I Hate To Complain, But...

It has been twenty-one days since I began to feel sick. I am not getting better. I reiterate for emphasis: I. Am. Not. Getting. Better.

I have begun to suspect that this is more than a bump in the road of my healthy progression. It may well be chronic. It may well be hypochondriac. It may, in fact, be deadly.

There is no way to be sure. The only certainty is the pervasity--and the perversity--of symptoms. Symptom after symptom after symptom.

Numbness prickles up and down my arms, left and right. My neck clamps into a rigid mass of muscle, making it painful to lie on my side. A crescent of pain gouges deep within my calf. My breathing is at one moment sharp, the next minute muffled as if struggling through cotton. My eyesight swims in uncertainty. A cheisel of pain wedges itself in my sternum, and flexes with the shifts in cold and heat. At times it seems I drift away from myself, my body becoming an unruly tanker of precious cargo that must be navigated through a narrow fjord in high winds. I grow panicked, I grow lethargic, with no warning and no impetus.

And always this oceanic sense of being moments from the oblivion of a swoon; always this top-heavy terror.

You see the world differently when you might collapse at any moment. Every step outdoors is a testament to the kindness of strangers. I find myself smiling at them with a desperate ferocity: please, I say through my teeth, if I fall down in front of you, call someone. This isn't a trick.

I find myself adjucating projectiles, leaning towards the softest sides of the sidewalks I carefully navigate. On stairs, I cling to the railing for dear life, knowing that if I should slip into a coma somewhere in my ascent it can mean a break in a limb, a neck, or my life.

Crossing the road is stressful: do I run? Walk slowly so that incoming traffic will see my fall and swerve around my prostrate form?

My daily ablutions are a quandary. If I bathe, I could slip under the water and have it be my remarkable single action of fate. Showering is no better an option, though: I have no reason to doubt the end of a plummet into a porcelain-encased coffin.

The doctor's diagnoses have not alleviated the symptoms; if anything, the miasma has proliferated. In the absence of a clear vision, the people that comprise the voices in my brain make loud their prophecies of imminent woe: I'm dying of an unknown disease. I'm losing my mental capabilities to a debilitating fungus. Or worse, I am hale and healthy and this half-life is my fate for the next fifty years.

I am avid for diagnosis. I watch an old episode of The West Wing, where they describe multiple sclerosis. I am certain I have it. I visualize in helpless wonder the plaque eating my brain, tearing my nervous system to frayed shreds.

Imagination is bad, but ignorance is far worse. The real terror is that not even the ER doctors have found anything "wrong". I'm left to believe that this orchestra of ills is a simulacra of disease, an invention of my brain. Doctors suggest this with the cavalier air of something that should be relieving to me, as if it weren't horror on an ultimate scale to have your perceptions turn against you, to descend into a mild form of schizophrenia. I wonder if it's worth it to dope myself to the point of normative functioning. I wonder if it will come to that.

And beyond all the fretting about total cognitive collapse, stress-induced endemics are embarrassing, like wetting your pants in public. There is a sense in these suggestions that I have lost normal control, that I have become someone who needs to be carefully managed. As if, my frustrated senses maunder, persons in my life didn't need to put up with enough already, now I need a full-time nurse. A narcotic nanny. A pyschotropic practitioner. I can see myself in two years, locked in a wheelchair a la Hawking, trapped by the vagaries of my own mind. It has happened before to others. There is nothing to mark me as special, nothing to say that it couldn't happen to me.

I suppose the upshot is that I'm frightened, and wishing I could have a day in which my mind wasn't fuzzy and cluttered with these concerns. The animal me doesn't want to die, and as I approach that feeling I feel it bucking violently. But the real me is more concerned about the loss of thought, the attrition of my mental powers. If they are leaving me I'm truly becoming bereft, and there isn't much left for me in the future. I don't know if I can face that.

But life, really, affords very little choice in the matter of what we have to face.

Cetera desunt.

No Paean Without Gain

We contemplate Mister Fob.

Which is to say, rather, that we are uncomfortable with weakness in our superheroes; that we wish that everyone who presumes tights were textbook examples of well-turned muscles, of serious shindyism, of the grandest passions. Surely, Mister Fob places passions at our feet--anger, joy, the cancerous loves. But his SuperPassion is no doormat to smear off the collective mud of mundania; we feel the crack of the knees at every tall-building bound.

Therefore:

Look! --up there, in the sky: an Icarus bird, a super man, a plane of existence shearing into this one, scissors in the construction paper of the horizon.

To be seventeen again and weepy with desire, to spell letters in curlicues of sweat on another's back; there is something carotid about the emotion he sets down, warm blood feeding the angry brain, wrapped around the breathing thing. This is what it is to be a hero in his frame: to note the privies in the palaces, to turn the tables of celestial corruptions--to identify, indemnify, iterate possibilities. The man hangs batlike from his toes and views the world, and there is value in the floor vaulted overhead.

He sends his fishlike ideas into the world to do as fish have always done: to look unblinking, to eat unthinking, to be cold and scaled and delicious to the tongue, lean meat. They paddle upstream against the sluices of social living, they break the surface and flutter fins in the light, scattering green light upon the maundering natancy below. His men are great spiders of thought, spinning the stuff of their guts from pole to pole. His women--his women are wonderful.

Is writing living? There is no way to ask this without self-condemnation, without snaring the self in style. But Mister Fob bears the world as a bound scroll, sails in a freighter of paperback bindings. Struck between the two great worlds--transfixed by technicolor triangles, caught by Caesar's crosses--he is his own alter ego, his own altar superego. Write it, then: mild-mannered. But if it must be mild, it is the mild of an ocean's murmur on the far shore of a white-eyed tsunami, the rapid sheen of orange light down a knife's edge. Something rages in his peace, something as noble and as common as the salvation of the world.

And so we ask in some awe, what--indeed, what--immortal hand or eye can frame his awful sympathy? He is at once self-defined and self-obscured, an oversized thrush piping in the shadows. His is the red eye that sees the world ahead one step coming, his voice the drowned Dickens' heroine who returns.

The world is greater for his wriggling into it. The world is better for his barbs, struck with green insouciance between the lines. And heroism--that model for God--is more desirable for his detente. The giver of gifts turns to the dog and cries, "We're not in cantos anymore."

Quae cum ita sint, perge quo coepisti. Or, in mumbled grattitude, happy birthday.

Ode to His Life, On the Advent of the Perseids

The shooting star

is only rare

when he and other

stars compare.

For he, when on his

stellar race, is

juxtaposed by

others' stasis.

Thus, if you wish

your worth to prove,

don't just stand there--

Move! Move! Move!

More of the Same

I have decided that I don’t care if I’m being maudlin or overdramatic. The fact is that the last two weeks have been an exercise in mind-numbing futility and a barely restrained hysteria of misery, and as a result I have come to an eye-rattling sobriety about a few key issues concerning the quality of my life. I descend into this e-maundering not because I expect my penned charisma to crystallize sorrow into something easily expunged, but because truthfully I’m seeping with self-loathing and the poison has got to go somewhere. I elect for it to go on the page. Really, self-loathing bears a resemblance to manure in that way: spreading it around dilutes the effect somewhat. (Manure also provides important nutrients to growing things—and trust me, I understand the nourishment of schadenfreude to a shattered ego. Consider my small donation—as Julianne Moore once quipped with juicy astringency—a parting gift.)

You may well ask why these last two weeks have been so rotten. Well, the uncomfortable truth is that I don’t want to tell you. This is partly because I don’t trust you. (Sorry.) Dismal experience has taught me that nothing is so risible as me trying to explain how I’m wronged and wrong, and quite frankly I don’t need my already punctured soul scoured with derisive laughter (or even knowing smiles). In addition, your imagination has got to be more creative than the actual facts, and will doubtless come up with a life-situation so dire as to elicit real, warm pity. At this point I’m not above grubbing for sympathy. (Not, however, that I expect to get it. In fact, paucity of sympathy is the cornerstone of Eye-Rattling Sober Fact #1 of Tolkien Boy’s life. It turns out that sympathy is like oil: fungible, expensive, and the key to the seeming interminability of George Bush’s baffling presidency.) I doubt my silence will last long: I’m doubly hampered in confidentiality by being deep at heart a masochist (an aficionado of romantic S&M, if you will) and deeply invested in my inchoate biography as a nascent Oprahpick. Clever readers will note this puts my pain on a pedestal. Clever readers are invited, summarily, to go suck on their big toes.

I fully recognize that the reason why I’m so down on myself these days is that I perceive myself to be (with whatever delusions such perceptions require) simultaneously old, fat, and ugly. I should state with some rapidity that this is not a logical perception and therefore is completely immune to power comparisons: well-meaning people who attempt to prove the relative rosy-ness of my life through demonstration that older, fatter, and uglier people exist do little to raise my spirits. (For expansion on that theme, I refer you to Housman: “What does it matter to me/ that some lad had it worse?”) Psychiatrists will support my assertion that illogical perceptions are notoriously uninterested in comparison, anyway: it’s unlikely, for example, that Jeffery Dahmer could have missed the fact (so popularized in the media) that the vast majority of the populace neither decapitates nor devours their dinner guests. (One can imagine a particularly Polyannic therapist saying to the man, “Now, now, normal people don’t do that, dear” with mixed results.) I am similarly schizophrenic: indominately convinced of my unattractiveness I remain, and fiercely critical of any efforts by others to speak reason to me. I’m a monster. (Grr-rowr.)

I maintain this particular psychotic philosophy because I’m inveterately opportunistic, and because it answers the question which has made these last two weeks so doleful. The question is (drumroll please): Why don’t people want to hang out with me? Somehow, in the past two weeks my social calendar (always tenuous here in Seattle) seems to have completely dried up—people are not even answering my phone calls or my cheery invitations with vaguely plausible excuses anymore—or even at all. I don’t have anyone even to go to the movies with, which at age 28 is pretty bad—joint failures in professional ambition and emotional connectivity leave only the categories of rebellion and sports ability in the dossier of Summer Films Guide To Success. I am not, as you may guess, hopeful. I’ve been kicking this question of my unacceptability around most of the summer with little to no clarity coming forth on the subject; and frankly, the theories I have posited have been depressing. What, I ask with increasing dramatics, is motivating this exodus? I don’t think it’s my bubbly wit keeping people away, as I view that as rather an asset. It couldn’t be my real interest in people—who doesn’t like talking about themselves to an engaged audience? I’m hardly a threat to anyone, and I’m not a wet blanket. I lead when the group wants me to lead and follow when the group wants me to follow. In summary I’m a charming milquetoast, the perfect sidekick. You’d think someone would take advantage.

By now you are dying to suggest that my dogged pessimism is the reason why I am less popular than a polar bear at an OPEC convention. You’re wrong, though. I’ve eliminated pessimism from my daily discourse, and have reverted to noncommittal cheer in conversations with all persons save a few select friends. (This eruptive blog post may seem transgressive of that, but I excuse it with the fact that the few readers who might see this all live in states other than mine.) So, my oodles of unhappy imprecations are storing up for the person who wants to get to know me better (Heaven, help him!), and until that moment pessimism doesn’t factor into the fact-gathering.

So, I return to unattractivity, which even if depressing answers a lot of lingering side-questions in the whole issue. If my forehead looks like southern South Dakota, it can be assumed that the lovely people I meet know they can do better. If my hair resembles an unwashed and balding yak’s pelt, it makes sense that I should seem a little ridiculous. If my chin dissolves with disconcerting regularity into my neck—well, I understand that few people want to befriend Jabba the Hutt. If me on my best day can never match my acquaintances on their worst, it’s only natural that everyone should sort out to their own level.

I know I sound flip about all of this. Trust me when I say it’s deflection. In actuality, I’m in a crockery-throwing mood which is hardly helped by the fact that there are wall-length mirrors everywhere in my apartment. If I could pull the man out of the mirror, I think I’d punch him as hard as I could for being generally an idiot and believing that people he likes will return the interest. A high-school feeling, I know, but I think I got caught somewhere—I feel like I’m trying over and over to find one person who might say to themselves, “I’d like to hang out with him sometime” and failing, failing, failing. And failure—for all that I know I should be sticking to my goal and persevering with all those lovely Disney qualities of healthy living—is demeaning, deflating, and generally makes me wonder if, under all the bland mildness and showy wit in my personality, there’s anything worthwhile going on at all.

And that’s why it’s so rotten, these two weeks: I’ve been listening to myself. And after almost two weeks of insomniac cataloguing all the ways I’m wronged and wrong, I’m finding the full package of Tolkien Boy kind of pathetic. And that makes the selling all the more exhausting.

Blogs and Other Melodramatic Metaphors

How charming. The shakes are back.

I feel an unusual level of sympathy with my blog these days—not, mind you, what I have written, but the actual electronic mechanism which allows me to jot these schizophrenic thoughts down, those workhorse ones and zeroes doing their best to keep everything going smoothly. I feel this sympathy because it strikes me that we have a lot in common.

I have two laughs; has anyone noticed? They are not equal. There is my reserved laugh, a just-shy-of-explosive heh heh heh that I use in most social situations. It is not duplicitous—I don’t use it to lie—but I do find it easy to use when the situation calls for equivocation. My other laugh is more a shout than a laugh, a belly-full roar that can be embarrassing in its volume. The second laugh is much rarer than the first, it bursts out only in moments when I’m not watching. I have not used it for months. It may have been nearly half a year since I had a to-my-toes laugh. I miss it. It’s not that life isn’t funny—it is, in its perverse way—it’s that I don’t have anyone at the moment who sympathizes with my viewpoint. And a lack of sympathy puts me on guard, which ossifies the heh-heh-heh as my modus laugherandi.

“You need to open up to people,” says my friend, over and over again, until I want to point out with some hysteria that he’s decided that I’m closed so strongly that he misses everything I’m saying. Rather, he advantage of this perception of my closeness to tell me more about himself, to define himself in careful colors while I work alongside him to help him spell it out. In our four years of friendship, I have belly-laughed with him once. He might be surprised, in fact, to learn that one of the reasons I seem so unassailable is because he has never—or hardly ever—expressed even the slightest curiosity about the realities of my life. “Do what my lips are telling you not to do,” is often the message, and I don’t respond to that. Call me curmudgeonly.

So, why am I the blog? Well, as Someartist can attest, I have absolutely no working knowledge of what makes this blog operate. The extent of my knowledge is finely calibrated to encompass everything I need to know to get this blog to give me a blank slate to try to define myself on—beyond that, as long as it functions properly I’m perfectly content to be ignorant. And when it doesn’t function properly, I take it as a personal attack, and petulantly beg others to fix the problem so that I can go back to my self-defining activities. This, I think, is the attitude my friend takes to me—with a possible difference that my friend has a neverending confidence that I’ll be “all right” in the end, whereas I have great faith that eventually my blog will blow up.

If, I propose, I could have had a belly-laugh this month, I would not have the shakes tonight. But probably I am wrong—the shakes are more about love and feeling acceptable than anything, which has nothing or little to do with releasing excesses of emotion or truly enjoying myself. So, perhaps, belly-laughs are not really the way to reach the “all right” my friend predicts for me.

Still—I wouldn’t mind one. Or maybe twenty. Really, I find them much more charming than the shakes.

Yeah, It's That Obvious

HOMELESS WOMAN TO ME AS I PASSED HER BY ON THE STREET: "I hope you get feeling better soon, so you can be fashionable again."

Job's Lament

When life is wrecked and empty,

and senses bland and blue,

my friends will come to comfort me

by telling me what to do.

When loving friends abuse me so,

I cannot help but think--

How oft, to men near dead of thirst,

have I lectured how to drink!