loopinfinite

Today I went to the student health clinic because I had an appointment. This appointment was scheduled for two p.m, but I was in the waiting room by one-forty-five. This wasn’t because I’m some kind of anal, meticulous dude; it was  because I miscalculated the driving time.

The clinic’s waiting room is small. It only has enough seats for five, maybe six people. A table in the corner is cluttered with brochures. These brochures have titles like “HIV Facts” and “The Truth About Herpes.” They are propped up in a loose circle, and in the center of this circle is a basket, and from this basket rises a cairn of shiny, glowing condoms.

I looked at those condoms today and thought there was something mystical about them. The henge of surrounding brochures just seemed to give them this dignity, this gravitas. These condoms, I knew, were pure. They were holy. I felt terribly unclean just looking at them.

I considered raking ten or twenty or fifty of those condoms into my pocket. I would give one to each new person I met before even shaking his or her hand.

“You’ll want to wear this,” I would say. “You’ve got to protect yourself from me.”

The person would say, “You mean you have an STD?”

“No,” I’d say. “I . . . am an STD.”

(The pause between “I” and “am” was of course the most important part. That was the part that would make the person realize I wasn’t kidding.)

There’s a flat-panel television in the waiting room, too. It is mounted above the receptionist’s desk. It is a nice television.

I remember watching this TV about a year ago, shortly after it had been installed. I watched part of an episode of Seinfeld. Three months later, I returned to the clinic and watched part of a different episode of Seinfeld. Three months after that, it was still Seinfeld. And it was Seinfeld today.

The television is obviously wired to some sort of medical device that pumps Seinfeld, and only Seinfeld, into its electrical veins. Or maybe it’s just hooked up to a DVD player.

I watched today’s Seinfeld with great interest for several minutes until I realized I’d seen the episode before: it was the one where George thinks he’s having a heart attack but actually just needs his tonsils taken out.

It’s weird that it took me so long to recognize what I was watching. It’s only been a few years since I last saw it. Was it that long ago?

I watched a hell of a lot of Seinfeld in summer 2007. I watched the show in one big, concentrated burst. I had nothing better to do.

When they called my name I went in for my appointment. I was there to get my antidepressants renewed for another few months.

I see a nurse practitioner for my antidepressants. I’ve never seen a real, actual psychiatrist. I think I’m afraid to.

The nurse never asks many questions. She asks if the meds are still working for me. I say yes every time, and I guess I’m lying. I don’t know. Maybe they do work. I can’t tell if they make a difference. I would have to stop taking them for a while to be able to tell, and I’m afraid to do that, too.

I went to CVS to fill the new prescription. It’s too bad. I should have done it tomorrow. I was kind of planning to. I thought it would be perfect. It would fit. I mean, I pre-ordered Final Fantasy XIII, and that game comes out tomorrow.

My plan was that tomorrow I’d get up early and pick up the drugs on the way to pick up the game. Then I thought I would post some faux-meaningful shit here about how I purchased Final Fantasy XIII and refilled my antidepressants on the same day and that this “seems somehow significant,” and that “clearly there must be some kind of connection between the two.” Et cetera. But I got the drugs today. I ruined it.

Now I’ve got to study.

March is yet another “study month” for me – my third. I’m not studying.

Why is this? I’ve had so many days to get my shit together. So many days, but my shit is still scattered.

The amount of time I have wasted is a little sickening. What did I even do in November? What did I even do in December, or in January?

In February I did the oncology thing, so that was sort of my excuse for not working. But now, almost a week into March, I am still not working.

I’m trying to work, of course, but the trying itself is not working either.

Today I turned my laptop off, then unplugged it and put it in my closet. I vowed not to take it out of there until April.

My thinking was that doing this would make it easier for me to study. My thinking was flawed.

It was true that without my laptop I could no longer distract myself by staring at web pages all day, but without the web pages I just stared out the window.

I tried to get away from that by going to the med school library, but I quickly realized that was a terrible idea. The med school library has, as the kids say, hella windows.

I tried taking the elevator to the fourth floor, thinking I’d study on one of the drab and windowless “units” there, but without windows I just stared at the ceiling.

Basically, as long as there is something around to stare at, I am fucking distracted.

I might be a little less distracted by a ceiling than I am by the Internet, but the fundamental inability to focus is still there, always, no matter how many elements I try to subtract from my “studying” “environment.” This is, I think, because the real problem has almost nothing to do with my environment. The real problem is somewhere inside my brain. Something inside my brain, right now, is making it impossible for me to concentrate on a goddamn thing. You know, I can’t even concentrate on this post enough to finish it.

I drove up to main campus again this afternoon. I parked in the garage next to the dorms. I meant to go to the library, and did, but I took a long walk first. It seemed like the right thing to do.

The weather was right for it. Today, for the first time in months, I felt actually warmed by the sun. This means it’s not winter anymore. The definition of winter, I think, is that season in which the sun does not seem to actually warm you.

The sun in winter only seems to serves a decorative purpose. It’s just this smug fireball that floats annoyingly in space some ninety-three million miles away from you. It casts weak light over sheets of ice, et cetera; meanwhile, you look on, shivering and in a jacket.

You look at the sky, and thus into space, and thus at the sun, and you say, “Hey, help me out here.”

The sun looks down at you and shrugs. “Can’t do nothin’ for you, man,” it says.

Something in the sun’s tone suggests that it is lying. The sun, you suspect, could do somethin’ for you, but it’s just too damn blase to bother. The sun in winter is a bastard, and spring and summer are the only seasons in which it seems to care about you even a little.

I walked today even though I had my books with me: Rapid Review Pathology and First Aid for the USMLE Step 1. They were shoved into this kind of faux-messenger bag.

This bag has a twisted, too-long strap, and both bag and strap are made of a cheap and soft plastic that bears only a minimal resemblance to actual cloth. It may be impossible to carry this bag around without looking like a clueless doofus. I try not to let this bother me, but it bothers me.

Campus has changed hugely since I was a freshman in 2005. UMKC has traditionally been a commuter school, an underfunded dead-end branch of the University of Missouri system. This has only really begun to change in the past few years.

We never had a student union, but they’re building one now just uphill from the dorms. I think it’s set to open in 2011 or 2012 or 2013. I remember a certain amount of outrage when it was first announced, because our tuition was going to go up infinitesimally to pay for it.

People thought this was “unfair.” If the student union wasn’t to be finished until after they had graduated, they didn’t see why they should have to pay for it.

This argument strikes me as cosmically (and comically) selfish – particularly when I think of the BMW-driving, Armani Exchange-shopping, Frappucino-sipping people who were making it.

I can only hope that these people someday fall below the poverty line and then try to get covered by Medicaid but end up denied. Then I hope they come down with horrible illnesses that require treatment with drugs they can’t afford. I would find this both amusing and entertaining.

It doesn’t seem like it would ever happen, though. From what I’ve seen, rich people kind of stay rich.

I keep wondering how it is that we came to construct things the way we did. Did money have to exist? Was it an inevitability? Some kind of ineluctable consequence of mankind’s history of et cetera?

How much of the infrastructure we live in is necessary? How much of it is just arbitrary?

I went to Barnes & Noble tonight to study and also to buy Don DeLillo’s new book, which is called Point Omega and which I’ve been meaning to pick up for the past month.

DeLillo’s publisher is marketing Point Omega as a novel, but if it is it’s an absurdly short one. There are just one hundred and twenty pages, and the pages are unusually small, with unusually wide margins. The words are all typeset in a pretty huge font.

People say that DeLillo’s books have been getting shorter and shorter since Underworld. They say this like it’s a bad thing. I like short books, though. They work for me. My attention span, after all, has degraded pretty seriously over the past decade.

In 2000 I read terrible genre fantasy, books so fat and so heavy that they would have been lethal weapons if I’d thought to throw them at my enemies, if I had enemies. In 2010 I am unable to read a novel that’s more than three or four hundred pages long.

The only books I can read now are short “works” of “literary fiction.” This is bad because I believe that one day I will find myself cornered in an alley with only a copy of something like Point Omega to protect myself. On that day I will be fucked.

Anyway. Point Omega has a cool cover; it prominently features that famous figure-eight symbol for infinity. I have long been obsessed with that symbol. I can remember how it (and the concept of infinity) were first introduced to me. I was arguing with this guy, in first grade, about what the biggest number was. I told him it was 9,999,999,999. He told me I was wrong, and that the biggest number was infinity.

I asked him what infinity was. He said he would show me. He took out a piece of paper and put his pencil down and drew the figure-eight and kept drawing, his pencil going around and around and around, the figure-eight getting darker and darker and deeper and deeper. Eventually the paper ripped.

“That’s infinity,” he said.

That kid and I went on to have many more cliched schoolchildren arguments, such as what our three wishes would be if a genie were to give us three wishes. He said he wanted money, power and happiness.

I told him that this was incredibly dumb, and that the real right answer was money, power, and three more wishes. I said that’s the loophole: you have to use the third wish to wish for more wishes. He said it so does not work that way. I said it does too. He said does not. I said does too. Oh, to be in first grade again.

The arguments about infinity changed throughout elementary school. I think third grade was when a friend of mine realized that the largest number was not infinity, that it was in reality “infinity plus one.” I said, no way, what about infinity plus two? My friend said, what about infinity plus three? I said, what about infinity times infinity? And so on and so forth, et cetera, et cetera.

In fourth grade someone found out that infinity was actually “not a number,” and thereafter that guy used this knowledge to abort infinity arguments before they even started. I’d say, “So what do you think the largest number is? I think it’s infinity times infinity times infinity times infinity,” and this guy would just look at me and say, with this bizarre faux-mystical wisdom, “Infinity is not a number.” And he’d walk away.

In high school I took trigonometry and the only thing I remember about that class is the phrase “as x approaches infinity.” I have no idea what that phrase means or signifies anymore, but I think about it all the time. As x approaches infinity. It just sounds so fucking profound.

So I took Point Omega to the Starbucks that’s sort of built into Barnes & Noble’s second floor. I put it and my bag down on a table near the window, and went over to the barista and tried to order coffee, and was caught off-guard because I couldn’t remember how to order shit at Starbucks and also because the barista was lithe and lissome and generally very pretty, and there is something about pretty members of the opposite sex that causes my brain to crumple.

“I’ll have,” I said, “a, uh, like, uh, you know, like, like, well, kind of a tall, like, a tall, uh, a latte.”

In my confusion, I mispronounced the word “latte.” I said it with a short “a.”

When I had the coffee, I returned to my table and noticed that the person sitting in front of me was an Indian dude and that he was reading a book. I could, at a glance, recognize this book. It was First Aid for the USMLE Step 1.

I could recognize the book because I have a copy of it. Almost every med student I know has a copy of it.

Right now I’m supposed to be using that book, because I’m supposed to be studying for “the USMLE Step 1.” “USMLE” stands for “United States Medical Licensing Exam,” and “Step 1″ signifies that the test actually has three parts.

I don’t know what parts two and three involve, but I know that part one is meant to test your “basic” “science” “skills.” The test requires you to commit a very large amount of information to memory, and this is where First Aid for the USMLE Step 1 comes in: it is a book that kind of consolidates all the shit you need to know into one thing.

How does it do this? Well, the book is very, very thick: about four Point Omegas thick. The book also just summarizes the hell out of shit. It doesn’t actually explain anything. The book is little more than an incredibly lengthy list of facts, with no explanation of why those facts are what they are. What I’m saying here is that it would be a laughably huge understatement to say that First Aid is a little hard to read.

Several people have told me that studying for Step 1 is “really simple” because “all you have to do is memorize First Aid.”

Part of me wants to wonder what kind of crack these people are smoking, but most of me knows that they are not smoking crack at all. They are just people who are capable of memorizing shit. They can do it pretty easily.

I cannot do that. Maybe it means I’m defective, or maybe it means my mind just doesn’t work that way. Maybe the problem is that I never actually did any work up until now: every single thing tested on Step 1 is something I was taught at some point in the past two years, but I blew all those classes off, never even attempting to learn any of the information long-term. I crammed, because it was easier, and because I didn’t give a fuck.

And a book like First Aid is what I guess you could call a “reviewing tool” as opposed to a “learning tool.” It assumes you already know this stuff.

So I have First Aid, but cannot use it. Instead I’ve been trying to use individual, “subject-based” review books, to get more detail, more context. There are a lot of books available. I guess review books are big business. A list of just some of the titles I own: Rapid Review Pathology; Board Review Series: Physiology; High-Yield Gross Anatomy; Lippincott’s Illustrated Reviews: Biochemistry; Katzung & Trevor’s Pharmacology Examination and Board Review.

And I’m jumping all over the place, not studying any of this in a coordinated way.

I tried to read pathology stuff tonight but kept glancing around. At one point I saw two Indian girls walk into the cafe area, saw them sit down several feet away, and saw one of them pull out what was unmistakably a copy of First Aid.

I have no idea who these girls were, or, for that matter, who the dude in front of me was. It’s possible that they go to the other med school in Kansas City: maybe they’re all from KU, rather than from UMKC.

KU’s med program is, colloquially, referred to as “KU med.” I knew a guy in Springfield, in high school, who wanted to go there. I didn’t like this guy much. Freshman year, spring 2003, we were in the same English I class together. English was the last class of the day, right after lunch.

Since I had no friends, et cetera, I typically ate lunch by myself in about five minutes and then left the cafeteria and sat down in the hallway near the English room, where I’d try to read for the next twenty-five minutes.

I say “try” to read because as I read, more people trickled into the hallway and this guy would invariably show up and just fucking ambush me and start talking, earnestly, about shit I didn’t care about, such as, to take just one example, KU med.

“I really want to go to KU med,” this guy would say. “That’s why I want to take Latin next semester.”

“Uh, what?” I said.

“You know, because, like, the majority of medical terms, they come from Latin, right? So I figured I’d learn Latin to get myself kind of a heads-up.”

Not only was this absurd, it was also wrong. It seems clear that most medical terms come from Greek. Maybe this guy didn’t know there was a difference. Greek, Latin – you know, same thing, right?

I remember we were allowed to do one of our book reports in English on “any book” that we “wanted.” I picked The Sword of Shannara, by Terry Brooks, and wrote this kind of scathing thing about how shitty it was (this was around the time it hit me that all the genre fantasy I’d been reading was terrible).

This guy picked Kiss the Girls, by James Patterson. An interesting fact about James Patterson: he is probably the worst fiction writer in the fucking English language. I think I would rather read Dan Fucking Brown than James Patterson. This is saying a lot.

This guy loved the James Patterson book. The book, in fact, converted this guy into a Patterson fan. He told me (many times, and at length) about how he now had this burning desire to read every novel James Patterson had ever written, because Kiss the Girls just really, really impressed him.

The following semester, this exact guy ended up in my English II class, where he kept asking me to help him write some essay about, I don’t even know, fucking Lord of the Flies or some shit. I was getting so tired of this dude. I eventually told him that.

“Seriously,” I said, “just leave me the hell alone, okay? Why do you keep talking to me all the time? We’re not like friends, you know. You do realize this, right?”

The guy said, “I think you could stand to be a little nicer,” and slunk off.

And I thought, man, maybe he was right: maybe I could stand to be a little nicer. Then again, I had to get this guy off my back somehow, right?

A problem with me is that I’ll allow situations like that to kind of fester for a while, because I don’t want to offend anyone. And then I snap. It was probably unfair to the guy. It’s not like he knew I hated him that whole time. Maybe he really did think we were friends. Well, whatever.

I was turned on to Don DeLillo by a friend of mine here; she read White Noise in high school and recommended it to me. I was kind of surprised that DeLillo was on her curriculum, but she went to some kind of fancy private school, so I guess that explains it.

We never read anything terribly interesting at my high school. It was standard-issue, predictable stuff. To Kill a Mockingbird, Fahrenheit 451, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby.

I really liked White Noise. My reaction, after I finished it, was this overwhelming desire to just read the thing again, immediately. I almost never feel that way when I get done reading a book. Usually I just think, well, okay, I got done with that.

White Noise compelled me to seek out and read every other book DeLillo had ever written. It just had that effect on me.

White Noise also made me wish (not for the first or last time) that I’d gone into English or some shit instead of fucking medicine, because then I could be doing something entertaining, like writing a master’s thesis on White Noise and “consumer culture” as “reflected through” the “lens of” something-or-other right now, rather than, for e.g., being in my current position of needing to memorize the fucking contents of First Aid for the USMLE Step 1.

I like DeLillo a lot as a stylist. I know that sounds incredibly pretentious but I can’t think of a less obnoxious way of putting it. I like the guy’s spare, kind of deadpan prose. I wish I could write like that.

DeLillo, from what I understand, still writes on a typewriter. He only writes one paragraph per page. Sometimes he types the same paragraph out over and over again, obsessively. He says he pays a lot of attention to the actual shapes of the words he’s writing. He looks at the form of each letter and considers how they physically fit together.

That kind of deliberation appeals to me. Nabokov did something sort of similar: I’ve read that he wrote his novels on index cards.

After about an hour, that Indian guy put First Aid away and pulled out his laptop. It was a MacBook Pro. Look at that fucking lemming, I thought, using a MacBook Pro. Then I realized, to my absolute fucking chagrin, that I, myself, own and use a MacBook Pro. Why am I such a dick?

I tried to picture myself as a “famous writer,” some forty or fifty years in the future. I’d be this old masterly dude, like Don DeLillo is now. Someone would be interviewing me on the occasion of the release of my fifteenth novel, Loop, Infinite.

The person would ask if I still use a MacBook Pro to write, and I’d say, yeah, I’ve been writing on the same one since 2009. Except, no, that would never happen. You can use a typewriter for forty or fifty years, but not a laptop. Laptops break. Laptops become obsolete.

I felt like this was something almost profound, and found myself wishing I had Don DeLillo’s cell phone number, and wishing that we were friends, because then I could call him and tell him that shit about how laptops break, and he’d probably say some incredibly deep and wise shit about how that’s symbolic of some particular aspect of consumer culture. Unfortunately, I kind of doubt Don DeLillo even owns a cell phone.

I looked back at Indian dude’s MacBook. I could tell, from the way his Dock and Finder looked, that he was still running Tiger. I wondered, for a second, why he had not yet upgraded to Leopard, and then I berated myself for thinking something that fucking nerdy. Who gives a shit what operating system this dude is running?

A little less than a year ago, a girl asked me to upgrade her own MacBook Pro, which was running Tiger, to Leopard. I remember that I agreed. Why did I agree? On one level, I was just trying to be nice.

On another level, the girl was totally pretty, so I almost had no choice but to comply. One of my problems is that if a sufficiently pretty person asks me to do anything, I will do the thing, no matter what the thing is, and no matter who the pretty person is.

This is, I suppose, a big character flaw of mine. It’s the kind of thing that would have led me into big trouble by now if my life were somebody’s work of fiction.

I went to get more coffee, and while at the front, waiting for my coffee, I noticed there were actually coffee mugs on sale, right there at the coffee counter where you order your coffee. You can order coffee and buy a coffee mug at the same time, if you so desire. This was another thing I would have called Don DeLillo about if I had his cell phone number.

The mugs on sale had inspirational messages printed on them. The one closest to me said, “Do what you want and follow your heart. Live the life you’ve dreamed of living!”

I said, “Easy for you to say, mug.” Actually, I did not say this, because there were people around. The pretty barista was right there, and did I want her thinking I was crazy? No. I mean, it’s not like I’m not pretty crazy, because I am, but I didn’t want her thinking that.

I set my alarm for six a.m., then did not wake up until eleven, then did not go to the med school until four. Then I left at seven, so I guess that makes three hours of “work” – if you can call it that.

I opened books to random places and skipped sections and read chapters backwards, just to keep myself from falling asleep.

I took frequent breaks in which I stared out the window at the parking garage, which is made of concrete and is totally uninteresting and in no way worth staring at.

So that was today. Now I guess I should go to sleep. When I wake up time will have jumped forward another arbitrary notch. February feels like the shortest month. That’s probably because it, uh, is. February had a beginning and an ending but there was no clear middle that I can remember.

I vaguely recall spending hours in the hospital. I remember many, many patients with cancer. I am sure these people had names. I can’t find those names now. I know they’re folded up somewhere inside my brain. I think everything that’s ever happened to me might be in there. Losing a memory is only losing access, and so on. Memories are created and never destroyed.

I don’t know how people keep all that data straight. You start building these towering trash-piles of memory from the moment you’re born. And you jump from pile to pile. You can make twenty, fifty, a million jumps in a single nanosecond. You connect and disconnect and assemble meaning, unless you can’t.

I don’t see a pattern. The signal has degraded. There’s just this hiss. No carrier. There’s this pulling back, this totality. I can’t integrate all the shit at once. I climb to the tallest trash-pile and look down and contemplate the screamingly vertiginous height and the mind-rending size of the fucking landfill within my brain.

It’s all landfill. There’s not anything beyond the landfill. The mountains in the distance are just more trash-piles. The sun is made of trash too. Space-time is made of trash. The electrons and protons and neutrons are trash.

Everything’s been infected by the days, weeks, years of living in the world. You’re born, you live, and you create memory. And memory informs everything, pulls the entire world into your brain. You reassemble the world and process it and you create trash that can’t be extruded. It just kind of stays in your brain.

Language is functional but is it even good enough to describe what’s actually important? I don’t know if words can articulate the stop-starts, the connections that are lucid one moment and nonsensical the next. Language describes what’s outside, not what’s inside.

Maybe that’s not a failure of language. It’s hard for me to describe what I don’t understand. I can describe the edges of it, maybe, I can describe the outline, yet I don’t know what’s really going on in here.