The Carrying On of A Wayward Son

Blogger’s note — what follows is a series of blog posts I wrote earlier this year about my experiences last summer.

 

Part 1 — Summer Loving Happened So Fast

 

During my last month in College Station, I lived like a gypsy — being kicked out of three apartments in the span of two months. Having to find a new place to live every couple of days, I went from crappy, rundown dwelling to crappy, rundown dwelling — living in places that Danny Boyle makes films set in.

The last place I lived in was a former frat house that was infested with roaches; had uneven, unsettlingly stained floors; and possessed a front door that a third-grader could have kicked open in a fit of juice-fueled sugar-rage.

One night, after having locked myself into my bedroom and fallen asleep watching episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles on a portable DVD player, I woke up to noises that sounded an awful lot like someone breaking into the house and rummaging through the kitchen. My eyes glued to the locked bedroom doorknob, I remained still in my bed, trying to convince myself that it was nothing but the wind shifting through my cutlery. The next morning I awoke to find the backdoor unlocked and swinging wide open. I don’t know for certain if I was the victim of a home invasion that night but I do know this — going to see The Strangers that next weekend was a very, very bad idea. I spent the rest of my time in that apartment armed with a rape whistle, wishing I hadn’t sent my dog to live with my parents.

When I wasn’t packing and unpacking my belongings with every new move, during the summer of 2008 I passed my time by being involved in three car accidents within the course of three months.

The first accident took place when, after arriving early to a job interview in Dallas, I found myself needing to use a bathroom. Not wanting to potentially ruin an interview by making a stink in the company’s restroom, I decided to drive to a nearby gas station and use a neutral stall.

Unfortunately, not knowing my way around Dallas, I fond myself lost and desperately trying to return to the interview site on time. Driving on a Dallas freeway and simultaneously paying attention to a map I had printed off the computer, I found myself trapped on a curved exit lane, blocked by cars and unable to pass into the next lane. I was driving much too fast to decelerate in time and ended up driving off the side of the freeway, down a grassy hill and over several signs that had already been knocked over by other cars that had apparently made the same mistake I did.

Able to steer my car down the hill and into a nearby parking lot, I assessed the damage. It appeared that the only problem was a flat tire and so, dressed in my business finest, I changed my first flat tire at the age of 23.

If the fact that I’d never changed a tire in my life before was not already a big giveaway, I’ll admit it: I don’t know a lot about cars. What I thought was merely a flat tire turned out to be a whole lot more damage to the underbelly of the car. In fact, the car would remain in a shop in Dallas for two weeks while I amassed a large credit card bill by renting a car in College Station. My first accident of my life would not be the last accident of the summer though. There would be much more rental car bills to come.

 

Part 2 — Who’s Going To Drive You Home?

 

About two weeks after I had gotten my car back from the shop, I found myself involved in another accident.

I was driving down University when the light ahead turned yellow. Deciding I could make the light before it turned red, I sped up — only to be struck from behind by a car that also decided to run the light, making a right turn on a red.

The driver climbed out of his car, red-eyed and twitchy. Now an expert on car accidents and dealing with insurance companies, I informed him that I was going to call the police so we could get a case number for our insurance companies.

He immediately begged me to reconsider, offering to settle the whole thing with cash. I declined, reasoning that since I’ve established that I am an idiot when it comes to judging the damage of a vehicle, I was pretty sure that I would not be able to accurately estimate the money it would take to repair my missing rear bumper and dented side. The other driver explained that he was driving his friend’s car and was not on his insurance ­— even more reason to get the cops involved I reasoned.

As we sat there, waiting for the police to arrive, I grew proud of the calm and rational way I was dealing with my latest accident — a stark contrast to the quivering legged, blubbering mess I had been during my last wreck.

When the police arrived they quickly took statements, processed citations and, to my surprise, arrested the other driver. It seems the real reason my friend had not wanted to get the police involved was due to the fact that he had an outstanding warrant out for his arrest.

When I finally arrived at the apartment I was currently living in, my vehicle’s rear bumper stuffed into the back seat of my car, I plopped myself down on my air mattress and let out a sigh. Surely having experienced two accidents in two months had fulfilled my quota for the immediate future. I hoped that I could look forward to a few years of relative safety on the road now.

I was wrong.

Flash forward a month and I am visiting my parents in Houston. I had gotten my car back from the shop and was looking forward to sleeping on a real bed and eating meals that didn’t come in frozen boxes with the words “hungry” or “man” on them.

When my mom asked me to accompany her on an errand she wanted to run, I agreed — as long as I didn’t have to drive. The two accidents had left me slightly shell-shocked and weary about unnecessarily getting behind the wheel of a car.

We ended up taking my father’s car. Enjoying the chance to be merely a passenger, I decided to lie back in my seat and take in the scenery that only the suburbs can provide.

I even closed my eyes for a bit — which prevented me from seeing a car that sped through a red light and hit the car in the lane to the left of us as it attempted to cross the street. The collision knocked both cars into the lane my mother and I were in — resulting in a three-car collision that totaled my father’s car.

Luckily, my mother and I escaped without injuries. My confidence, on the other hand, was shattered. I now had a feeling that all of my religious jokes had finally upset someone upstairs and I was now on the hit list of a very vengeful God.

Three car accidents in three months seemed to be a sign from above — little did I know that I would soon be seeing real signs — of the burning bush ilk.

 

Part 3 — I Saw the Sign and It Opened Up My Eyes

 

I’ve struggled with severe headaches most of my life. A dull throbbing marked with sharp, rhythmic pain-blasts; the headaches are often accompanied with severe nausea, exhaustion and general crankiness. They can be brought on by anything from stress, a missed meal or the dry arid heat of a Texas summer day.

The headaches I experienced last summer were probably caused by stress. Between my multiple accidents, my desperate attempt to escape from my unfulfilling job and the parade of shoddy apartments, each less inviting then the last; I was experiencing a lot of stress.

This time, though, the nausea and exhaustion that normally followed my headaches were accompanied by a new friend — hallucinations.

It’s hard for me to say exactly when the hallucinations started. At first, they seemed almost mundane, impossible to separate from reality. I would see friends’ faces in a crowd or hear my phone ringing when it was powered off.

I initially blamed these occurrences on a lack of sleep. Unable to get comfortable on my air mattress (my real bed had been put into storage until I could find a more permanent dwelling), I was not getting my required eight hours of sleep at night. I was constantly exhausted and figured that phantoms were merely symptoms.

It was the herd of buffalo I saw running alongside my car as I drove home from work one afternoon that made me begin to think that there was something wrong. Soon, my hallucinations began to increase in their frequency as well as the fantastical. I was seeing winged men and women swooping through the sky. Talking heads on the news would turn to the camera and start speaking to me in an alien language. The final straw came when I found I had lost three hours one night, seemingly spent walking around the apartment in a trance — my dinner left uneaten in the microwave.

All of these flights of fantasy were accompanied by severe headaches. While I had never experienced such vivid hallucinations before, I had heard stories of headaches accompanied by phantom sounds and smells. These stories all had the same ending: brain tumors.

So, taking the day off work, I visited my physician, praying that at the end of my visit the doctor would set down his clipboard, remove his glasses and, in a pitch-perfect Schwarzenegger impression, say, “It’s not a tumor.”

 Unfortunately, the only thing the doctor was able to offer me was a referral to an imaging company where I could take an MRI.

I’ve never been one to go to the doctor. I prefer to suffer through my ailments on my own, confident in the fact that my immune system will save the day. Fevers, colds, stomachaches and even a bleeding rectum have all been taken care of with a long nap and plenty of ibuprohpen.

It’s not that I’m afraid of the doctor or even that I don’t trust modern medicine. It’s just that I don’t have the patience to shift through insurance claims or deductibles. Going to the doctor is a headache in it’s own right, necessitating a Dante-esque journey through the hellscape that is medical coverage.

That being said, the thought of a brain tumor being nestled in my cranium, laughing at me as I wasted away into a drooling mass of pain was enough to convert me into a believer. I made my appointment for an MRI.

 

Part 4 — Where Is My Mind?

 

Since you’re reading this blog instead of my obituary, you’re right in assuming that the MRI came back negative for a brain tumor. In fact, the only real news I received during my MRI was the revelation that I hated MRIs.

From the moment I was asked to disrobe in a closet the size of a pygmy port-a-potty to the horrible muzak the technician played in a futile attempt to drown out the deafening drone of the imaging machine, I was in a constant state of discomfort.

I guess I should mention that I have a mild case of claustrophobia. Along with my fear of heights, clowns, dying alone and being killed on the rooftop of a desolate skyscraper by a homicidal clown, I grow more then slightly uneasy whenever I find myself in a small, enclosed area. Even large, over-crowded areas give me the shakes.

This is why, then, I was so uncomfortable during my stay in the sardine can that was the MRI machine. Besides the emotional dread, there were also the physical implications of being a big guy in a small tube. As I lay wedged between the cold walls, my head throbbing with each chirp, wiz and whirl of the machine, I struggled to remain still. I would shift my neck slightly, hoping to combat a growing cramp, and the physician would inform me that I had messed up the readings and she would need to start all over again.

At first, I felt sorry for the technician. I wasn’t only wasting my time every time my weakness for comfort ruined the readings; I was wasting her time. Any sympathy was quickly forgotten, though, when the nurse came to administer a dye injection between tests. During the eternity that I had been crammed inside of the MRI machine during my first test, the only thing I could think of was the joy I would feel when I would be rolled out of the tube between tests and given an opportunity to breathe some fresh air and pop my neck.

Instead of a momentary flirtation with freedom, though, the technician only rolled me halfway out from inside the machine — only far enough so that she could inject my arm with the needle.

If there’s anything worst then being stuck with a needle, it’s being stuck with a needle when you can’t see it. I have no idea how large the needle was or what was inside of it. The only thing I could tell was that I could feel the contents of the needle flowing through my veins as I was shoved back into the MRI machine for the second round of scans. When the entire process was over, I walked away with my very own souvenir — a migraine headache.

A few weeks later, when my physician received the results, he informed me that the only thing wrong was a slightly swollen sinus cavity. He prescribed to me some kind of steroid that I could inhale through my nose.

I was actually kind of disappointed with the results. All of the trauma during the MRI for what? Sinus troubles? I actually kind of hoped that I would be told that there was something bogus going on with one of my glands — something tangible that could be cured and would mean a lifetime free of headaches for me. Instead, in order to learn the headaches were something I would always have to deal with, I had to suffer through one of the most excruciatingly uncomfortable hours of my life.

But life wasn’t all that bad. Later that week, I received the job offer I had been waiting almost two months for.

 

Part 5 — Take This Job and Gently Push It Away

 

During the bad apartments, the accidents and the headaches, the bad was made worse by the fact that I was spending 40 hours a week working at a job I hated.

As a technical writer for a large software company, I spent my days parked in front of a computer. Whatever my job description may have been, the job I found myself doing involved taking manuals and build documentation that had already been prepared and written by company engineers and transforming them into HTML.

If you’ve ever coded HTML before, you know it’s a tedious task. I would spend hours of my day typing brackets and backslashes and paragraph breaks, my only relief coming from the hour-long naps I would take in my car during lunch hour.

When I first received the job, I was psyched to learn that I would have my own office. Long accustomed to cubicle dwelling, the thought of not having to hear my co-worker a couple of stalls down talk on the phone would be a relief. Or so I thought.

I soon learned that office life is a lonely life. With a door that was impossible to prop open and strict regulations about where I went in the building and how long I was gone from my desk, I found myself a stranger at my own company.

I didn’t know my co-workers and there would be days that would pass by at the office where I didn’t speak to a single person.

This was not the job I thought I would have when I was a kid playing make-believe.

And so, four months after being hired, I began looking for a new job. After a couple of false-leads and close calls, I finally got the job offer I was looking for. I would go to work for a non-profit youth organization.

As a member of this group for the majority of my youth, I had a lot of experience with the program. The thought of having a fast-paced, ever-changing job with evolving expectations appealed to the side of me that was tired of sitting behind a computer for eight hours a day.

More so, I felt by working for this company, I could finally have a job that I could be proud of. Knowledgeable of the fact that I was spreading the organization’s program to today’s youth, I could go to sleep at night feeling I accomplished something important — a drastic change from the feelings of hollowness I felt after spending an entire day writing out the instructions for how to build a car dealership’s key safe.

The only hitch in the new job would be the fact that I would be moving back home. Well, kind of.

After high school, my father was transferred to a new job in Houston. This meant every time I took a break from college to visit my family I visited them in a house and neighborhood I did not grow up in. Well, kind of.

Deciding not to live in Houston itself, my parents bought a house in Missouri City, the Houston suburb I had lived in before moving to McAllen. While the neighborhood had changed a lot since we moved away eight years before, visiting Missouri City was a constant state of déjà vu. And, by taking this new job that would be serving the Missouri City area, I was facing déjà vu all over again.

Because I did not have a feel for the city or a sizable savings, I took my parents up on their offer to move into their house for a few months. I figured it would be a great chance to slowly ease myself into my new job and save some money to boot.

But, like Thomas Wolfe said, there’s no going back home.

 

Part 6 — Ike Can’t Stand It Anymore

 

The first few weeks of living with my parents were a real treat. I enjoyed eating homemade meals, having access to a washer and dryer four feet from my bedroom and having very cheap rent. And yes, before I get called a moocher, I paid rent. I also paid for my share of the cable bill.

Things were good and it was nice to spend time with my parents again. Unfortunately, an event happened a few months into my return to Houston that quickly proved the existence of too much of a good thing.

Since I have friends in Galveston and other parts of Houston that came out of Hurricane Ike much worse off then me, I will try to spare you the sob story of what it was like to be stuck in a house with your parents for two weeks without electricity or easy access to gasoline and surviving only on a diet of Spam and canned fruit.

That being said, life for those two weeks sucked … hard.

The power in my parent’s house went out at 6 p.m. the day before Ike made landfall. It did not return until almost two weeks later. In the time between, I experienced the full gamut of emotions. Bitterness, for not having access to the Internet or “The Colbert Report.” Laziness, as I struggled to remain cool as the temperature and humidity gave me a peek at global warming. Restlessness, as I paced around the house trying to think of something to do that would get my mind off of my current situation. And finally annoyance, at my parents for playing the radio 24/7 despite the fact that it was regurgitating the same facts every ten minutes or dragging me to the supermarket to wait in line for an hour in the hopes we would get ice that we did not need or wasting the last drops of my laptop’s battery so that they could watch episodes of “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit,” a show I cannot stand.

A lot of my frustration was born of the fact that I was stuck with my parents all day for several days at a time. With my office being shutdown for the first several days post-Ike and gas supplies severely limited, I could not afford to escape the prison that was my parent’s home. I would have resented any roommates I was stuck with during Ike. I was stuck with my parents, though.

Months after the hurricane has come and gone, trying to describe the frustration I felt during Ike sounds silly. While I can look back and recognize the pettiness behind my craving for television, I did not feel so petty during those two weeks. Constantly drenched in sweat and having to change shirts every two hours were only the tip of my misery iceberg. I couldn’t stand the fact that I would wake up in the morning with the sheets stuck to me like a wet bathing suit or the fact that my days ended at 8 p.m. when the sun went down and I was forced to get ready for bed.

I was tired of being a prisoner of Mission Valley Drive.

When the power finally returned and things began to regain a type of normalcy around the city, I resolved that my life needed change. I needed to branch out and explore my new city. I needed to make friends that were closer to my age. I needed to meet a new girl.

There was no way I was going to do any of these things while I was still living at my parent’s place. As much as I appreciated the opportunity to reconnect with my parents and spend some quality time with them, I needed to find my own place and re-become my own man.

 

Part 7 — The Day After Yesterday

 

Which brings us to today.

I’ve been working for my new job for about five months and have really loved it. Definitely the best job I’ve had yet.

A few weeks ago, I moved into a new apartment in Sugar Land. The place is, needless to say, a major improvement from my previous solo dwellings.

I’m happier, healthier and, with the return of my beard, hairier then I was this time last year.

There is still room for improvement, though. And that’s where these blogs come in.

When talking with my sister last week, I made the claim that I don’t believe in New Year’s Resolutions. At the risk of eating a big, heaping bowl of crow, I’m going to say that the fact I decided I needed to write more and the fact that this daily writing exercise started on January 1 is merely a coincidence.

With a mouth full of feathers, I decided to try and force myself to write a page a day in the fear that, in a job that doesn’t require me to use my writing skills often, I could potentially loose said skills much like I lost any artistic or acting abilities I may have once possessed.

I may not post everything I write. Some of it may be embarrassingly private; other pages might be of absolutely no interest to anybody but me.

I’m going to try and post as much of it as I can, though.

Why impose my unedited, half-thought-out brain-leaks on my friends and peers? Because I truly believe there is no point of writing anything unless there will be an audience. So, while I can’t imagine most of you will care about a 500-word essay on why I hate apples, there might be at least one person out there in the world who will take the time to read it — giving purpose to the fifteen minutes a day I plan to spend on this project.

I would like to take the remaining half a page I have left to thank my friends and family for supporting me and being there for the first chunk of my life. I hope that you are each doing well and enjoying the paths you have either chosen or have been forced to tread. Either way, hopefully you are making the most of the journey.

For the friends who I haven’t seen or spoken to in a while, it’s good to know that you are still out there in the world, affecting others like you have affected me. Just because we don’t hang out anymore doesn’t mean I don’t think of you with some degree of emotion. Hate is an emotion right?

I’m mostly kidding.

As I see you update your Facebook statuses, letting the world (and me) know what you are up to, I often find myself feeling an odd mixture of pride and envy at the lives my friends are living. It seems that nearly all of my friends have gone on to great things and interesting lives.

I sure know how to pick ‘em, right?

So, once again, thank you for being my friend. I’ve traveled down the road and back again. Your heart is true, you’re a pal and a confidant. If you threw a party and invited everyone you knew, you would see the biggest gift would be from me and the card attached would say, thank you for being a friend.

Now that’s off my chest: get back to work. Your job doesn’t pay you to surf Facebook. Unless, of course, you are now employeed by Facebook. In that case, surf on.

~ by robsaucedo2500 on July 27, 2009.

Posted in Musings
Tags: car accident, embarrassing stories, hallucination, headache, home invasion, Humor, hurricane, MRI