[EDITOR: At some point while writing this story, I was asked the following question:
seriously, what is with you and your obsession over this!??!?
The following was my reply. I have included it unaltered which may make it a bit confusing, since this was over two years ago.]
Seriously? Okay, Seriously then.
There's an old saying: Never ask a question you aren't prepared to hear the answer to.
I mention this, because you brought this on yourself.
My mom is a refugee and my father an orphan. WW2 to be exact. I was born in America and if my grandfather on my mother's side hadn't been a genius, he wouldn't have figured out how bad things were getting in Poland and failed to get his family out before Shit hit the fan.
And by genius I mean grandmaster of chess level of genius.
And Lo the nazis and Russians cut Poland up like a pie and Grandpa joined the US army to fight for Poland. Being super smart and a polyglot, and of no small insignificance of a personage in Poland, the US army in their infinite wisdom sent him to go fight in the pacific theater.
Where upon a shell fragment entered next to his eye, went down the center of his brain and out the back. They said he was going to be a vegetable. Three days later, he was walking around. It appears the only part of his brain it got was the part that tells you to shut the hell up. Tough as nails that man. It is from him I learned how to become the Determinator. No matter how many times you got knocked down, you get back up again. That's what a MAN does.
Anyways, Poland in the end was occupied by the Russians and Gramps was having none of that shit, so he started smuggling guns into Poland and smuggling people out. I am Ashkenazi, BTW. Jewish to you laymen. All the jews in our family had been killed off by the nazi's, and over the years, the communists would kill the rest. Simply put, the commies couldn't get to my grandfather, so they found everyone who he was related to and had them shot. No, he was not working with his former family. In fact, they cast him out. None of them had committed a crime. This act was done for no other reason then sheer spite.
No genetic relative of mine in Poland survived.
This is where I come in.
At the age of 8, along with a number of other Polish males born in America, we were gathered together at the Local Moose lodge to hear testimony of people who had fled Poland. We were to remember and never forget what was happening. Ironically, I forgot most of it. I was only 8 and it was way over my head. However, when I asked one guy what was wrong with his hand, he held it up and the translator calmly explained they tore out all his fingernails with pliers.
That stuck with me.
Mom wanted gramps to just let things go, but Gramps always made sure to pour as much anti-communism as he could into my head. I regret not giving him more time. The stories were important to him. He needed to know the fight would not be over when he died. However, after the fall of the Berlin wall, he thought the problem with communism was finally over, and when Poland was finally free, he felt his work was over. He died about a year later.
I'm glad about that. It would hurt him to see how bad things have gotten since then.
So what's all this got to do with what I write?
I had put into my head a serious sense of responsibility. That one has a duty to the future. To pay things forward. It is a duty and responsibility of every man born to do this. You are a man and it is what you do. I failed at doing my duty for a long time, but eventually I got my act together. I'll spare you the details, but I was a very selfish youth.
Now I talk people out of suicide. I help the mentally and physically disabled. I work with people getting out of mental hospitals and over the years I am proud to say I've saved quite a number of lives. A few of them have gone so far as to call me hero. One of my hobbies is rescuing dying cats. I have a real knack for keeping cats alive for some reason. I also work very hard to put ideas in people's heads. Get them to think. Ideas that will make them stronger, give them solace when they need it most. Mostly I do this by talking to them. I also do it through my writing.
However, as of late, things have gone really... really bad.
I've had a client I worked with for years lose it and wind up in jail ruining his life.
I've had a former client finally give into the demons in her head and finally catch that train she's been obsessing about.
I've got another who's 94 years old who I've had to transfer to a facility where she's going to be warehoused until she dies.
I've got a cat who is on death's door and I fear I will have to put him to sleep soon.
All of which I don't have time to deal with, because at this very moment, my wife is in surgery having two cysts removed from her lungs. She went in about 40 minutes ago.
Those cysts are not being removed to save her life.
No no no, it's too late to save the lungs. This surgery is just to determine if she qualifies to get a lung transplant. She's got about 2-3 years to live, and the lung transplant waiting list is about 3-4 years. Let's just skip over the 2.03% chance she never gets out of the surgery alive. It is 5 hours long and her lung will be collapsed most of the time. Hard enough for a healthy person, much less someone who's lungs are covered in scar tissue from an immune system deciding that said lungs are a threat.
Oh, did I mention I moved to a new home that was a ranch so my wife wouldn't need to go up and down stairs anymore? Turns out the construction next door to my old place shifted the ground and the corner of my house sunk. Twelve grand to fix IF I want any hope of even SELLING the place. I may just have to let it go into foreclosure. [Editor: I did]
Do you have any idea how expensive it is to pay for all the medical bills just TREATING my wife? Let's not get into the cost for this surgery, or the next one, or staying in the hospital. Even with insurance, I am being bled dry.
Not that I care.
I'll let you in on a secret. If you live long enough there will be a point where gold loses it's luster, diamonds stop sparkling, and the only thing you will value is TIME. Nothing else matters, except time. You start to measure everything you say and do in units of time. How much time wasted doing X, how to save time doing Y. What is important and needs to get done, and what you can put off because there are more important things to do.
Time spent with those who may not be around to spend with anymore.
However, given the situation, I, ironically, find myself like I am right now, sitting around and waiting while other people do what I cannot. They are being paid money both directly and indirectly by me to take the course of action that will give me more time. All I do is sit here, watching time pass.
It is amazing what you will sacrifice for mere moments.
And it is also amazing what becomes important. What gets brought into sharp clarity. What was important in your life, and what wasn't.
It. Is. MADDENING.
Trust me, just sitting here can drive you insane. You might WANT to spend every moment worrying about the one you love, (who might be dead as I type, but they just haven't come out to tell me yet) But there's no point. I am helpless. I have no control. At this point, it is up to the winds of fate. The butterfly will flap its wings, and maybe a tornado destroys a trailer park in Ohio.
To sit here and obsess would weaken me. It would leave me mentally unfit. So many people depend on me. The one that I love is the one dying, not I. I simply do not have the luxury to worry about myself. I cannot allow myself to spiral into depression. I MUST remain of sound mind. I MUST hold it together. Failure is not an option.
But you cannot FORCE yourself to hold it together.
The only way to remain of sound mind when the universe is falling apart is to experience Joy. Happiness will be beyond you, but not joy. You can't hold your breath in anticipation forever. You have to keep breathing. Moments of positivity can give you just enough "oxygen". A mouthful of air.
A gasp in a vast echoing void.
When I find myself unable to sleep, and unable to do anything productive, I write. I write about the life of a man who's life is infinitely more screwed than mine. Not just because he's in the long dark, but because of far darker things that are on his island. An island in a particularly skewed world with a few laws of physics that aren't in this one. And those laws make his world a nightmare with a thin illusion that keeps most people from going insane.
Nothing I write is just for fun, although I hope you smile from time to time.
I am describing a man who is fighting against cosmic horror, because I am fighting a more mundane horror and of the two, I would prefer the cosmic one. It would make more sense. The world that the Quonset Manager lives in is a terrible place, but it also has something the real world does not.
It has a face to punch.
There is something to blame for the horrors of QM's world. There is reason. There is logic. As unfair that world is, There is a face somewhere that deserves to be punched. His world has meaning. My world has none. In my world, good things happen to bad people, bad things happen to good people, and there is no justice. Life is not fair in my world. And I tell myself, over and over, that this is a GOOD THING.
It is a good thing, because if life was fair, that would mean I had it coming. It would mean I was a bad person being punished, or the people I love and care for are being punished. They are suffering because they are bad people... IF... the world is fair. If the world is fair, my wife is dying from a genetic disease that turns your lungs into scar tissue and kills you by robbing you of the very breath of life because she deserves it.
If... the world is fair.
I know a man who was a first responder. He helped a little baby 18 months old. She had been raped by her step father so the mother could film it and sell the video on line to make money to buy the Heroin-Fentanyl combo that is so popular here in central New York.
Yes, I help my fair share of recovering drug addicts as well.
But his story... He told to me at 2am one night, I work the night shift you see. When the clients have problems, I'm the one who handles them. This was just him unloading about the horrors that finally broke him. When he finished describing it, I asked if the baby had it coming. He almost attacked me. And I asked again, "Did the baby deserve it?" And he screamed "No" and, "How could I ask such a thing?"
I replied, "So you know that life isn't fair. If it was fair, she would have deserved it. People want life to be fair, but not me. If life was fair, then everyone would win half the time, and lose half the time. Most people when they say they want things to be fair actually mean they want the world to be UNFAIR in their advantage."
"Me? I want everyone to win. I want everyone to be happy. Even the people who raped that baby. I wish they had been happy enough they didn't feel the need to have done it in the first place. I want to cheat. I want everyone to cheat and everyone to win. Because that would be unfair. And in an unfair world, that would be possible."
He settled down and let go of me. I waited until he had time to think before I continued, "I'm telling you this, because you want the world to be fair, and it CAN'T be fair. You can never make this right. You can NEVER punish the guilty enough in this case, and you can NEVER compensate the victim enough. If you try, you'll only fail and eventually try to kill yourself again."
"I'm sorry. I really am. But you need to accept this hell you are in and let it go. Life is a pile of good things and a pile of bad things. They don't cancel each other out. They both exist and you have to deal with both SEPARATELY. Nobody who ever won the lottery deserved it. That baby didn't deserve what happened to her either. All we can do is accept what we cannot change and try to make things better going forward."
"So you got a choice. You can drag everything down into flames and burn the world to ash, or you can try to make the world a better place. Let those who committed wrong be dealt with by the justice system. That's what it's for. It's not perfect, but it's better than the alternative."
"I don't expect you to forgive the mother or the step-father, but you need to put yourself first. Not just for you, but for those who depend on you. You aren't going to survive like this. You will keep breaking and winding up here until you find a way to let it go."
And he asked me how. I said, "I don't know. However, I have a board game over here. Let's try and get through the next twenty minutes."
Sometimes all I can do is get through the next twenty minutes.
And so I write. I write about silly things and horrifying things and true things and new ways of seeing things. I build a world based on truth and nonsense. It is a wall. It is a house of cards. It is a toy. It is a metaphor. It is a cross. It is... It's...
It's just a game.
A game I play to make myself forget the horror of the real world where I am powerless and helpless and alone. If I lie down nobody is coming to save me. In that respect, I identify with the Quonset Manager. In the end, nobody will save us. We get back up, or we die where we fall. That's my life. That's always been my life. I tell myself that this is how things are, and that every other option would be worse.
This IS the best of all possible worlds, because every other option would be worse.
And occasionally I take some time to forget and to rest, not because I can't handle it. Far from it. I can handle the horror of my life just fine. The question is, For How LONG? Moments like this, where I write shit like this, is just to rest. Not because I want to, but because I NEED to. I need to relax and rest because...
Well...
Things will get worse. When things get worse, I need to be ready. I need to be at my best. I cannot allow myself to be anything less then 100% ready to do everything I can at a moment's notice. All I have right now is hope. All I can depend on is chance, and Chance is a fickle thing. If chance gives me an opportunity, I will have to be ready.
This is what I pour into the Quonset Manager. I pour all of this into him and it fills him and then I try to break him. Again and again and again and again I shatter him against the rocks. I pound the surf into his soul and lash the wind into his back. Because if he can make it 20 more minutes, maybe I can make it 20 more minutes.
If life was fair, hope couldn't exist.
If life was fair, nothing would change, except that you would deserve all the shit that happened to you. That's all it takes for life to be fair... for you to DESERVE what happens to you. Nothing changes, just the purpose... just the reasons... just the MEANING of your suffering. So, between the two: life being fair, or life having hope, I'll take hope.
I want to live in a world where sometimes...
Things works out in my favor...
Even if I don't deserve it.
Because right about now...
I could REALLY use an unearned miracle.
(And that's why I write.)
PS
In case you are wondering, they got the cysts, doctor says no complications, I'll be able to see her in a few hours. Went faster than expected. It'll take about a week before the pathology report comes back. Then we decide what to do next.
[EDITOR: My wife is on an experimental medication that has, thankfully, stabilized her. Her health is still poor, but she isn't getting any worse. This is included for those who may be curious as to her current status. We never did get a new lung, but she has already outlived the doctor's predictions by a year. LAM is a rare disease and poorly understood. If you happen to have it (chances are you are a woman.) feel free to contact me about how she's surviving. I don't wish to give medical advice, but LDN has been doing wonders. Yes, it's an off label use, but if you can't stand the side effects of sirolimus, like my wife, maybe it can help you.
It is easy to say, 'every moment matters', but you can't actually live that way. Life is about highs and lows. You can't always be tense and ready. You need to relax. People need to take things for granted. I think the greatest feeling I have right now is that I have finally returned to a place where I can take for granted that my wife is alive. I can actually forget, occasionally, that she had a genetic time bomb in her lungs that ironically means her overactive immune system fought off COVID much easier than mine.
There's an upside to everything, I guess.
The Origin Of The Quonset Manager was written during a very black time in my life, but it also made me do a great deal of thinking about my writing in general. This is the 'seed' of the Eldritch-Verse. The setting that my stories are built upon. Over time these concepts and ideas would be refined to make the overarching meta-narrative of the stories I am currently writing. The story is also.... difficult to chew. However, if you are the type who like puzzles, there is a lot to unpack here. I hope you enjoyed it.]
