“Lyin’ in Bed”…A 10-Year Retrospective…
Hello All:
April 29, 2014... 10 years ago today, at the tender age of 55, I finally came to my senses. I thought I had August 31, 2012...but as Elrond sighed, “it was not so...” 😥 (More on that later.)
Was it the darkest day of my life? Don’t know, I’ve had so many of them. But it was down there. April 29, 2014... 10 years ago to the day, at the tender age of 55, I finally woke up to the reality that the business I was telling myself I was setting up, the business and life-long ambition it had sprang from that I finally put into plan September 2003 at the age of 44 in a desperate attempt to save a dying marriage... Was dead in the water, was going nowhere... was never going to go anywhere... 🙄 That over the intervening 11 years, when lost income was factored in, over and above the purchase of tools and equipment (about $20,000 I suppose 🤔) I had “invested” over $100,000, chasing a Will-o’-the-Wisp. I had a pile (still do) of old, semi-junked woodwind instruments no-one wanted or would ever want, that by no stretch of the imagination I could make any money from by repairing and reselling.
All that, simultaneous to the realisation I had pissed away over the course of 2012 – 2014, the remainder of my inheritance, $64,378.38 ($82,433.21 in 2024 dollars) while simultaneously running up a shitload of creditcard debt, putting my life on hold for the sake of my older sister Goneril; a worthless alcoholic who had squandered all her many gifts and opportunities, who’d smoked and drank herself to death (a pack, 2 packs of smokes, every day, for pretty much 40 years; a case to a 2-4 of beer, every day, for pretty much 40 years…🙄😱) — and who was contemptuous of me. Had no time for me. Colon cancer. January 27, 2013. “If you smoke your risk of colon cancer is as great as your risk of lung cancer – and if you drink your cancer risk spikes” my former chiropractor told me, and I’ve no reason to doubt him. But between January 27, 2013 and April 29, 2014? Like I said: Thought I was setting up a business, pissing away my inheritance, very occasionally making a sale for repair work...
April 29, 2014, I finally awoke to the bitter truth: I was $34,000 in debt. I had maybe $75.00 to my name. And I had no income. Thus in effect I’d managed to squander an additional $100,000 for Goneril’s sake ... and for the business that was going nowhere, was never going to go anywhere.
And oh yeah.. I also grasped that day, regarding “The Remains of my Family”? The assigns of my departed siblings and their children? They couldn’t give a festering flying fuck if I lived or if I died, likely never did... and like my departed siblings, only ever held me in the lowest contempt imaginable. 2019 my cousin Rennie phoned to inform me – with considerable anguish – of the news my brother-in-law had arranged a celebration of my niece’s graduation from university. He’d invited the entire family including my ex-wife Jing, but told Rennie “Keep it quiet! I don’t want Roy to know.”
“Nice” how my ex-wife was still a member of the family in Paul’s estimation. But I was not. How could I possibly be worth so little?
Thus, my “Fell Epiphany” of April 29, 2014: About the most distressing awakening imaginable. Not as bad I suppose as that member of the RCAF Band in Winnipeg who woke up in the gutter in New Orleans and no memory of the three months between starting his bender in Winnipeg and waking up in the gutter... But bad enough...
“Had a reboot moment, did you?” a co-worker cynically replied to my story above... Oh boy. Did I ever.
Since then? Here I am 10 years later. Medea is now my wife, we’ve been together 12 years, coming up on our 7th anniversary in November. I’ve paid off that debt, I’m slowly rebuilding the money I squandered, but it will likely take me another 10 years to do that assuming nothing awful happens in the world at large. I can’t afford to retire. My home was stolen from me August 2017, no help from the Government who in addition deprived me of my employment from November 2021 – July 2022. I’ll probably never be in a position to own a home outright like I had for the 5 years between 2012 – 2017. I have entirely lost faith in all our institutions: The Government, all our politicians, The Lying Whore Media, The Judiciary, The Academy, Religion… And Medicine. Especially… Medicine…
Onwards and upwards.
Best,
Capt. Roy Harkness
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“This is not going to do. You’ve worked too long now, and too hard, to throw it all away like this” said Medea, surveying the debris in the aftermath…
Matters came to a head April 29, with a visit from My Dark Companion…
By the time she’d left… one of my mother’s bone china plates was smashed… my parent’s large wooden salad bowl was smashed… the iron they left behind, was smashed… the Venetian blinds on my “living-nook” front window, torn off their mounts, and smashed; my business’s sign torn off its mounts and thrown to the ground, but Thank the Goddess, 5/8″ plexiglass is pretty much unbreakable…
… and I damn near smashed … my hand-made Larrivee guitar, Serial #71 …
That old BNL Song, “Lying in Bed (Just Like Brian Wilson Did)” chewing through my brain like an earworm with teeth… as I lay there on my bed, in my pajamas, ’til three o’clock in the afternoon… Every time I got up to do anything, it was instead to go crazy, and smash something.
Not till three o’clock that afternoon did I manage to bid leave to My Dark Companion, usher her out the door and begin to pull myself together.. Get showered… get dressed…
Since February 15, I have been working to repair my situation. It is May 15 as I write this, three months gone.
And I have nothing to show for it.
March, 2012, I moved into this place, all full of good intentions, I had according to my journal, $64,378.38… The equivalent of two years’ income (at least, what I was ever used to) left from my inheritance.
I am at this point, > $34,000 in debt, and I am penniless. I have $15.00 in my chequing account and $60.00 in my savings accounts.
How on Earth did this happen?
Well… I naively put my life on hold all through 2012, waiting for my sister to invite me three-quarters across the country to Banjo-strummin’ Lakefield, ON, to visit her before she was too sick for a visit to be of use… innocently believing this is what she’d want… In fact, and as usual, I was the very last to learn how sick she really was. And instead she kept putting me off… and putting me off… and putting me off… and putting me off…
And, come to think of it, growing gradually more and more hostile… every time I called her…
Wasn’t ’til October 2012 that I began to clue in: At a friends’ behest — this time against my own better judgement — I called, for what turned out to be the last time… I got what I usually got…
…“The Silent Treatment”…
I got off that phone in a hurry and never called back.
January 2013 however, The Call came, and I had nothing left. The flight, the hotel, the car rental, all on my Visa…
She didn’t die; she rallied a little…
Three weeks later and into the worst blizzard in Ontario in years, had to do the whole wretched odyssey all over again..
Over $5,000.00, still a significant chunk of change for most of us, on my line-of-credit Visa card …now cancelled by the bank due to no payments in 6 months… to see her off because I’d spent myself into oblivion waiting for her to invite me down while she was still healthy enough for it to be worthwhile.
What hurts the most is I could reach out, for nearly a year, in love and compassion (with limpid sincerity, that’s what I thought I was doing) to my last family member, only to discover, far as she was concerned, I counted for nothing. She did not value me, she did not respect me, and really… Who was I kidding? She never liked me.
And she certainly did not want me around.
I suspect, on top of the shitpile of resentment of the fact that she was going to die, and I was going to live — sorry, Goneril — I had the sense not smoke something like 2-3 packs of cigarettes every day for 35 – 40 years…
… Over-and-above a case and a half of beer (=24 – 36 bottles) to wash it down with… every day… for 35-40 years… And if you drink, your cancer risk spikes …
… There was the previous shitpile of resentment of the fact that, while our sister Regan, my twin, was struck down out of the blue with cancer, and was going to die…
I, on the other hand, was to be the one to live.
I think the family (what was left of it) would have preferred a different outcome.
Sorry folks. I didn’t have undiagnosed Celiac Disease (I guess that’s what happened to Regan, courtesy of reading Wheat Belly).
How many times have I reached out to my immediate family, only to be slammed back into my hole for my trouble? I see now, over the last few years, that I have paid a savage price for my loyalty, caring about people who didn’t give a damn about me in return.
Oh! They were there for me when they needed me!
Otherwise I could pretty much go pound sand.
Don’t know what, exactly, I was doing 2013.. Money was coming in, I was coasting along from day-to-day, putting out the perpetual brush fires that is Life on Earth I suppose, making a bit of a living from my business; smug and complacent in the knowledge I had a ready solution to my financial issues: The repair and sale of the instruments I had on hand.
Surprise, Sucker!!
And too, I suppose, the not-too-surprising-yet-not-too-productive attitude of “Fuck it: I could be dead tomorrow.”
Thus the visit from My Dark Companion.. Frustration piled on frustration, with no obvious let alone simple solution… and the long overdue greasy grey glimmerings of bull-goose enlightenment:
The opposite of “Love” is not “Hate”; It is “Indifference”.
First thing I did once I got my wits back, an appointment with my counselor, Marsha the Merciful, to see if she had any useful suggestions…
🎶 Lyin’ in bed just like Brian Wilson did…
Well I’m lyin’ in bed just like Brian Wilson did… 🎶
More shortly…
Tacit emotion here. It is a tough read for anyone with empathy. Hope things sincerely improve. x
Sorry you went thru all that, if it helps, my sister couldn't care less about me either, she's always been jealous.