and the rest were piled on the dresser, which was built into the closet.
What a garish assortment: bright red plaid bell bottoms with cuffs, shirts with huge collar points, wide paisley neckties in brutally clashing colors…clothing designs that in any other period of recorded history would be considered absurd. I found a tin of aspirin in the pile—probably handy for headaches caused by the sight of that gaudy stack of fabric.
The clothes in the dresser looked as if they had been dumped out of the same bag that had been emptied out onto my desk before I had cleaned it up. Grayish underwear, a couple of turtleneck shirts, two pairs of new jeans that were as stiff as corpses, a hopelessly wrinkled maroon sweatshirt with SIU in a white circle on the front. But on top was a well-organized sock drawer, the socks neatly rolled into themselves.
“Well, some things never change,” I murmured, remembering that the sock drawer in my trailer was organized the same way.
And there, hanging in the closet, was the project of the day: twenty pounds of laundry stuffed into a ten-pound bag.
In the laundry room, in the basement of the dorm, I stuffed my clothes in the washers, which only cost 10 cents for a load, got them going, and went back upstairs. A half hour later, I bounced back down the stairs and found a stopped dryer full of somebody else’s dry clothes. I laid them neatly on the laundry table and put my clothes in the drier. Thirty minutes later, while whistling a Chopin Etude, I trotted downstairs again to pick up my clean laundry, but it wasn’t in the dryer…it was on the floor.
As I was angrily picking it up, I heard behind me: “Listen, asshole, don’t mess with my shit. Do you hear me?”
I turned around and saw a six-foot-tall kid staring at me with squint-eyed fury. Muscles bulged under his cutoff T-shirt.
“They seemed dry to me,” I said as the gremlins banged my nerves.
“Bullshit!” The kid looked like he was going to leap at me. I backed warily away from him with my dripping clothes in my arms and darted up the stairs. This was the incident that I had been harboring in my mind for nearly 40 years, and it hit me with a psychological body blow. With shaking hands and mounting anger, I flipped through the Von Reichmann Book.
“The nervous person must understand that other people are entitled to have opinions that differ from yours,” I read out loud.
Horseshit!
“When aggravated by someone, you must decide whether you will let yourself be annoyed.”
…Yes I will!
“Laughter and anger go together like gasoline and water.”
That’s it!
I needed to start laughing immediately, or I would be carrying this nightmare around for four more decades.
“Functioning towards a realizable goal nearly always reduces nervousness,” I read.
When I stepped down into the basement again, that hulking cartoon character, a walking advertisement for SIU’s open enrollment policy, was leaning on a dryer.
“You’re absolutely right,” I said as I breezed past him.
The malevolent kid was smoking a cigarette. He looked up with a quizzical expression and then ground the butt under his heel. “What the fuck do you mean?” he said, and spat a speck of tobacco out of his mouth.
“I mean, I mean…with this humidity it takes a long time for the clothes to dry.”
“Is that so?” said the kid with a leer.
“Yup, here…” I gave him two dimes. “…make sure they’re good and dry. I mean, I did take some of your dryer time, and I forgot that it’s awfully humid outside.”
I wiped my brow. The kid took the dimes in his big paw and inserted them into the dryer, and as I had hoped, he increased the heat setting to ‘high.’ He sat down again without a word, pulled out another cigarette from his pocket, and sullenly lit it up.
An hour later I had my feet on my desk as I watched that savage walk slowly along Point Drive with his new friend: the gremlin that had been tormenting me for years. The kid was glowering—slung over his shoulders were shirts and trousers that looked like crumpled notebook paper that someone had tried to straighten out. As long as I remembered that image whenever I did my laundry, that particular gremlin would never pluck my nerves again.
My technique of reducing nervous symptoms might not have met with the approval of Dr. Von Reichmann, but it did work, and I took a deep, heebie-jeebie-free breath of nice, damp air. That’s when I noticed a faded 3x5 note card attached to the radiator with old yellow tape rippling in the breeze. On the card, some time ago, I had written:
The future is no more uncertain than the present.
Walt Whitman
I pulled out a piece of paper and my mechanical pencil. Maybe when I woke up the next morning, I’d be in 2009 again. Or some other year. Or maybe I’d have to relive most of my life all over again. I looked up at the oak tree outside the window; it would still be there in 2009, and so would I, one way or the other.
Now, what do I want from the future?
Honestly? I didn’t want to be poor anymore, yet I didn’t have the nerve resistance to hold a stressful job for very long, and until I could purchase a new and improved nervous system, all jobs would be stressful for me. I needed alternative ways to earn a living. I needed to take stock.
Stock!
I put pencil to paper:
FINANCES
Stocks that will appreciate over the next forty years:
General Electric
IBM
Microsoft
Southwest Airlines
Dell
Apple
Family Dollar Stores
Boeing
All I needed was $200 extra each month to invest in the stocks that I knew would appreciate, and then I would be set for life by the age of forty. I continued writing:
WORK
TV and radio news anchoring and reporting—stressful, but this is where my talents lie.
Radio talk show—stressful
Anything in broadcasting—stressful
Under no circumstances did I want to wind up at another part time, temporary, no insurance, Testing Unlimited-type job. I needed to be capable of taking the pressure at a radio or TV station in a medium or major market, because anywhere else would pay not much better than Testing Unlimited. I would have to get my nerves under control. WSIU would help:
To strengthen my nerves, practice techniques in Von Reichmann book every time I work at WSIU.
If
