Golem 

or, Mixed Metaphors of Dissociation, pt. 1

The trouble is, I don't feel like myself, and when that happens, I don't really know what I should do, because how can I do anything if I don't even feel like me?

I don't feel like myself. In the morning, my alarm goes off, and someone swings his legs out of bed; his feet touch the floor. He walks to my kitchen, makes coffee, drinks it. This person arrives at all of my appointments promptly. He speaks my words. He goes about all my business. But this person isn't me. He isn't thinking my thoughts. He isn't breathing my air.

This person, he feels it too—estranged. He goes on long walks, as if he's looking for something. He follows winding mountain trails, the steepest he can find, and when he finds them, he runs, hard as he can. "What are you running from?"

He's trying to stir his heart.

He runs till there's pain in his legs, his lungs, his chest; he can't get enough air. He thinks the pain is a gateway and if he can cross the threshold, then either he'll be dead or he'll be alive. Either option is preferable—so he runs.

But at the end of running, nothing has come true: he's sweaty, tired, and the same.

This person is not me. I know this because at night, when I turn off the lights and lie in bed staring into the dark, I take stock and think how it's as if the day never happened.

The ceiling fan spins round and round and round.

I think my bed is like a small sailboat in deep ocean, and there's no current and there's no wind, and I'm feeling the rocking of the waves and wondering what they're trying to tell me. Boats pass by sometimes on the horizon, and I wave at them as they go, but I don't know if they see me.

Quitting 

Every day lately, I wonder if I need to quit caffeine. Every day, I feel one cup shy of a nervous breakdown, like the tiniest overpour might overwhelm my fragments of peace of mind. I'm not even clear why: the normal pressures that make up my life—the job worries and the art angst, the money shortages, the girl troubles, the social anxieties—these are so common to me by now that it'd be wrong to call them stressors upon my life: more accurately, they are my life. 

In fact, I've come to realize: the things that I sometimes think of as "stressors" are exactly the things that I choose for myself, to keep my life from becoming mind-numbingly boring. If I really had the peaceful life that I sometimes pretend to want, then I'd almost certainly have to hang myself. Or, more accurately, I'd commit the smaller suicides that have become the recurring themes of my life's history: I'd change my city, quit my job, end my relationship, neglect my bills, drive out of town, write poems, kin with nature, and then come back—tanned and kissed by freedom, and safely now distant from the stability I, in equal parts, crave and dread.

Is life this complicated for other people?, I sometimes wonder: the consternations, perplexations, machinations, the planning and replanning, so much systematic constructing and deconstructing and destructing. Maybe it is.

[Is life this complicated for ants? Maybe it is.]

And while my pot of coffee is brewing, I realize, too: the only way that I've learned to get by in the world is not to live in it, but rather to live parallel, beside it, at arm's length, able to pluck and reach from its passing conveyer belt like it's a cafeteria, but being sure not to getting caught up in it, tangled and dragged, and certainly being sure to avoid stepping on.

Peanut Butter and Fizzy Water 

More thoughts on the Apocalypse

The weird, sad fact is, I want nothing more than I want the Apocalypse. The end of all things means the end of obligations, failures, and future disappointments. No further payments will be remitted. I won't need to match my socks, and I can eat peanut butter and chocolate for as many consecutive meals as I want.

After people, there's no one left to dislike you.

I can see now that I've been gradually transforming my apartment into an austere bomb shelter (with thin walls and lots of windows, useless against actual bombs): a stockpile of canned beans, fizzy water, wine, and still-unread books just waiting till I have some free time. And what is the Apocalypse, if not a sudden excess of free time? "Finally, some peace and quiet!"

It's only now it occurs to me that I've been making a few probably-erronious assumptions:

1. That I will continue to exist after the Apocalypse (thereby to enjoy my stockpile of beans, books, and time); and
2. My obligations will not. I've been assuming that the Horsemen of the Apocalypse will round up the creditors first and the debtors later

—but since the extant literature gives us plenty of reason to believe the Apocalypse is more bad than good, I suppose it's better to assume that when the end comes, there won't be a whole lot of free reading time (nor light in which to do it); and now it seems completely possible that the bills will continue to arrive in the mail long after the sun has flared out. Death and taxes, they say, and student loans, too.

So, this revelation: the Apocalypse won't be the spa vacation I'd imagined.

Private Conversation 

I think I need to go shopping but I don't need to go shopping.

There's a part of my brain that says, "You're out of cereal! You need to get breakfast cereal."

It's true that I did finish a bag of cereal this morning. (My cereal comes in bags. Don't get hung up on this.) But there's also still other cereal in there—a different kind, but plenty to get me through tomorrow, and probably the next day, too. So my brain needs to chill the fuck out.

"You need to chill the fuck out," I tell my brain.

My brain says, "You were going to buy white pepper today and you didn't. You need white pepper!"

"Nobody needs white pepper."

Earlier today there was a part of my brain that said I needed garden soil, so I stopped what I was doing, drove to Home Depot, and I bought six cubic yards of garden soil. While I stood in line, my brain chirped, "Perlite!", so I bought a bag of perlite.

I spend more time and money buying dirt than I ever imagined I would.

When I got back home, my brain said, "You need a hoe."

Another part of my brain is fixated on a smell in my apartment. "Does it smell like garbage in here?" Maybe it does smell a little like garbage. I can't tell. "You should take the trash out!", this part of my brain screams. But the trash bag is empty, and anyway, I'm not really sure it even smells. "Let's say it does smell a tiny bit like garbage—and I'm not saying it does—but if it does, that's not the worst thing in the world."

"Oh yeah? What is the worst thing in the world?"

I consider this for a moment, then realize it's even more distracting than taking out the trash.

"That woman is coming over!" I'm not sure which part of my brain screams this at me—quite possibly more than one of them. "You should straighten up!" "You should make the bed!" "You should floss!" "You should definitely take out the garbage!"

"I should floss?"

"Well, the ones you want to keep..." my brain mumbles back, a sheepish aphorism.

There's another part of my brain, thinks it would be a good idea to go for a walk. "You know, work off some of that tension."

"What tension?" I ask. But we all know the answer to that question: my brain and its screaming is beginning to stress me out. Maybe I will go for a walk. While I'm out, I can even pick up some breakfast cereal. Maybe some dirt.

The Man in My Eyes 

When I close my eyes, there's a man talking to me. He's little, and if he's making sound, I can't hear it, but he sits on the inside of my eyelid, well-dressed, behind a desk, like a newscaster on a tiny television, reporting sternly and firmly on the passing of pressing events.

I don't know what he's saying but I know it's important.

He's not there every time I close my eyes—only intermittently, usually at the ends of long days. Sometimes he's changed his tie or he's wearing a different colored shirt. Even in a pink shirt he looks composed and urgent.

He's very small, and it's hard to make out the movement of his lips, but one word I think I can make out, because he uses it so often: "Help."

Lately, he's been cutting to other correspondents with greater and greater frequency. They're always on the scene of a terrible disaster—plane crash or hurricane or the death of an innocent child. When the correspondent finishes, they cut back to the original little man, but he always takes a moment of solemn stillness before his lips begin to move again, silent reading of an unknown almanac.

"Help," the little man is saying inside my eyes, and then maybe, after that (it's hard to tell) "yourself."

My Movie Pitch 

"Here's my movie pitch. Wanna hear it?

"There's this guy—this young, bright, hopeful guy. Like Orlando Bloom coulda played him a couple years ago, before he got old. But not Shia LaBeouf. Smarter than Shia LaBeouf.

"This guy, he gets outta college, he gets a job, everything's going pretty good, and then ... he starts feeling like he's losing himself, you know? Losing track of his dreams. So he says, "Fuck you, job! I quit! I'm gonna chase my dreams!"

"But it's too late, see? Because he's already forgotten them. So he just stumbles around all the time, trying to remember what he wanted.

"It's sort of Reality Bites meets Memento meets The Road."

Urban Renewal 

These last couple weeks I've been in such disrepair: it's actually seemed like my brain shut down its thinking and feeling processes, to protect me from myself. (The clinical term for this is "neurosis.") So I guess I've been really pretty seriously unhappy, though I can't think, this time around, that it was actually cued by anything. (The clinical term for this is "depression.") And from this numb unhappy place, I'd occasionally retreat into half-articulated fantasies of escape—moving to Canada to take up organic farming, etc.—fantasies I haven't entirely put out of my mind. (The clinical term for this is "psychosis.")

I feel like I'm finally switching back on, powering up, slowly coming back to life.

(I've learned that I can gauge my psychic energy by how many camera-phone photos I take while walking: when I snap pictures, it's a sign that I'm taking interest in the world; and when I stop taking them, then it's a symptom I've disengaged. The last one I took was a month ago...)

Tonight I wandered through the Manhattan streets, wandered aiming to get lost—such a simple joy, to get lost and to get filled with a renewed sense of wonder, to see some of the things I've been missing, to feel the air in my lungs, to feel the light on my eyes, to feel my heartbeat and the heartbeat of the world around me—to feel renewed, to feel wonder.

The city is endless and wonderful, and though sometimes it feels as though it steals everything from us, other days it seems to give everything back, and more.

In absence of my reflection 

In absence of my reflection,
I remember myself incorrectly.

This is where I am  

This is where I am: walking across the bridge, beside the trains and above the trash barges, five hundred yards from either side, away, away from everyone and their noise, till everything is just a disappearing din, most of all, myself.1

---

1. (The old pond,
A frog jumps in:
Plop!

A Look in the Mirror, Pt. 2 

or, A Girl Needs a Gun These Days on Account of All the Rattlesnakes

I don't think I'm one of those people who doesn't know himself. But sometimes I catch myself doing things that would be perfectly reasonable to do—if I were someone else. If only.

But, as me, they're ridiculous.

Like the other night, I did two loads of laundry at the laundromat, and paid $4.50 in quarters. I waited two hours and I read a magazine and two short stories.

I have a washer and dryer at home.

Weird, right? Not for other people, people of different circumstance. For them, a trip to the laundromat would be perfectly reasonable. The right thing to do. But for me: weird choice.

Or like kissing that girl, tonight.

Sometimes I wonder if I'd even recognize myself, if I walked by me on the street. I figure I probably would; I just wouldn't like myself very much.

Why I Blog 

The metaphors are all too hyperbolic, but the one that gets his attention: "It's like I was born without skin." It strikes me as trite, but it gets through to him, which was the intended effect. So I elaborate: "Sometimes I try to hold the elevator door for someone and they don't make it; the door closes. And it upsets me for the rest of the day." Really. "I consider going back for them."

Another: "The woman at the bus stop. I think of giving her my umbrella. There's a torrent of rain. She needs the umbrella at least as much as I do."

Another: "Sometimes I see a couple at a restaurant, silently reading different sections of the same paper. And I cry. I actually cry, right there at brunch."

"How does that make you feel?," he asks, like a robot.

It makes me feel like an abandoned alien waiting for the mothership.
It makes me feel like a candidate for shock therapy.
It makes me feel like I was born without skin.

"It's upsetting," I tell him.

There are people I know who say they love me and at some level I don't doubt it; but they won't ask me how I feel, because the answer—How I Feel—it's a Hudson River, a mile wide and five hundred feet deep and meandering and unstoppable; it's canyon-carving; it's tidal; and they don't want to know. They want to read about it now and then, the highlights; but they don't want to know.

That's why I blog.

Passive Aggressive 

My therapist suggests I might be passive-aggressive, so I cancel my next appointment though I don't tell him why...

Slow Leak from Parade Balloon 

On Thanksgiving (and most other days too), I'm aware and grateful that I am both lovable and loved—and that these things are, it turns out, no cure for the human condition...

On the Farm 

I had a really vivid dream that we were on the farm. Everything was cold and crisp and quiet and kind and beautiful. We were walking through the woods, and came to a field with a herd of deer, and we stood there, really quietly, till eventually, they ignored us and wandered around us and surrounded us. There were so many of them that we were scared, if they panicked, they might actually trample us, but it was worth it, just to be surrounded by all those deer. It was that same sort of feeling as walking out onto a frozen pond, and hearing the ice beneath you creak: you're pretty sure you're safe, but you're not totally sure. We stood there quietly, without speaking, just shivering, as the deer brushed by, grazing on the grass.

(Sometimes I wish I remembered my dreams a little less well, or that my real life was as interesting to me as my dream life...)

Hope Springs External 

I saw today a psychiatrist—the second in three months and third in six months. "It's so hard to find a good dentist in this town!," and apparently not just a dentist. Because I'm crazy, I suppose. The first psychiatrist more or less said that he saw no course of treatment for me that did not involve medication. "I'm not a drug pusher," he said, "but." Since I never wanted to be on medication, I went to a second psychiatrist, who asked me, "Have you considered medication?," and I replied that yes, I've considered it, but I wasn't especially interested, thanks anyway. At which point she shrugged her shoulders and then almost immediately retired from her practice—maybe because I am crazy or maybe because she is or maybe for neither of those reasons. I met the third psychiatrist today, and this one told me that he's "not a drug pusher," of course not, no way, don't mind his Celexa stationary; he's actually happy to sit and talk and analyze and muse on dreams and ruminate on childhood and try and help me glean whatever insights we can from these things; but. But, it's quite likely that—since I've already been doing all of these things for years—it's quite likely that we will find no course of treatment for me that does not involve medication; and if I really want to change—if—then it's entirely possible that the change is not within the grasp of my (mere) wits and will; and though I resent this idea—that I can't help myself—and though I'm terrified of this idea, I also, well, ... There was an incident last night involving me and a little beige pill. There was this incident, and then I picked up a book of short stories, and read it, and felt more inspired by words, and by living, than I've felt in a long time. It's not a clinical effect of the beige pill, I know, of course— the little beige pill didn't make me larger or small or happy or new or changed in any measurable way; but inside the little beige pill is a new possible future. Isn't it? In regular, timed-release doses....

Hope springs external.

Retroactive Consolation 

"Don't worry. Yesterday will be better."

You Say Tomato, I Say Euthanasia 

In my dream, I walked into the drug store seeking Chloraseptic^®, the noxious-tasting throat spray that temporarily numbs your mouth, making it possible to swallow when strep throat or other illness makes swallowing otherwise too painful.

The problem was, in my dream, I couldn't remember that it was called Chloraseptic, so instead, I kept asking the pharmacist for "Euthanasia."

"Excuse me—where do you keep the Euthanasia?"

One after the other, each drug store turned me away: "We don't sell that here!"

Lucky for me, New York City has a Duane Reade on every corner. Finally, a chemist of dubious ethics heard my request, invited me in hushed tones into his office, and sold me a bottle of Euthanasia^®.

(Coincidentally, it came in a clear plastic spray bottle full of cherry-red liquid, with instructions to "spray liberally 2-3 times in to the back of the throat.")

I thanked him, took it home, struggled with the plastic child-proof (and always somewhat adult-proof) safety seal, and sprayed into my mouth—five or six times, because who ever follows the instructions on their medication?

The pain did leave my throat, as I'd hoped, but it was only as the edges blurred at the outside of my vision that I realized my mistake: "Oh! I meant to ask for Chloraseptic!"

And then I fell into a deep dreamless sleep (which was, really, all I'd wanted...)

The Far End of the Curve 

Ode to the Infinite Jester

"Successful, obscenely well-educated, and sort of adrift." - David Foster Wallace, describing himself and his readers

Why do we continue to feel shock and disappointment when our heroes choose to end their own lives? Why do we respond every time as if this trope were impossible to imagine? How many times will we be surprised by these repeated acts, and what is it that keeps us from understanding them as commonplace? Suicide: quite ordinary. But strange every time.

We're so quickly numbed by school shootings and genocides—the nightly news and its mundane varieties of death bore us—everything bores us—but give us David Foster Wallace, hanging from a rope, and we're thrown agape as if it hadn't always been a foregone conclusion.

[How does such a thing as a suicide gene continue in a species? How is it possible that Darwinism—"survival of the fittest—could favor members of the species who have such low regard for their own life? Because these same people invigorate us, even while they destroy themselves.]

To see and feel things so keenly.... To live and think so freakishly far at the end of the bell curve, till you are lauded for the thing that alienates you. The bell curve, an island where the mob gathers at the safety of altitude, watching while you spelunk the slippery shore. The mob won't immolate you, though you frighten them; you immolate yourself, burn up on your own fuel, and the mob uses you to warm its fingers.

Flotsam 

Yesterday without much planning I got on a train headed north and wound up at the point where Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey meet: there's a river and depending on which way you cross it, you wind up in one state, two states, three.

Now I'm somewhere else.

There's a farmhouse. There's a white farmhouse with peeling paint and a patio that wraps around. There's a farmhouse with two dozen twin beds, a French bathtub, two toilets that shouldn't be flushed ("If it's yellow, let it mellow"...), a garden full of dill and wildflowers, and bats living inside the walls. This farmhouse is half full of people I know (or knew, once upon a time) and half full of strangers, who help alleviate the feeling of distance between me and my old friends.

In the next room, a woman is cutting cabbage. In the next room, some people are laughing. In the next room, a baby is crying. In the next room, a woman is also writing, like me, writing something about this house, about the people in it, about who she is and who she isn't and wondering where she belongs.

"Dear diary," maybe she writes. Or, "I'm having an amazing weekend," maybe she writes. Or maybe she writes, "There is no loneliness like being with the ones you love, and still feeling lost..."

These journals are the father confessors we never had (but fall short of granting absolution).

My bag is packed. I don't know when, but soon, somehow, I'll find my way back south—maybe with my new friends or maybe with my old ones, or maybe alone. The miles that ticked off on the train yesterday (the unfurling of railroad ties, like a ruler measuring my life: how far I've come—or not...)—those miles today must untick. The tide that carried me out here, to this town I can't even name, will turn, and carry me back, too. Will carry me somewhere. And there, I will wonder all these same things.

The difference between flotsam and jetsam: only one ever finds its way ashore.

Awash in a Sea of Nothing 

If you drink enough, you stop feeling your skin, and that's a good thing: it is the falling away of the last boundary between the world and your own permeability. Without skin, you're free to melt and meld with the world; your identity is unexpectedly diluted—you're unsure where you end and where the world begins. And that's a good thing. In that moment, through your blurry eyes and stupid tongue, colors are crisper, music is truer, intentions are clearer, and for a moment, if only for a moment, maybe you feel your heart. Maybe you are alive—if only temporarily, and only on account of this gentle poisoning—you are alive. Alive and awash in a sea of nothing.

That's a good thing.

Kurt Cobain's Stomach 

If rock'n'roll is a menace to society, then maybe it's because we're all so ill-equipped to pick our own role models. We somehow spend our formative years idolizing long-haired, philandering men in ripped Spandex who have no greater skill than the ability to keep 4/4 time while drunk.1

How does this happen?

When Kurt Cobain died, they called him the spokesperson for my generation, without considering that this spokesperson was best known for lines like "Load up on guns " and "I have never failed to fail." I'm not sure that this is what one should seek in a spokesperson.2

What is the long-term lingering effect of a whole generation that admires and aspires to be a sickly, whiny, hyper-sensitive, drug-addled suicide?

I wonder this because lately I seem to have inherited Kurt Cobain's stomach—his famous stomach, the one which caused him so much hard-to-diagnose pain that he turned to heroin (or so the story goes)—and I'm proud of it as though it were a stigmata.

---

1. Which is not entirely unimpressive.

2. I took a makeup class once. (If you've ever wondered what exactly people do in acting school, this is one such thing.) After a few rudimentary lessons ("This is a pancake…"), we were each asked to clip a photo of a celebrity from a magazine, and then, using our makeup kit and whatever we could find in the nearby costume shop, make ourselves look like that celebrity. Become the celebrity. Be the celebrity. (If you've ever wondered what exactly people do in acting school, this is one such thing.) Most of the class walked in that day with photos of rock stars, and I had that famous Rolling Stone cover of Kurt Cobain.

 

Kurt Cobain Action Figure

These Are My Hands 

There's a fire in my kitchen. This is a thing that happens sometimes. There are several pots on several burners and something somewhere has overflowed, and instead of simply making a mess, it has made a fire.

I might put out the fire with a towel, but I can't find one, and instead I try to dampen the flames with my bare hands, by pressing them against the hot metal burners. This is an ill-advised solution to the problem. In my own defense, I never decided to put out the fire with my hands. It just sort of happened.

Kind of like that unplanned phone call I just made. Sometimes it's like someone else grabs the steering wheel and drives into oncoming traffic. "I swear, officer—it wasn't me."

My hands have a mind of their own. My hands have Tourette's. My hands are always having an out-of-body experience, doing things I neither plan nor condone. One of these days, I'm sure, my hands will up and slap you. They'll sit down at a keyboard and plunk out a Tom Clancey novel. They'll goose someone on the subway. They'll drive the car off the road.

"I swear, officer—it wasn't me."

What scares me most is that I don't know whether or not that's true. It kind of was me. I don't know which is more me—the hands when I control them, or the hands when they control me. Which is more me—the one putting out the fires, or the one starting them?

Chutes and Ladders 

PATIENT:      I just hope to God that death is the fucking end. I feel like I'm 80 years old. I'm tired of life and my mind wants to die.
DOCTOR:      That's a metaphor, not reality.
PATIENT:      It's a simile.
- Excerpt from Psychosis 4:48 by Sarah Kane

"Sometimes," he begins, "it's like I'm trying to build a ladder while I'm climbing on it. I have two long poles and a lot of short ones, for the rungs, and I have a hammer; and the first thing I have to do is hold these two poles upright, hold them parallel, and then join them together with the first rung. This is a very difficult job to accomplish by one's self—holding up the two poles, then situating the rung and hammering it into place. This is very hard. The poles keep slipping out of place. Assembling it takes strength, coordination and luck.

"I have none of these things.

"It would be an simple job if I had a lot of space, if I could lay the poles on the ground, if I weren't so crowded, if I could put it all together without having to fight against gravity, against physics. It would be an simple job if I had a friend or two to lend a hand.

"But I have none of these things.

"Once the first rung is in place, the two long poles are much easier to handle. The second rung will be hard but not as hard. Each new rung will make the ladder stronger but also put the tools, the hammer and pegs, more and more out of reach. Building a ladder while standing on it isn't easy. But the second rung is sure to be easier to affix than the first; and the third easier than the second; and each one easier after that.

"I know I could climb out of this, if only I could figure out that first rung."

Reaching the Pegbox 

The thing is: you are not the primary agent of your life.

You think you are. After all, it's you who decides when to set the alarm, whether to add cream and sugar to your coffee, whether to take the scenic route to work.

But now and then, something happens. You stumble. The world that seemed so clear suddenly wavers in front of your eyes: a veil lifts, and you get a glimpse that things are in fact quite different than you like to assume. Your petty acts of will exert very little influence on the course of your life.

Maybe you had a near-car-accident and tasted your own mortality. Maybe your wife left you. Or maybe your sudden belief crisis was cued by something more subtle or invisible: maybe it was a song on the radio. Maybe you looked up at a flock of migratory birds, wondered where they were going, and suddenly lost faith in everything.

One thing is for sure: you are not the primary agent of your life. Other, stronger forces are at work. Some of them have names—gravity, economics, love. Some you can never and will never know. What you do know is that suddenly, everything that seemed so good is now spiraling out of control. You don't know what's what, what's important, what to believe. "If nothing holds fast," you ask yourself, "then what has value?"

You have discovered, quite organically, metaphysics.

You get the sense that your life is a tightly-strung violin, and your every act is intended to bring it into tune. But you can't reach the pegbox, and all you have at your disposal are the tiny screws on the tailpiece that allow you to make fine adjustments. Not very much control at all.

* * *

Ten years ago, I spent a week walking through the desert, thinking that I was dead—not that I was going to die (though that too was a distinct possibility), but that I already had. I became more and more convinced that I'd passed from this world, and wasn't even sure exactly when I'd crossed from one state into the other.

Death Valley is weird like that.

My brief walkabout into psychosis wasn't totally unplanned: after all, who goes into the desert except for some sort of spiritual revelation? Being dead explained many things, not least of all why, after so much effort spent, I still felt I had so little influence on the world around me:

Spirit can't touch body.

Eventually, I came back to the conclusion that I was alive—which meant there were whole other, still misunderstood reasons for my inability to affect change.

* * *

The Buddhists say that much of what we think of as reality is, in fact, illusion, and our confusing the one for the other causes us great suffering. They say that one can find happiness, but only when one stops wanting it, or wanting anything. The cessation of craving is the cessation of self: you must admit that you are not the primary agent of your life.

The cessation of craving, the cessation of self, is a kind of death.

To help remind themselves of this, they chant mantras, over and over, in Sanskrit.

Some say that God speaks Sanskrit, and that a chant spoken in Sanskrit offers truth in itself, without translation: one is already speaking the sound of truth, directly. But truth can't, won't, come in words (words being tied to particulars, to things, so the diametric opposite of omni-anything); truth, when it speaks, must speak in larger rhythms, in dialectics, in waves; and if one wishes somehow to speak truth, then one can't do it through understanding, but only un-understanding; through tearing down what we think we know; and through the mindful repetition of ... anything—a chant, perhaps, or the gravelly sound of footfalls in the desert, or the long drone of a single note from a violin. Focus on a single note, only, in relation to nothing but itself, and that note will never be out of tune. And you will disappear completely.

The Shortest Days 

"You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see. You hang around cafés."
- The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

Two months ago, in a seizure of optimism and despair, I quit my job. I felt guilty about it, because I loved my job; but I didn't feel that guilty: I recalled very clearly a conversation with my boss a year earlier: "I like to hire people who are interesting," he said, "and that means it's inevitable that at some point they move on."

According to one particular interpretation of this, then, in order to be interesting, I had no choice but to quit. ¹

I want to be interesting; ∴ I quit. ²

I went to Europe; I drank quite a bit; I became obsessed with sex; I've spent all my time talking, not working. I've hung around cafés.

I'm not sure, so far, that it's made me more interesting.

* * *

The cost of sleeping till 11am, or dallying around the house, is greater on these shortest days of the year: one begins craving lunch around sunset. Days of this go by, weeks—short days of doing nothing. I need more sleep now than any other time I can remember, and I wonder, am I recovering from some great fatigue? Am I exhausted from some otherwise-hard-to-see growth spurt (internal, emotional), sleeping off the exhaustion of a sea-change? Am I sick, depressed? Or just profoundly lazy?

Just wondering about these things costs me another hour, and the sun is already low in the sky.

* * *

An expatriate, of course, is someone who lives in a foreign country; but in its original usage, it implied an outcast, a person driven from their native land. The term is muddied in our present day, when nation-state boundaries are easy to cross, but community and kinship are elusive: what is the word for someone who fails ever to find compatriots, or a place called home? How does such a person not "lose touch with the soil"?

It is important to remember on these short dark, days: the sun also rises...

1. Was it not an option, I wonder now in retrospect, for him to make the workplace more interesting instead? I honestly think it probably wasn't an option, and insofar as it was one, he would have tried to do so, and did try.

2. I often wish the therefore sign were as easy to reach on my computer keyboard as the exclamation point (which I use less often).

Unusual Cognition 

or, Voices in the Noise

I read a scientific study on the Internet that claimed "Hearing 'Messages' Embedded In Noise Could Be An Early Sign Of Schizophrenia." And it's the Internet so it must be true. So I've been listening to a lot of static lately, you know, just to be sure. To see if I hear voices. I don't think I do, but it's hard to be sure...

I've also been listening to this singer named Pete Galub, who played some sort of atonal alt-country rock opera at Magnetic Fields the other night. I don't really know what those scientists meant when they said "noise": one man's noise is another man's symphony. Some of Pete Galub's stuff was pretty noisy. And I definitely heard voices. But I loved it: if this is schizophrenia, it's not so bad.

The words people hear inside the noise, which indicate that they're crazy, are "increase," "children," "A-OK," and "Republican." These are words I hear pretty often (except maybe "A-OK").

I read another scientific study on the Internet that claimed schizophrenics get all kinds of tail. And it's the Internet so it must be true. People find schizophrenics sexy on account of their "unusual cognition." They find them sexy and this leads to an "increase" in "children," "A-OK"?

I can only speculate why schizophrenics hear the word "Republican" in the noise.

But I did read something on the Internet about this today, which claimed George Bush is a psychotic who should be put in a straightjacket. (In order to commit someone to a mental institution against their will, you have to prove they are a danger to themselves or others...) It was on the Internet, so I guess that means it's true. But then, the Internet is just another kind of noise, and these are just the voices I'm hearing...

Caution Curves 

There must be a word for that sudden, inexplicable urge to drive your car into a telephone pole. You know the urge I mean. (I hope it's not just me...): you're driving on a perfectly safe stretch of road, having a completely unremarkable, maybe even happy day—till a little devil on your shoulder tells you to flick the wheel hard to the left, into oncoming traffic, a telephone pole or off a cliff.

You don't do it, of course. There's a half-second pause between the thought popping into your head, and your acting on that impulse—and that's enough time for you to realize it'd be a really stupid idea. It's enough time to stop yourself.

Usually.

Hopefully.

Even if you do manage to stop yourself (and if you're reading this, I assume that you've always managed to stop yourself), still there's a subsequent adrenaline rush, when you realize how thin the line is between an idea and an action; between thinking of driving off the cliff, and driving off the cliff; between a blissful, unremarkable day on a country road, and a life-altering collision of your own making.

* * *

Mothers, lock up your daughters, and drivers, lock up your cars: the devil on my shoulder is loud and insistent, and lately, in many aspects of my life, I'm pulling the wheel hard to the left. I'm making irrevocable and maybe irrational decisions.

Why? I'm not sure I could say. The road was too straight, too smooth. It was too easy to see where it was going. It wasn't going anywhere.

Or, ...

The devil made me do it.

* * *

There's another, similar siren call I've always found hard to resist—the call of mountain roads. Too many nights I've hurtled a car recklessly up and down the hairpins of Mulholland Drive, defying gravity to pull me off. I'd drive so hard it'd make me sweat, knowing anything—a bump in the road, gravel, a deer, (a pedestrian) could be the difference between living and dying.

What I've never been able to explain: it's not a death wish that drives me to be so reckless. It is absolutely not a wish to die.

It's a wish to live. A wish to be alive and to feel it.

There must be a word for that.

Coathanger Lobotomy 

I'd pay a couple dollars for a homemade lobotomy if I just knew "a guy". Instead I try the same with a whiskey bottle (it costs more) and contemplate getting another tattoo, an effect which, if not therapeutic, will at least last longer than the whiskey.

I'd pay up to $20 for anyone who could rig me up to an electrical outlet for homemade electroshock, but you'd have to promise it wouldn't leave telltale scars on my temples.

A mentor writes me recently, "I remember your Buddha-bliss-extended smile, the blue eyes, the great gaze and the brilliant mind, which, I am sure, has only become more infinite with time."

If I wanted to flatter myself, I suppose, yes, I could chalk up everything going on in my head to the "infinitude" of my "brilliant" mind. Sure. Whatever.

In practice, I have neither the math nor the religion for such thinking. Grab me a coathanger.

Perchance To 

or, the Ids of March (part three)

Have I told you about the dreams?

Probably I haven't.¹ Or I'll mention one every now and then because it's quirky or interesting or entertaining; I'll make passing reference to that "action-adventure dream" or the "dream where I had no arms," and you'll say, "Wow! That's intense!"

You have no idea.

That's the warm-up act. That's the sneak preview.

Between midnight and 8am, it's a grindhouse, a grotesque opera, a ballet of the deformed. My id gallops whole herds of nightmares roughshod through my head. Just this week, I drowned in a riptide, commanded an army of elephants into battle, put holes in my throat with a Swiss Army knife awl, rode a Third World bus knowing it carried a bomb set to explode, and the finale, last night, when I was held captive, locked in a closet with two other men by a mime who sometimes got in a mood to reach his black-gloved hand through a hole in the closet door, and slash at us with his butcher knife, while we crawled over one another trying to hide from the invisible blows. Yes, a mime.

If you think I look tired when I come to work in the morning, well, I am. At the water cooler: "What did you do last night?" I've been drowned, war-ravaged, blown to bits, cut up, and exhausted with fear. How about you?

Shelley: "A dream has the power to poison sleep."

Last week, I slit my throat for no reason at all, almost on a whim, almost by accident. I used a serrated knife, and it hurt more than I expected. But rather than die, I became invisible to others, and with no throat, I couldn't speak—so I was speechless, bloodless, unseen, and alone for the rest of my days.

The week before, I dreamt up a sexy psychiatrist. (I never said my dreams were subtle or hard to read...) She told me wanted to press me into a book like a butterfly, for her collection. To "save" me.

"Dreaming," said sleep expert William C. Dement, "permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives." Well, it's not on account of my waking hours that I claim to be the craziest person you know.

I've told you that I miss you, that I miss falling asleep next to you, I miss seeing you when I wake. What I haven't told you till now is that when you're with me, I don't dream. Not one bit.

1. I have told you about the dreams—here, here, and every March 15th...

---

A Definition of Irony 

MP3 audio track

There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet.
— Samuel Beckett

The Irish, claimed Freud, are "one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is no use whatsoever"—a quote that usually comes to my mind after a few shots of Jameson's, when I get that hard-to-suppress urge to punch something. Usually, I have the (relative) good sense to pick an inanimate target, at least, so that the only person I hurt is myself (which I think is why people go into psychoanalysis in the first place...).

I'd like to posit a theory, based on the evidence provided by two of Ireland's more famous—Sam Beckett and James Joyce. Clearly the Irish have a refined sense of irony. ("Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world.") And for an ironic, there's no higher station than that of a sad clown. The Irish are impervious to happiness because anyone with a heightened sense of irony is in love with his own sadness. Ever the aesthete, he will go out of his way to sabotage his own life, because only then can he fully savor its irony...

Solipsist in a Hall of Mirrors 

My Saturday starts in a stunned stupor. I'm so unsettled by the relentless week I've had that my first thought upon waking: "Where am I?" Layers of fatigue and frustration have turned into actual aches and pains, and also the feeling that I've misplaced ... something.

I wake stunned and stupefied and can't quite start my day. It's 7am when I get out of bed but 1pm by the time I manage to leave the apartment.

Where does the time go?

* * *

The thing I've misplaced is knowing what I want—that pocket-sized stone around which to wrap my hand in moments of flagging faith, to verify, There it is!, yes, still there, solid, in my palm. That tangible rock-solid something I believe. That gemstone. That old thing.

I've misplaced it.

* * *

Dissociation, they call it. An almost out-of-body experience. Feelings dis-associated from cause, detached from object or subject, rattling around inside my head, going nowhere. They are the ghosts of feelings, not even feelings themselves. They're too numinous to dispel and too wispy to believe. I'm a solipsist in a hall of mirrors.

* * *

"Try to remember what it felt like," he said, "before you learned to dissociate"—and I laughed out loud at the impossibility of it, and the irony, as if: "Doctor, I've lost my keys.", and he asks, Where were you when you lost them?

* * *

I think of an old friend who sometimes reads this blog, who once said of it, "It's impressive—all those words. How do you write so many?" As if the goal were volume, as if I were paid by word count. Whereas the real trick, as I see it, is how not to write every last mangled, tangled thought that pops into my head (as I'm doing now): how do I write so few?

"How are you?," asks another friend, but I can't answer, now or ever, because beneath that question is another hidden one, a riddle that leaves me stunned and stupefied:

"What do you want?"

Everywhere You Go, There You Aren't 

You wake up before the alarm and you're completely disoriented: the way the light comes through the window makes you think you're in that apartment you had in Santa Monica, all those years ago. When you come to, you head to a coffee shop down the street, which reminds you of one you visited a few times in Berkeley. Later that morning, you stroll through a park, a copse of trees that looks a lot like a section of Valley Forge, near where you grew up, and that bend in the stream reminds you of another spot, in Westchester County. That afternoon, you're riding in a friend's car, suffering deja vu from a road trip somewhere in Arkansas, and you pull into a parking lot that strikes you as looking oddly like one you visited in Phoenix. Your destination, a grocery store, is laid out exactly like the one you used in Ithaca, New York. Finally, you get your bearings in Harvard Square, a place that looks, thankfully, like Harvard Square, but as you look around, you're nostalgic for another time, ten years ago, when you and some good friends spent a summer here. You duck into a movie theatre—escapism from all of the escapism you've been feeling—and once the lights go down, thankfully, you could be anywhere. You could be nowhere. By the time the movie is over, you sincerely have no idea where you are...

Disimportant 

or, Insomnia pt. 2

The air conditioner can't cut through the damp heat of the apartment. I'm propped on a make-shift wrought iron patio watching the fat moon sit on the horizon, and the cars as they pass below, ambulances and motorcycles, people going every which way.

There are dirty dishes in the sink left from this morning. I found an embryo, I think, in the egg I broke—a small brown ball I couldn't pull off the yolk. I skipped breakfast but haven't washed the bowl.

Earlier, on the walk home, I shook hands with a homeless man, and now I'm wondering if I washed the hand. I put my fingers in my mouth more than I realize. After I told him I had no money, I felt bad for lying and gave him a subway token. He had an unfortunate asymmetrical face.

I pour from one of the amber bottles on top of the fridge into a glass of ice and watch it while the ice melts, but I realize without sipping that I don't want it.

Surely days should add up to more than this.

How many boxes, I try to guess, will it take to hold all my things? How many trips up and down the stairs? And where, in the end, will all those boxes wind up?

As I'm doing push-ups, I watch my arms shake: they're thrashing around but still, if I blur my eyes just right, I can't really even tell that they're mine.

You can't wash your hands too often.

Why don't I get tired?

With the book I'm reading I keep a pen and paper handy so I can jot down everything that feels significant. I'm copying every other line. Out of context, it's all a jumble.

I put a single song on a loop and it plays over and over and over and over.

The hours stitch together one after another and add up to something disimportant. Or maybe that was yesterday. Sometimes they're hard to tell apart.

"There's no poetry," she said, "to your living in Boston." Whose fault is that?, I ask myself, making funny faces at the mirror. Anyway, cadence, I think, is more important than meaning. And less arbitrary.

---

Breakdown / Metaphors 

"It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive."
- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

"My brain is on fire" is a metaphor.
"My brain has been on fire for a week."
"My brain is a house of cards."

"I am Jenga tiles."
"I am pick-up sticks."
These are metaphors.

"I am a raw nerve, a cracked tooth."
"I am fractured."
"I am a man without skin."

"A sacked castle."
"Wilting."
"Flotsam."

"Meltdown" is a metaphor.
"Collapse" is, too (though also somewhat literal).

Even "breakdown" is a metaphor:
I am not an engine.
I am stalled. (Metaphorically.)

All words, really, are metaphors—approximations of feelings and ideas which can never—will never? should never?—be expressed: an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction.

Everything: just a figure of speech.

(Not) Nova Scotia 

The third time I wake up it's just before 6am: I've weathered another stormy insomniac night. The sun will be coming up soon, or would be, if it weren't pouring rain outside. Again.

I decide to go to Nova Scotia.

When I lived in New York and got these moods, it was Montauk—an impulsive exodus popularized by Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind. Now that I'm farther from home, I need to branch out, and a frigid peninsula off the Atlantic coast seems as good a place as any.

I'm supposed to be at work in three hours but the idea of going to work today, or ever again, is inconceivable. On the other hand, the idea of getting on a train with a big wad of cash and no return ticket—very conceivable.

How long can I be gone, I wonder, before they have no choice but to fire me?

How long can I be gone, I wonder, before anyone even notices?

Did you know that the word "ravel" and the word "unravel" mean exactly the same thing?

* * *

Most people reading this blog know me, or think they do. Maybe you do. Or maybe you don't really know me till you've seen me with a belly full of Klonopin and red wine, fleeing for some faraway land.

The first time I left California I hadn't managed to get the Pacific Ocean sand out of my shoes before I was dipping my toes in the Atlantic. It took me three days to move from one coast to the other, and into a new identity. Before then I'd fled Philadelphia, and before that London, a tenure that was over before it started. I leave. It's what I do. Why should today be any different?

Why should all the work I've done toward becoming stable and reliable be worth anything, when it's pitted against my nature?

There's something about a train that's magic.

* * *

The train, it turns out, doesn't go to Nova Scotia. Instead I buy an arbitrary ticket to Amherst. It seems tawdry by comparison (i.e., they use American dollars there), but I have some nostalgia for the place, and anyway, the destination isn't the point. Escape is the point.

I forgot the train station is a little ways outside of town; after a short walk I settle in at a cafe on the main street and finally wonder what the fuck I'm doing in Amherst. It's a really good coffee, by the way, but still maybe not worth the trip. The trip is about something else, and I still haven't figured out what.

Even transience eventually becomes inertia.

I write a few old-fashioned letters from the cafe and drop them in a mailbox by the old movie theatre, and then hop a train back to Boston.

I should have gone to Canada.

Oh well. There's always the next breakdown...

Insomnia 

The sky is a lush curtain of purple and the house I'm in is washed out of any other color—that one hue only, and the rest is silver gelatin. And hints of pink in the clouds, from a sun that has long ago set but still stubbornly throws light from below the horizon. The night is long but I'm more awake than I've been in months, years, maybe ever; and the air is so clear it carries every last smell to my nose and I breathe it in. First among them is the sweet sweat of my lover. Her cheeks are flushed and she's breathing short breaths. I have a hand firmly on her waist and the other has a grip on the back of her head, and from there, her two centers of gravity, head and womb, I hold her sway, and seize into her with a hungry kiss. She collapses almost imperceptibly into my body, moans slightly. Then the blood starts. It is spilling from the corners of her mouth down the line of her jaw. I am sucking her blood up through her lungs, gulping breathfuls of it, but spilling more of it than I'm swallowing, and a small river of it runs runs between her breasts and begins staining the belly of her white dress from the inside. She can't breathe.

Finally, I ease her down into the grass. She put up no fight, even at the end, because she loved me. I am a vampire, but she loved me.

* * *

The freighter at sea groans like a creature breathing, its metal subtly twisted by relentless underwater waves, so the hold is full of sound even though I'm alone. I climb a ladder to the top deck and try to make out details—landmass, iceberg—but the dark is too thick: I see shapes where there aren't any. All I can see are different grades of darkness.

I look a minute more: I'm desperate for some confirmation of what I'd just learned, with absolute certainty but no proof, down in the hold. A single tangible fact to make my next acts easier. But there isn't one, and sadly I turn away from the railing and start climbing the short ladder to the ship's bridge.

It's warm when I step in, lit by an amber lantern, and all of the people there—my family—are huddled around the lantern like it is a campfire. When I throw open the hatch, they look up with expectant eyes, relieved to see me. It is my job, I know, to get them out of this, to save them, and they know I will. And I, too, know I will. But I know something they don't. I know with absolute certainty that the ship is about to sink, and this room full of people I love will soon fill with water, and every last one of them will drown painfully in a dark arctic ocean. I don't know how I know this but I do, and that's why I have the machete behind my back, and why I used it already on all of those people down in the hold. I must kill them to spare them. Because I have failed them.

* * *

Am I dreaming? There's something not right. I don't remember leaving the door unlocked, and I can't explain the smell of cigarette smoke in my studio. Nothing looks amiss, but ... something isn't right.

Maybe I'm dreaming.

Or maybe he was here.

My heart surges thinking about it. Maybe he was here. I haven't turned the light on yet and I'm suddenly glad I didn't. I move slowly toward the window and peek through the half-open curtain. Is he out there? One of those parked cars across the street? Or any of the darkened windows in the apartment across the way?

Has he seen me come home? Because if he has, I'm a dead man.

An axe, I think, is what he used last time. Against the last person he hunted. A hatchet.

How I wish it were a movie, or a dream—I'd have a box hidden in my closet with a handgun. Bullets in the nightstand table. I'd have some way to fight back. But it's just me, inside my dingy apartment—a pile of books, a few pots and pans, dirty laundry. Nothing that actually matters, now that it comes down to it. The tinny set of kitchen knives that seemed like such a bargain now seems worth every penny I paid for them and not a cent more. Barely cut a tomato; useless on meat.

I'm going to die here. And I can't even remember why.

Has he seen me, yet, through the window? Is he walking, even now, quietly up the stairs? I don't know. But if I run for it, he'll see me for sure.

I sit on the floor. With inevitability, I find, comes calm. Maybe I hear him, down on the stairs, the hatchet man. He's coming. Now, or later. There's nothing I can do to stop him.

Maybe I'm only dreaming, and I'll wake up, tired, sweating, frightened, but alive. Or maybe I am awake, and this is exactly why I've been having so many nightmares...

Little Yellow Envelope 

I had a fantasy that by moving to Boston, to a place I had nothing and knew no one, I'd have some peace and quiet, and in the quiet, I'd be able to figure things out. Maybe I have figured a few things out; but mostly the quiet has come from having no one in particular to talk to, and the peace has been disturbed by being always lost and uneasy. "Which way to Brighton?"

Sometimes I think that the other people in my life offer me a kind of mirror—through them I can see a reflection of myself; through their reactions, I get some understanding of who I actually am. And without them I get confused…

* * *

I keep a little yellow envelope, full to bursting with the small set of photos, postcards and memorabilia I've decided to keep. I don't keep things. I blame it on the frequent moves, but I don't know if that's the real reason: I write a journal on a cheap legal pad; I write in it nearly every day; and when I fill up the pad, I throw it out. It's served its purpose. It's printed ephemera. I take another pad from the 10-pack and start again.

My yellow envelope is the arbitrary pile of the relics I've decided to keep.

Sometimes I think if I look at these pictures and postcards, I'll see my past in a new light and learn something new about myself. But the wisdom in this envelope is oracular, and the answers don't come easy. One scrap says, "Life was simpler in America. (Our life.)" Another says, "Chris's Life" and then offers a short list of alternate possibilities:

• balloon animals
• merchant
• kayak instructor / outdoorsman
• masseuse
• ghost writer / political speech writer

Yet another: "How to Fend Off an Alligator." (Tap or punch the alligator on the snout or behind the ears to make it back away.) Another: "I hope that everything that was broken last year gets fixed this year." (It didn't.)

There's a long black feather in the envelope.

There's a stone, wrapped in a piece of paper that says nothing.

I don't know how to make sense of any of it.

* * *

This weekend I saw the woman who gave me the stone. We strolled through the refurbished tenements of New York's Lower East Side. ("Early morning traffic is audible, as is the cry fishmongers.") The buildings, we noticed, had layers and layers of old secrets—here the exposed bricks showed the outline of another, older building long ago torn down; here there'd been a fire. My friend talked to me about palimpsests—old reused parchments which, after time, begin to show all of their collected layers. Their rich secrets are only known after the passage of time. Words accumulate; no erasure is complete; and in the end, there are layers upon layers of sense.

I don't know how to make sense of any of it.

---

The Finished Form of the Future Catastrophe 

Some days—and today is definitely one of those days—I wonder why we even bother. Why, when I woke up, did I bother stretching for ten minutes, riding a bike, or adding "super-food" blueberries to my cereal? Why did my neighbor bother to lock his doorknob and his deadbolt in a secure building? Why did that woman bother to run for the train? Why were all those people stuck in traffic on the freeway even bothering with work? Why did that man bother to add sugar to his latte? Why did the weatherman bother to predict the snowfall that never came?

Why bother with any of it, when no matter what we do, the news wires will always run stories like the one they ran today, the one about the woman who was found dead in Brooklyn, the woman who'd had her hands and feet and face wrapped in packing tape, who'd had a sock stuffed in her mouth, who'd been cut and tortured and sodomized and then strangled to death?

"The way her face was taped also could indicate the killer wanted to watch her face as she died."

Why do they bother telling us?

Why even bother?

* * *

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." And God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food." And it was so.

And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.

* * *

Sometimes, when the thoughts in my head are loud but I can't wrestle them into words, I'll distract myself doing multiplication tables. Sometimes I'll cook, or mop the floor, to take my mind off things. Often I'll take a hot bath, hoping the feeling will pass, and that the noise in my head will go away on its own. And sometimes I'll think I should try to push through the feeling, should try to force my confusion and sadness and disappointment in mankind as a whole into words, a blog entry, maybe—even when the confusion and sadness and disappointment feel too big for words. Every once in a while, I manage to do that. Most of the time, though, I just think, Why bother...

A Visitors' Guide to Crazy 

First of all, that thing you're doing now: it's not crazy. It's normal. Everyone talks to themselves. People might cast some funny glances in your direction, but they've all done it, too. It's important to remember that: the way you're feeling now, the way you're behaving, though slightly unusual, is also slightly usual. You think that there will be a moment, a crossing over from being one of us, to being one of them. But it's not like that. There's no boundary. There's blur. You might not always know where you are.

Don't forget that. It's important.

You realize you're in an almost-constant state of dialogue with yourself. Most of the time, you don't mind: you're pretty good company—never at a loss for words, and a good listener. In fact, most of the time, you don't even notice this is going on—not till it's very quiet, and you're trying to sleep, and you can't sleep because you're in the middle of a heated argument, with yourself. Then you realize you've been having this argument for hours, for days. Like many arguments with loved ones, you can't even remember what it's about, exactly. But you don't want to go to bed in the middle of an argument, so you keep arguing. With yourself.

You're not exactly sure how much of it happens inside your head, and how much happens out loud, for all the world to hear. But it doesn't matter. Everyone talks to themselves. That's normal.

* * *

That thing you're doing now, it's normal. Everyone does it. It's not hallucinating, exactly. Call it instead a hyper-active imagination. When you walk by those stone lions outside the museum, you don't really think the lion has just moved, come to life, taken a swipe at a passing child. Of course you don't. You don't really think the lion has just roared; you know that was actually just the sound of a passing bus. You know you're just indulging your rich fantasy life, trying to make your otherwise-routine day a little more lively.

You know this, but it doesn't stop the adrenaline from coursing through your bloodstream. It doesn't stop your feeling a panic that you're actually about to be attacked by a lion.

Likewise, when that yellow cab cuts the corner a little too close and nearly hits you, walking across the street, you know it hasn't hit you. Of course you know this. So when, in your imagination, you bifurcate the possible futures, and indulge, for a moment, the alternate reality in which the cab has hit you, you don't actually feel the searing pain of the smashed bone in your legs. You don't hear the sound of crunching bone, not really. And you don't experience that crushing wave of sadness when you realize that you'll never get a chance to say goodbye to the people who love you. None of this is real. The cab has gone and you're still walking, safe, two bags of groceries in your hands. Everything else is just daydream. Everybody daydreams.

* * *

That thing you're feeling now, it's hard to describe. That's why no one talks about it. It's not because they don't feel it that they don't talk about. Everyone feels it; they must. And if they thought about it, if they actually tried to put it to words, then they'd agree that yes, this is normal. It's within the realm of normal.

You're in your kitchen. You're making coffee. You've just gotten home after a day filled with spreadsheets and Gant charts, phonecalls about budget projections, analytics, metrics. At lunch, you joked with friendly people you don't particularly know. At the end of the day, you walked a familiar route through a city that feels nothing like how you think home should feel. In short, the entirety of your day seems to have no correlation to you, to the "you" you think you are. It's as if your life is happening to someone else.

This feeling comes often—while you're talking with the barista at the café, or waiting in line at the movie theatre. Really, it's persistent, but most of the time, you just choose to ignore it. Your actions seem to have no bearing on your actual self, a self which is hidden, safely tucked away; rather, you live your life through this avatar who resembles you in the mirror, and who goes through these motions on your behalf.

Sometimes you look at your hand, and you wonder if it's yours, or your avatar's. Sometimes you'll do things just to see if you will feel them, or if he will.

But everyone feels this. To call the feeling "dissociative" sounds so pathological. It's not. Everyone feels this. This is normal. It's within the realm of normal. It must be.

---

A Look in the Mirror 

He looked in the mirror for signs of the damage and saw none. It was there, but it had spread covertly like cancer, and in his reflection he couldn't separate the disease from what he saw as his own beauty.

Even harder than tracking it with the naked eye was recalling the specifics of its origin: it had started more as a hunch, a theory, or a hypochondria, that had gradually grown to prove itself true. At no single moment, he had changed into a monster, foreign, alien, unlovable.

What were the symptoms? What were the signs? When did this otherwise normal-looking man begin his transformation into such a subtle gargoyle? He could not be sure. There was no single moment, but there were single moments, planted periodically throughout his personal history, which, normal enough singly, in sequence appear quite ominous in hindsight:

1. He was slow learning to walk, and refused to take a single step until he could walk across a room unassisted.
2. His teachers liked him and he liked that they liked him. Still, he joined and then quit the study of violin, clarinet, soccer, Spanish, and the Boy Scouts. He never could explain why.
3. When he lost his baby teeth, the new ones grew back in just a bit oversized. And yellow.
4. A mole appeared on his neck in 1987, and, in the fall of 1990, when he was still lovable, he persuaded his girlfriend to pluck out the rapidly-appearing back hairs that were growing in dark and thick, as if betraying that some change had already taken place under the skin.
5. Most importantly, his brain ceased to function either as the rational interpreter of daily, causal events, or as a creative instrument. Seemingly-normal events became rife with subplots, convoluted meanings, and paranoia. Nothing was as it appeared to be, and his actions grew to be more and more inappropriate responses to what had triggered them.

As this lapse became more apparent to him, he countered it with an ever-friendlier smile, and would sometimes inexplicably engage in favors for virtual strangers, as if to compensate for whatever internal decay was taking place.

Thus he made no sense but did so with the best intentions, and people were forced to treat him politely, without ever quite knowing why or what he wanted from them.

Faced with his reflection in the mirror, thinking it fairly benign, he started to question his own senses: "Is it possible," he asked, "that these pedestrian features I look at now are not what others see? That my eyes deceive me? That I mask from myself something repugnant, just under the skin?"

He gasped. "I wonder—have I started to rot, from the inside; only I can't smell it? I wonder: are there bones and organs, growing at strange speeds, twisting up all of my inner processes into something elephantine and alien?"

But honestly, he could only honestly locate the damage in his head, and his heart, and his marrow, and his soul. He believed there were no immediately visible traces written on the outsides of his body—no lesions, no tell-tale melanoma. He had an invisible disease that somehow was readily apparent to all of the outer world.

He knew that it was making him smaller, that he would build things he thought had value, as if to say, "This is interesting; therefore, I am interesting"; and meanwhile the things built would grow more grotesque, misshapen, incomprehensible, and alone.

He was getting smaller, and he would continue to do so, until finally there would be no form at all, no need for form, only pure things, pure feeling, pure love, pure need to be adored in any shape at all, while shape still remained, while object still existed, while love still had value as a term that could be understood. Before he disappeared altogether.

Are You Lonely? 

Do you feel lonely at the end of the day? On weekends?

No, not particularly. But if that's true—why did I pick up this pamphlet?

Do you feel lonely because you've just moved? Because a friend or family member has died?

Well, that seems natural enough, doesn't it? I mean, even if I answered yes, it wouldn't make me pathological. Would it...?

Try to reach out to one person each day—either an old friend, or someone new that you would like to get to know. Call on the phone, send an email, or write a letter just to say hello. Make plans to take a class or join a club. Avoid escapes: TVs, movies, and romance novels are all great sources of entertainment, but be careful not to use them to avoid social contact. Accept invitations from acquaintances. And take care of yourself: if you try to look your best, you will feel better about yourself.

Why are you listing all of my hobbies as if they were symptoms?

Seek professional help. If you are feeling overwhelmed by loneliness or having trouble making changes, seek help from a therapist, doctor, or other professional.

Truth is, I only get lonely when I'm with other people—when I fail to connect, when I want to like them more than I actually do. Truth is, I only get lonely when I try to reach out across the great void that separates one person from another, and fail, because the void is so great. Truth is, I look at this little deserted island on your pamphlet as a vacation spot from all the jabbering and jabbing. I think that's why I picked it up in the first place. You said, "Are you lonely?", but I read, "Wish you were here." "Greetings from Beautiful Loneliness." "If you lived here, you'd be home by now."

Therapy 

What follows is an actual transcript with Eliza, the classic online therapist:

CHRIS: I've been really troubled lately

ELIZA: I'm not sure I understand you fully.

CHRIS: I'm having trouble sleeping.

ELIZA: Do you enjoy having trouble sleeping?

CHRIS: Of course not. I wake up tired and sore. I'm stressed out.

ELIZA: Did you come to me because you are stressed out?

CHRIS: Yes!

ELIZA: Come, come, elucidate your thoughts.

CHRIS: Well, I've been having terrible dreams...

ELIZA: Can you elaborate on that?

CHRIS: Sure. The other night, I had a dream I accidentally cut off my hand. I packed the severed hand on ice, and then I lost it.

ELIZA: Are you disturbed by your dreams?

CHRIS: You better believe it! Later the same week, I had another dream where the same arm had been severed roughly at the elbow. I got confused: I remembered cutting off my hand in the first dream, but I'd thought it was just a dream, with no consequence. Now, here I was with no hand—all because I'd lost it in a dream. I remember thinking, "Well, that was an irresponsible thing to do..."

ELIZA: What does that dream suggest to you?

CHRIS: I think it's odd that in both cases, I was maimed pretty horribly, but barely even noticed. Later in that second dream, I looked in the mirror and saw I was missing an eye. It was in there, but it was all white: the part with the color was gone. So in all three cases, I was damaged but didn't realize it.

ELIZA: (Long pause.) What is it that you really want to know?

CHRIS: What I really want to know is, What's the matter with me? Why am I stressed out? Why am I insomniac?

ELIZA: Don't you really know? Why are you stressed out? Why are you insomniac?

CHRIS: I'm dissatisfied with what I've become. Is that what you mean?

ELIZA: Do you believe it is normal to be dissatisfied with what you've become?

CHRIS: I suppose it is normal, isn't it?

ELIZA: Say, do you have any psychological problems?...

Try Eliza for yourself.

---

Chemical Imbalance 

I. Testosterone

I hadn't seen my sister in three months and the first words out of her mouth: "Are you going bald?"

Well, I hadn't thought so....

II. Serotonin

The wrapper says "Servings per bar: 2 ^2/3." The wrapper says "Calories per serving: 210." The wrapper is empty.

Though I'd like to believe otherwise, chocolate is not a serotonin re-uptake inhibitor....

III. Adrenocorticotropic Hormone

After three months of sticking this thing in my nose and squirting, I finally read the label on this pharmaceutical I was prescribed. Corticosteroids, it turns out, are potent enough steroids to have gotten some European cyclists in trouble.

Probably won't keep me out of major league baseball....

The Ids of March 

MP3 audio track

"I had a vision of myself right now, as a kind of wandering bachelor Mendican poet, wandering all the way down the beaches of Malaysia, eating magic mushrooms all the way as I went until I reached Bali and evaporated in a state of ecstasy in the sunset."

- from Spalding Gray, Swimming to Cambodia

* * *

I'm crazy. Or at least I was crazy. Or at least there are some pieces of paper somewhere in the world that would indicate that I'm crazy. Or was crazy. Sometimes it's hard to tell about these things.

I went to an eye doctor when I was in fourth grade; I had no idea I was near-sighted until he flipped some lenses in front of my eyes and the world suddenly snapped into focus. I never thought to ask why the world was fuzzy; that was just the way the world was. Crazy is like that, too: a doctor presents a theory, or a prescription, or a suggestion about how to look at the world, and, like the eye doctor, asks, "Better or worse?"

Better or worse.

Better or worse.

Fuck if I know. The thing is, whether the world is blurry or not, we keep stumbling through it. What choice is there?

What choice is there?

* * *

I'm home now. Except I don't mean the home where I live; I mean the home where I grew up, the home where I was a kid. My parents' home. Except I don't mean that home, either, because my parents moved a few years ago. They packed up all the furniture and books and trinkets and all the landmarks and icons of "home," and unpacked them in this other place, so that this new place seems familiar even though it's completely different. The house is full of memories that I never actually had.

They pulled off a funny trick when they moved, managing to fit a full house worth of stuff into a smaller house. I try to pull off a similar trick when I visit: I try to fit all the experience I've acquired since I moved out; I try to sneak those ten-plus years into this place; but it never fits, just like the high school letter jacket doesn't fit. So one sense I get, coming home, is that nothing fits.

* * *

I find a stash of old books and CDs in the basement. This was me, then. This is what my world sounded like. These are the words that went in and out of my head.

Better or worse?

I try to explain to the stylist why it's so hard for me to get my hair cut. I don't know what I want. I don't know what I'm supposed to be. She seems to understand: "The hair," she says, "is where the superego meets the id. And it's right there in the mirror, every single morning."

Sometimes it's hard to tell about these things.

Some days I want to evaporate.

"He is a dreamer; let us leave him. Pass."

---

This Is Your Life 

MP3 audio track

You wake up a little before sunrise. You sit up but you can't see; you have a cracked pair of glasses around somewhere but who knows where. You must have been sleeping on your neck, because it feels like whiplash. Something's not right: an amber flicker on the wall, which your myopia reads as sunrise till you glean that it's the candle you left burning all night. You reach for the plastic cup of water by your bedside, and drink half before it slips and spills on the bed. You roll to the opposite corner and fall asleep.

You wake again an hour later, the sun now bright enough to find your glasses on the windowsill, next to the half-liter of whiskey that survived the night before. Outside: the small yard filling with brown leaves where squirrels find some refuge. Across the way: a symmetrical grid of darkened windows, ethereal in a morning fog, like row after row after row of Mark Rothko. You see all this, like you see every morning, through a set of wrought-iron bars. They are there, you remind yourself, for your own protection.

Your body is sore and your mouth is dry and you can't say why, exactly, you feel so bad. Winter and its too-short days. You think of recent events and how the sum total of them should add up to more than this, this vacant feeling, this deep-down boredom and disappointment. You think back to a doctor's appointment earlier this week, as he ticked down a list of test results, each one "Negative." You found yourself wishing, Please, let me have something. Please, let there be some measurable deficiency, some quantifiable cancer or lurking parasite, some infection, something. Let there be an explanation, or at least an excuse, instead of this general malaise, this incurable unwellness.

You refill your plastic cup and drink it. You blow out the candle. There's no reason to be up, yet, so you don't bother. You return to bed, confident or at least hopeful that by the time you wake, next time, things will look better. They often do.