This morning I had what I predict is a new, recurrent, anxiety dream. I was looking for something. Eventually, it was, somewhat miraculously, found. But in between, enormous feelings of guilt and misery, letting down the (long-ago) client these things had belonged to… colour separations for a printing job assigned to a company now long out of business…huge efforts to resurrect phone numbers and remember names of the printing rep, the jobber they had usually tasked with making and storing separations, and so forth. Waking up relieved and surprised. This was not the ancient recurrent falling dream, the familar exam dream with its variations. Yet I have the hunch that it’s the dream of this stage of my life, the fear of “losing it.”
It came at the end of a long and good night’s sleep, after a day when I had nominally been in charge of a pot luck lunch at church, itself marred behind the scenes by ovens and stoves that failed (one sparked spectacularly) after I had not been able to find the new oven thermometers I had bought six months ago to verify the functioning of those same three stoves. Not that the thermometers could have helped, really, with the functioning, though the volunteers might have better known what they were up against. Only the oldest stove, a big six burner restaurant appliance, was working right. Here again, somewhat miraculously, people were fed, food was abundant, leftovers were distributed, dishes were washed. Even the horrible black crust on the bottom of the pot that burned on the stovetop was scoured clean by a newly retired engineer and devout lay reader. Three strangers appeared when the last tired but cheerful members of the clean-up crew came downstairs to the curb; the three guys helped load all the bags of dirty tablecloths and tea towels, and the cleaned pots, into the share car which (also miraculously) had not been ticketed all day even though I had not been able to pay for the parking at all on my phone, which defaulted to the “information: new hours” screen every time I tapped “continue,” after I had been just too stubborn to go pay with cash–instead, had made screenshots of the computing glitch, preparing to defend myself if fined.
And when I come to write all this, for a blog I now see with horror has been dormant for three and a half years, I find my desk covered with papers and “debris” with scarcely room to rest my forearms on either side of the cup of hot microwaved coffee.
Yes, I live with the fear of “losing it” these days whether it’s the discipline to regularly clear the desk or kitchen table, or to unhaltingly climb up or down even a small flight of steps, or to remember keys or keep track of appointments … I’m almost used to forgetting names now…or to keep my temper in the face of stuff that wouldn’t have irritated me five or seven years ago.
Because “losing it” also means losing not physical stuff or capacity but self-control in a wider sense, doesn’t it?
I witnessed the extreme example last week, watching what my friend D. calls “people behaving badly”… a seemingly endless cable tv show in the US called “customer wars.” It’s comprised entirely of video footage from restaurants and shops where customers insult servers or bully and punch each other. Quite an eye-opener to the unititiated me!
So many questions. Are the people who watch this show (why?) desperate for someone to feel superior to? Vicariously relieved that somebody else can simply raise mayhem? Are the people who act out their frustrations, without any filter or control, the folks for whom Donald T is the ultimate hero? Are the producers of A&E making a fortune, having put scriptwriters and camera people and actors out of work, substituting their craft and lifeswork with the images of hapless and unphotogenic humans caught in low-resolution jumpy images on security cameras? Who watches this stuff? And how can showing this as a form of “Art and Entertainment” not degrade public comportment further and further? Are they abdicating some responsibility they ought to be living up to?
I guess I’m coming late to this parade. But, well, there you are. There’s much more to say on the subject of “losing it” but those notions need to wait.
New Life Supermarket 