Self Pity is Fun

Part Truth, Part Fiction

Now I play board games with Gina, who has schizophrenia, and the other mentally ill people who live in the intentional community where I live. It's not so bad here. I have a one-bedroom apartment. I can be grateful I'm only on-and-off dating a cranky middle-aged guy with a DWI and a kid he gets to see once a week, instead of being married to one and pregnant with his kids and watching soap operas on TV. I should be grateful for my intelligence, and my independence, and forget my loneliness.

I met the cranky middle-aged guy on facebook. When I brought him over to join the Community for Mental Illness, he expressed some interest. He brought a cake. I met him outside a Starbucks. I told him later I thought of Hagrid. He said, “When you think of me?” When we went to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II, I said he was Lupin, and I said that we could be Lupin and Tonks for Halloween. The guy had a thing for werewolves. He didn't like being compared to Lupin. He thought he was ugly. He didn't like redheads. I have no idea why he didn't like redheads. I am clueless, it seems. He covered my eyes when it got to the part where we were watching Alan Rickman as Severus Snape. He'd gently kiss my hair and nuzzle my neck at the right parts, though, and that's what I needed, that's all I could handle I felt, as damaged as I was, as broken and damaged and needing the Lord's forgiveness. And my mother was dead. He liked to bite. Tonks was younger, had punk rock hair. At first Lupin rejects her because he thinks he is too old and too scary for her.

The day that I picked him up in the car, he was just a friend of a friend I'd added on Facebook. When I got angry, the feelings of which are expressed in the following paragraph, angry enough to upset the gameboard, he told me, “It's just a game.”

The following is adapted from a blog post I wrote called “Self-Pity is Fun.”

It is about how I managed to ruin a perfectly good game of Settlers of Catan. It is about how I stayed miserable despite winning on my first time playing. It is about how I chose to over-analyze the politics of the game. Most of those progressive politics I learned from my time volunteering at a gift shop in Nob Hill Albuquerque called Peacecraft. I collected the wood, the iron, the other resources. I set up roads and houses. In my mind, it was boiling, it was steaming, and I couldn't stand the placid calmness of the group of us sitting around the table. Gina was especially calm. She has learned to be that way. She hears voices. Thing like board games help her stay distracted from her voices.

By going off on a rant. I'm the only politically correct person in the world. I came from such backward Republican people who had no idea what they were talking about. Every time I mentioned something about the environment or civil rights it got shot down.

This stupid game Settlers of Catan is fucking capitalist. It's all about buying. Buy wood. Buy wheat. Buy sheep. Buy coal. Buy bricks. Build settlements. Hey peeps! Ever hear about the Israeli settlements that are driving the Palestinians off their land? What? We should just play the game?

And I'm winning. I'm a good little Capitalist. It's easy to win when I play by the rules. Cuz boy ain't I smart!

The guy asks to be excused. I want to escape the maddening game, so I follow him out into the backyard of the apartment. There is a full-grown tree. The wooden fence is perfectly cut around the shape of the tree trunk. The side walls that separate this backyard from the ones around it are made of corrugated tin.

“I came out here to smoke,” the guy explains apologetically. He withdraws a cigarette from the inside pocket of his black trench coat.

“I don't mind as long as you stand downwind,” I say. I am used to hanging out at coffee shops like R.B. Winnings or Satellite with smokers. Smokers remind me of summer camp.

He asks me if Gina works at a hospital. A mental hospital, he means. She is so together, in his opinion, with her serious eyes which he can see through her tortoise-shell glasses, that he cannot believe she will be visiting the facility tomorrow for ECT.

“One almost hesitates to inquire what ECT is,” he says.

“ECT is Electro-Convulsive Therapy. Shock Treatment straight out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,” I explain.

“Oo! Poor baby!” he says.

I consider it a bit patronizing that he would call a grown woman a baby, but in the circumstances we find ourselves in, I can appreciate his sympathy.

“She thinks it helps, though,” I say. “Sucks to be her.”

“Wow. That is pretty intense and is a shame,” he says. “I feel for her. Makes me wonder what warranted the treatment.”

“You can go back in there and ask,” I say. “She's very open.”

Dating can be like a game of Settlers of Catan. You can feel like you lose even when you are winning.