Jung and the Restless

Okay. So.

Last night I was sleeping and was vaguely aware of my husband coming home around I guess 4 a.m. (he tends bar and gets home late.) I was dreaming, mostly dreaming of how soothing and infinite the duvet felt, when I heard screaming in from what seemed like the actual horizon screeching car brakes and then a full-out crash! I never knew how high and full and metallic a big-ass car crash sounds, like they added reverb.

So I wiggled out of bed and went over to "Trey" who was looking out the window and asked him what was going on. In a completely deadpan voice, he told me,"

"Well, there's a car on fire in front of our house..."

You have to understand, we live in Williamsburg right by an off-ramp of the BQE. It's both urban and old-school families-sitting-on-lawnchairs-on-the-square-of-sidewalk-in-front-of-their-house-all-day neighborhoody -- not a street where you would expect to see a car BURST INTO FLAMES. Nor a man in a business suit looking very like a mouse with a CPA opening the trunk of the burning car to retrieve his briefcase and suitcases. T. described him as the "Associate Director of the Super Secret Agency." We heard the fire truck coming and saw people milling around in the dark.

And then I looked through the blinds to my right at what once was the little stone wall in front of our apartment building, except -- there was a car there. A car had plowed over the little wall in front of our building. If that little 4' high flagstone wall weren't there the car would have driven through our front door or into our HOUSE. The bumper was touching our door. A car fucking DROVE INTO OUR HOUSE!

The fire department was there, and the cops, and neighborhood people coming out side to offer their incontrovertivble expertise (esp. Josie, the 50 year old Puerto Rican lady with the astonishing beehive yelling "EY HERD A SKREAYCHIIIING...." and was wearing her sunglasses in the dark.)

I feel asleep finally, after laughing hysterically a great deal and could not stop saying "A car drove into our house?!?!?!?!" and also thinking "so loop this every 15 minutes and maybe it's what being in Baghdad would feel like - except the car would have exploded." He held me until I fell asleep.

This morning I opened our door and looked at a pile of rubble.

But the thing is, I realize that I'm actually relieved this happened. Because the car driving into our front door, the door my husband had wearily passed through moments before, represents such an incontrovertible occasion for sympathy. The pervasive bad feeling, the sense of evil about this election is just too much to articulate --I have been feeling tooo disenfranchised to speak of my heartbreak over the election and/or my sense of foreboding about what will happen next.

It's kind of like how people who cut themselves do so so they have evidence of the anguish they feel. They can look at a mark and feel like things have been contextualized, ritually inscribed. So when I tell people that one car at 5 am drove into my front door and the other burst into a fireball, they say ,

:"ohmigod are you OKAY???? That is SO. FUCKED. UP!!!
i'm totally here for you, okay?
....whoa! that is crazy!"

Now our house is the perfect correlative for our psychic state, induced by psychotic states!

I wonder how many more expressions of disorder will manifest themselves in the coming weeks.