Volume 4, Entry 9: Craterbound
Drop everything and tumble down with me
I drop things constantly as it is, but nothing slips through my fingers more readily than the feeling of happiness.
When I pick up my house key, the small ring always seems to be properly secured. There’s no indication that I’m going to drop it. I’m just trying to slip out the door or go grab the mail, nothing major, but then my keys have fallen behind the shoe rack or onto the garage floor and I am twisting and cursing while reaching unsuccessfully for them. That recovering them will take multiple attempts is Thanos-style inevitable. Even when they end up in my hand once again, I know they will be dropped again. There is no relief in holding what is destined to drop; I can feel the deterioration in my fingers’ joints just waiting to make itself known as gravity accepts what I could not maintain a grip on.
Being happy is like that.
It just snaps away. Blink and you’ve missed it. The world recolors itself, it toggles into this bluegray sheen that muddles everything. It doesn’t matter that the light is warm or the scents of a hardy meal linger still in all corners of the room. Everything has changed. The bright pop songs suddenly modulate into a minor key.
This happened last night. I could write that about so many last nights, but I’m writing it about this one. After a tumultuous day, I had knocked out my lessons and eaten a way-too-heavy dinner way too late. After finishing the meal up, I had a full final exam draft already handwritten, I’d redone the facility request forms, I’d watched a movie, and my to-do list had reached a point where none of the work stuff could be completed before bed. Yes, my energy had been sucked out of me by a miserable day, but at least I wasn’t a captive to more work, no matter how persistent a little voice was with telling me to start typing up that final exam.
The day before had included my annual contribution to the Babe Ruth baseball league: I ran their draft again, as I have every year since 2006. With only six teams and almost every coaching staff populated by familiar faces, it was the smoothest, most positive experience I’ve had while filling my tiny role.
After the draft ended, one of the long-time coaches, Scott, asked me if I still had the draft grid for 2011. He had the complete set from his coaching tenure, he said, except that one. With that last one, he’d have the full record of every kid he’d coached.
Asking me to dig into my old computers and paw around for an obscure Excel spreadsheet might as well have been a gift card to Crumbl or a new A’s hat. All throughout that miserable day, I’d been thinking about that search: where I would look, why Scott might have missed that one, who might have been drafted that February when my AVID class was still in their junior years. Thinking about that search sent my brain racing through other adjacent thoughts as well: whom I had drafted in earlier years and whether I could remember them (I could).
So, post-dinner, I let myself begin the hunt in earnest. I pulled out my broken old laptop and searched there. 2014 and 2015 got recovered, but no dice on anything earlier.
I moved to the tower and began digging around. False lead after false lead eventually gave way to several discoveries: 2007, 2008, and 2012 all moved from cobwebbed corners of my hard drive into a prominent folder on my desktop. All three left me excited with anticipation: the file Scott desired had to be close.
2011 remained elusive, though. I’d found the empty Draft Suite template primed and ready to be completed by a 24-year-old me twelve years ago, but not the grid. I wondered for a second if I could reconstruct it from memory but, alas, since I wasn’t coaching that year, the names felt less familiar.
I began spiraling. You know that old saying about how “doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results is the definition of insanity”? Well, there was my application for diagnosis. I kept clicking on the same six template files, each time hoping that the contents would be inside and that I’d somehow missed them. The generous interpretation of my delirious clicking and re-clicking would be that it kept my fingers busy while I thought but
Wait.
I had it. I had it. I had it!
I never delete emails. I never close my old email accounts, either. My account from high school and college that I used for baseball stuff until 2014 is still open, accumulating junk mail and forwarded messages from my current account ad infinitum. What if I searched there, in my sent messages folder? Surely I would have sent out a final grid to the coaches (or at least the board members) after the 2011 draft concluded?
Sure enough, the draft grid was there. Saturday, February 26, 2011. I’d sent it out a little after noon. I gleefully downloaded it into my new folder for the archived draft artifacts, and then sent a message to Scott. After attaching it, I took a deep sigh and pressed send.
I walked back to my kitchen, expecting that rush of joy to carry me through the rest of the evening. Two steps beyond my sink, though, I cratered.
The joy just disappeared. My heart sank, my mood fell, and my stomach twisted. My arms felt heavy and a sourness spread throughout my chest. My face froze into its catatonic stare that always accompanies this sudden shift. My lips had been curled up moments—literal seconds!—before in a contented smile as I thought about Scott getting that email with precisely what he’d asked for and how chasing something down to deliver happiness to an acquaintance left me feeling powerful and then my face was frozen in a despondent frown, the room lit by a somber blue light visible only to my eyes.
I could feel the misery machine booting up, its low sickening hum poisoning the soundscape around me too. But, unlike the aged machines I’d been scraping around for Scott, this computer had booted up instantaneously—and without me pushing any button. It was off but then it was on, dropped keys, lost files, a punch to my gut that left me OOFing in my head while my face remained paralyzed but for arrhythmic blinking.
I tried to short circuit the cratering before it got worse. Steering my malfunctioning brain back to that draft grid and sending the message to Scott, I tried to focus on the last kernel of happiness I had felt. What I’d done had been nothing in the grand scheme of the universe, but executing a plan to enact a tiny bit of good for a good dude just because I had the power to do it was
I was sobbing before that thought could finish. I had felt powerful in that moment, like a force of good with agency and strength, but attributing power to myself was laughable. The voice didn’t need to say it; in my cratered state, emotion arrives automatically without hesitation. A powerful person wouldn’t fall into an outward fugue state three minutes after experiencing satisfaction. Nice try. My brain computing too quickly for me to keep up with it, all I felt was the defeated feeling of having been naïvely stupid to have felt powerful.
The sobbing fit meant a panic attack would be imminent, and I was not feeling up for one of those. But that meant I needed to get ahead of my brain, to stop it from catastrophizing further and dumping further toxicity into my thoughtstream that could cloud up the final vestiges of my awareness and, pitifully minimal though it was, my control.
My TV was on. The YouTube app sat waiting for me. I clicked down the Home Screen until I found a Taylor Swift mashup. I didn’t care which songs were included, I clicked on it before I lost sufficient composure to operate my hands. The mashup was with an Olivia Rodrigo song from SOUR which meant I had to concentrate on the music and lyrics as their interweaving subverted the notes and lyrics I kept anticipating. Halfway through the piece, the sobbing had receded into tears and my unmovable lips were only quivering.
I thought about the upcoming concert. I thought about Speak Now TV which could release any day. I thought about walking along the creek when I first realized I loved her music which made me think about the “Betty” culdesac and the Memoria street and splashing in the puddles while listening to Dorkfest and singing Ke$ha in the car and about grocery store birthday cake and the warmth of seeing Larry and Carey and Brent and Amanda and Brian and that my last pick Michael is a police officer now and how long ago it had all been but yet I could still lay out the draft order from that Infinite Cardinals team and drafting Cameron before Joe and Rodney could take him and that my Oscars Deathrace was so close to completion and that I would be making this a four day week and
The mashup ends. I toggle autoplay off on the YouTube app, but, for some reason, that never applies to music, so another song begins immediately. “Run Away with Me” by Carly Rae Jepsen, the only song outside Taylor’s catalog that I’ve given any play in 2023 while I’m unable to run. One of the most fun, engaging songs I have ever heard. A song that I routinely dance to. A song that makes me picture being the guy Jepsen is pulling through the video and begging to be a part of her life.
I am sobbing again. When I realize it, I attempt to jerk my shoulders into motion; I’m am hoping to give myself up to the music and dance around in that stupid way that her song makes me do, but my body is catatonic again and my thoughts are already spiraling into my inability to take care of myself and how I need someone to protect me and help me with everything I can’t do but how desperately I don’t want anyone around me for the peace and security of not needing to cater to their needs and lose myself in the process but yet how I desperately need people and want someone to grab me by the hand and tell me what to do because everything I choose is wrong and I don’t know myself any better than anyone else because I am a chameleon who compulsively becomes what you want and you need and who can’t stop thinking about other people because I crave their attention and adulation to fill in the craters that comprise me but who sinks into a crater because they want something from me and Jepsen is so happy so so so happy on the screen and wasn’t I just that way like seven minutes ago I was but now I’m not because I’m so fragile that I break without being touched and nothing good that I feel escapes ephemerality and I am on that roller coaster going downward and I only go up to go down again and I’m plunging into the crater and finding the darkness so familiar because I always land here but yet it isn’t welcoming but a nightmare of emotional paralysis that leaves only this flickering pea-sized relic of my self and my thoughts to cower in the corner while I sob myself into a frenzy over one of my favorite songs oh if Jepsen could pull that tiny slivering hang nail of me out of this crater and away into that vibrant musical world just so I could escape this crater that might as well be Samara’s well so dark and due to be sealed up any moment if I don’t
A spasm of my failing fingers clicks the power button on the remote that has never left my hand. The only sound in the house is my plodding feet across the carpet. My brain tries to autocomplete the song but its melody has faded. I stare down at my shoes as they walk and try to match my breathing to their steady gait. My head is still fugued but my eyes wander the room as I traverse around it and I spot Cayenne pepper and a tiny panda seal keychain and a shiny grill set and a book about baseball and a stationary bike that only fits because Nate carried out the speaker boxes two months ago before he and Bria moved and my laptop bag from the draft. The draft
where I talked to Scott. He said he needed the 2011 draft grid to complete his set. I found the 2011 draft grid and sent it to him. It makes me happy that he might be happy.
I flex my fingers and they feel sluggish and ill-fitting. But my keys are hung on the rack Ethan helped me mount that day he and Michelle helped me pick things up before surgery. The keys will stay there until tomorrow morning. I’m sure I’ll drop them. I always drop them. But they’re hanging up right now.
I take no chances. I brush my teeth and climb into bed at 8:21.
My second-to-last waking thought is a series of questions:
Are you sure Scott wanted 2011? What if it was another year? What if he needed a different one?
My last waking thought is not a question:
I hope it was another year. That search made me feel happy.
[[ The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results. ]]
The pieces of writing that stick with me the longest are the raw ones when I don’t fictionalize or editorialize or even revise but simply transcribe. This is my brain, my cratered emotions, my mind and heart and flickering-out will in its most naked form.
I have a choice about whether to share something like this. I could have polished the warm little story about reading a British novel in the emergency room or taken another crack at the extended allegory about the horse. But I choose to share this, whether anyone reads or not and whether anyone cares or not, because I have to believe there is value in modeling openness this way. Value to you; value to me.
If people want to erase the stigma around mental unhealth, they need to talk about it. I talk about it. I’m as proud of posting something like this, publicly, as anything I do.
