I thought being poor would make taxes easy this year. Nothing doing. Sounds like I’ll get shit tons of cash back but I still have to itemize. I didn’t think I would have to bother. I was up before 9 for the first time since forever. Not on account of taxes, just because I couldn’t sleep.

…

I wrote that yesterday. Today is today, a beautiful Sunday afternoon at the ghetto coffee shop.

Discovered something today that I guess I already knew: Doing anything mentally engaging lowers my blood pressure, and loosens the occasional angina (hate that word) which clutches at my pectoral area. By mentally engaging I mean playing piano, composing, writing, just anything besides nothing. I find myself surprisingly prone to doing that. Doing nothing. That has never been a problem in my life until now.

Some day I will look back at this time of my life with nostalgia, as I sometimes consider the Parc Lincoln days or even the brief stint in Atlanta. I hated my life, had nothing to fall back on or to look forward to, yet somehow I miss having nothing. Those days were worse in that I had substantial debts to pay back (5-figure student loan debt and a credit card run amock on account of that stupid move to Atlanta and back). Now I worry about the day I can’t make rent, a day which is far away but nevertheless in my mental notebook of possible realities.

A friend from the Sunswick days is homeless now. I heard of this a couple of years ago, when a friend said she saw him on a subway in about as random an encounter as one could concoct. More recently another friend saw him sitting on the floor of a subway station. She sent me a photo. He actually looked alright, much better than I would have thought from accounts of aforementioned friends. If his appearance belies his situation then apparently his smell does not.

…

 I woke up screaming and kicking from a dream in which I woke up to discover my apartment had been robbed of almost everything. The only thing they couldn’t haul off was my big, beautiful oak desk. Three men moved that fucking thing into my apartment. I think they should have hired at least one more. I may never be able to get it back out should I ever move on from this paradise of Astoria. I wake up screaming sometimes but I cannot remember waking up kicking. What the hell did I think I was kicking?

One time I came home to find the door to my apartment wide open. You can’t help but think that someone had broken in under such cirumstances, but as quickly as I had those thoughts I somehow knew that I had left the door open. There was something about just how open it was. I said wide open but really it was about half way. That was exactly how far I would leave the door open before turning around to pull it shut and lock it. Somehow my instincts knew this. I recognized the exact position of the door for what it was: a diurnal, quotidian flourish of mental furniture which typically passed through my mind without notice. It was a Jaynesian moment of consciousness and awareness such as I have experienced frequently of late.

If the desk was a focus of a nightmare then it might be because of what I found in it last week. Dad’s trust documents, a 400 page binder of mostly bullshit designed to screw our mother out of getting one dime from his estate. They were never divorced and in Florida the spouse (aha, mother hated that word) gets everything unless one party tries very hard to prevent that. Along with the trust documents was a stack of death certificates which I guess I never needed. I packed up all that shit in a box which I intended to take to storage today but didn’t get to.

Also in the desk and headed for storage was one of the the metal crosses given to my sister and me at the funeral of our mother. The cross was in a box with a printed note that said  something about her soul being “in repose”. I saw that and muttered “I doubt that.”