Lockout Triggered

Locked myself out for the fourth time in as many weeks from my new apartment in KCMO. I am distressed and disturbed, but the distraction is the reason.

But which distraction? The fact that I have slept 20 hours in two weeks, the fact that I relate to Sonny’s bastard son more than any other character including the clarinet player, my daily wake up call on my lack of financial independence, or just me.

I am my own distraction. I have to distract myself from myself. I have to text, call, write - emote - just to sit with myself. So I am the distraction which puts my own security in jeopardy…at least this morning.

But what about all of the other distractions which brought me here today? The sun in the sky, the oceans, the plants and animals, the people. All distractions. From myself. What am I to focus on now? I saw too much of myself which others choose not to believe and still others pay to protect.

You distract yourself and you miss the distractions of the world. Distractions will walk up on your wallet that climbs out of your back pocket now as if begging to be looted. Distractions will call and ask how you are doing. Distractions will promise to bring your cat food under the guise of maintaining control, or at least their sense of control, over your life.

My apartment is a distraction. I sweep, I mop, I dust, I do laundry, I make my bed, and do the dishes if I can afford to cook. I do not even pay rent and it is a distraction, a distraction from any solution to the fact that I find it a problem that I cannot pay my own rent.

It is funny to think that I could ever afford me in the 20th century, fuck-all in terms of affordable sanity in the 21st. Whole cartels cannot afford me. The federal government cannot even afford me a living wage.

And I fought hard to survive, disabled or not, even if the war was in my head and the scars are on my emotions. Did I not earn a pension? Is my intellectual property not worth my economic status? Why let me go find my own way and then smother the ashes I left behind? Was I burning down my house or your’s?

If money makes the world go round, and I am distracted by anything, it is the fact that I am still going around the world with other peoples’ money. I hate money because it is fake. But people do real, awful, violent, painful, debilitating emotional and physical things for money. I have no money to show for 41 years of putting up with other peoples’ money problems and so I will never love money.

But I need money, whether I want it or not. And it’s gonna cost $50 to get back in my apartment today, so maybe focus on nothing at all. The world was, is, and will be my perpetual disappointment to the point of distraction.

NO, JHB, 2025.