Time for maybe a heavy one
Kind of a heavy one.
I have to admit that I once again have come to a place where I am hurting. In big ways I am satisfied and happy but I’m also suffering the death of a thousand cuts, a thousand small battles I wish were over, instead all mounting up.
My last girlfriend, with whom I thought I had a great though long-distance relationship, ditched me without explanation. I'd offered to move nearby and she wouldn’t hear of it, and gradually she drifted off. It was a long time ago now, but with no one else to occupy my thoughts, it’s on my mind a bit more often than I would like. I would’ve given a relationship with her a serious go, it would have been worth the work. And numerous frustrated exes will tell you that’s not something I say about many people. And she, I guess, didn’t care? I don’t know. I’d call and ask, we drifted apart on perfectly fine terms, but after all the work I put in forgetting about her I’d rather not risk restoring my feelings to immediacy. I never wanted to break up.
My stock broker, and I admit this is probably a big part of what’s making this wave crest right now, is fucking me very hard. They changed hundreds of my orders behind my back so I lost money, thousands of dollars, totally without my permission and knowledge, and now they’re challenging me to resort to legal avenues if I want anything done about it. They openly admit they caused the losses, and simply refuse to compensate me for it because they claim “it would be impossible to figure out exactly how much you’ve lost”, so, they won’t pay a penny of it.
On top of that, my best efforts as a trader are failing badly. I still have a more than adequate safety cushion but I’ve lost a staggering sum of money. I have yet to get it together to do a major analysis of where my money has gone, because by and large I profit in most of my trades, most of the time, I win. And yet my overall balance keeps dropping precipitously, every time I look it’s dropped by leaps and bounds. I can’t understand how. I’ve lost about a year’s (before taxes) income to it, and if I wasn’t doing so much better now than I ever have before, just a couple of years ago, it would have equaled several years’ income. In terms of percentage, my losses are not out of line with a lot of people’s right now, but I thought my trading system was much better than most people’s, and not being able to figure out where the point of failure is is scary.
I have no close friends within regular socializing distance. I have people I’m friendly with, who I see every once in a great while, like once or twice a year maybe. I’m literally a hermit, I see my neighborhood shopkeepers when I buy groceries and that’s the extent of my socializing, outside of maybe once every six months seeing a friend for a couple hours.
More seriously, for this week at least, I’m feeling right now like I’ve somehow wound up attracting a lot of shitty people and few good ones. It’s gotta be something I’m doing.
A few days ago I found out an old friend had died, and the situation around it is kind of fucking with my head. About 10 years ago he suddenly started spewing a bunch of antisemitic vitriol. No efforts to talk him out of it worked, and in fact they made the situation worse, until I blocked him for making some pretty wild and unpleasant accusations about me. I always assumed he had a brain tumor or something. Periodically over the years I’d get antisemitic emails from him to which I never responded. I eventually found out I wasn’t the only old friend he did things like this to, although I was certainly the only one of our circle of friends.He finally came to a bad end, alone and almost friendless, depressed and suicidal and declined treatment when he began to show the symptoms of cancer, and just let it kill him. This was a year and a half ago but as he had no family and virtually no friends anymore, certainly not with anyone in my crowd,
It was a heavy thing for me, because when I got the news, I just didn’t care that he was dead. In a way, I was almost glad, because in the back of my head I secretly worried one day he’d blow up whatever he imagined I’d done to him so much in his head that he’d turn up at my door with a gun. (And it’s not an unreasonable fear, a years ago another former friend, who I’d been extremely close to for decades and helped out a lot, repaid me by losing his mind, breaking into my home while I slept and attacking me in my bed.) But, not feeling bad someone I’d like was dead made me feel like I’d turned into someone I never thought I could be. He was already dead to me so no real loss there, but I didn’t know I had the real capacity to be so cold.
And besides him, and the other maniac who broke into my home and attacked me, there have been others. Not 4 days after getting the news about him, I found an old hard drive on which I had some forgotten writing from right after Chris Hume died. I’d forgotten how fully horrible Chris, another old friend who I’d gone to great lengths to help out, had been to me at the end. With very little provocation, he wrote me some of the meanest, shittiest, most hostile things anyone’s ever said to me. And, in the years since his death, I’ve learned that around the time we met, he had fathered a child with a very sweet young girl and then, when she told him she was pregnant, threatened to sue her if she ever spoke to him again. So the entire time we were friends with him he was leaving a kid fatherless. I saw him treat women very poorly at other times, certainly emotionally abusively. So I wonder, in retrospect: he was funny, and extremely talented, and could be a rewarding person to be friends with if he decided he liked you, but was he just a huge piece of shit all along? Did I let just a shitty human being become one of my best friends?
And, to top it off, that same hard drive there were photos of Lexi, who I’d been friends with since I was 14 and in the years since stopped returning my calls, stopped replying to texts. And then, picturesquely, during a time when I got to missing our close friendship so much I was actually writing a song called “I Miss Lexi”, I discovered she’d not just unfriended but intentionally blocked me on facebook, without any explanation, finally leaving me no way to contact her at all. And that was the end of that friendship, to this day completely unexplained.
My last roommate, who I initially got along with so well I sometimes worried we might wind up dating, managed to come and go within 4 months, rip me off for a few grand in rent and steal some of my furniture in that short time.
And that’s ignoring the perhaps dozens of friends, the entire social life I adopted when I first really started going out into the city in SF, who wound up being, nearly to a one, completely worthless people and not really friends at all.
I just wonder how I wound up spending my life literally totally alone almost 24/7. I didn’t see that for myself. I never sought it out.
Meanwhile, on the home front, my landlord removed the carpeting from the apartments above and below me so for the past year and a half my life has been a fusillade of foot stomping and doors slamming from 5:30 in the morning until 11pm or later. And the restaurant next door, whose endless noise we spent years successfully fighting in city hall to keep constrained inside their premises, is now running a bigger, louder outdoor 100-seat dining room on the sidewalk, following a mayoral proclamation having something to do with it being good for business during the pandemic to permanently overthrow all previous rulings that benefitted the neighbors’ peace of mind and the sanctity of the insides of their homes. I could start another letter-writing campaign, they’re clearly in the wrong, but I don’t have the energy. Plus, having seen it, the pot dispensary across the street has now decided that it is crucial to selling pot to have a giant outdoor party every month and force the neighbors to listen to shitty disco inside their homes. So I get to either be the grumpy old guy shitting on everybody’s fun, or have the inside of my home be a sonic discotheque and restaurant whenever the surrounding rich people say it is.
Then, the main client who pays my bills, I’ve run into a snag with. 5 years ago, I took over the contract from the previous consultant, and it was a lucrative one. But they didn’t tell me at the time that a term was being omitted from the previous contract: the last guy got almost a 4% raise every year. That got left out. So here we are nearly 6 years later, and inflation is through the roof, and I’m doing the same work for an amount of money that’s worth a lot less, while a burger and fries in my neighborhood now costs $18. I told them in February I’d like to discuss reinstating that clause, and they seemed amenable, then told me they’d have to get back to me, and immediately went ahead and hired a new in-house hire with my same skill set. Not so happy about any of it.
I think that about covers it. It’s a lot. Every one of these things is a problem that needs consideration.
And it’s funny, because, I read down this list of complaints, and it sounds bad, but overall, I’m actually happier than I’ve ever been right now. I spend my days doing what I enjoy. I pursue my hobbies all the time. I still have have plenty of money. My mood is, overall, pretty good.
Looking through that hard drive of 15 year old writing and photographs, it underscores how miserable I was for how long and how much more content I am. I can hardly look at the stuff, I’m in such a different place. I’m really good, fundamentally, better than ever. In the last few years, my life has made tremendous strides forwards in undeniable, tangible ways, for the first time in decades.
It’s just, lately the battles have been mounting. They’re taking a small but noticeable toll. I already knew I was thinking just a little too much about the former GF, and I think maybe the news of my former friend’s death and finding that hard drive full of perspective within a few days of each other was a lot, on top of at the same discovering that despite my best efforts I've lost a fortune, and the long-term ongoing noise and bother of my living situation, of neighbors and landlord and stockbroker who are free to fuck me. And today for the first time I looked inwards and realized, I’m hurting again. I need to do something about it.