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.

Flight Dream

So, me and dad were in a plane. A small plane. A very small plane. The kind of plane you see pulling banners over the beach, or circling over MacArthur Airport. He was in the pilot’s seat. He was driving. We were on the ground, trying to take off. Just driving through back roads, trying to find a stretch of road long enough to take off.

“Dad didn’t drive planes.”

I know. I know. Just bear with me. He wasn’t driving it like he drove them all the time. It was like we were in the little Datsun, the little yellow one, but it was a plane. Anyway, there was this little kid with us. This little egg-head kid. You know the kind I mean. The kind that’s like me. A little know-it-all, egg-head doofus. And he’s sitting next to me. I’m sitting between him and dad.

“In the Datsun.”

In the plane.

“Who was the kid?”

I don’t know. I couldn’t tell. He was just there. And he and I were talking as dad was driving the Datsun – the plane through all kinds of wooded back-roads, trying to find somewhere to take off. And the kid – I don’t know, whoever he was – was just asking me questions about dad.

“I’ll bet he was. Your father didn’t fly planes.”

I know, I know. I don’t know what he was asking. Wait, no. I know. He was asking about ‘was dad scared when he had to run the country.’

“Dad didn’t run the country.”

I know! But the kid – I don’t know, the little egg-head. He was convinced – he thought that dad was, I don’t know, in charge of a country. A European country. France or Belgium or somewhere. I don’t know, Switzerland or Denmark or something. He was convinced. He was worried. Scared. Sad, because dad had had such a hard time running his country.

“His parents were peasants. They were poor. We were poor. Anyone that came here was poor. You know this. It’s – it’s boring. It’s not your business.”

So this kid, this little egg-head just keeps going on and on and he’s almost crying, he’s so sad for dad and how hard it must be for him to run the country. And then dad, he’s just behind me, to my right, I’m between him and the kid, and dad says my name and I look at him. And I have a flashback – I know, ‘how can you have a flashback in a’ – I know. But I look over my shoulder at him and his eyes are small and kind, and his nose is big, and his moustache hides his mouth, and he is just like he was when he would drive me to any of the places I was afraid to go as a kid. He was – apologetic. Apologetic, but inevitable. And he said, ‘I found us somewhere to take off.’

“This is silly. Dad – couldn’t fly a plane. He worked hard. He took you where you needed to go.”

And I looked out the front window of the plane, because it was a bigger plane now, and I saw that road; that same long road, bound on either side by big tall pines, with power lines over head, descending in plateaus – no, no. In increments. Descending in flat, lowering increments, that same narrow road that used to give me nightmares. I hadn’t seen it in years, and there it was. I realized that I’ve been dreaming of that road all my life. I don’t know why it should be so scary. It’s just, the way that it descends – the way it goes down and down and out of sight and is empty and ominous. And the boy is not here anymore – well, he’s not next to me, but he’s here on the plane with us. With all of us. We’re all here.

“I’m there? Who’s there? Your brother?”

I don’t know.

“Your Uncle? Your boyfriend? Who??”

I don’t know!!! I just know we’re all there. And dad smiles at me. And his smile says that he’s sorry and that he loves me and that it’s inevitable. And he looks out in front of us, and starts to speed up, and I can tell that he’s getting ready to take off. And the plane rattles and shakes and shudders and starts to pull itself off the ground. And I’m happy, because – well, because dad doesn’t fly planes, and this plane is going to take off! And I settle in, and I think that I couldn’t possibly be happier to be here, with him, with us, in the Datsun –

“The plane.”

The plane. And just as the wheels are about to part from the asphalt, just as we are about to make that tiny separation that means that we’re flying, just as it’s about to happen, dad turns to me and says, ‘I wish I’d done something better with my life.’

“He would never say something like that.”

‘I wish I’d done something better with my life.’

“This is – this – are you hungry? Let me make you a sandwich.”

‘Something better. With my life,’ he said. And the plane roared and pushed and the skin on my face started to spread backwards and we were – we were off the ground. We had taken off. We were – we were flying. Flying! Our little plane had launched off the horrible little descending road from my nightmares. We were heading up. My stomach dropped. I was beaming. And just –

“I’ll cook you an egg.”

And just –

“Or make you some tuna.”

And just as the clouds cleared and the sun shone and the whole sky opened up to swallow us whole –

“Your father doesn’t fly planes.”

I felt us catch on something. I felt us drag. The plane got caught on one of the power lines over the road. That was it. We were doomed. It was over. I could feel, I don’t know, the plane get yanked out from under me.

“I’m making you a salad.”

This plane, it was – we were moving too fast. Dad had made us go too fast. He couldn’t get us past the power lines. We got caught, and now we were doomed.

“I’ll put some egg in the salad.”

And somehow, the logic of it all got messed up. Somehow, my mind wouldn’t allow this to happen. Somehow, as the plane collapsed, I was thrown forward through the windscreen. I was airborne. I was flying. Somehow, time slowed down, and from the wreckage and the catastrophe, I was thrown forward. I was floating. I moved ahead and I spotted one of the tall, greasy timbers the powerlines were strung from. The powerlines we’d been caught in. There was a grey or green transformer bolted to the side of it, and I floated down and I landed on it. With bare feet. Without splinters. I landed on it, and I embraced it. The brown, splintery, greasy timber that the powerlines were strung from. I hugged it and I waited to watch the fireball of our little plane, our little Datsun to come screaming past.

“I – I’m going to make some – do you want a hamburger?”

And it never did. It didn’t come screaming past. It vanished. And there I was, grease smearing my face, hugging a giant wooden pole, standing on a high-voltage transformer, waiting for a fireball that never came. And, do you know what I did?

“I – no. No. I don’t know.”

I don’t know. I woke up. I went to work. I – I thought about something else. I put it away, this message I’d received. This symbol or this whatever-it-was. I ignored it. What sort of a person does that? What sort of a person just ignores the things that their own brain is trying to tell them? I mean, don’t you think it means something?

“I think you’re overreacting. I think I don’t enjoy this kind of talk very much.”

No. No, I wouldn’t think so. No, I don’t think I enjoy this kind of talk much myself. I’m going to – thanks for letting me stay for the weekend.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

No, really. Thanks.

“Let me cook you a hamburger.”

No, no. That’s alright. I think – I think I’ll just go out for a little while. Take a drive, maybe. Cool off.

“If you’re sure.”

Yeah. Yeah, I’m sure. I’ll just go out and cool off for a little while.

“…”

Maybe stop by the bar and have a beer or something. See if anyone’s around.

“…”

Yeah. That’s what I’ll do. Hey – don’t. Let me – I can help you clean up, if you want.

“No, it’s fine. It’s almost done. You go.”

I’ll go.

“…”

See you later.

“…”