Your Shit Needs Help

I blew off my therapy.

It's going to be two weeks if I don't make my session tomorrow. Three weeks is a magical cut off. They start getting demanding after two weeks. The problem is that if I don't straighten out this cakeshit Social Services case, I'm going to be cut off from them anyway. Especially if they 'Sanction' me at SS (aka HRA). Sanction means a suspension in your benefits. Sometimes a month, sometimes for three months. Pretty serious shitheads. So not only to they take the food from your mouth, they just might remove the roof from over your head. I guess starvation and privation is a good control over errant clients. GOD. I'm glad I lived out on the streets. I can find places to eat, put on weight, get clothes, so on and so forth. The only thing I can't do is keep the roof over my head.

But I can live in the streets. That I still can do. I'm not completely without resources.

The only thing that I'm depressed about is my printer. I love that printer, but I can't take it with me. I can't carry it around with me in the streets. Maybe I'll ask Igor to hold it for me while I'm gone. He has a laptop with no printer. He could use it. That might be a good idea. My clothes I'll have to throw out. My Darling, my coffee maker, will have to stay behind. Along with my meager collection of books. Just great.

Thinking about counter actions, I realize two things: 1) my brain is catastro- phizing again. I'm building unneces- sary scenarios and solutions to them. But I'm building too many, which will only burn me out in the long run, 2) I was here once before, early winter, when I was in the shelter, The Box, and they learned about my blogging about them. I was catastrophizing then too. Thinking that I was going to be asked to leave the shelter and sent back into the streets. I was prepping, just like now, to jettison clothing, printer, books, toiletries...the works. Because in the streets you have to carry very light.

But in both cases, I'm preparing as if the streets have a constant pull. As if the streets have a certain gravity, which has caught me, dragging me back down. I no doubt FEAR a return to the streets, if every time something happens to me I think they'll throw me out on my ass. I jump to the conclusion that the solution for those powers that be would be to send me packing to nowhere. I must be living in terror of a return to the wasteland. The Inhospitable Land. All this shit that I'm talking about is just bluster. Just bullshit to make me feel good. To make me feel as if I have options, when I actually don't.

And why not? Shit. I'm getting to be a little too old for this shit. I'm not as young as I was two years, three years, ago. I'm suddenly soft, and not as tough. Shit I have to go on a diet to knock off the weight that I didn't have back in the day. I've grown fat and weak and soft. I need to develop that hard, mean exterior that I had when Doc A. rescued me from the streets.

I was in fucked up shape though with rampant edema in both legs, runaway blood pressure, renal failure, heart problems, and the tendons and ligaments in my feet torn and shredded. My Doc actually probably believed that I would kick the bucket. But I was tough then, and was held together as if with mortar and bricks. Now I'm held together with toilet paper and spit. What the fuck is a dainty flower like me going to do back in the streets? They are foreign to me now.

Well whatever I'm going to do, I think I better prepare, at least, for the worst. The good thing is that I might have headed my case termination off at the pass. After the twelfth they would probably close the case, severing my benefits. But I might be able to convince the 'Social Worker' to give me a second chance and not do something like sanction or terminate the case. How I'm going to do this? I really don't know. There was a time that I felt that I was up to the challenge. I was confident, much more than I am now.

But all that is gone now. The streets have bled that out of me. The streets taught me just how powerless I am. How unskilled that I am now. How poorly I think.

Well, with that, I'm sitting in Madison Avenue Starbucks with my brother. Soon they'll kick us out and I'll head home to see if my Internet connection is still down. You won't hear from me any longer tonight. Probably early in the morning when I get up and go to the Starbucks downstairs to get online.

To say that I'm depressed is an understatement.

Hobobob