Well, I did it. I woke up on time for my therapy appointment. I was barely coherent and had to spend the first ten minutes of my appointment time drinking an energy drink in order to be cogent enough to get some use out of the session, but then my sessions with this therapist (long story, but this is not my usual therapist) are typically only thirty of our forty-five minute appointments since they’re usually late and we usually wrap up a few minutes early. Which, in this case, means that I wasn’t late and had myself mostly together by the time they showed up. Sessions with this therapist are useful if I can stay focused, but my mind tends to wander once I get talking, so they tend to be really hit or miss. It’s generally fine to wander through topics with a therapist, unless you’re there to talk about something specific. Unfortunately, I’m seeing this therapist for something specific and, because of the way the organization they work for is set up, I see them once every five or six weeks for each of these incredibly short sessions (every other therapist I’ve seen has involved hour-long appointments). I’ve honestly thought about ending these sessions since I’m not sure how beneficial they are these days, but I’m also pretty sure I don’t need LESS therapy in my life. After all, it’s not like things are getting any better in the world. I mean, I spent today’s (the day I’m writing this) entire session talking about the medications I’m on, how I’m handling the stress of living in this day and age, and never quite got around to the stuff I’m seeing them for. I mean, to be fair, I have a LOT of history and given that I see this therapist about nine times a year, I’ve only just sorta mostly gotten through the details of said history, so any tangent I go on to talk about stuff happening in my life today usually requires a few additional tangents in order to provide them with necessary context.

The way I woke up, sans alarm, feels kind of appropriate, given all that. I sleep with my windows open for most of the year, until I need to turn on the AC to stay cool enough to sleep at night, so I’ve never been good at sleeping past eight or nine in the morning since the ambient noise of the outside world is often enough to wake me up, even if the light coming through the top of my curtains isn’t bright enough to wake me up on it’s own. Today was no different. I made it to about half-past nine, which is more or less the time I’ve been waking up at all week, but I might have slept longer if the garbage truck hadn’t dropped the dumpster it had picked up. Every Friday morning, trash collection arrives at my apartment building, makes a lot of noise, and then leaves. For most of the time I’ve lived in this complex, there have been two people driving the garbage trucks: one to operate the truck and the other to go fetch the wheeled dumpsters from the underground garages of each apartment building. At some point in the last year, the company picking up my apartment complex’s trash reduced their workforce so now only one person drives the truck. Sure, all of this stuff only requires one person to do it, but it takes a lot longer since there guy running the truck now has to hop in and out of the truck several times while also pushing the dumpsters around. I doubt that their schedule has changed much in that time, which means this guy has to run a lot and has, so far, broken one of the wheels on the dumpster on three separate occasions since November and keeps forgetting to close the garage door again.

All of which seems to have culminated in this harried man not hooking the dumpster securely enough so that it fell off the truck as it was being lowered back down, dented in one of it’s sides in an incredibly alarming scream of metal, and then snapped off the lid. Normally, at least on Fridays I’m not working, I can cover my head in my blankets on a cool enough morning and ignore all the noise until I fall asleep asleep again. Even with how warm it was this morning, I started to do that and had only just started to fall asleep again when the scream and klang of metal woke me up again, sending me shooting out of bed to see whatever could have made that horrible noise. You see, I’m two floors above the garage door and wouldn’t be surprised to see my apartment crumble into the garage if something damaged the structure of the building around the garage door (the building I live in is truly just not that well-built), so I respond quickly when I hear alarming noises outside my window in case I need to quickly move to a more structurally sound part of my apartment. This poor guy managed to right it and tucked it back into the garage where it belonged, broken lit tucked inside it, but it really feels pretty emblamatic of life these days. Business decisions impeding normal, peaceful life in the name of profit.

My day has been mostly fine since this event. Sure, I’d have liked to get more sleep and my therapy appointment wasn’t particularly useful (I was extra scattered, as I always am, because I was forced to full alertness so rapidly), but my biggest problem today is having to figure out how to put my hair up comfortably for an entire day so my neck doesn’t sweat too much in this unseasonable heat. I don’t know what’s going to happen to this poor guy who somehow managed to crunch up a dumpster (and gouge the asphalt, but my apartment complex has already proven they don’t give a shit about the state of the parking lots), but I bet he’s having a pretty miserable day as a result of this. Or he was already having a bad day before this and dropping the dumpster only made it worse. Either way, I feel pretty bad for him and wish there was something I could. Just, you know, like everyone who is suffering these days in ways that incredibly visible but still deeply personal that leave me feeling like I’d be an intruder if I tried to help directly. I don’t know. It’s not a direct metaphor, but it has turned my mind in ways that it is already inclined to go and all I can do is stew through it as I think about what life is going to be like as things probably get worse before they get better. It’s not like I can fix any of those problems with a restful vacation.