Robbery With Insolence
(Editor’s note: I wrote this four years ago on a different platform. I saw it today on my ‘Memories’ page on Facebook. It still (mostly) applies to my life today)
“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” — The Lorax, Dr. Seuss.
I read that line this morning. In a different context, of course, but it does seem to fit the narrative of my life.
Oh for the day when the bullshit stops. For the day when getting older doesn’t mean another day surrounded by well-meaning, emotionally bankrupt nobodies who keep pumping bullshit like the local drunk at the end of the bar.
I have put up with shit for too long from people who say one thing, do another and then have a litany of excuses and the “check is in the mail,” lines at the ready. I’m sorry to have intruded on your lives, people, but you asked me to have faith and that everything would work out in the end.
What “end” are you talking about? The one where I move 700 miles to get cheated out of a house? Ending up homeless and bankrupt in the process? The one where I get the “best friend and soul mate” line for the 200th time and then I get stuck with a ton of nothing? And how people backstab me and think I accept living my life with a broken heart? How about all those times people told me “I matter” to them, when, in truth, I’m just a conduit to getting better seats at the ballgame, or an attorney or some way to figure out of a mess that they won’t listen to in the first place. I’m sorry, I’m not here to be used or abused like some runaway teenager. Or some freak of nature in a wheelchair who happens to know how to put together a coherent thought or sentence once and a while.
I am tired of being devalued, of being seen as of lesser value because of my condition. I am tired of folks telling me things 1000 times over, but nothing ever coming of it. I am tired of being screwed with and left to deal with it. On my own. Whenever I have to clean up messes, I have to jump through so many hoops, it’s not funny. I am no one’s “best friend and soul mate,” nor do I matter to 95% of you. The number of people I matter to I can count on one fucking hand, maybe half of the other. I have spent most of my life longing for things that I will never attain and I never had a chance to in the first place. If that makes me bitter, so be it. I have every right to be.
You think you know me? You don’t. Nobody knows anyone.
I’m not looking for sympathy. Or validation. Or anything else, for that matter. I need to vent, rant, say what’s on my mind, that’s all. And yes, this is aimed at certain people, but I don’t give a rat’s ass what they think.
“Well my door was standing open,
security was laid-back and lax.
It was only my heart that got broken,
you must of had a pass-key made out of wax.
You played robbery with insolence
and I played the blues
in twelve bars down on Lovers Lane.
And you never had the intelligence
to us the 12 keys hanging off of my chain.”
“Your Latest Trick” Dire Straits, 1986.
