My car, for one. My clutch is dying; my clutch engages about half an inch off the floor; driving with my clutch is a little like ripping the skin off the bottom of my car’s feet and then making my car walk across gravel. I’m holding off replacing the clutch as long as I can. This means I’m avoiding using it as much as possible, which means overusing the brakes, stalling a lot, and bucking down the street like a bronco. Unsurprisingly, my brakes have begun to deteriorate from the misuse. So now we have a situation wherein acceleration is a bit like the part at the beginning of a roller coaster ride where the cars keep jerking forward and bumping against each other and deceleration is not unlike an earthquake. My car is a thing in my life, and it’s not doing too well.

Another thing in my life is all the new crap I bought to go along with my new computer. And this stuff doesn’t have my car’s excuse: this stuff is not a 1997 Ford Escort with 175,000 miles. This stuff is a shiny new scanner, a shiny new keyboard, things like that. I spend 12 hours this weekend setting up a scanner and figuring out how to work it. About 3 of those hours I was on the phone with Hewlett-Packard. Umm? It was a miserable experience. And at the end of it, when I finally got the damn thing working, I realized it isn’t the scanner I wanted. This scanner blows. And, my new keyboard arrived in the mail with a nonfunctional colon key. And, my old computer is taking up space and taunting me. There are boxes everywhere. There are instruction manuals everywhere. AARGHHH! THINGS!

And you know what other thing hasn’t been doing too well? My body. Switching from a PC to a Mac, being temporarily without my voice recognition software or my ergonomic keyboard, has been really hard on my arms and neck. Could I please return my body to the manufacturer and get a replacement model? Does Apple make human bodies? They seem to be the only company that makes things that work…

I think this is why I was posting about superpowers the other day. I need some magic, because I’m feeling so overwhelmed by physical things that do not work. I’ve been flying on airplanes and returning purchases to stores and overusing my sore arms and worrying about my car, and these are all the wrong things. The things I need right now are an armchair and a book, maybe some music, maybe some darkness, some quiet, some aloneness. I’m so uncentered, I’m disconnected from my soul; I’ve barely meditated at all in the past couple of weeks. I’m focused on all the wrong things, and I’ve kind of lost sight of the point. Do you ever feel that way? How do you deal? Should I just throw my things out the window?