Interlude, breather, story

The Pessimistic Shrink has been looking for a home – a working and resting place. At age almost-sixty-seven, I am seeing my life as a kind of final bend and straightaway. Not as limited time – I still sense, absurdly or not, decades not years – but as a single terrain or theme. The only alteration of that I can imagine would be if I started writing for some journal or other medium. Then I would get to depress many more people than my especial readers.

A component of my particular “serene dysthymia” is a total sense of lack of home. I grew up in a nondescript Jewish area of Baltimore, Maryland; have lived in Indianapolis, Indiana, Roanoke, Virginia, Garberville, California, Sarasota, Florida, Columbus and Pickerington, Ohio, and now southern Nevada. I feel no “home” here, and recoil with depression at the thought of returning to any past place of life and memory. No imagining of a next state or country has the slightest sense of meaning. I am incapable of feeling any place is home.

Except for the company of my wife. And except for the spiritual ambience of a place to see my clients, widen eyes, fiddle with their psyches, teach insights that I somewhat narcissistically feel are unique and eternal. This may, I realize, be just another manifestation of my “life instinct”: my odd and feeble sense of hope (feeling something like the taste of the smallest piece of long-lasting hard candy) that has always been grounded in unreality, some residue of my birth kernel of bright that always underlies the grey. In college, ca. 1970, the emptiest and smokiest Self possible, I would imagine the titles of the philosophy books I would someday write. That kind of unreality.

But I like to believe it. I am not a self-building go-getter. A few “sorry’s” by the big insurance panels (“Our provider list is still full, you nameless cipher!”), and I gave up trying to have my own practice. I am not ambitious, unless someone would call working one hour at a time, seeing one client per “sixty-two-minute hour” then the next to an aggregate of seven to nine per day – ambitious. It just happens. I would like it to happen in a pastel-ish place of casual atmosphere, not too bureaucratic militant and U.R.* kiss-ass, where clients would magically continue to return despite their fears. My office would not be tacky. The atmosphere would be human, yet private. A real boon would be a men’s room that was not exact center-stage in the round between and two feet from the lobby patrons, reception area and all the workers milling about.** I’m a little squeamish.

Of course, nothing would be better than seeing my clients then writing a column and an article.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHqASg2iXgs. The ground is nicely hidden but you can hear it.

 

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* Utilization Review.

** For real.