-This is basically the email I wrote to my brother the next day about my experience at Bridges
I show up to Bridges, about ten minutes early. There’s a couple of scruffy looking dudes waiting in this little area outside the room. While we’re sitting there a few more scruffy looking dudes come meandering in. The room starts to take on an air of engine grease and socks, and somewhere in there I detected a distinct smell of superglue. Anyway while we’re all sitting there, saying nothing for the most part like the world’s biggest most uncomfortable elevator, we can hear through the door to where anotehr counseling session is already happening. Out of nowhere some lady in there goes “Goddamn it! I am tired of this shit! You guys are all blahbablahablabablah” She’s kind of screaming at these guys, and I’m sitting there thinking, “oh goody, I get to go in there and get screamed at by some incoherent woman, this is new.”
It quiets down in that room somewhat after that, some of the guys in my waiting area are talking, telling their hard-luck stories. One guy is in there, he’s obviously a mechanic, he’s talking about how he has to pay $40 a week for this class, he’s on probation which apparently costs $70 a month, and he has to go to some court-mandated parenting class to get custody of his kids that is costing him like $120 a month. It really seems like the system is failing this guy, well actually it’s fucking him prison-movie style. Probably the only reason he’s not starving to death is because he’s taken a second job selling meth (just guessing on that one)
So we wait. Class starts at 7:00pm, and we wait and wait. At 7:25 we hear from inside the room “Ok, we’re like 25 minutes late, let’s wrap it up.” Five minutes (Do you know how long five minutes is, when you've already been waiting twenty-five?) later that room clears out, and that group of scruffy looking dudes comes out and intermingles with my group of scruffy looking dudes. So I’m absorbing the idea that I am paying $40 a session to come here (for the next 26 weeks) and I was warned up and down not to be late for my sessions or else I would be counted as absent and possibly be reported to the courts for non-compliance, and yet, they can just ignore us for 30 minutes.
If you’re still with me, here’s the best part. We go in, and the dude who’s in charge, the one who previously judged me to be a sociopath based on a second hand opinion from some woman who’s credentials to make such a judgment are in question, is standing there looking like some sort of yuppy douchebag. We all introduce ourselves, and then he puts on a movie. That’s it, I paid forty dollars to watch an hour of some shitty movie The Waitress.
Since you probably haven’t seen it, it’s a movie about a woman who is a waitress (who saw that coming?) who is married to a total asshole. He talks down to her, makes her give him her money from work, slaps her around and is generally a bad guy all around. I am sitting there thinking, “This is how they are trying to get the point across to me?” If I was to watch that movie in any other scenario in my life, I would be like, hey no big deal, but in that room in that context, you feel like the finger is pointed at you, with somebody saying "That's you, you're the bad guy." I sat there through the entire movie thinking that I should make some asinine remark about how I thought the guy was just misunderstood, and she was the real villain, but I didn’t want to take my chances that they would take me seriously and immediately petition the judge to put me in crazy-prison.
The coup de grace here is that at the end we have “homework.” We have to take and fill out these sheets that say “What was a situation that made you angry?” I sat there the entire time thinking that I would love to fill this one out all about my situation that evening. The problem is that they have me by the collar, all the have to do is decide that I’m not cooperating with the program and they can call the judge and screw me over.
I hate my life.
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