Working Notes 11: Four Cops and a Toilet Flap
Last night I was all tucked into bed, ready to fall asleep, when I heard my wife calling me from the bathroom. She was going to take a shower before going to sleep, but there was no water. By the time I stumbled to my desk to contact our landlord, he’d already sent a message. There was a leak, and the water was off until the morning, when he could trace it and repair it. Because it was so late, I thought that was reasonable, and went back to bed.
Cut to 6 am the next morning: our apartment door is open; the landlord’s inside with us because he’d come to investigate possible sources of the leak; our neighbor is in the hall screaming profanity at him; and both of them end up calling the cops on each other. The neighbor’s pissed that the water is off and doesn’t think the leak is his problem; the landlord is pissed because the neighbor keeps going down to the basement and turning the water back on.
Anyway, three hours and four cops later, I realized that I am completely burned out. I welcomed the chaos because it meant that I didn’t need to write, or think about growing my subscribers, or paying the bills. All I needed to focus on, all I could focus on, was this. My neighbor screaming that he was going to “slap the shit” out of my landlord in front of multiple officers with active body cams was a much more desirable place to be than at my laptop. Telling my landlord to please stop talking when, a moment later, he brought up that he has a concealed carry permit and one of the cops asking him if he knew what premeditation meant, was a far, far more inviting place to be than thinking about content strategy and product mix.
As rough as the past three months have been, emotionally, financially, and mentally, I think that my cognitive collapse was indicative of something more than this uncertain world putting pressure on all of us. There’s a lot of dysfunction in traditional roleplaying publishing, and in the hobby itself, whether or not the participants can see it or are willing to acknowledge it. There’s a lot of bullshit in traditional publishing, indie publishing, and the creator/subscription space as well.
And my cognitive issues aside, I’m not sure how to move forward with this. Even if my short-term memory wasn’t nerfed, and my ability to sequence tasks was still sharp, the bullshit would still be bullshit. And even though there are quantifiable, physical reasons for my cognitive changes – literal brain damage – I’m starting to think that maybe, subconsciously, my brain noped out on purpose because I needed a break, and the only way I was going to take one was to be incapacitated.
Oh, the leak turned out to be the aggressive neighbor’s toilet flap not closing entirely. It was running constantly for a month and ran up a huge water bill, and he never reported it. A problem that three cops had to detain said neighbor for while the landlord and one cop could go upstairs to replace it, a chaperone was needed because the neighbor was convinced the landlord was going to do something untoward. A five-minute fix with a five-dollar part turned into a pointless three-hour drama. And I’d rather relive that than go back to work on Monday.
I love what I do, and I’ll continue to do it with a passion, but the world is the world.
