Drown with Me

(The Endless River; Madrideograpghy iv)

Put a bullet in my brain, and it makes all the papers
-David Bowie

I hate banks. I hate insurance companies. Never ending phone calls. Never ending gaffs. I had to cancel my credit card at Citi Bank on Spet 30th because i canceled my Health Insurance at Kaiser Permanente (I have insurance now here through Sanitas (tied to United Health Care) for 1/5 of the price. But when i called Kaiser to find out where to fax my cancellation, they said they would still auto debit my account. I asked why.

"Because you need to give us 4 weeks notice."
"That's ridiculous, " i said.
"I'm sorry you feel that way," she said, reading off of a card.

"ANYONE would feel that way! A month to cancel an auto debit!" You would too if you weren't reading off of a script and had an independent or empathetic thought in your echoing skull. So i canceled the card. It took two phone conversations of over 30 minutes to cancel the card. I told them to send it to the same Citibank on Calle Orense that they've sent it to 2x because they were hacked. They said they couldn't look up the address. I had to look it up on the Internet, which is hard when you are in a phone booth at a Locutorio. When i went last week the card wasn't there. SO i called today. After almost an hour on the phone, and talking to six different people, each one more of an Epsilon Minus Semi-Moron than the other, i found out that they recalled it because they expected fraud. But they never called me, neither in Spain or at Mom's. This idiot woman told me, "we did try to call." What does TRY mean. Did the buttons give you trouble Tootz?

I said, "well what number did you call?"
"I can't give that number out."
"What! I've given you all my account info, the other person's name on the account and my password six times! Fuck!"

"Hanging up because of the language. Good-bye."

Plus they were all speaking so low and could BARELY speak English. They were all in Kentucky, or nation's asshole. It will take 4 days. SO then i had to talk to someone to be sure i could use my debit card. I have been waiting three weeks to get my new crown for my tooth, but i need my credit card to pay for it!

And then, the train to Arganda Del Rey, for my 4-6pm class, had an indefinite stop because a passenger got sick. I had to call Carmen and cancel. What a day. What a few weeks. What a life!
I live in a no-man's land between lunacy and exhaustion.

One scrap of good news; this class at the University is a graduate course on Business English and also prep for the TOEFL (Test Of English as a Foreign Language). Both of these things will be very handy on my CV my i return to the US. Officially now, i will be here until July 2011 as I have a contract through July 12 with the University. Unless I drown myself in the Manzanares River first.

Man. Two references to suicide in one post. Who am i, Bruce Springsteen? That's another crazy thing i've never been able to understand about the folks who want Born to Run to be the NJ anthem. It has two references to suicide. Don't we from Jersey have enough trouble with our branding?

Baby this town rips the bones from your back
Its a death trap, it's a suicide rap
- - -
I wanna die with you Wendy on the streets tonight
In an everlasting kiss
- - -
The highways jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive Everybody's out on the run tonight but there's no place left to hide

Damn. That's like three suicide references, really.

But some days, like today, merit it.