Spin Out

My tires are spinning.  I can’t get any traction no matter what I do.  But there’s nothing discernible causing the spin.  No oil slick, no ice; I’m not bogged down

in sand or sludge.  All systems are operable, functioning as they should and topped off with just the right amount of fluids.  I’m progressing in a carefully controlled and measured way, taking on just the right amount of cargo and passengers.  I’m not over-burdened nor am I stalled out alone.  But I just can’t make anything move.

I bought a car two weeks ago, but I can’t have it.  It’s somewhere in an

undisclosed, apparently unknown plant in Mexico and nobody can say when it will get here, if it will in fact get here. 

I made a huge life decision to quit my job but I still have to stay there for another 15 months. 

I chose and committed to my story and the novel format but I don’t ever seem to have time to actually write it. 

I made another huge decision to sell my house and find someplace cheaper to live so I can quit my job – but I can’t find any scenario that will actually allow that goal. 

I entered three writing contests all promising notification win or lose and I haven’t heard from any of them.

The projects around the house I take on, physically grueling work, make my

heart hurt and contract upside down or sideways or otherwise stab at me until I slink back between the covers of a book, or just sit and stare at all the work needing done that I can’t do until it calms down again.  I’m held hostage by my heart.

The ground squirrel invasion continues unabated no matter what I do.  I have the entire perimeter of my yard stacked with rocks and bricks plugging the holes and tunnels as fast as they dig them while my son watches from his room, shaking his head while googling local dementia care facilities.  And still they come.  They’re squirrels.  They can climb fences.  All the hole-plugging I do doesn’t matter.  It just makes me feel like I’m doing something productive, something active to affect my fate.  Is that what I’m doing with all these other grand schemes?

I feel like a rat in a maze.  I know the goodie is there, I can smell it, my rat whiskers all aquiver – but I just can’t seem to ever get there, regardless of the paths I choose, all the running I do.  All I can do is keep trying path after path,

scarfing up the crumbs along the way that promise the prize.  Seriously – what the hell?  Wasn’t there a book, “Who Moved my Cheese”?  Well, I get that now – I seem to be literally living it.

I’m in an odd insulated time vacuum or something.  I mean, something has to give eventually, right?  I bought the car; they have to deliver it at some point, right?  In 15 months I’ll have to be living somewhere, right?  At some point I’ll know one way or another if I won any contest.  Right? 

Time is going by but somehow I’m outside time, watching it from above,

watching it all just slide by without touching me, all my efforts slamming into the perimeter.  Am I doing something to cause that?  Am I the reason for a spin out, something I did or didn’t do correctly? 
   
For no matter what I do, nothing happens.  I don’t get any results.  Like I’m a

ghost floating through this existence.  I think I’m here, that I’m doing things, but whatever I do it doesn’t have any physical impact.  Life goes by as if I’m not here at all; as though all my actions don’t matter at all.

 Am I being cosmically pranked?

When I find myself beating my head against an immovable wall, I usually learn that I’m on the wrong path; that I’m going after something that’s not true for

me.  But I can’t manufacture that meaning now.  These are seemingly random things that are adding up to a huge weird cluster.  It’s like I’ve ended up as a log wrangler, jumped from my path into a river.  I’ve been riding a hundred different logs, guiding them all down the river trying to get them all where they need to go but now it’s finally too much and everything is jammed all together and nothing can get

through.

At this point I just want an air-evac out.  There doesn’t seem to be any way through and there is no one log I can find that is the focal point, that if I work exclusively on it and free it, the rest will follow.  They’re all just an indistinguishable mess.   I keep adding more logs on top of, or behind the rest, trying to still find a way to get something done.  But it just adds to the pile-up. 
 
What now?  And what’s the life expectancy of a ground squirrel?