Night Panic

Chronic Anxiety is hard to deal with, especially if you can't afford health care. I was diagnosed back in 1999 when I had company insurance. I haven't had a Doctor since I was laid off in 2001. While I could afford the prescription for Busbar I was able to recognize that what I was feeling was internal, and had nothing to do with anyone or anything else. This is when I learned that I owned my feelings, all of them.

Occasionally when I get acclimated to a different work or living environment I tend to forget that I choose how I feel in every situation. Then in the dead of night when I wake up in a state of near panic, I get out my earbuds and listen to TuneIn.com through my phone. Specifically, Blues Before Sunrise. You can find the play list at http://www.bluesbeforesunrise.com/

The key is that it's not the music I grew up with. It's from long before I was alive. Listing to familiar music just makes me emotional, nostalgic and regretful, reminding me of the old days when I thought people made me feel bad and I reacted badly.

If nothing else works, try the steps at http://www.anxietycoach.com/nocturnal-panic-attacks.html

First and Last Sight

It was the summer of 1977, the first week of July. I always spent the month of July in Old Mission, every year for as long as I lived.

The house seemed a hundred years old. I think it was built by doctors who escaped from the cities during the influenza pandemic that followed the first world war. It was dark and old.

Usually the front door is wide open and the screen door keeps the bugs out, but for some reason I remember the front door was closed. It was dark in the front hallway when I heard the knocking. I must have been on the porch or something, but I remember seeing Johnny when I opened the door.

'Finally! Someone else was in Old Mission!' I thought.

Johnny told me he brought some friends with him and he wanted me to meet them. All was right with the world. Then I was walking down the old sandy, cracked sidewalk toward his house.

He introduced me to his cousins Luke and Sally. If I can recall, I probably thought at that point that it was going to be a pretty good summer. Then, there she was, kind of hiding out behind Sally.

She had blue eyes and blonde hair and I must admit that was a major factor in my qualifications for attractiveness at the time, but when our eyes met, it was as if we communicated data from a past relationship.

We knew we belonged to each other. As if we separately held the keys to each others hearts from the beginning of time.

I wanted to spend every waking moment with her. Bridgett. I will never forget. We were naive children at the time and never engaged sexually. Even a few years later we met again, and I was still ignorant.  I think of nothing else but what I could and should have done.

To this day I wait for a relationship, of any kind, with anyone.

The Magic Material

Once upon a time during a raging war, there was a chemist who invented a material that could stop bullets. It was so amazingly resistant and a very light, flexible material.

The chemist won a huge government contract to create armor for military vehicles, aircraft, ships and even uniforms. The material passed every test on the gun range. There didn't seem to be any shrapnel and nobody could find the fired bullets and bombs. They had to go somewhere but nobody found out where. It didn't matter because the tide of the war had turned and our side was winning the war.

One night several weeks later the chemist was startled awake by loud banging and crashing sounds. He ran down into his laboratory to find it in ruins and the material he invented in tatters, which it turns out only absorbed kinetic energy and kept it in temporary suspense.

The end.