Fuck. Why is it so easy for me to sit in the same place doing nothing for five hours?
loop, infinite
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Anonymous
Kansas City’s roads are uneven. There are cracks everywhere. Potholes. Half-buried metal plates. These things sit where I least expect them.
Sometimes I drive over one and my car rattles. I wince, as if I’m mid-shave, as if I’ve just brought my razor down on an innocuous-looking clump of lather only to feel my blade connect with a zit.
Every so often the city council picks out a stretch of road and arbitrarily decides to resurface it. That happened last week to the segment of Westport that links Main with Broadway. Workers tore all the asphalt away and they poured out a fresh street.
Now that part of Westport is black and smooth. It’s sliced into lanes by bright, clean lines of paint. It won’t be like that for long.
They’ve resurfaced so many damn roads that I can no longer keep track of what’s new and what isn’t. Two years ago they revamped a part of Charlotte Street that runs near the med school. You wouldn’t know that now from looking at it.
The heat of the sun; the dripping of motor oil; the scraping of tires; the pounding of rain; they efface everything. Clean and new then, maybe. Anonymous asphalt now.
Brittle
I’m not comfortable in the checkout line at the supermarket. I feel like a jerk-off, watching other people bag my groceries. I avoid that when I can; I use one of those self-checkout kiosks. That way can I scan my own items. I can deal with bagging them on my own.
It works well. Sometimes it even saves time. The kiosk lines tend to be a lot shorter than the regular ones; no one wants to bag his own groceries if he can help it. I can’t help it, but that’s not down to sterling social conscience. I don’t have that. What I have is more of a brittle alloy of social anxiety and liberal guilt.
Weekend
When I get a weekend off, I’m actually more depressed than I am on a weekend full of stuff to do. In a way that makes sense.
When the burden of actual work hangs over me, like a huge fucking boulder suspended in midair six inches above my scalp, it’s difficult to think about too much else.
When the boulder’s gone, when there’s nothing overhead, it’s just me and my thoughts.
I don’t get along with my thoughts. Leave me alone with them and a fight will break out sooner rather than later. My thoughts fight dirty, and they tend to gang up on me.
My thoughts aren’t on my side anymore, and maybe that’s why my actual speed of cognition seems to have actually decreased. Maybe there’s a problem in the synapses somewhere. Signals aren’t getting where they need to go. Some are going backwards. Others are getting caught in a loop.
Even writing something totally vapid, like this post, is fucking traumatic. It should not be this hard. I shouldn’t have to strain like this, but everything has shut down. I have to start over. I don’t know if I ever learned how to write. I keep reaching for words I can’t find. I might be forgetting this language. The English text I’m putting on this screen looks so unfamiliar.
I wouldn’t really even mind forgetting English. So long as I forget everything else too, I’d be open to that.
. . . anyway, I went to the plaza today. I’d forgotten just how crowded it can get on the weekend.
People were everywhere, people with friends, families, lives, enjoying themselves, taking photos. It was a delightful and perfect summer day. What a perfect day.
Weakness
I don’t know what the hell to write here. Sometimes I don’t have that spark of inspiration or whatever; this appears to be one of those times.
You could call that a sign of weakness. If I don’t think I’m in the right frame of mind for something, I don’t even try to do it. That’s too much effort. Instead I sit back and let these slow-shifting mood gradients dictate my behavior.
Asleep
My brain is dead and hollow. I think I killed it at the library today. There’s another test tomorrow, see.
I cannot do this. Sometimes it takes me an hour to read half a page. Sometimes I fall asleep and wake up twenty minutes later.
It’d be great if I could get my consciousness, but not my actual physical body, to fall asleep for a few years. Then I wouldn’t have anything to worry about.
I’d take a nap, and my body would get shit accomplished. Without me around, it’d be free: free to do all the dirty work by itself. It would turn page after page, memorize table after table. It would study like a fucking machine. Machines don’t daydream.
Stripe
Evening today: a thick mesh of clouds caught the sun’s rays, filtered them into a pink stripe that sliced the sky in half. In that scattered light, even the most mundane shit looked alien, unsettling. I saw cracks and shadows in the library parking lot I’d never noticed before and may never notice again.
Critics
There’s this Chinese takeout place across the street from the dorms. I used to go there a lot, back when I lived on campus. I went because it was convenient. I did not go because the food was good. On the contrary, the food was rubbery and slimy, and eating it invariably made my insides shrink and wither and rattle. While I never actually threw up, I came close several times.
Somehow, I still go to that place on occasion. It’s like I forget how awful the food is and I don’t remember until I’ve already walked in and paid six dollars for something and gone back to my apartment and peeled back the top of its steamy, flimsy styrofoam container and inserted a fork into the putrid mess inside and put it to my mouth. Then I think: oh no. Of course, by then it’s too late.
I went to the Chinese place today because I’d first gone to the Subway next door and had been told it was “out of bread.” Bummed and hungry, I saw the familiar takeout sign and thought, “Oh, okay, I guess I’ll walk in here.”
. . . Never again, I hope.
I went inside and stood in line behind a portly middle-aged guy with graying hair. He was signing a receipt. He was also wearing earbuds.
The girl at the cash register – and I say girl not to be patronizing or sexist but because she really was a girl, probably younger than me – said, “Look like you listen to music a whole lot, right? All the time!”
The man pulled out his right earbud, gave the girl a serious look.
“Quite a bit, yes.”
He put the earbud back in.
He was really taking his time with his signature, like he wanted to savor the moment, like this was the last time he’d ever write his name down.
The girl turned to me.
“What you want order?”
“Uh. The chicken fried rice.” Why do I always order that? It doesn’t even taste good!
I handed my credit card over and looked away for a second as I wrestled with a sudden, overpowering sense of dread. What had I just done? Memories of sickly fumes and monosodium glutamate and oil and grease went roaring through my mind. I was starting to feel lightheaded.
When I looked back at the middle-aged guy, he was handing his earbuds to the cash register girl, saying, “Here, give this a listen.”
She put the buds in, closed her eyes, and listened for about ten seconds. Then her face lit up.
“Music! It’s a song! Music!”
“Yes,” said the guy. “This song is called ‘Southern Point.’ It’s the best song on the record.”
Wait. Was he talking about the fucking Grizzly Bear song?
“It’s the best record of the year,” the guy went on. “That’s what critics – lots of the critics – the critics say. Do you download mp3s? Off the Internet?”
“Yeah, I download a mp3.”
“Well – here.”
This guy reached into his back pocket and pulled out a tiny notebook. He ripped away a page, and on it he wrote: “Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest.” I am not making this shit up.
He handed the girl this piece of paper.
“Thank you,” she said. “I will look for online.”
The guy grinned and departed with his food. As soon as he was gone, the girl threw the piece of paper away.
Then my styrofoam box of chicken fried rice arrived. I went home and could not eat more than a third of it before wanting to retch. Think I’ll go throw it out now before it makes my apartment smell all shitty.
Shuffle
I had gotten so used to the chintzy old umkc.edu, but the site’s been redesigned. Now it’s very 2009: it has a lot of negative space, a lot of JavaScript. But underneath that it’s the same as it’s ever been. The content’s no different. The presentation is slightly cleaner; that’s all.
That’s how it works. Circumstances change. People can shuffle around. The underlying patterns, though . . .
. . . Today, in the University Center parking lot, on my way to the library, I ran into my old Histology professor, a guy who helps coordinate a class at the med school called “Human Structure Function.”
Human Structure Function is lengthy and kind of grueling. Every year, it lasts from January to July. My year to take it was 2008, and in July 2008, while studying for the class’s cumulative final, I would tell anyone who would listen that my six months in Human Structure Function had been “the worst six months of my life.”
But on July 14th, 2008 - that was the exact date – I finally took that last HSF test, and later that afternoon I ran into my then-current Histology professor – the same guy whose path would next cross mine on July 13th, 2009.
“Well,” he said, “how’d it go?” He had been directly responsible for a fourth of the final that had just kicked my ass, and we both knew this.
I told him, totally deadpan: “I think you need to think about making these tests a little easier.”
He laughed, but I hadn’t actually been joking. “I’m sure you did fine,” he said.
As it turned out, I got a 55% on that final. I don’t know if I’d call that “fine,” but, bizarrely, 55% was just enough for me to pass.
Today - a year later – was the HSF final, again. This was the new 2009 version, administered to the class below me, which consists mostly of people I really don’t know. I watched these people streaming out of the med school this afternoon and thought: has it really been 364 whole days since I took that same exam? That long?
The people who’d just taken that final – they were done. They were on vacation. Me, I had a Pharmacology lecture to attend. Those people were leaving the med school, but I had to enter it. Two Pharm lectures had been scheduled for today, and I attended the first and skipped the second. Then I drove down to main campus, parking at the University Center.
There in the parking lot, I ran into my old professor. He had just left the gym. I guess he’s on vacation now too.
“Haven’t seen you in a while,” he told me. “How’ve you been? What are you doing now?”
I told him I was taking Pharm.
“Boy,” he said. “That must be awful. I think if I were a med student taking Pharm, I’d probably hate it. Well, good luck.”
He walked off, presumably to his car.
Rhythms
I took a 100-level chemistry course in summer 2007. I didn’t technically need it to graduate; I had tested out of it when I first arrived at college. I’d skipped ahead to Chemistry II and Organic Chemistry.
Yet I had gone back to take Chemistry I anyway, for this reason: at the conclusion of the spring semester, my grade-point-average had reached an embarrassing new low. I knew I had to prop that shit up.
The class wasn’t so bad. At least it was short: five weeks in all, it began towards the end of May and was over well before the Fourth of July. I skipped every lecture and crammed for every test the night before. I ended up with an A, and I guess that made me feel smart.
Of course, since I had already taken Chemistry II and Organic Chemistry, there was obviously no way I couldn’t have gotten an A in Chemistry I. (This was a detail my brain conveniently chose to ignore. Though I had no business feeling smart, that wasn’t going to stop me from trying to feel smart anyway.)
I had the same trouble focusing then that I have now. True, in Chemistry I, slacking off and still acing the class was feasible, but (one of) the problem(s) with med school is that the further in I’ve gotten, the more it’s become clear to me that there’s this implicit prerequisite that I have to care about what I’m doing. With every passing month, the inner questions get louder.
Motivation is a barrier now, but two years ago it was just as bad. I will describe the scene the night before my first Chemistry I test: I sat in my apartment at my tiny, rickety desk, textbook splayed open and illuminated by my desk lamp’s harsh circle of light. I had a Bic pencil in a clammy hand, and it floated over a spiral notebook open to a blank, bare page.
I sat there, frozen, nearly all night, though every so often I stood up, trying to get my blood moving, but mainly trying to stop staring the work I had to do in its sick, ugly face. Then I’d sit back down again and look at the notebook. It would, of course, still be blank.
At two, maybe three a.m., I went outside, walked down the sidewalk, and clambered into my car. I didn’t drive anywhere; I just stayed where I was and let my fingers tap out pointless rhythms on the steering wheel.
Then I went back inside, sat down again. It wasn’t until the sun came up that I made myself actually start working, and even then, I wasn’t giving it my all. I didn’t even know – still don’t even know — how to “give” something “my all.”
I took the test, and yeah, I got an A and tried to use that as a reason to feel “smart” and “special,” but I knew those desperate stabs at self-confidence meant exactly nothing. This was Chemistry I, and not getting an A would probably have been harder than getting one.
And when that class’s five weeks were over, I could have gone home; I didn’t. Instead, I stayed in Kansas City for three weeks. I did nothing and hated, hated, hated myself for it. I had friends who were taking summer classes, who had tests to study for, who had lives. Me, I sat in my apartment and listened to music and played videogames and watched torrented episodes of TV shows and tried to write.
I watched three full seasons of the American version of The Office, a show I really don’t even like, just because it was something to do, just because it was a way to get out of my own head. (And that’s probably why most people watch TV, but that sure doesn’t make me feel any better.)
Sometimes I’d go outside. I’d get in my car and drive around. Aladdin Sane would be in my stereo but I’d never actually listen to the whole thing, just “Panic in Detroit” on repeat. I listened to “Panic in Detroit” in my car in summer 2007 primarily because it reminded me of listening to “Panic in Detroit” on my iPod in summer 2006. And I kind of wanted it to be summer 2006 again.
When I tried to write, I was utterly stymied no matter what I did. My thoughts were flighty and desultory and impossible to tame. I mostly wrote horrible, stupid short stories, truly wretched things that I still have in a folder on my external hard drive and that I still pull up whenever I want to make myself feel shitty.
A friend encouraged me to review Super Metroid, a game I don’t even like (but that I’d been playing at the time), for Action Button. I must have churned through ten false starts for that piece. It never took form. How could it have? It was dead on the screen because my brain was dead, because my motivation was shot, because my self-esteem was zero.
One evening I decided to get really fucking drunk. I liked the romantic image there: brooding “writer” drinking his life away, et cetera. If that stuff was good enough for Ernest Hemingway, I thought, surely it’s good enough for me.
So I poured out some vodka that I’d talked an over-21 friend into getting for me. I drank a pretty significant quantity of the stuff and my vision warped and colors congealed and parts of my mind started disappearing and I thought, yes, at last, my creativity is fully untapped. And then I typed a bunch of shit and of course it was all terrible. Even through the alcohol fog, I could see that. It seriously was terrible.
Depressed, I put my head in my hands. I called a friend.
“Hello?” she said.
“Hey,” I said. “I love you. Marry me. Let’s get married.”
“What?”
“I’m serious. It may not sound like I’m serious, but I am actually serious.”
“I have a final coming up,” my friend said. “I have to study.”
“Okay, fine,” I said. “Be that way.”
I hung up.
Eventually it was one a.m. and I noticed I was hungry. I had no food, but hey, there was always the Taco Bell on Linwood. I went outside, stumbled over to my car. Then it dawned on me that I was probably not sober enough to drive, so I didn’t actually turn the ignition. I just sat flicking my fingers against the steering wheel, tapping out those same damn rhythms.