1000 Natural Shocks

Here’s how you can really get a keen lock on your progression away from everything and everybody. Your keen and inexorable unmooring. With this one horrible little turn of phrase, informally spoken and not actually meant, you can be ruined;

“You should write a book.” Right? The worst, right? “Oh, my god. That’s crazy. That’s so funny. You should write a book.”

“Hm,” you think. “Maybe I should write a book. How hard could that be? You know, I should write a book. A book, all about it.”

“Oh, my god. What a great story. You should write a book. Don’t you think, honey?”

“What?”

“He should write a book.”

“Yeah. Why not? He should write a book.”

“You should write a book.”

It goes on like that. You go on like that, thinking you should maybe write a book.

Then you don’t write a book. You work. You talk. You accumulate little party stories, little bits of things to say at a bar over drinks with the people that you know who also tell you should write a book, and the people who think you should shut the fuck up. You drink too much, you smoke too much, you don’t bother to do anything apart from think about how badly you’d actually like to write a book because it might just get you the fuck away from the bar and the work and the people and the horrifying inertia that leaves you in such a panic that you can barely stand to even look at a fucking book. You stop reading books.

You read newspapers, at first just for the comics. “Family Circus.” “For Better Or For Worse.” “Herb and Jamal.” “Zits.” “Ziggy,” “Cathy,” “Marmaduke,” “Garfield.” Motherfucking “Peanuts.” Whatever. Stupid shit with tidy, feel-good messages that, after a while, start to make you want to kill. “Mallard Fillmore.” “The Wizard of Id.” “Hagar the Horrible.” Is this shit really still in the newspaper? “The Lockhorns.” “B.C.” “Apartment 3A.” “Brenda Starr.” That thing with the cute little cat and dog that speak phonetically in baby-talk. Instead of “yes,” they say “yesh.” Y-E-S-H, “yesh.” That thing with the grumpy-but-nice retired couple. “Where’s the remote?” “The what?” “You know, that thing where you push its buttons and you become interesting??” “Fuck you, bitch!!” Ba-dum-bum. That thing with the young, brunette couple raising a red-headed infant that, in the scale of the comic strip, would be the size of a gerbil in real life. “Aww. He shit his pants again.” “Aww. Our gerbil-baby’s shit has reminded me to ‘hang in there!’”

So you stop reading comics. “Maybe I should read a better paper,” you think. “A paper without comics,” you think. So you do. You read that. You read the News. It is appalling. You read the International news. It is even more appalling. You read the Opinions. They are not your opinions. You read the Business Section. Well, you don’t. You stop after the scrawl of numbers frightens and intimidates you. You set the Sports section on fire on the subway, then quickly get off at the next stop.

You switch to magazines. Big, glossy rags with gossip and fake boobs and thongs and pictures of celebrity homes and stars without their makeup in their giant, house-sized cars. Easy-to-complete crosswords and makeover advice and sweaty pecs and giant handbags and tiny dogs and pencil-thin waistlines. Sex-quizzes and fertility formulas and yoga positions and hyper-realistic, pornographic close-ups of food and stomach-stapling procedures. Before and after photos of bellies, noses, necks, hairlines, lips, jowls, teeth, tits, and man-tits.

You switch magazines again. And again. And again. And, even whether it’s political or literary or experimental or artsy or just plain Hip, you switch magazines again.

And then what? What then?

You go back to books. And back to the bar. And back, and back, and back. And when it comes around again, the next turn-of-phrase is worse.

“Why don’t you write a book?”

“Why don’t I?”

“Why don’t you! Write a book!”

“Hm,” you think. “Why don’t I?”

Why. Don’t. I?

Well, that’s another whole different thing, though, right? I mean, you phrase it that way and you have to ask yourself; why don’t I?

I mean, at that point, you really have to get into it. You’ve been asked a direct question. “J’accuse,” someone has said. Yeah, it’s rhetorical. Yeah, the question isn’t asked with any kind of answer realistically in mind, but the question’s been asked nonetheless. “Why?”

So, if you’re like me, you think. You think, “Why?”

You think that, and you read some more books. You read good books. And you read really, really shitty books. And you read everything in sight, and you ask, “Why?”

You read all the time, and maybe it makes you kind of un-well. You read the label on your laundry detergent to see if you can find that one ingredient, the one chemical compound that makes it, once and for all, “laundry-line-fresh.” You read every panel of every advertisement in every car of every subway, because you feel clever that you’re on to them for knowing that they write them sequentially just to keep you reading, to give you a way to not have to deal with the smelly little man next to you, and maybe you are the smelly little man and you just don’t fucking care, you’re going to read it all anyway. You read the horrible menus in the horrible delis with their horrible grammar. You read the touch screen at the ATM, and feel cozy because it knows your name, and says “What shall we do today?” You read the horoscopes and sex-columns off the back-pages of the folded up weekly that sits atop the teetering pile of them beside your toilet. You read them over and over again and parse them for meaning until the next issue comes. You read the acknowledgements page in the book you’re reading just as thoroughly as you read the book itself, because maybe, if you knew who to thank, you would know why you don’t write your own book, already?

And you stop. You stop it all. You kill it. You drown it. You suffocate it. You stop it.

And you get on. You have a laugh. You see a few people. You work, and work, and work, and you forget. You go out to a bar. You see someone you’ve told a funny story to before, and you tell them a funny story.

What do they say?

They say; “Ha-ha! That’s good. I don’t know why you don’t just write a book.”

You see what happens? You see how dismissive? You see how it’s not even a question anymore? Now it’s, “you poor fucker.” Now it’s, “I lament you.” Now it’s a fucking kaddish. A requiem. A sadness and a lament. And you haven’t even done anything yet. You haven’t done shit. You’ve pissed everything away. You’ve vomited it and crapped it out with ass-burning diarrhea and you’ve consumed and drunk the world, and you haven’t done a fucking thing. And you’re not even some crazy old bastard, running around in your underwear with a flashlight trying to stop the Norwegian princes from partying in the basement. You’re a “regular guy.” You’re just some guy trying to get by in this crazy little world, trying to put himself into context, trying to understand how he got here, to this squalid little place. You’re just trying to put it all together.

I don’t know why I don’t just.

I don’t know why I don’t just.

“Just.” I mean, “just??”

As if to imply that there were things to do, simple things that anyone might do, that if you weren’t too unimaginative to just do them, that they would in some way, I don’t know, fix things. That they would make the world better. That they would make you better. That the endless talk and chatter and confession would somehow fix the million little wrongs that were done to you when you were a small, impressionable child, a little shivery thing the size of a gerbil, with your big wide eyes and your gap-teeth and your dirty fingers and your trust your trust your trust.

You can’t fix it. You can’t talk it. You can’t write it.

Maybe you could act it, if you could just shut the fuck up for a minute. If you could tell that little gerbil baby to shut the fuck up about its million little hurts already, if you could stop analyzing and micromanaging and confessing and confessing each and every mundane thing you do in every hour of every day, like it was a daring, madcap caper.

“Omigod, I totally almost said something really insulting to that guy on the elevator, omigod, omigod, what the fuck!” “Omigod, I totally like a kind of music that most other people don’t like and I think it probably ennobles me and I really need to find other people who will validate that for me. Are you there? Omigod!” “Omigod, I’m so lonely! What the fuck, what the fuck, Omigod!!”

Like you were unique.

Maybe if you could shut up and leave yourself alone for a minute, maybe you could move forward instead of spinning. Instead of standing in one place, spinning.

“But I hurt.”

You hurt? Of course you hurt. It fucking hurts! So kill yourself, then. Stop complaining, and kill yourself already. End it. Stop spinning, start dying. Do it. Do it!! Don’t do it passively. Don’t do it with drink. Don’t do it with smoke. Don’t do it in isolation – ignoring, forgetting. Withering. Really do it like you mean it. Open up that shirt. Expose that sternum. Take that kitchen knife. Wedge it right in there, right between the ribs. Then twist that knife. Pry that ribcage open. It’s just gristle, it’ll give. Make a little space. Dig in there. Get your hands dirty. Feel around in there. Find the thing that makes it hurt. Then grab it. Then rip it out. Then crush it. End it. Do it!!

No?

Too scared? Me, too. It’s scary. Because – well. Because it is. Because what if it’s worse? Because what if you go through with it and end up spending eternity with a bunch of dead relatives? Because you’ve been very, very bad, and what if you do have to pay for it in some way? Because, what if the Buddhists are right and you just have to start all over again? And because, since you’ve been bad, you have to start over as a cat or a chicken or a fucking tree, just to work your way back to being a man again, and then hurt all over again. And then if you can stand that, and if you can stand it a thousand more times, you will be rewarded richly with nothingness.

Because, ultimately, why squander yourself, just because it hurts?

I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t. Know.

I would write a book about it, if I could stop thinking and spinning and just shut the fuck up for a minute.