Man Down

"Aid 1, respond to man down. Unconscious, unresponsive."
I was sitting down with my father at the cafe in town overlooking the ferry landing on a beautiful late summer day when the pager went off. "This sounds like a bad call Dad, I gotta go on this one." He was disappointed but understood and I rode my bike to catch the ambulance before it left the aid station. Man down. Such a non specific complaint and I mentally ran down the list of all the possible reasons one could be unconscious; strokes, heart attacks, low blood sugar, overdose...the list is exhaustive. The one thought that didn't go through my head was a 3 day alcohol binge . It certainly occurred to me the second I opened the door to the tiny room this guy calls home. Squalor and sadness greeted us as did the smell of old stale air mixed with vomit and evaporating bottles of beer. The patient was coming to and was not unconscious nor unresponsive. Just very drunk and dehydrated and wishing he were unconscious. Dried bloody vomit was on his clothes and the stained yellow sheets as well. The room itself was disgusting and the landlord, no... slumlord, should be made to live in one of these rooms to atone for the sin of actually charging others to stay here. Brown paneled walls darkened the already dimly lit room. The brownish shag rug was filthy with old stains and some festering new ones. Our man was lying in a single bed that took up 2/3rds of the width of the room and more than half the length. A tiny dresser/desk cluttered with dirty laundry, encrusted food take out containers, empty bottles and other flotsam of a shipwrecked life was crammed against the wall at the foot of the bed. Above the dresser was a TV mounted to the wall and the History Channel was going on about some long forgotten WWII battle. Distant explosions echoing through time into this mans bombed out hell hole of a life.
Outside... the crisp, stunning, cloudless Indian Summer day was almost oppressive in its glory. And this room was its antithesis...the dank and foul air begged for an open window. What an appropriate metaphor I thought. This guy is surrounded by the beauty of San Juan Island and yet the internal squalor of his soul is causing so much ugliness. There is no judgement from me...no smug feeling of superiority as he is just a mirror of my own craziness. A cracked and dirty mirror to be sure, but one that shows me how all of my own sadness and anxiety and pain come from an internal source. The world around me doesn't change that much from day to day but my mood can, and in an instant. My pain doesn't come from external sources, I know that much. But I just choose to deal with it all in a different way. Not by binging it away in a desperate alcoholic stupor, but by whining about it on the internet. Hoping that by explaining it to people that I'll never meet there may be some understanding of our shared humanity. We're all just cracks in the massive mirror of this existence that reflects light back from above. And those cracks each refract light in unique ways that make up the kaleidoscope of this world. Maybe that's why we're here...to share our experiences and to shine back different ways of seeing this world and therefor understand more about ourselves and others in that sharing. If so then I thank my new teacher and hope he can teach me this lesson in a way that is a little less destructive to himself. Maybe this man down will lift us all up somehow. God I hope so.