Control: I Have a Terrible and Pretty Great Life…
I, Dalton Lewis, live a terrible life. Voices talk to me in my head. They tell me things, horrible things. This is real, guys — this is a real and terrible condition called paranoid schizophrenia. These voices often take the form of a story, a story in which the good guys lose and the bad guys get away with everything. This story runs through my head all day long, a story in which the bad guys win almost every time. I sit around, trying to watch a movie or read a book, and I am interrupted by the voices framing me for rape or murder again. They say that they are chopping off my head again. There we go, decapitated again. There we go. I’m dead in my head again. I have to live with this. I try to tell them that I’m innocent and didn’t rape or kill anybody. They don’t listen.
I don’t pay attention to the world around me. I don’t pay attention while I’m eating, and the food falls all over my shirt. My shirt gets filthy after one meal, and I don’t seem to notice. I wear mostly sweat pants and casual shirts or sweat shirts because there’s a super psycho death virus and I can’t go out or I might get sick. If I get sick I might die on account of my obesity. I’m fat. I’m fat because I eat too much. I eat too much because I hate my fucking life because voices talk to me and because I have medication which slows my body down.
I don’t have a wife or a girlfriend because I don’t want to date. I don’t trust myself to be able to be a good husband or boyfriend, and I don’t want to disappoint people because I’m dating them poorly.
I don’t have a lot of money. I live a middle-class lifestyle because my mom is happily retired from library work, and my dad has taught tennis for forty years. I also get disability. Disability also pays for the pills that enable me to function from day to day and prevent me from going back to the hospital.
That is why I have a terrible life.
My terrible life is also pretty great, though. Why is that? It’s because I get to sit around watching television all day long. I get to play video games all day long. I do write because I choose to write and try to make it as a writer. Reading books is fun. Playing old video games over and over satisfies me in a way that little else can do. I can think of worse lives than playing video games, reading, and watching movies and television shows all day long. I can think of worse lives than writing about what’s wrong with life all day long. Hell, I could have died already. I’m forty-three years old, fat, and still alive.
I also have some friends. They are often busy and unavailable due to having full lives, but they make some time for me. One of them is a lawyer out in Seattle who writes wills for people. Another is an aspiring filmmaker who is writing his first feature right now. I just hung out last week — super psycho death virus and all — with a friend from high school, playing the Sons of Anarchy board game and Magic the Gathering with whatever bad decks we had on us. I also know a veteran who used to be a drill instructor for the Navy who plays strategy games and wants to win. I want to win, too — to get to the level of the top players of the game. We will see if that happens.
I also have a pretty great family. My mom is seventy-five years old but still cooks dinner every night for the family. My dad still coaches tennis and reads and gets around, watching movies and reading and driving around town. I used to live alone but struggled to take care of myself and had to move in with my parents. I want to get a job and move out of my parents’ house, but that’s not an immediate goal.
I also finished writing another novel that I worked like crazy on. This novel represents a huge amount of work at something that I love and care about. I want people to give it a chance. They won’t — it’s three dollars and not very many people will buy it.
So you see — I have a terrible and pretty great life. I have a lot of things that are terrible and a lot of wonderful ones, too. Thanks for listening.
Thanks, and take care, friends.
