an insurmountable thing.
     Still, I’m not miserable. Most of the time, I laugh and joke around. I’m fairly pleasant to be around, at least I think I am. I think life is absurd, and I am definitely nihilistic, but I try to remain optimistic, even if my idea of optimism and best case outcomes is probably vastly different than yours.
     It’s not that I can’t imagine a better future, it’s just that I don’t really know if it’s worth the effort to try to get there. I’m 55 years old, and I’m tired. I’ve seen most of these movies before, I know how they turn out. Still, I have not given up. Everyday, I look around me and see success stories. Everyday I see things that inspire me. I just have a really bad habit of stubbornly waiting for the world to meet me halfway, and that’s not something the world really has any interest in doing.
     I’m not depressed, not in any clinical sense. I don’t get melancholy out of the blue, and I don’t get sad when I’m doing something happy. I know people with depression, and it can be debilitating. I’m not saying that I don’t have any issues, I just spent a bunch of time illustrating most of them right here. More than anything, I am just worn down. I have a bunch of reasons why I’m kind of spinning my wheels, but at least half of them are valid. I recognize that I am at a transitional point in my life, I have been there for awhile now, but I’m just not sure how to move forward yet.
     And so I wait; for inspiration, for someone to walk into my life and make it better, for some opportunity to present itself. Like I said, though, the world has no interest in doing any of that for me. Perhaps I will never find the spark I need to start getting my life back together again.
     Then, for no reason at all, I walked into my bedroom yesterday, took my bed apart, and moved everything back to the way it used to be. I stood there afterward, kind of in shock that I did it. I hadn’t even been thinking about it, I was just watching TV and being bored. It was like something snapped, and I suddenly had a purpose, no matter how small. Now, here I was, staring at my room with everything back in its original position, and marveling at how I hadn’t done it sooner. Then it seemed kind of overwhelming, and I was suddenly very aware of the room and myself, and I instantly decided that was enough for one day. Back to the couch!
     Today, I went back into the room, and I went through piles of clothes that had been there for years. I vacuumed and cleaned everything, the first time in ages. I got rid of a bunch of junk that served no purpose other than to remind me of her and what I had lost, what we both had lost. I got the new sheets and bedspread, and I made the bed. I stood in the doorway, and just looked at my room, clean, organized, and reclaimed.
     It felt good.
     It felt weird.
     Uh oh. Back to the couch again!
     A few hours later, I thought about how I haven't laid in a bed in so long, even my own, and I realized that I didn't even remember what it felt like. My bed was there, in the next room, freshly made, where it was supposed to be. It was my goddamn bed!
     So I went in, and I flopped down on it, and it was so comfortable. It was my bed, the one I remembered from so long ago. I didn't think about how big it was, or how empty it seemed. I didn’t focus on who wasn’t there with me, and wonder if anyone ever would be again. I just thought about how good it felt to actually lie on my bed. It felt like progress. It felt like closing a chapter.
     It also felt like opening a cage door; or maybe the door was never closed, but I was trapped in there just the same. As I lay there, I thought about a lot of things, and the pain that usually accompanies those thoughts wasn't really there anymore. The memory of it was, and it was a little frightening, but it was controllable.
     It dawned on me that maybe I had turned a corner. I knew that I still wasn't going to sleep in my bed tonight. I may have turned a corner, but that's still farther down the road from where I am presently. I can see it, though, and that's enough for now.
     Now, I'm back sitting on my couch, but I am writing this down, and that's the real accomplishment. That's acceptance, and that's growth and bravery and time. I’m making lists and plans to reclaim other parts of my apartment and life as well. Soon the time will come when I can sleep in my own bed, by myself. I used to feel so lonely, and think that I was bereft and unlovable, and deserved to be there with no one beside me. That was me fooling myself again. It was never just me. I always had company with me under those sheets, but no more! The ghosts and demons will have all disappeared, and I'll be glad to be alone once more.
     Maybe we have to be our own exorcists…

+/-

     I made a conscious decision years ago to be more positive. This seems to annoy a lot of people. I post about it on social media all the time, to very little fanfare. There is a core group of people who seem to like it and get something out of it, but most people just ignore it. Some people actually get mad about it, but I think if you get mad at someone else for saying that things aren’t as bad as they seem, and there is beauty and kindness in the world if you look, you might have some more pressing personal issues you need to sort out. Ultimately, it seems to help a bunch of people, as well as myself, so I'm not going to stop talking about it.
     I used to be one of those people who got mad at other people who seemed to be content or nice or happy. I remember reading about Sting some years back, and how he meditated and examined himself and how he really was at peace. He seemed sincere. It seemed genuine. And I hated him for it. I used to think he was a smug, happy bastard, who was just rubbing my face in it. It’s easy to be happy and at peace when you’re a rich rock star, you deluded asshole!
     Then, I started to notice that there were people from all walks of life who had somehow achieved this inner peace as well. I realized I was jealous of them for not having that inner turmoil and anxiety that I knew so well. I envied their cool confidence, and how they saw the good in everything and kept hope alive. All of those things were about as far away from where I was as you could get, but I had no clue or roadmap on how to get there.
     So, I used to be anything but positive. Like most negative people, I think had myself convinced that I was the most positive person in the world. I would explain how I was a realist as well. I would go on about how I wasn't going to ignore the truth, and somehow twisted my cynicism, fear, and bitterness at the world into some half baked, pseudo philosophy that didn't quite hold up under scrutiny.
     So I just didn't scrutinize it.
     I was proud of the fact that the way I would approach any problem or concern was to first and foremost imagine the worst possible outcome. I would then reassure myself that I could handle it if it came to that, and work my way back from there. To me, that was sensible and logical, the pinnacle of reason.
     The problem was, I was training myself to immediately visualize the most negative outcome possible, and that's not positive thinking, that's trying to control the uncontrollable. That's starting from a place of fear, and worrying more about your ego, and succumbing to irrational thinking than addressing the problem at hand.
     If you think that's reasonable and logical, let's look at it from an oddsmaker's perspective. How many times have you been faced with a problem or uncertain future, and the worst, most absolute possible outcome you could conjure up came true? It would be something like close to 0%, because we face stuff like this all our lives, and we're not all living in a shack by the river with the bubonic plague and wooden stumps for legs. Sure, a few times in your life, you're probably going to get some really bad news, but when you compare that with all the times you basically skate through stuff that terrified you at first, it's almost nil.
     So worrying about the absolute worst thing you can imagine every time you're faced with a conundrum is not very reasonable at all. It's like going to the track and betting the longshot every time. It's like hitting on 20 in blackjack, or mortgaging your house and buying lottery tickets with the money. It's like a whole lot of other sucker bets that make no sense, and go against the odds every time. Ask any gambler, you're not going to get anywhere by doing that.
     You're brain tricks you into believing all kinds of absolute bullshit, just to alleviate your fear. Make no mistake, we are all living in terror most of the time. We are so frightened of the unknown, paralyzed by uncertainty, that we will base all of our behavior on trying to reassure ourselves, no matter what we have to tell ourselves to achieve it. One of the easiest ways for our brains to do that is to lower our expectations. To denigrate the things we really want, to invalidate our dreams and desires, so we don't miss them when we inevitably don't get them. Aim low, and that way you're never disappointed. You don't deserve it anyway, so settle for what you get.
     Then we convince ourselves that we are being responsible and realistic. We are parading our negative attitude around like it's some sort of admirable trait.
     There's an old joke about a traveling salesman, whose car breaks down out in the country on a desolate road on a rainy night. He trudges down the road for miles, looking for a house to use a phone to call for a tow truck. He's cursing the rain, cursing the chill, cursing the dark. He thinks to himself how he will most likely find a house, and no one will be home, or he will get a door slammed in his face. Maybe it will be a farmhouse, and some dumb hick farmer will try to shoot him for trespassing, or because he thinks he'll try something on his daughter. Out here, they probably won't even have a phone.
     Finally, he comes to a house, with a light on inside, and walks up to the front door and knocks.
     The door opens, a man opens the door and says "Can I help you?" 
     The salesman yells "You can shove your phone right up your ass!" and storms off into the night.
     The reason I know that joke is because since I was a boy, we teased my father that he was like the salesman. My father has a lot of amazing and admirable qualities, but he is a Ferraris, and we come from a long line of negative thinkers. In our family, to this day, when one of us catches the other being negative and bitching about things that haven’t even happened yet, we just say "Shove your phone up your ass!" and the point is well taken.
     Like I said, I used to be negative as well. I expected the worst; out of people, out of the world, and ultimately, out of myself. I didn't even realize that I was doing it.
      I'm a Ferraris.
      My brother is a Ferraris as well, but he's not nearly as negative as the rest of us. None of us are sure why. In fact, we kind of saw it as a defect in a way. The prevailing opinion of my brother was that he was a dreamer, a butterfly who flitted about without a care in the world and no sense of responsibility or how to live in the real world. He stays up too late, and sleeps in some times, and is often running late.
     The thing is, my brother can be cynical or get down at times. As far as not having any sense of responsibility, he somehow managed to build a career, get married, raise two wonderful children, and become a pretty amazing potter along the way. My brother lives his life. He does more in a day than most people. He works, he takes care of his family, he helps out his friends, he gets to his studio, he goes to museums and lectures and lunches, and he finds time to talk on the phone with me and goof about dumb pop culture references and inside jokes when he's not listening to my problems.
     It turns out that the joke was on us. My brother might be as imperfect as the rest of us, but the things we saw as weird and irresponsible was just him not being as miserable and negative as we were. He did just fine, thank you.
     So one day, about 8 years ago, my brother and I were playing golf. Around the 5th hole, I suddenly realized that my necklace was missing. I had that necklace since the early 90's. It was a trilobite fossil a friend had given me, and my parents had a jeweler they knew make a special setting for it, with a silver chain. I have worn that necklace every day of my life since I'd gotten it, some 20 years earlier.
     Now it was gone.
     I immediately thought to myself that the odds of ever seeing it again were zero. It was lost on a golf course, and probably had already gone through a mower. In an instant, I gave up any hope of seeing that necklace again. I convinced myself to just let it go, because there was no sense even thinking I would ever find it. I told my brother we should just forget about it and keep playing.
     He looked at me like I was nuts. He wanted to drive back over the course and look for it. He wanted to see if anyone had found it and turned it in. I told him he was crazy, it was gone, just let it go. He searched the golf cart a few times, and kept trying to think of places it could be. In my pocket, down my shirt, in my shoe, all which seemed ridiculous. I told him again to just let it go and forget about it.
     He refused. He told me how he always envisions the positive, and believes that there is always a chance for a happy outcome. There goes my wacky brother again I thought to myself. Always a dreamer.
     Still, we traced our path back across the golf course, and just like I thought, we came up empty handed. We finished our round, and once back at the clubhouse, he asked if there was a lost and found, and if anyone turned in my necklace.
     No one had.
     The guy at the counter told us that odds were it was gone, just like I'd been saying. Still, my brother said he refused to accept that there was no hope, and that it would turn up somewhere. It was starting to get annoying. He went to his car to put his clubs in the trunk, as I walked to mine to do the same. I was angry about my necklace, and perturbed at my brother for being so daft as to think that I would ever see my necklace again.
     As I reached down to open the trunk, there was my necklace on the ground. It had fallen off when was getting my clubs from my car trunk earlier. It had been here waiting for me the whole time. I picked it up, and put it around my neck, only then willing to even admit to myself how wrong everything seemed without it. I couldn't even let myself feel distraught about it missing, let alone entertain the thought that I might get it back.
     I went over to my brother and showed him that I found it and told him where it was, and he didn't seem all that taken aback.
     "See," he told me, "I told you it would probably turn up. Think positive."
      At that moment, I had one of those epiphanies we all have all the time, then immediately forget about. Only this time, I didn't forget. I thought about how I easily I had given up on something I loved and cherished as much as that necklace. I thought about how many times I had just given up without trying because it was safer and easier than having hope. I remembered how a friend of mine once said to me that the reason I was so tormented was because I still had hope, and to be truly happy, I should get rid of that, and I had thought he was the wisest person I'd ever met.
     From that moment, I decided to be more positive and as fearless as I could be.
     But yeah, turns out it wasn't that simple.
     When you have epiphanies, the universe sees it, and takes it as a challenge. At least, that’s the way I saw it. I had a lifetime of fear and anxiety drilled into me. It had been beaten into me by bullies, absorbed by frightened and confused people all around me, it loomed over everything during the Cold War, where we were reminded that we could be vaporized in a nuclear holocaust any moment.
     It was all around me even now, in the news and in advertising, in political speeches and urban legends and horror movies and true crime shows. Most songs were about heartbreak, most people seemed suspect, and everyone seemed even more terrified than I was.
     Everyone was afraid of being alone, yet afraid of being in a relationship, afraid to care, afraid to trust, afraid to live. I was no different.
     Still, I thought I saw a better way. On paper, it still seemed like it made more sense to be positive and forward thinking than to be stifled and caged by insecurity and fear. I needed to somehow transfer that from an idea to a way of life.
     I needed to reinvent myself.
     Some people accuse people like me of putting on an act. They think I'm fooling myself, or trying to trick them, or manipulate others. They think I'm trying to put lipstick on a pig, or polish a turd, or some other disturbing metaphor that people in times past could relate to, for some reason. They think I'm fooling myself, and trying to convince myself of something that I don't really believe.
     Here's the funny thing about that. At one point in my life, that was probably more true than not. After that day on the golf course, I was still pretty skeptical about the whole thing. Negative thinking and low expectations was my safe place. It was like I was afraid to expect anything good, like even allowing myself to hope for it was jinxing myself. It was scary to simply accept that there was a chance things could work out, even though most of life things pretty much worked out okay.
     I still get that. I still knock on wood and try to rein in my enthusiasm at times, like if I say what I want out loud, or even think about it too much, I'll ruin it, like the way you can't tell anyone your birthday wish, or it won't come true. I didn’t want the universe to see it as a challenge.
     So for months afterwards, I would have to force myself to stay positive, and I was so anxiety ridden that I was somehow asking for trouble by thinking I might deserve the best possible outcome that it seemed completely wrong and counterintuitive. I felt like a phony, like I was trying to convince myself of something that I didn't really believe.
     Because I was. It took work. It took facing my fears and insecurities. It took strength holding onto that positivity until things did turn out okay. Even more, it took faith and hope that when they didn't, it wasn't the universe punishing me for wanting it. I came to realize that whether or not I worried and fretted about things that were out of my control, things were going to happen the way they happen, so why should I spend that time worrying?
     You might say that I'm just giving in, or not trying, but here's the real secret about positive thinking your frightened brain doesn't want you to see. You waste your energy on controlling an outcome that doesn’t even exist yet, rather than work in the moment on the things you can actually affect. When you're not wasting your time and energy on things that are beyond your control, you can put that time and effort into the things you can influence and determine. Letting go of your illusionary stranglehold on things is a huge help in itself.
     Have you ever been driving down the road and noticed a pothole up ahead? Sometimes, you focus on it, and start telling yourself the one thing you don't want to do is hit that pothole. You find yourself transfixed to the point where you can't see anything but the pothole, and before you know it, you're driving right over it and knocking your front end out of alignment.
     That's the real damage negativity does to us all. It gives you tunnel vision, it sucks your will and strength, it holds you back and holds you down. No matter where you are, all you can see is a destination you want to avoid. That’s like planning a trip to the Grand Canyon with a map of the Sudan.
     Eventually, it makes you see the world around you as a place to fear and hate. It makes you see people as weak and corrupted, because that's how we start to see ourselves. When you focus on the bad, that's all you see. We downplay the things that should bring us pride and confidence, and as we push ourselves to failure, we diminish the love we have for who we are.
     We lose track of the fact that we are amazing and capable of greatness. We lose sight of our dreams, because the more we fear failure, the more we are ensuring it.
     I realized all this, but I still couldn't quite have the courage to live it. I knew it, but I still didn't feel it.
     So I faked it. I put on a brave front, even though I was terrified inside. I acted like the person I wanted to be, not the person I felt I was. But you know what? One day, I realized that I had become that person. I willed myself into becoming the thing that I wanted to be; the thing I was pretending to be ceased to be pretend.
     I was a real boy!
     No, wait, that's Pinocchio.
     But really, I was so much freer than I had ever been. I wasn't trying to fool myself or fate or destiny. I wasn't trying to manipulate the universe into letting me be safe and average. I wasn't denying who I was and what I wanted out of life.
     I started sharing my writing and my outlook online. I started singing with a band, and writing songs. I took chances in life and business and love. I talked to people I met, and learned how to listen and care and express myself. I learned how to put myself out there and not be afraid of hearing "no" or getting hurt.
     And I got hurt at times. I came up short at times. I got discouraged now and then, and there was still heartbreak and misery along the path.
     I took those failures and heartbreak, and I gleaned wisdom from them. I cried when I needed to, but it made me stronger and strengthened my resolve.
     I'm still not where I want to be. I'm still prone to tripping myself up at times. I can still be a little self destructive, like all of us. I still fuck up, and say the wrong thing, or make the wrong decision, or bite off more than I can chew. I still disappoint others as well as myself.
     The difference is, I don't sit around beating myself up for it. I don't let it stop my forward momentum. I apologize when I'm wrong, I course correct when I need to, I laugh at my faux pas, and I make sure I learn whatever lesson is there to be learned from my mistakes. I still get bogged down, but I use that time to plot a new course. I don't let people take my missteps or failures or shortcomings and use them against me. I don't use them against myself.
     I find the strength to keep going in myself, and in the belief that the world is full of opportunity and kindness and second chances. I find inspiration everywhere I look, and in the people I know and read about. I share all the little and big things about myself with the world, because I think it makes the world a better place. I think it brings comfort to people. I think it makes me stronger and more accessible. I look for light, and I find it all around me, and I let that light vanquish the darkness.
     I know who I am, I'm David Ferraris, and I'm kind of wise, and somewhat talented in a couple of areas. I'm loyal and funny and smart and comforting. I'm sort of easy on the eyes, and I really like that I can feel that way and accept those things about me, because for so long, I couldn't . I thought I was wrong or ashamed for liking and embracing myself. I want to inspire others and find the good in people. I want to leave things better than I found them. I want to succeed and grow and learn, even if that means failing at times or looking silly. I'm proud of who I am, and I'm happy that I'm the sort of person who wants to lift everyone up around him and try to save the world in my own little way, one person at a time. Life’s a journey, you might as well make it a pleasant one.
     I expect nothing less, and neither should you.