the rix mix

This is the 10th anniversary of a terrible six month period, & a lousy year generally. A beloved girlfriend left me - all the reasons she had were sufficient & certainly added up. I was working at Union County social services, earning a living wage & decent benefits, but was laid off after only 5+ months as part of the Clinton welfare "reforms." I wasn't altogether dismayed by this, since I had been poorly trained for the job by someone who was not very good at it, been "civil service" promoted to the next level of mediocrity, & promptly abandoned me, her replacement, to a pile of complex, messy unfinished cases while other trainees were being smoothly guided by their conscientious mentors into the routines & shortcuts of the work. I never got a handle on it, & one of those messy cases had already gone to a hearing; the County won, my supervisor was actually pleased I'd nailed a serious cheater so fast; but I was falling behind on everything else. I disliked the job & workplace, & from the start was trying to figure out how to get transferred to the smaller Plainfield office. Both my mother & stepfather were dying & I'll always feel ashamed of how I handled that, I can't use their timing as an excuse, I simply failed to be compassionate & dutiful. So while 1995 had ended with hopes I'd struggled for several years to pull together, six months into 1996 they were all falling apart & I had nothing with which to replace them.

I started seeing a therapist over the summer, he was helping me cope, then abruptly announced he was emigrating to Israel. Which didn't matter because the 90 day post-layoff grace period on my health insurance was ending anyway. I'd taken a sabbatical from WFMU & didn't have a weekly radio show to lean on. I couldn't afford to head down to Wildwood by myself for a 5 night August R&R, & had no one to go with. My only positive memories of that summer are of exploring the Jersey bayshore - driving down Route 36 & turning left into some neighborhood I'd never visited, & of the many late evenings spent over friend Edie's chatting about literature & movies. On warm Sunday nights I usually nursed a few beers at the uncrowded Waiting Room bar in Rahway, feeding dollar bills into a juke with an excellent selection of CDs including Sinatra, The Stones, Steely Dan, & The Clash. I was in a funk for nearly the entire year.

Oddly, an angel appeared as my unemployment ran out, a man from a nonprofit agency in Elizabeth who'd interviewed everyone laid off from County, had little to offer at the time, received some additional funding for a six week computer class, remembered me, called, got me an extension on benefits, & I learned basic PC applications including Windows '95, just in time for the internet bubble. I never fully adjusted to the changes brought by the 1996 watershed; I didn't lock up my heart but it's stayed loosely wrapped ever since; I was finally too old to play a young literary lion; my family had totally fragmented; & when I went back to WFMU, I realized the well of under-appreciated & obscure recorded music that had carried me through 15 years there had at last dried up. The studios were located at the edge of a desolate, bankrupted Upsala College campus where I'd met wonderful friends who had moved away &had had so many enjoyable experiences. Until 1996 I looked, felt & behaved at least ten years younger than my actual age. I couldn't do much about the looks, but I learned in the years following that there are other parts a poet must at least keep suspended in a kind of agelessness, if not youth. & some people never understand whatthehell poets are saying.

Labels: growing up, mental health