Washed Out

I was feeling sort of washed out and blue yesterday, Saturday, maybe because Friday was a really social, perhaps excessively so, day for me.  I saw my regular shrink at 1 and had my guitar lesson at 300 and saw my psychiatrist at four thirty.  As you can see, my social life is so lame I have to pay people to talk with me.

I see the psychiatrist every four months for a med check.  He sees people at his house, so I have to go to this place up on the mountain that is worth maybe 8 million dollars.  He charges 100 buck per half hour.  I decided long ago not to stint when it comes to my mental health and my tendency to excessive moodiness, if you can call it that exactly.  So in the half hour I talk real fast and hit the high (or more precisely, low) points of the last four months. Maybe that’s what wore me out, recapping and re-remembering the hecticness of these last four months.  We decided to stay status quo on the drugs for now.  I don’t know much about him because he doesn’t say anything (that’s because he is not supposed to).  But I do know he was raised in Louisiana and his father owned a hardware store there; and I know he knows his stuff about meds.

My shrink told me a week or ago that she will be retiring at the end of this year.  She is 82 or 83, I forget which, and decided not to renew her license to practice, not so much because it costs to renew as because to renew you have to go to some stupid classes to show you are keeping up with the so-called “field.”  She is pretty much sick of those classes and is convinced the “field” is going down hill because of all the new rules and regs being generated by the state as the result of actions by insurance firms and lawyers. 

My shrink’s daughter is a shrink too and raised up under the new rules and regulations has been on her mother’s back (my shrink’s back) to stop seeing me for about five years now because she (the daughter) feels my relationship with her mother is probably illegal, seeing as how her mother talks to me in ways that could invite a law suit.  Also at the end of each session my shrink and I hug and that is probably grounds for a suit too.

So nothing is stable in this world not even your shrink.  Hell, I figured we would terminate when she died; maybe this retiring thing will be better and less dramatic.  Anyhow, she is crazy.  She has this thing for animals of all kinds and has had numerous cats in her house over the years.  She so dotes on the cats that she leaves her back door open a notch at night so the cat can do its thing, and right outside that door all around her patio she had constructed a chain link “cage,” like in a zoo or something, that allows the cats to go outside but not to run away or get eaten by ever more daring coyotes.  I am not paying much attention and get confused when, as she walks me to my car, she says that she woke up with a skunk walking around her bed. I think maybe she has begun to hallucinate till I remember the business with the cage and the back door.  Somehow the skunk is getting into the cage and then into the house and walking around my shrink’s bed.  She wakes to see this big fluffy white tale moving around in the darkness.

So far this has happened twice and she is rightfully worried that the skunk will get in, get upset by something, and let go its load of stink.

One Reply to “Washed Out”

  1. Nick, I’m just like you about this. If I enjoy anything,no matter what I hear concerning it, I do it. Always have and still feel fine about this, it’s my space, isn’t it? We all need to hold tight to the things that please us! I think we all should have at least someone who’ll listen, no matter what. Take Care, you’ve been cracking me up, big-time, lately.

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