The Move

It was a diabolical surprise. The lease was not extended.  We lease from year to year as little companies whereas bigger companies, more attractive to owners,  lease from decade to decade. There is no Office Aid for us little businesses. Musicians don’t gather to throw benefits as we go under one after another.  We take these things in stride. It’s not the first time for me.   I was moved from the Broadway corridor, with it’s $6 and $8 an hour parking,  when the building I was in was sold.  This time my office in the Downtown East Side (DTES) went as the floor was overrun with lucrative business.  I worry I attract prosperity like the Rain God in Mostly Harmless. It doesn’t benefit me but the area around me grows rich by association.  My few idiot savant patients cause the gods to smile on all those they visit.  
I’m just a doctor.  Today the traditional is eclipsed by the conventional. My little office lawyer neighbours left the month before me.  Someone somewhere would have us all in bigger collectives, transcontinental corporations, so we could all benefit from the economies of scale.  Bigger is better.  The pressure has always been on me to join a collection of shrinks, pool our resources and factory work the mentally illl like  Big business and Big government does.  Maybe then I could buy some Big Machine and be a Big CEO and get pay  50 million to go away.   Maybe one day we can all profit in our chosen profession of health care, when death is no longer more lucrative, with abortion and euthanasia competing for  top dollar.  It’s all so, attractive, in a sick psychotic way.
I suppose I could buy and mortgage. I could increase my  debt becoming a greater slave in this slave society of indentured labourers and pimps.  I lack the commitment, though.  The threat of nuclear war throughout my youth has harmed my faith in real estate. Ex wives have profited by my buying houses.  I imagine only the realtors would profit from my buying an office. And I’d feel more trapped than I already do, lacking the necessary space ship to depart this world of woe.  I was given scholarships and wasn’t  trained so early in servitude, with  disgusting student debts,  the way the young are today.
So I have moved.  Thank God, for Angel, my office administrator, and Bill Gyles and his friends who moved me.  The disruption and chaos are astonishing.  I can’t find anything. And yet I muddle on looking like a professional while all around me there is disorder.  I have no external validation for my own internal organization.  I muddle along doing what I always do in this new place.  Yet I was stretched to my outer limits before this latest ‘challenge’.  The word challenge is the new therapy speak for Cluster Fuck.
Of course more is expected of me while those above me, increasingly more powerful and richer, do less and less and demand more and more.  I’m dying in my harness. Bets are now being made as to which stress related disease I will die from.  All the while I am told to exercise more, rest more, eat better and take more holidays.  I have no time and no benefits.  Thos who look down on me are paid for by my exorbitant taxes.   Like Job, my sickness is blamed on my lifestyle and my sins.  Yet the moment I stop dancing feverishly someone from central casting or the internal revenue service would be there in an instant to take my costume and flog me for the slave I am.   I believe Satan has a lot more to do with matters than those who are denied the knowledge of his name.
I believe God and Lucifer conspire in a game like something out of Matrix or Buckaroo Bonzai.  It would be so easy to fall into the Marxist Leninist paranoid stance of us and them when I know there is but one God and I’m not it. I struggle to love where fear is far easier, this myth of Sisyphus in the existential angst of existence.
I have moved.   There is less shouting in the streets below than there was in the Downtown Eastside.  Here there are not hourly sirens.  When I go for lunch I am not hustled bootleg cigarettes, hard drugs or illicit sex block to block.   I’ve not explored my neighbourhood.  There’s a Serenity Shop beside me and a gun store.  I wonder why this block requires the three of us to be together.  God moves in mysterious ways.  One stop shopping at the local mall. If serenity doesn’t work, see the shrink and if that doesn’t work, buy a gun.  And if none of those seem likely solutions for what ails, there’s a tattoo shop and a bridal gown consignment store.
This is suburbia.  My first psychiatric office, some 25 years ago was in the suburbs.  It all comes full circle.  And when I began I had no idea of where I’ve been.  I am that moved.