I get why people "go postal" now.  I get why people strap themselves with bombs and run into giant corporate headquarter type buildings.  I understand why mothers just up and leave and never come back.  I get why a person could do that, or how.  When I was a kid working at 7-11, a co-worker, Tanya did that. A mother of two, in what looked like a fine marriage to a nice guy.  She just...told the kids she was going grocery shopping and never came back.  Called the family three days later from Iowa.  We were shocked, appalled.

I get it now.


I just fought down myriad urges like that, a while ago.  I stood up from my chair, sobbing furiously, looking for something heavy I could use to start tearing the walls down in this house. I want to kill this house. I want to destroy it.  I want to bomb it. I want to run away from it and everything about it.  I've been fighting tooth and nail to get this house fixed from all the Sandy damage.  We're looking at $70,000.00 damage.  Another $30,000.00 to lift the house four feet, out of the danger zone, as per town specifications.  We have $520.00 in the bank.  And we're living in this busted-ass house.  We've been fighting with our insurance company for four and a half months, and nothing.  Everything is a dead end.  I've never felt hopeless in my life. Really genuinely hopeless.  Today, I learned that.  One more letter, this time from the state, rejecting our claim, saying that it's not their jurisdiction, and they can't do anything about it.

The house has been fucked up and busted since October 29.  We've done the best we could to fix it and live here, but it's horrible. I feel like I'm suffocating. It's killing me, and sometimes I think- literally.  I spend most of my life thinking about it, doing paperwork, talking to countless nameless anonymous people, trying to get the insurance money that we're owed, that we've paid into all these years.  I don't want the moon. I just want my house fixed.  Not better than before. Just. Fixed.

One beacon of hope in this mess is through FEMA. We were approved for a $70,000.00 low interest (1%!!) loan through the Small Business Administration.  The payments will be $247.00 a month. Even I can swing that. It's less than we spend on beer, a month.

Here's why I want to run away forever, and not look back.  The Wallings are crazy.  Every Walling going back to Irv's great grandfather has been, and I am not kidding...committed for insanity.  His grandfather died in a mental hospital and buried in a pauper's grave.  His father was committed for months in the mental ward at Riverview.  Irv is following right in their footsteps.  Due to a long history of bad decisions, illiteracy, and general bad business sense, they've lost money, land, their lives to alcoholism...I could go on and on.  What I'm left with is Irv, who is showing signs of mental disorders.

Here's our loan, which I slaved for a month and a half to get, and get approved for. When I say, "we're losing the fight with the insurance company. I'll continue to fight, but right now, let's take this loan and get the house fixed."  He says, verbatim "The government is just looking for a new way to come take our house from us. That's all they want, is to take the house."  Which echoes through the generations. His father said that almost every day. His grandmother. His grandfather who died in the mental hospital.  That's his family mantra.  Meanwhile, I'm living in, literally, a house of shit, buried under this level of crazy.  I work my ass off, like a full time job, to get money anywhere I can, and I hit a brick wall of irrationality.

I can't obviously leave.  I did feel that so overwhelmingly, before, like I wanted to put on my shoes, hop in my car, and drive across the US to some anonymous location, and start a new life.  I went upstairs and cried myself to sleep, instead.  I haven't exactly stopped crying, for the past eight hours.