Diary of Surrender, Week Six: War

Maybe we’re always at war and we just don’t know it.

Photo by Museums Victoria on Unsplash

I’m writing a diary about my year of giving up, although I may give up on this too. Who knows? You can read about why I’m giving up here, and the previous week of saying fuck it here. (The term “week” is used loosely).

On Wednesday I found myself sitting in the middle of Pershing Square, screaming and crying on a three-way call between a credit bureau and my father. I found myself in this predicament because the credit bureau refused to lift a freeze on my father’s account, and therefore no one could run his credit. They proclaimed that there was no way for us to verify his account over the phone, or online, and we would have to send hard copies of “documents” — they never specified what kind — to a P.O. Box in Texas. I snapped.

If you’re familiar with Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles, you know that it’s already full of mentally ill people screaming into the abyss, so no one noticed my meltdown. And you would also know that Pershing Square is a visual blight on Los Angeles, a horrible mishmash of concrete and orange concrete and purple concrete, a result of someone who decided that concrete was somehow better than grass and trees. Rumor has it that Pershing Square was once beautiful, before it was assaulted by a group of developers or city planners or whoever decided to steamroll right over it, to battle it into submission, to make it the Dresden of downtown Los Angeles. It was the perfect visual backdrop for someone completely giving up, calling uncle, waving the white flag.

You see, I’ve been taking care of my parents’ finances — and their health, their housing, their groceries, their social lives, and everything else you can think of — since June of 2020 when I found my father unable to walk because of his advanced Parkinson’s disease. When I last saw him in January 2020 he was fine, and I stayed away for the first half of 2020 because of the pandemic. But by June I was getting phone calls from emergency rooms that he kept falling in the shower. When I showed up to see what was going on, my father was pulling and pushing himself around in a desk chair because he could no longer walk. My mother had completely checked out, and so I had to mobilize.