Volume 3, Entry 44: Pop
A raw transcription from inches away
It all starts innocently enough. You’re listening to Will and Tim talk about Tar. They’re excited by the film; you get excited about the film. You wonder if it’s playing locally so you open Fandango and discover that it’s at Delta Shores and at Tower. Neither is ideal—25 minutes and 40 minutes of transit time, respectively—but the film is here. You can see Tar.
You let your mind drift away from the second movie they’re reviewing as you look in your head for a date to see it. [[This was your mistake.]] Today, Saturday the 29th, is out for your mother’s birthday dinner. Tomorrow is out for the review session and the test you’ll need to finish tonight but then redo and make a rubric for tomorrow as well as the lesson plans, the playbook update, the new test version, the AMC organization, whatever recommendation portals get opened, the new Standards Quizzes (since you reused a pair last week), making lunch and dinner, and maybe squeezing in a few thank you messages for Diamond Day if there’s time. Monday is out for PowderPuff practice and test grading, the latter of which you won’t finish and will thus hang over you through Tuesday when the rally, the team photos, the game itself, the Mathletes meeting, the new lessons you inevitably don’t get to Sunday, the practice tools to buy time, and organizing the field trip paperwork and maybe the receipts to hopefully get reimbursed, will all take over. You’ll have some time in first period while they quiz, but not much. So maybe it’s Wednesday night, you think, ever the optimist. But you know you will fall asleep if you go on Wednesday—Tuesday night will be so so late; plus Wednesday must be your catch-up day from everything that falls through the Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday cracks. So it should be Thurs—nope. Mathletes meet. Hell: Mathletes meet chased nearly immediately with a review session you’d honestly rather not host because of its timing but that you’ve already felt the pressure to host. So Thursday’s out, which leaves you Friday…when you’ll have a six-page test and two quizzes to grade. Add in the exhaustion of another jam-packed week and you’ll be too tired to watch anyhow. Saturday is out because of the play that you will end up snoozing through despite having the best seats you can imagine. So…Sunday? Maybe Sunday afternoon? It depends on what lessons you have to—oh. That’s right. You have a full week of lessons in every single class upcoming. So Sunday—next Sunday, not just this Sunday—is out, just as Tar could be by the time you have even one single evening when you can talk yourself into trying to see it.
When you leave for your morning walk in the dark, all of this is still running through your head. You’re also thinking about the inquiry you haven’t written to the news magazines about your book and the boxes you haven’t opened and the text you still haven’t responded to and the birthday wishes you haven’t sent and the overheard words that are bouncing around your skull with serrated edges that leave your brain feeling damaged. You don’t have room for those thoughts. They float like helium balloons at the top, looming in the background of all the other thoughts, colorful distractions that need to be dealt with but are simply out of reach.
The nausea arrives first. You felt a bit more discomfort earlier that you attributed to the excessive meal last night, but this nausea is strong enough that you can taste the rising bile pressed against your throat. The claustrophobia soon joins as the still-dark, star-pocked sky begins to press down on your chest despite their orthogonality. You are freezing, your hands barely functioning, and your head is heavier than ever, its mouth and eyes filled with jagged blocks of cement that drag your eyes downward. Your breathing is brisk—it always is on these solo walks—but you recognize the difference immediately. Trying not to give into the pa…feeling, you cut short your normal path toward the creek and proceed directly home. If your symptoms worsen, you can’t be in public. You can’t be out there as the sun rises. You can’t risk a concerned passerby calling 911 for you.
You down an antacid. You spend time in the bathroom. You turn off the music. You start to lose consciousness and drift off while still walking but you slap yourself to wake up. The slap is harder, more forceful than you intend it; you have no precision right now. You are not spiraling or caught in an attack right now, but you can feel yourself on the verge of one, a scarier position than actually having one because the tense anticipation sets everything on fire. You want to sob because your concrete head seems like it can’t hold anything anymore but your emotions have glitched out and you can’t smile or frown or alter your expression at all. Your face is as locked into place as you feel, caged into slack-jawed half-alive zombie despair. You are not sad; you are defeated. You see nothing on the horizon but work and dwindling sleep and unnecessary conversations and pointless activities that wouldn’t be pointless but that others will make you feel are pointless despite the time you have to invest in them and you’ll get more and more and more letter requests and more and more work and more and more rule changes and more and more disappointments and more and more stomach aches and more and more overheard hypocrisy that will keep hooking you like the meat hooks in American Horror Story and each day the taste of your Clif Bar or buttered noodles or slice of pizza will be less and less convincing as your target, especially when the wrong overheard comment will remind you that you have either 26 more years of this or 26 years of feeling guilty about the years not being full of this and you’re not sure you can do 26 more days of it let alone years of this miserable fucking life where you can’t even read a book or watch a fucking movie because you’re so paralyzed by needing to do more but haunted by being told to just go with what already exists but then finding so much crap that defending it to your students let alone yourself is a bigger task than just starving your body of sleep and fixing it except fixing it requires a meeting to explain the fixes that should be obvious and so you realize you are fucked from every direction and that this entire fucking thing is terrifyingly unwinnable and that you are hooked to an IV that pumps toxic liquid into your veins that poisons everything anyway but that you never let kill you but instead watch as it tears apart the atoms in your brain and heart until withering dying cells of joy whimper on the ground like wounded birds that once could fly away but no longer can any more than you can you flightless lump of misery that hooks up the very IV that slowly murders you. It’s you, hi, you’re the problem it’s you, but this isn’t a revelation it’s a fact, it’s why the slap was harder than needed and why none of this ultimately works and why you punish yourself every single day over and over and over and over again with the very poison that induces your nausea. Is it Munchhausen by proxy if you make yourself sick? Can you bemoan the exhaustion if you orchestrate it?
Orchestrate.
Conduct.
Conductor.
Tar.
Tar is about a conductor, right?
You’d like to see Tar.
Tim and Will enjoyed Tar so much.
You should see Tar.
When’s the next open
…
Can’t you see it? Can’t you see the notes on the page are arranged wrong? It’s your name at the top! It’s your handwriting on the staves. You composed that bass line! The dissonance is in your ear because you transcribed it from there. It’s you hi you’re the problem it’s you. You know the chord sucks but you keep sending the progression there! You are the nurse hooking up the needle. You are the composer scribbling in off-putting notes. You are the person who decided to try to change and feel differently this year and said yes to everything even though you knew it wouldn’t make a difference, that it wasn’t last year’s iteration that was wrong but the earlier one, that you hate being in a place that makes you ill and you resist the vampires that drink of your blood but complain about the bitter taste, and that you hate the work that fills up every hour and that you have been so thoroughly trained to prioritize over yourself that you knew when you said yes to all of it that you would get like this. You fucking signed up for this! It’s you hi you’re the problem it’s fucking you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you’re the problem IT’S FUCKING YOU. Fuck you, it’s still you, it was you, it always will be you. YOUR BLOOD IS BITTER, YOU MORON! It. Is. YOU. You didn’t want to see Tar; you wanted a concrete reason to explode against the poison. Little did you know that was going to backfire and land right back in the mirror. It all does, fucker. All of it does. Everybody agrees everybody agrees.
And now you’re trapped again, the lyrics perverted into larger, sharper needles that hang from your skin like hooks. If only you could cry and sob and struggle to breathe. If only the panic attack could actually start instead of this stoic intellectualization of your self-immolation. Instead of exploding at yourself, you could just explode and experience the equilibrium that you crave. But your face is locked in place. That’s why your jaw hurts. That’s why your stubborn eyes are burning. You want the release of losing control but you can’t anymore because the song is stuck in your head and you can’t pretend that you have lost control. You know exactly what you are doing to yourself. You can’t get out of this unless you stop hooking up your IV and stop writing terrible harmonies and stop trying to positive, optimist, Therapy Thursday your way out of this. You hate it all—or you hate so much of it that the parts you don’t hate are gnats in comparison. You know how this is going to end in a few sentences. You’ve known since the feeling overtook you at the first beat of track three. You know the answers but you keep studying like you haven’t been studying every minute of the last three years. You can say it with me if you want. But you don’t have to. You’ll hear it either way. Taylor sang the lyrics but they’re your words and have been your words for so long that they don’t even taste bitter anymore.
Are you ready?
Need to get one more slap in?
It’s you. Hi. You’re the problem it’s you.
You.
I had a choice with this piece. I could share it or bury it.
This entire exercise fails if I bury it.
