December 3, 2013 started out as just a normal day. That was the problem. I needed something other than normal, and I knew it. Normal wasn’t working anymore. It hadn’t been working for a long, long time.
On its surface, “normal” didn’t look so bad, at least from the viewpoint we’re all sold and taught to worship in modern society. I had all the exterior signs of a good life: the house, the busy practice, the professional degree, the neatly padded résumé, the status and sense of having “accomplished” something that mattered. But to whom? None of it mattered to me, yet like many of us I mustered what we bizarrely call strength and hunkered down and face one day after the next, which turned into one week after the next, one month, one year. I knew I needed to staunch the flow to protect my emotional health and creative well-being, but when it came down to it I found it too easy to just continue. What I rationalized as strength was nothing more than laziness, or should we call it fear–of change, of giving up the accomplishments and exterior trappings I had worked so hard and spent so much time and money to construct and maintain all around me. Looking back on it, that was a lot of effort to build and protect a temple of misery. Maybe the temple looked shiny and attractive to people, maybe it didn’t. What mattered was that I was sick inside.
The professional gig was a private practice in mediation, which followed my graduation from law school a few years earlier. Now there’s something our world reveres as hallowed. It’s an altar, alright, but one that flows with human blood. As the victims’ hearts are burned in offering to the societal gods of Accomplishment, Book Smarts, Status, and High Earning Potential, the heads roll down the temple steps, followed by the limp and useless bodies. The murderous priests stick the heads through the crown chakra on a spike and display them in the public square. We can all look at the visages of horror and of agony, and the spike? We call that the Alumni Directory.
For those unfamiliar with mediation, it really isn’t all bad. In fact, alternative dispute resolution does society and people a great service, saving millions of dollars in court costs annually, and saving individuals tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees. In essence, it is making the effort to resolve disputes outside of court. In my case, the disputes involved parenting time and child custody. This meant two things: one, I was always busy, and two, because I was always busy, I was always exposing myself to toxic chemicals, to asbestos, to lead, to mercury, radon gas, on and on. You see, toxic emotions are no different than physical toxins that scientists can measure with their instruments. Those who have lived through a divorce or the end of a long-term relationship can attest to the fact that when your world appears to be crumbling, you are not at your best. After 12 years of private practice in family mediation, I had personally had enough, yet because I continually satisfied item number one above, the fact that I was busy, I kept going, because if the money is decent and you can afford nice things, aren’t you supposed to just keep trucking? You are, aren’t you, you know, supposed to put your head down? You’re not supposed to like it, after all; it’s work. It is supposed to suck, else you haven’t earned your paycheck. That’s supposed to be your head up there on the pike, the mangled one collecting flies.
I couldn’t bring myself to get away. Of course I knew I had to. I hated the winters in western Oregon, and as a longtime traveler I know one can always pick up and leave. It makes sense that people are never stuck, so why do we make ourselves stuck? What is it about that big, long pike that we keep finding so attractive? I suppose for me, at least at first, that I was worried I would never earn enough money again to pay the mortgage, keep up appearances, etc., etc., etc. Then I think I just got lazy. After that I just got numb.
The third of December 2013 was a Tuesday, and that day I was scheduled to teach Linn County’s Parent Education class for people involved in court-mandated mediation. This involved an early start to the day, an hour drive to Albany, two hours of talking to a group of distraught people who sometimes learned something, but more often than not just wanted the two hours to end so they could gather their certificates of participation and flee. After that I would visit whichever other clients I had booked for that day. Depending on the day, people would tell me all about how last Sunday night at 11:47 she texted me that I was a lazy asshole and had better get my shit together or tell it to the judge, or how he threatened to take me back to court if I didn’t get the kids to the bus stop on time and on and on, he said, she said, my lawyer told me, his lawyer told me, her brother told me, etc. Anger, rage, and blame. Say goodbye to one client, rinse and repeat. Collect a handsome hourly rate, and swallow the same shit again the next hour. Feel it slither down, like it. Swallow. The money’s good, so it’s gotta be worth it, right?
Wrong. Again, I knew this, but hadn’t found my way out. On December 3, the Universe found it for me. One moment I was driving to Albany, the next I found myself in the hospital. The entire left side of my body pulsed with waves of acute pain. I had been pumped full of enough drugs to not even notice the catheter or the breathing tubes in my nose. The hospital room looked orange, just orange; it couldn’t discern any objects. People kept telling me I was going to feel sleepy, I suppose after a dose of some heavy narcotic drug. Sure enough, I would wake up hours later, or was it minutes? I don’t know. I didn’t know then and I still don’t know today. There was no such thing as time. There still isn’t.
They told me I was in a car accident, a bad one. As it turns out, I was T-boned by a car traveling about 50 MPH. No wonder I don’t remember the wreck. In fact, I don’t remember it today, and I barely remember the drive, which on a normal day takes about an hour. I recall I got gas on my way, and can remember feeling atrocious when I left the house that morning, not physically ill but spiritually sick, tired of the shit I kept feeding myself every day as I climbed the temple steps. On December 3, I was on my way again.It was my last journey to munch of human feces.
And you know what? Apparently the accident was my fault, so I woke up with a $200 dollar ticket in my lap. The god of High Earning Potential is a shithead. Talk about demanding a sacrifice. Weeks after, friends and acquaintances told me I should fight it, but why? Apparently the other driver emerged unscathed, so he (it was apparently a dude) could have easily lied to the cops for all I know, I mean it’s an awake person’s word against somebody who is passed out from the impact and struggling to breathe. Hmm, who you gonna believe? Exactly.
I suffered a fractured acetabulum. I didn’t know what the word meant either, but I now know it is the bone that surrounds the hip joint. While my car was a complete loss (think the victims’ useless bodies), the hip joint turned out just fine, and the orthopedic surgeon fixed the bone during a six-hour surgery that left me in an incredible amount of pain and saw my nuts so swollen with fluid that they were the size of grapefruits, only a bruised and sickening purple, like an eggplant. Yet I survived. If it had been my time to leave the body I would have certainly left it, but it was not, so you have the picture at the beginning of this post. That is my hip, and the hardware is all still there. So is the scar tissue that surrounds it.
I never went back to mediation. They had cut my heart out too many times, anyway, to feed their gods. My bloody head is up there on the pike with everybody else’s, but they gave me the body back, complete with scar tissue and a couple of really gnarly gashes.
That’s the thing about scar tissue, and if you have it you know: it doesn’t bend and stretch very easily. It is not elastic, and when temperatures drop, it hurts. It freezes up. It throbs in the middle of the night, and sometimes in the middle of the day. In my experience, once the temperature in the Willamette Valley sank below sixty degrees I was pretty much fucked, totally in trouble.
I had ditched the horrendous sacrificial job, but I hadn’t ditched the sacrificial climate. I still had the trappings, after all, the mortgage that the job allowed me to qualify for and pay, you know, proving I belonged. It would take me a few more years to pull the plug. Meanwhile, even while traveling more often for a new and more lighthearted job, I would return to those infinitely gray skies and 38-degree January temperatures, the constant rain and complete lack of sunshine, that soul-sucking gloom. I found myself still climbing the temple steps. I still felt I had to, so again: why the attraction to the pike that spears our heads? For all the wonderful things the place has to offer, that is the Western Oregon winter to me: a public display of misery, cruelty, human waste, and suffering.
People have asked me why I feel so attracted to Mexico, and there are many reasons, in fact far too many to mention in just one post, but in unwinding a bizarre phase of my life, I feel we have to start somewhere, and I am starting here. Many of us are forcing ourselves to suffer, whether in a work environment or a climate we cannot stand any longer. It doesn’t matter if you agree with me or not; you don’t have to. The Willamette Valley rains to you may feel like an 85-degree day on the Caribbean does to me, but to each his own. Or, that grueling job may really make you want to shout with joy, I don’t know. If it doesn’t, you are not stuck. I made myself stuck, and now I’m unstuck, and you can do it too. Everything of this world has to have an end, after all: a job, home ownership, the need for a heavy-duty raincoat. Nobody is saying you have to move, much less to Mexico, but you do have to make your way toward happiness. You owe that to yourself, and to all of us, too.