This morning, I was shaking my pills out onto the counter (2 psych meds, an asthma and an allergy pill which are fucking useless at the moment). All are round pills of varying sizes, the smallest being my allergy pill. The last pill I shook out was my anti-anxiety pill. Now… normally my pills land flat. On occasion, they start out on their side, roll off the counter and onto the floor where I frantically search for it before Baxter can find it. Much as I don’t think giving him an anti-anxiety once in a while wouldn’t be a bad idea… Anyway, this morning I shook out my anti-anxiety last and it hit my tiny allergy pill just right and stood up on end, just like the quarter pictured here.

The first thing that popped into my head was that episode of The Twilight Zone, “Penny For Your Thoughts”. This was followed by hearing Rod Serling’s diatribe: “Flip a coin; what are the odds… Half the time it will come up heads, the other half tails…”

For those who have never seen the episode (which is probably most of you, so get your ass to Netflix or Hulu), it starts out with a mild-mannered, geek bank worker, Hector B. Poole (Dick York) who casually tosses a quarter into the box when he buys a paper and, instead of it landing heads or tails, it stands straight up. The odds are astronomical that would happen, right? But Hector shrugs that shit off until he realizes that, afterward, he can hear what people are thinking. It makes for an interesting day at the office, that’s for sure. At first it gets him into a bit of trouble. He tries to warn his boss not to give a loan to a businessman because he’s planning on gambling it away. Of course, everyone is outraged with poor Hector. He even accuses an extremely elderly coworker of planning to rob the bank. Of course, the old man isn’t offended when called on it. He fantasizes about it every day, chasing different locations to abscond to in order to make the day interesting. In the end, the boss learns Hector was right about the gambling business man and, because he knows of his boss’s plans for a secret rendezvous with some girl, he manages to get the job he deserves.

In the end, he ends up walking home Helen, a coworker who has the hots for Hector (he can read her thoughts, remember?) and when he stops to buy the evening paper, he flips a quarter in the box and ends up inadvertently knocking over the quarter he had flipped upright earlier. What are the odds? It stayed up all day and the same guy who, by chance, flipped it that way is the same guy to knock it back over. And, once he has, he can’t hear what people are thinking anymore, much to his relief… I thought about all this when my pill landed on end this morning. I’m currently waiting for Rod Serling to show up and find out exactly what strange occurrences will befall me in The Twilight Zone.

Things got a little weird after that…

Suddenly, Foreigner’s “Double Vision” just popped right in my head. Not one of my favorites of their’s… I mean, it’s okay, but I’d rather it have been another song. So there I am, taking my pills and singing this damn song in a vain attempt to get it the fuck out of my head. Sadly, it didn’t work. It’s still in there now, even though I’ve listened to 2 other songs, one of which is another ear worm. So I suppose I’ll need to dig out my Foreigner 4 LP and listen to the damn thing. Fuck it; YouTube is easier…

It’s really not that unusual for a song to just randomly pop in my head or just be there the second I wake up. But what was really odd was what happened when I sat down to write this entry…

A friend sent me a text, which is a bit unusual. I don’t really get texts in the morning because everyone is going to work or getting ready for work. In fact, after I responded, I said to myself, “Aren’t you supposed to be at work…?” As soon as I said it, BAM! It popped in my head: “Then the horns kicked in… And my shoes started to squeak…” I had to laugh at myself as I said, “This is ponderous, man… Really ponderous…” If you’ve never heard the song, “This is Ponderous“, go take a listen. It’s actually quite amusing! I can’t wait to see how weirder my day gets!

Okay, onto boring shit…

The universe seems to be giving me a sign, but I’m so unsure of what to do or if I even can do what the universe is telling me to do.

This is the stressor I wasn’t willing to speak of before… See, I live in a row home in a really shitty neighborhood. I’m talking like a demilitarized zone. Meth labs busted, drug deals are the norm, not the exception. There’s fairly mild violence and destruction of people’s property. And once, a party turned into a crime scene that involved several ambulances and at least 20 police cars. And I live in a small town of not even 3,000 people! And it’s only this one, small community of row homes that’s like this.

Seriously, I couldn’t find any pictures that look like my town because they were all too pretty. This is too pretty… I live in this literally tiny, shit-splat town that consists mostly of pizza places and bars. Seriously, there are like 4 or 5 bars in this one tiny town, one of which is a “gentleman’s club”. A male friend dragged me in there once… I can safely say that shit-splat towns get the grossest strippers. Anyway, aside from that, it’s just a small town of old houses. Then you come to my tiny neighborhood and it’s like you stepped into the bowls of the Bronx… something the mayor chooses to ignore because, as she’s been heard to have said, “Every town has its blemish…” So she makes these ridiculous projects to waste our money to make the town look quaint and everyone praises her for it except we of the “hood” who knows that she’s really just turning a blind eye to the issues and giving us a big “fuck you”.

Now… first of all, my row home is not near as nice as the pictures that came up in the Google search, which made me feel worse about things… Anyway… I’ve had some mortgage issues. You know, emergency surgery, missed work, fell behind (several times I had surgical issues), re-modifications that made payments ridiculously higher each time you tried to fix it… Well, in any case, at this point, I have two options. I can pay the arrears off or use that money in a more financially sane way and literally hand the bank my home and tell them it’s their problem now. I’m sure most of you are thinking, “Are you nuts?! Pay the arrears, save your home!” But there’s a reason it’s foolish… As I said, this place is literally a “hood”. It’s gotten to the point that the houses have depreciated to a point where, if I sink this money into my house to save it, I’ll never get back my investment, not by a long shot. To give you an idea, the last home that sold here sold for over $40,000 less than I bought my house for. I blame the town for not cleaning up this shit hole hood…

Now, I could sink that money into a double wide trailer instead and sign my house over to the bank. It’s a better idea, from a financial standpoint. Not to mention that the only nice neighbors I have are moving and the company that rents their house will undoubtedly move in the same trash they’ve been moving in. Sharing walls sucks as it it. Sharing walls with people who sound like they’re running a dance club at all hours? Oh hell no… The problem is that, if I do this, it will literally wipe out every cent of the money I’ve come into. Plus I’d lose over 200 square feet of living space, having a basement and a fenced in yard… I’m at a crossroads and don’t know what to do. I finally found an out from this money pit and I’m not sure it’s something I can or should do.

So all day yesterday (and today so far) I was suffering the worst anxiety. What do I do?! I know the obvious financial option that makes sense. And I know the park this trailer is in is a very nice community. But… I’d lose a lot of what I have with owning a house, especially storage space. I’m not even sure all my furniture will fit in this place! And there are things I’d miss about this place, mainly my tiny backyard. I’d miss the fact that there are trees and a creek. My backyard is like a hidden world compared to the front of my house. I don’t want to lose it, but do I want to risk the possibility of bad neighbors? Of having to be buried in the backyard just so I can get some of my investment back?! Gah! I’m freaking out… I don’t like change and indecision. So if you have any advice, please leave a comment.