Cupcake Heartbreak

When I was seventeen, I flew to California to meet my father. I wore a shimmery blue A-line floor length skirt with a sparkly moon on the bottom in the front, and a red hoodie with 3/4 length sleeves because that’s what they wore in the Delia’s catalog and my only dream then was to imagine myself one of those girls: capable of effortless, cool outfits, endlessly reaching into my closet and producing something other than the same pit-stained baby tee that said something like DOLLHOUSE or FRESHJIVE on the front. Oh, and headphones: anything with an image of those chunky serious record producer-style headphones on the front meant Cool. It meant Probably Has a Skateboard. It meant Is Interesting to Talk To About Stuff Like Bjork and Knows About Bands Like Snowpony. It meant oh yeah I can totally afford a shit ton of $34 tank tops on my Dairy Queen paycheck. And since I was seventeen, nothing really had to mean anything else, I guess.

My father told me a story in between driving me to one place or another (driving everywhere, we spent the whole trip in the car: visiting the rehab facility where he had spent nearly 15 years, visiting his mother and stepfather, driving to see this or that relative), in the story he had been crashing in some drug dealer’s apartment. It was a trashed out old Victorian home in the Haight-Ashbury district, where scores of them would come just to find a place to do drugs on an old mattress somewhere in the dark. Upstairs, they squatted for days just shooting up, coming down and shooting up again. In the midst of the euphoria, something kept shaking them from their stupor and crashing them back to reality: a busker on the street below, wheezing his heart out for the passersby. All was well and groovy until his harmonica came into play, a screech so incompatible with the drug haze, they all conferred (as much and as closely as a whole lot of really high people can) over what to do about the noise. My father, ever the man to take action, found a soup pot and filled it with water, and dumped it out the window right onto Bob Dylan’s head.

“You threw water…on Bob Dylan??“

“Well,” my father shrugged, his eyes scanning the curb where he once scored, the curb that used to look like a hippie paradise but was now home to an Urban Outfitters with a giant plastic Buddha in the middle of the floor, “he wasn’t Bob Dylan yet.”

He had so many stories like this. They were his only stories, really: things he did while he was high. Because he was always high, from the age of twelve to the moment he entered rehab, then again after, then again, then again. So high it was okay to smoke in the car with his two babies in their car seats in the back, so high it didn’t matter anymore if it was heroin hidden in the basement workshop where small-town dads were supposed to keep wrenches and porn. He once got so high, he said, that he lost time completely, and woke up in a hotel room with just the elastic rings of the tops of his tube socks, dangling around his ankles, some tatters of the yarn attached, and the wreckage of an epic binge all around him. He was injecting into his feet by then, of course, so who knows what really happened to his socks, though he maintains that he wore his shoes for so long they rotted inside. Maybe they did. Maybe that wasn’t Bob Dylan on the corner, just some other fool with a guitar and a harmonica.

It seems like there would be lots of them, how probable is it that Bob Dylan was the only one to come up with that? Of course, you can’t really trust the memory of a serious drug abuser. You can’t really trust anything they come up with. I used to tell myself it meant we were almost kind of a little bit famous: my dad threw water on Bob Dylan! Now I see that it fits neatly into a folder and slides into the file where I put all the lore of my father’s long and blurry drug years.

What I really, actually know about my father could fit into my hand, and all of it is stitched together from the things he told my mother.

His father left him on the side of the road once, during a family trip: just pushed him out of the car and tossed his pillow out after him (across his mother’s lap, out her window) and drove away. I used to imagine the road as being in the middle of nowhere, like a desert, but now I see it as having fruit stands on either side, selling avocados and melons. I see that there are diners and gas stations, but it’s still a lonely and heartbreaking landscape when you think of a little boy in the midst of it, a little boy trying to keep his upper lip straight while facing the ultimate rejection, watching his family shrink into the distance, the yellow California sun fading into the horizon ahead of them like an egg yolk sliding down a wall. His two brothers don’t turn around in the back seat, maybe his father has told them not to. The little woman at the fruit stand is staring, waiting. He goes into the diner and wonders who to call, how to call–he has no money.

His mother, I imagine, said nothing, preferring to wait for the literal dust to settle behind the car, for her husband to cool off and turn back. For most of the rest of his life, my father would try and fail to convince his mother that he was worth turning back for–and I don’t think it ever crossed her mind that she had any kind of role or responsibility in it, in motherhood, apart from feeding and disciplining them. I don’t think it occurred to her that she was becoming a mausoleum for the damage her husband caused her children.

This, right here on this dusty road, where he is a briefly abandoned twelve year old boy, is where I lose my father.

Somewhere along that road he met my mother, and if ever two more similarly and perfectly damaged people found each other, I can’t say. He was on a healthy, drug-free spell and working at a Denny’s as a line cook. She was sleeping in a tent on the front porch of the house rented by her cult leader and filled with his followers (she was in trouble for some kind of transgression and being punished with porch sleeping, a thing she relished, because if cult leaders know anything it’s how to find the people with the worst parental-induced damage and replicate it in exactly the way you like it). All of her Denny’s tips went to the cult leader, and she couldn’t have been happier.

There wasn’t any getting together with my father, she said, no moment when they became an item. They just understood from the beginning that they were together. He ridiculed the cult leader until she started saving her money, until she rented her own place in Santa Cruz. That’s how he got her out, even when they kept calling and shaming her to come back to her porch tent punishment: he laughed at them, that kind of laugh where you throw your head back and look as if you’ve unhinged your own jaw to let out a laugh that was just too big for your natural anatomy.

The cult was over. They lived in the little apartment on their Denny’s wages. They got pregnant and got an abortion. They drove up to his mother’s ranch house in northern California and got high in the den with his little brother, stretched out on the carpet at 2 am and laughing about nothing, when she stormed in and demanded to know what they were doing, shouted at my father to leave “and take your whore with you.” He had a nickname for her, some kind of red wine that he liked, something I’ve Googled endlessly and cannot find or figure out how to spell. She got pregnant again, and he made her sandwiches of graham crackers, peanut butter, and bananas. It tasted so good, she said, she’s never eaten it again out of fear that it wouldn’t ever taste that good again. She came home to Southern Illinois, obviously pregnant, and my grandmother and great-grandmother took her out shopping for maternity clothes. He joined her and they settled into the little house on Glenwood, a rental property owned by my grandfather. They decided to try and do the family thing in that shitty little coal mining town, and maybe for a while it worked.

Years ago, a coworker asked me what my father said or thought about something. He was one of those men who felt it was his duty to know everything about the women in the office. He said we were a family and it became clear over time that he imagined himself the head of it. He demanded the appropriate amount of morning greetings and afternoon goodbyes from the women in the office, out of respect, he said. So, for this reason, our real fathers and what they thought came up a lot for this man, who probably imagined himself on some sort of regional golf team with all of our dads, having taken up the responsibility for the care and training of all of their adult daughters here in this office.

I stared and my mind felt blank and terrified when he asked me this. My mouth dropped open and I wasn’t sure whether to lie. (I’d done that before: once, at church camp, I felt that the truth of my life made me shameful and farther from God, farther, that is, than the kids with normal families. So I told one of my camp counselors, who I knew was a father, that my father adored me and thought I was wonderful. Saying it made me want to cry–but I choked it out. The man scoffed and said “I’m SURE he does,” because my cabin had just organized and carried out a plot to steal all the pool balls from the rec hall and hide them in one of my stuffed animals. He scoffed because he had just found the 30lb stuffed frog and busted us, and because I’d done such a good job of saying the words that they sounded like the lines from an atrophied 90s sitcom.)

I stood there with my mouth dangling and finally my coworker said, “Oh, I’m sorry, is your dad gone?” As if this or anything else was his business. I nodded and hoped for the entire thing to be over. “When did he pass?” he asked, my god the things men will step in and take without asking, and the question blitzed my mind so hard, I wasn’t sure what to say and I still don’t remember what I said. He didn’t pass, he’s just gone.

It all came apart after I was born, as if it ever had a chance of staying together.

My father drove a truck for Scot Lad foods, carrying loads of generic branded goods across the tri-state area all night. He dosed himself on dilaudid and coke day and night, staying up for hours at a time. If he wasn’t raking and arranging the gravel on the side of the road by their house, he was accusing my mother of plotting against him, throwing her up against walls, pawning her jewelry (a garnet ring, with four little pearls and two opals), stealing her savings (there was $400 then one day just an empty box). If the responsibilities of fatherhood ever entered his mind, they served only to weigh it down further and drive him to do more drugs. He lost the Scot Lad job when he took the turn toward Evansville, Indiana; across the ravine and into the next state, too fast. The truck rolled down the steep embankment, pouring its entire load of white sugar into the water. He sat there, strapped upside-down and high as shit, without a scratch on him. And he emerged from the whole thing perfectly faultless: the environmental cleanup, the wreckage, the drugs. My mother’s grandfather, who had gotten him the job, also got him released from it and all responsibility for the wreck. My father swore to my mother that he’d get clean, he got a job as a line cook in a restaurant in town, he promised her he would be different and better. She realized that she didn’t care what he did, that her feelings about him were completely ambivalent. She asked him to leave her and offered to buy him a plane ticket, but he insisted on being left on the side of the road somewhere so he could hitchhike back to California.

January 13, 1983: This is where I lose my father, on the side of the road in Marion, Illinois, with his thumb out. Right here, glaring at my mother sitting in the car, wipers smearing snowflakes across the windshield, this is the road where I lose him.

When you’re a hopeful child, even something as depressing as a birthday card made from a used and re-used file folder, with a Grateful Dead skeleton pasted on the front, sent from a California prison, even something as awful as that can make you fly for weeks on possibility. When you’re seventeen, drug stories are cool. Those smeared green prison tattoos of skulls and bones that look like they were drawn on in Magic Marker are edgy. Prison and rehab are these romantic ideas as long as you get to be the star emerging from the middle of it all.

I am my father: I am his face, I am his look of incredulous innocence when I have definitely done the thing you accuse me of, for which I should be ashamed. I am his ability to look through the kitchen cabinets and put together the perfect meal out of nothing. I am his love of Mexican food, of wry humor that always comes alive at the opportunity to hurt someone’s feelings. I am his anger and his ignorance and his denial. I am years of years of his addiction, Christmas cards from prison commissaries, butterflies and bad writing. I’m his dry brown skin, baked in the California sun, creped by years of exposure, his ringless hands, his exhausted eyes. I’m a cast iron pot and a wooden cutting board that belonged to his grandmother, the things he brought with him and then left behind: I am heavy and dependable where he was neither. I am down in the reservoir when the truck goes over the rail, I’m in the water turning sweet and gray around me, the idea of fatherhood drowning next to someone’s tossed-over refrigerator and the carcass of an old innerspring mattress.

This is where I lost him: getting out of a stranger’s car on some street in California, newly free of his familial responsibilities and looking to score. Going up and down these alleys, places where I never existed or mattered, streets where Bob Dylan sings or doesn’t. On the map of my father’s life, the corners and streets are always changing, dead ends coming up everywhere, everybody else’s fault. You little fucking bitch, he wrote, You’re a bitch just like your mother. You either talk to me or I’ll give all my money to my wife’s kids when I die. (When he did die, on December 4, 2020, I don’t think he was married to her anymore. He expired alone in an ICU in California, his body handed over to sepsis and kidney failure, which I’m told is usually the result after years of intravenous drug use. I don’t like to imagine what a California ICU looked and felt like in the height of COVID-19. I don’t like to imagine most of what my father went through.)

Epilogue

I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I have convinced myself that I have nothing to say, that if I did, I wouldn’t know how to say it. My brain has let go of all of the curvy, elegant words it once knew. I am frequently tired by just the thought of writing. It’s like I was doing it and then someone poured water on my head and I decided it was time to stop. But something is telling me to sing this song, even before I know all the words, before it’s finished and polished and when most of it is just annoying harmonica breaks. This is it, tangled up; this is me, sorting it out.

What Lies Beneath: A Synopsis

What were you doing in the year 2000? Specifically, what were you doing on the weekend of July 21-23, 2000?

Well, if you were living in a small town with nothing better to do on the weekends than go see a movie for $5, and you were about to leave everything you’d known for 20 years and move to Chicago and were in need of a distraction from your oppressive anxiety, you were probably in the air conditioned theater watching Robert Zemeckis’ psychological thriller-horror film What Lies Beneath starring Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer! And you probably weren’t scared the whole time, either! Not even during the scary parts!!!

It is a stupid movie, full of stupid people with stupid feelings.

We start out in a beautiful waterfront mansion where poor, sad, white Michelle Pfeiffer is knocking about and spying on the neighbors because she is traumatized from a car accident she was in a year ago, which caused her to lose some of her memory. Her daughter leaves for college, and then poor lonely Michelle is even more poor and lonely because her husband Harrison Ford has moved her out here to this gorgeous property and gone straight back to work as a teacher at The Science College. She doesn’t like to garden or anything because you need two hands to do it and most white ladies who live in waterfront mansions only have one free hand (because of the white wine spritzer in the other), so she spends her time practicing Wrinkle-Free Pouting in the mirror and watching her neighbors fight in their yard. Poor lonely Michelle!

OMG I am so sick of staring at water.

The neighbor lady disappears one day after Michelle spies her walking around crying and I guess looking like she’s about to disappear. Then she sees Mr. Neighbor stuffing a body bag into the trunk of his car. She finds a bloody flip flop in the yard and at first she wants to toss it over the fence and yell KEEP YOUR DAMN FLIP FLOPS ON YOUR PROPITTY but she thinks better of it and holds a seance with her BFF instead. She figures if Dead Mrs. Neighbor is anywhere, she’s most likely definitely in Michelle’s beautiful shore house, because PEOPLE ARE DYING TO LIVE THERE AHHAHAHAH no but seriously stuff’s been falling off shelves and shit, so.

BFF is one of those characters that always accompany Nice White Married Ladies. They’re CRAZY because they dyed one strand of their curly hair bright red and probably fucked Mick Jagger and usually have a roach in their bag. They drive some kind of ridiculous car (“I got it in the settlement! Fuck that asshole!”) and they drive it fast. They come to fancy parties and ruffle feathers by making jokes about sex and saying EVERYONE DRINK MORE YES DEBAUCHERY YES and they fling their curly hair around and dance to no music at all and Nice White Married Lady smiles and shakes her head and says something like “That’s Begonia, she’s been this way since we were roommates in college, she’s a free spirit, you know, she’s like the yin to my yang which is something she read in a book from the occult store.” She’s the Manic Pixie Dream Girl they sell in the LL Bean catalog.

Shutup and let Begonia do this, she’s done it like a thousand times before. She’s so crazy! Calm down, Begonia!!!

Nothing happens during the seance, so Begonia hops into her hot car and speeds down the mountain toward home, which is probably a tiny apartment above a candle store, an apartment she describes as “funky,” which is full of nothing but wine bottle sculptures and prescription medication. No sooner has Begonia roared off to Funkytown than Michelle sees a message in the bathroom mirror because she was dumb enough to shower and leave steam on it for the ghost to use to communicate. “YOU KNOW” it says. You know!!!! She’s like, know WHAT? Seriously, I don’t…ugh! So frustrating.

Scared Michelle runs to Science Doctor Harrison Ford’s office to tell him the house is haunted as a muhfucker and he slams a bunch of papers down and says things like “I have to focus on my science!” and calls her needy and crazy. They’re standing there arguing and Science Doctor Harrison Ford is cramming stuff into his  briefcase and DUN DUN DUNNN there’s Mr. Neighbor! Michelle goes ape-shit ham balls on him for killing his wife, who scoots up behind him like “Oh what’s this my ears are ringing?!” Michelle concedes that okay maybe she is a little bit crazy and needs to take a nap. Mrs. Neighbor is like, yeah girl, I’m alive, so blame your haunting on someone else, also I don’t appreciate you taking my flip flop and that crazy friend of yours needs to quit parking on top of my rose bushes.

“I feel so dumb for acting crazy in front of the neighbors, I’ll be in the tub for the rest of the day.”

Everything is all well and good now, and the movie can basically end, except a picture explodes in Science Doctor’s home office and while she’s cleaning it up, Michelle finds a newspaper article about a missing girl who used to attend Science Doctor Harrison Ford’s Science College! WHAT! Naturally she heads on over to Missing And Presumed Dead Girl’s House to chat with her mom and get all the gory details. She also steals a full fucking braid of the girl’s hair out of her grieving mother’s clutches because fuck it, this haunting needs to be solved like yesterday because the property value is going down, which canNOT happen. Begonia lends Michelle a book from the occult store and she’s bookmarked the page with a ghost possession spell, probably with like a cat bookmark or a woven Celtic symbol or something. So Michelle flaps the piece of hair around and invites Missing And Presumed Dead Girl into her bod for the evening. Together, they seduce Science Doctor Harrison Ford and freak him the fuck out by doing this creepy mid-coitus face-swapping thing. He is NOT a fan and tosses Michelle across the room. She hits her head and remembers coming home on the night of her memory-wiping car accident and seeing Science Doctor having sex with Missing And Presumed Dead Girl on his desk. She’s like YOU A-HOLE and runs off to Begonia’s funky shithole, where she tells her the whole story between giant goblets of wine and Begonia is like oh yeah, I totally knew about the cheating all along, sorrrrr-ry.

Science Doctor Harrison Ford promises to be better. He also accidentally drops the hair dryer in the shower with himself and gets slightly electrocuted and needs Michelle to nurse him and listen to all of his bullshit apologies. Michelle comes home when he points out that he could have died! And anyway, none of this was his fault, he just slept with his student and then she totally bitched out on him and threatened to kill Michelle and he couldn’t have that so he told her to hit the bricks, and she straight up killed herself on their porch like a total fucking psycho! So he had no choice but to put her body in her car and push it into the lake. Because bitches be crazy, Michelle gobbles up every word, but tells Science Doctor Harrison Ford that he should prolly let the cops know what happened. He’s like, aw man, okay, fine. She stands there nodding and pursing her plastic lips at him while he tells the cops over the phone they’d better stop by if they wanted to hear a real hum-dinger of a story, oh boy! He says “Yeah okay so definitely talked to the cops just then, I didn’t just dial and then put my thumb on the receiver and say stuff to make you feel better. I’m gonna hop in the shower.”

This is when you can tell the movie expects what’s happening to be a Big Twist! and Shocking! and maybe even Scary! Whaaaa! Guess who’s not even in the shower, at all, but instead is lurking around in the dark with a syringe full of muscle-paralyzing Science fluid?! It’s SCIENCE DOCTOR HARRISON FORD, who is a bad guy!!! He dumps Michelle’s paralyzed bod in the tub and starts filling it up with water to make it look like she drowned. Because that shit happens all the time, you know, women forgetting that they’re in the bath tub and can’t breathe underwater and just go to sleep. Anyway, he’s a man, so the cops will believe it. This is also the part when the villain is like “I have nothing better to do right now, so I might as well tell my entire twisted story and laugh maniacally while our heroine is in this slow-moving life threatening situation.” He spills his guts about murdering Missing And Presumed Dead Girl, who is now Missing and Definitely Dead Ghost Lady. He tries to adjust Michelle in the water so she’ll drown faster but her face magically transforms into zombo-Dead Girl and it freaks him out so he falls and hits his head.

Everything but your face is paralyzed, you know? HAAAATE that feeling.

This means that Michelle has exactly 30 seconds or so to Kill Bill-wiggle-your-big-toe herself until she can wrap her foot around the chain and pull the drain stopper out. She’s saved! Then she has to crawl out of the tub and get to the truck outside. She notices that Science Doctor Harrison Ford’s gotten blood all over the floor and not bothered to clean it up before booking it up out of there, where is he anyway? She hits the gas in the truck and runs over the neighbor’s rose bush because she’s staring at her cell phone, which is the size of a VCR, waiting to get a single dot on the screen so she can call 911. Things are never that easy, of course, and Science Doctor was hiding in the back of the truck under a tarp, of course. He’s grabbing at Michelle and she’s trying to drive through the fog and then HOLY SHIT THERE’S A PERSON IN THE FOG IT’S A LADY WHO LOOKS SORT OF FAMILIAR because of course ghosts can only show up in misty, foggy areas that look like ghost-y places anyway. Michelle swerves to avoid hitting her because she doesn’t realize you can drive right through a ghost and they don’t care. The whole shebang goes off the side of the same bridge where Doctor Science threw Missing And Definitely Dead Ghost Lady’s body and now all of them are together at the bottom of the lake. Science Doctor is pulling at Michelle’s J. Crew chino pants to try and drown her again, but whoa buddy. The truck slamming into the the bottom of the lake awaaaaaakened the spiiiiirit of the ghooooost and also knocked her decayed old dead body loose. It floats up the side of the truck and lays some major side eye on Science Doctor Harrison Ford because she is NOT happy with him. She grabs his ass and drags him down with her, then looks up and tells Michelle to shoo fly on outta there.

oh she mad.

Michelle hightails it to the surface where the whole entire world is waiting for her and they all believe her story, even though she recently had a very crazy outburst in public and there is zero evidence supporting any of her claims, but whatever. The final scene shows her leaving roses on Missing and Definitely Dead Girl’s grave, presumably to apologize for stealing shit from her mom, but mostly probably so there can be a scene where she walks away through the cemetery in her finely tailored wool trench from Banana Republic. Missing and Definitely Dead Girl’s face shows up in the snow. She winks and goes WHATUP Y’ALL and the credits roll because there is literally nothing else they could possibly think of to make this movie scary.

A Detailed Analysis Of Why This Movie Isn’t Scary

Ugh. Michelle’s problems bore me. OF COURSE she’s bored and lonely, she lives out in the middle of fucking nowhere and has never had a real job, aside from Musician. I mean, I wanted to be a writer but I didn’t go after it as a job, because I knew I’d end up someday more like Begonia than Michelle, just drinking a lot and living in a crap apartment, selling soaps at the farmer’s market every weekend and pretending that a Fun Personality! makes up for total unhappiness. The loneliness part is, I guess, a little bit scary, maybe. It is sort of tied in with the idea of isolation and rejection. She keeps trying to talk to people about stuff and they look at her like she’s nuts, and she IS nuts, because she’s had something happen to her and it was awful and scary, but you’re not supposed to talk about those things because they’re not polite and would you just GET OVER IT already.

If they really wanted to make this movie scary, they’d have focused on that rejection shit. That stuff will keep you up at night, creeping around the corners of the door frame and floating above your bed, moaning at you YOU’RE A FAIIILLUUUUUURE and NOBODY LIIIIKES YOUUUU and stuff. You lie there and swallow and turn on the TV to drown it out and if you do end up getting some sleep, you wake up in the morning wanting more of it and you’re mean to the dog and late for work and just sit in your office and watch other people Move Around and Do Things all day. It’s exhausting to think that people somehow have the ability to ignore how awful everything is.

A truly scary movie would be about Michelle Pfeiffer applying and interviewing for various jobs like crazy, just spending 4 hours a day revising cover letters and plonking through phone interviews and answering the same questions over and over again, fielding laughably low offers and zero-dollar relocation assistance and banging her head on the wall. It would be really scary if she was very excited about one particular opportunity, and put all of her hopes into it, and got a second interview, and thought everything was going really well–then DUN DUN DUNNNN got the thank-you-but-no-thank-you phone call!

It would be really scary if she just sort of walked around for an entire day with a prickly feeling in her mouth and confused tears in her eyes and a kind of tired, disconnect-y feeling with her body. I guess they call this Shock, and she’d be like, why do I feel shock over this? I should have known it would go this way. Stupid, stupid dumb and stupid Michelle, hello? This is the universe calling! You are mediocre, and aiming for anything above-average will be a misfire every time! Hahaha! Don’t you know that yet, dummy? Don’t act like you’re surprised that you failed, because of course you did.

Uh, yeah…that’s basically what that means. Dick.

Zemeckis could have added an extra super bone-chilling thread to this yarn if Michelle had been job searching and simultaneously submitting pieces of her writing, like, I don’t know, personal essays and shit, because everybody is like “your blog is good, don’t give away your work for free!” but now she’s getting constantly rejected at every turn, when it used to be fun to write because it was only for her blog which felt good and free. Maybe she could join this group of lady essayists who all comment on each other’s posts and encourage each other in their essays about dogs with PTSD and struggles with cloth diapers, maybe she could start to feel a little bit comfortable with trying to be part of a community, then she totally fucks it up by pitching an idea for an essay about racist remarks about slavery, which she has NO RIGHT to do because she’s white and her ancestors owned slaves. They could put in the cricket sound right there, a tumbleweed could roll across the Internet, right across her post which has one single comment from the lady who comments on everything, and is ignored by all the rest. She could feel bad about it all day, and rejected, and pushed out of a community for being weird/doing something wrong/looking stupid. It would be like two million layers of failure. You can’t do any of the things you like to do! Also, people hate you and think you’re stupid! YIIIIIIKES. That would scare the hell out of me.

What if Science Doctor Harrison Ford had come out of the bathroom and confessed the whole terrible tale and then said, “You know what’s going to happen now? Nothing. Nothing is going to happen.” That would have been way scary. I mean, I spend about 90% of my time in the tub these days, whether or not there is water in it, so don’t give me that I’m-going-to-slowly-drown-you bullshit. I ain’t afraid of no tub, I’m afraid of being out of the tub! Hahahaha! What I am afraid of is, I don’t know, what if there was this giant clock on the wall and it counted down over and over again to absolutely nothing happening, all of the things and situations staying exactly the same? Michelle had to sit there and watch, paralyzed, while the clock just started over and over again, and the longer she was unable to move and the more things stayed exactly the same, she kind of hated herself a little more? Maybe they could do a really close-up shot of her hairs turning gray one at a time, or the second hand of the clock slooooowly ticking forward with a really loud TOOSH, TOOSH, TOOSH sound every time?! They could really drive it home if Michelle is sitting there watching nothing happen to herself while everyone around her succeeds at things and focuses on what they want to do and lets disappointments roll off their backs like normal people instead of crying about it for a week? Then it would be this whole layer of “everyone else is normal and you are not” and THAT shit, my friend, is fucking creepy.

WHY THANK YOU FOR THIS MOST HELPFUL INFO GRAPHIC.

These are just things I’ve been thinking about. About how sixteen years ago I watched this movie and it was maybe a little bit scary then, but how these days, things that are supposed to be scary are kind of dumb when you have real stuff to worry about. It’s not until you get out into the world and try to take steps forward and get knocked down and start to hear yourself telling yourself that you’re a horrible disappointment that shit gets really fucking terrifying. Don’t give me that goddamn ghost-in-the-fog shit, okay? Try walking down the street in broad daylight feeling like everyone is looking at you and thinks you’re dumb. Don’t come at me with your syringe full of paralyzing science drugs, dude. I’ve been trying to get out of bed for a straight month, so it’s not the inability to move that scares me, it’s the Getting Up And Doing Stuff thing that freaks me out. I’m not even a little bit scared of you, Science Doctor Harrison Ford. But I’m terrified of everything else.

Meanwhile, at the Cat Ranch

The wet and cold of this lazy-ass loser springtime finally started to look like it might be receding this morning. The light coming in the bedroom window looked less blue and more yellow, so I thought it would be an excellent morning to get up and have coffee on the porch. I did just that, relaxing on the lounge chair with my mug and a magazine I didn’t have to pay a whole lot of attention to in order to get the idea of what it was about. The dog found a patch of sun and curled up next to me.

I let out this long movie-length sigh because it’s been a stressful, fruitless, six-month job search, my mostly non-existent confidence and general unwillingness to keep working on anything pointless have lagged considerably, and that mixed with the dark and rainy weather has made me basically hit the point of “nobody will mind if I just stop going to work, will they?” that makes me stay in bed every morning until I absolutely have to get up in order to keep the job I do have, which is quickly eroding as more and more coworkers find their dream jobs and move on and the big bosses try decide whether to just fold the whole thing and give us gas money and ask us all to go home.

It’s been hard, basically.

So I sit there exhaling and letting the sun warm up my toes and think about how maybe everything will be okay, and telling myself to just take this quiet moment for myself and enjoy it because you never know when they will come around again. I’d been out there for about four minutes when the upstairs neighbor’s door opened and out he came, with a visitor. He shifted a cooler or a lawn chair or something above my head to give his friend a place to sit, which pushed about a tablespoon of dried leaves and crusty potting soil through the crack between the boards of the porch and directly down, -plop-, into my coffee.

Don’t buy it from these assholes, just stop by my porch and wait a minute or two.

Okay, so just…no more coffee for me, I guess, I thought. I will just sit here and read my magazine and enjoy this weather all the same and then the friend started talking. Loud, deep man voice interrupted my reverie, talking about how great it is to live in Portland and how great his apartment is and how everyone who visits says it’s better than theirs. I started to wonder if they ever de-bark humans who won’t shut up. What a waste to only do that to dogs. Is there a way to get this guy to shut up by maybe giving him a piece of vegan bacon, or something else he likes to eat? How can you make dog tricks work on humans? Is there a special collar…That’s what I was thinking when Neighbor interrupted his friend to explain the amalgamation of broken windows, busted baby gates, string, wire, two-by-fours, and other random garbage dragged in from various piles of shit in the alley and arranged at the top of the porch stairs. Apparently all of this refuse was intended to act as a sort of cat gate, to rein in their three cats, whom they allow onto the porch from time to time. The reason for the cat corral, as he put it, was “Because the downstairs neighbors have a dog.”

You’d think the reason would be BECAUSE DOMESTICATED CATS HAVE NO BUSINESS ROAMING AROUND OUTSIDE OR WHATEVER but apparently it’s the fact that my dog exists, making my porch an unsafe place for their obese felines to hang out.

Mere moments after this monologue extolling the safety of Garbage Gate, Dog stiffens next to me. He bounces up into a pushup position which means he’s about to tear off across the porch in search of something to murder. I grab his collar and look over and oh guess what the fuck? There are two cats hunkered down on the stairs less than five feet away from us.

“Uh,” I say. “Did you know your cats are down here?” No answer at first, and then Neighbor comes clomping over Garbage Gate in those sneakers made of cement and wood that wake me up stomping across the ceiling at 2 in the morning.

“Yeah, I’m coming,” he says. He leans down to collect one of the cats and that’s when Dog leaps with all his 65 pounds, taking my arm with him, slamming my wrist into the corner of the lounge chair.

“Ohhhhhkay,” I say. “Inside.” Defeated, I drag Dog with my busted and bleeding arm toward the door.

“Aww, you don’t have to put him inside!?” Neighbor protests. Because that’s the best he can do, I guess: expect me to sit outside listening to his friend talk about himself while the both of them shower me with dirt with every movement and my dog tries to eat their cats, so that he won’t have to feel bad for being inconsiderate and annoying.

I want to scream WHY DON’T YOU GO FUCK YOURSELF or MAYBE YOU SHOULD KEEP YOUR GODDAMN CATS INSIDE HMMM or MY COFFEE IS FULL OF DIRT FROM YOUR PORCH AND MY ARM HAS EXPLODED or something but instead I say nothing and take the dog inside.

The Wildlings have definitely scaled Mount Trash, dummies.

All I wanted was a few peaceful moments to myself, a few moments to feel like I’m not being dragged under the wheels of life, but instead I got dirt coffee, a cut on my hand, and a bump the size of a walnut on my wrist.

I know I’m the royal idiot for thinking there could or would be any kind of respect for peace and quiet in a city where everyone is stacked on top and on either side of everyone else. I’m the dumbass for thinking maybe the neighbors shouldn’t, oh, let their cats outside, or build things over our heads on nice weekends, using circular saws and other noisy power tools as we sit below with our guests, our plates of barbecue getting showered with sawdust. I’ve given up on being able to be outside as they grill above us, scattering ash all over our heads with every movement. I’m the asshole for always being aware of the noise of their feet, their slamming doors, their cats knocking shit over at all hours of the night, the noise of their stereo, their friends coming and going, shouting in the vestibule as if the door next to them doesn’t lead directly into someone’s living room. I’m probably being really short-sighted in not realizing how much noise I contribute to the situation: the dog barking, me screaming at the dog to shut the bleeding fuck up, running the blender at 6am, slamming cabinet doors in frustration that there isn’t one single cookie to be found anywhere in the house.

I’m an asshole, I know it. But I just want to go somewhere for half an hour where nobody is making some kind of bullshit noise or dumping crap in my coffee or doing something dumb like putting a pile of trash between their cats and my dog.

Anyway. I went inside and waited for them to leave, then came back out. Now there are two drunk bums having a screaming fight in the alley behind the garage, one of them insisting YOU DON’T LIKE MY FACE HUH YOU DON’T LIKE MY FACE and the other screaming DON’T SAY SHIT TO ME, DON’T SAY SHIT TO ME MUHFUCKER while they run and slam into each other over and over. It is called Alley Sumo and I guess it’s better than dirt coffee and cat wrangling.

Barf Hoes, bounce your ass and let your knees touch your elbows

I wish you would just take a minute to watch Bad Girls Club on your television. Because you’re probably smarter than me and will make some kind of scientific study out of it. Basically the idea is that a bunch of hot young girls inhabit a house in some heartless city somewhere. The house is full of two things: egg whites and liquor. They are allowed to leave once each night to go to clubs and get more liquor. They drink a whole lot and lie around in bikinis and then fight and barf everywhere. It is pretty much just the Fight & Barf Show.

Drink, drink, drink, now FIGHT

Last week, the chosen target for the week got too turnt up at the club and puked contraband chicken noodle soup all over the bathroom. The big fight for the week was the fact that she straight up left puke in the sink and all over the floor, and was hollering about how IT DON’T MATTER IT AIN’T THAT BIG A DEAL BITCHEZZZZ and all the other bitchez were like “you nasty” and yelled at her and stuff until she wiped it up with a paper towel and was like Y’ALL HAPPY NOW, HOES? The hoes were happy, but then they had a meeting in the kitchen over some egg whites and decided they were mad now and there was a fight in the back of the limo the next night on the way home from the club. All of this, from the full barf scene to the screaming to the wiping-up of the barf to the fight in the stretch Hummer, was on film. Meanwhile, there are about a thousand people with cameras and a bunch of huge security guards around to break up Lady Fights and stuff. I bet there’s also someone around to clean up the broken glass all over the floor, because if there’s one thing these women like to do, it’s throw dishware on the floor to make a point. They also like to ban each other from bedrooms by tossing each other’s stuff into the hall and then throwing their mattress on top of it, so that like, they know they’re kicked out of that room, there can’t be any mistaking it. No, Khym, a tornado did not come through here and suck up all of your stuff and leave it in the hall. See how your bed is out here too? Yeah, Jaimee and Mylysza want you to sleep somewhere else.

Sometimes I watch this stuff and I can’t believe we’re lucky enough to live in a time when all some people have to do is drink and hit each other with stuff. I mean think about how in the Middle Ages you could have died on your way out to the poop trench in the middle of the hay field. You could have been stabbed by marauders or (more likely) frozen to death on your way. Now all you have to do for a job and to fulfill basic human needs is live in a house with a bunch of other people and let someone film it. Oh, and be super hot, I guess. And wear a bikini. And flush someone else’s makeup brushes down the toilet as a matter of principle or something.

Yayyyy we’re dancing! Some of us are dancing. Stop dancing, Rhachyl, no one likes you.

If you punch enough people, they make you leave the show. Then they distribute a photograph of the replacement Bad Girl to all the Bad Girls in the house. They talk about how fat and ugly she is and decide that no matter what, they are NOT going to like her. She shows up and endures about a week and a half of everyone telling her she’s ugly and fat and stupid and throwing her shit down the stairs and urging her to kill herself, and if she survives, one or two Bad Girls decide she’s not really all that bad, and they end up staying up all night with her, drinking some kind of nasty pink lemonade flavored booze and crying about dead friends from fifth grade or something, and the next morning there’s a huge rift in the house because of the new friendship. “Jazmyn swore she wouldn’t try to be friends with Nhatylie,” one of them will whine to the camera. “Like, why you gotta lie? I can’t be friends with no fake bitch, nuh uh.”

Anyway. I’m thinking of applying to be a cast member on the show. I’m going to win because I’ll smuggle in a ton of anti-anxiety meds and just basically pill out and sleep 24-hours a day, through all the screaming and dish breaking and hair-pulling, and eventually I’ll be the last one standing, er, sleeping. That solves my job search issue, because where else am I going to find a gig where I can just sleep all day?

I just want to mention before I send you out into the world to enjoy this content that it’s on Oxygen. They have this to say about their programming:

Oxygen Media is a multiplatform entertainment brand that targets young, multicultural women.  The network’s relevant and engaging content reflects how real women with real stories see the world – vibrant, optimistic and bold.  Oxygen is the destination where women can come together across multiple platforms to have fun and encourage each other through their individual and collective journeys.

I AM GOING TO COME TOGETHER ACROSS MULTIPLE PLATFORMS AND ENCOURAGE YOU THROUGH YOUR INDIVIDUAL JOURNEY TO HELL, BIIIIIITCH

It’s helpful to note that Vybrint, Optymystyc, and Bhold are the names of the next three Barf Hoes to join the Pukefight House in Vegas.

I don’t know why I told you any of this but I hope you enjoyed it.
 

Last week was terrible and I feel like I did something to deserve every second of it. Why did I have to admit to the world that I am sometimes totally overcome with the fear of death, why did I have to mention the fact that every now and then I think oh fuck the dog is dying! I couldn’t help but feel like I’d tempted fate and brought this all upon myself.

Dog, trotting along on his afternoon walk, suffered a petit mal seizure. I guess “suffered” isn’t the right word, because he didn’t know what was happening anyway, just looked like all thought (and spit) had left his head for a couple of minutes. That happens all the time when you’re a dog, so that’s no big deal either. But the fact that this was a thing that happened and could now be a thing that happens more often made me feel like I was in a tiny canoe with a hole in the bottom and a fragile teacup in my hand for bailing water.

The vet said not to worry, the billion dollar bloodwork came back fine, and counseled us to just watch the dog for seizure behavior, and let us know we might have to medicate him in the future. Otherwise, no big deal! That is, until The Pants left for his business trip on Monday morning, which is when Dog decided to kill himself.

WELCOME, SWEET DEATH.

It was a decision he arrived at slowly, between bouts of vomiting. It was as if the pain of his loss had wadded itself into a cork at the Out end of his stomach, causing his body to reject every bit of food he ate. I gave him fucking dog gourmet all week: chicken breasts and rice and pumpkin and ground beef, and he ate it happily, then sprayed every room in the house with partially digested chunks and retreated to his bed to sigh and whine in the dark. By Wednesday, he had made the decision to never drink water again. He dragged around the house and groaned, approaching every task (such as Standing Up, Lying Down, and Looking At Toys With Disinterest) as if it was Dog Everest, and he just didn’t have the constitution to make the climb. Go on without me, his eyes pleaded as he stared up at me. Just let me die here.

Remember the gorilla they taught how to do sign language? They taught it something like 1,000 words and gave it a kitten. It would say things like EAT SAD CRY FRUIT if it wanted a lemon, or GIVE KOKO LOVE BABY LOVE if it wanted to pet its kitten. I stood over the dog and wiped the booger tears from his eyes and thought about trying to teach him this stuff. I’d say NO DYING MAN COME BACK. I’d remind him DOG DRINK WATER NOT DIE. But soon I realized that while dogs can technically learn all of these words, they can’t grasp the meaning behind “in 4 days” or even the very simple fact that a person is still alive even when they aren’t in sight.

Is there anything worse than a person with depression and anxiety owning a dog with depression and anxiety? Maybe it is a good thing that I’ve got something besides my own worries to focus on when I’m alone. Maybe it’s a bad thing because all I did last week was cry and clean up dog barf by scraping chunks of it onto old magazines and dumping them into plastic bags and spraying the floor with Nature’s Miracle and sobbing as I sponged up the rest of the vomit. Either way, I stayed busy, I guess. Dog watched from the corners of the rooms and expelled heavy, heavy sighs.

Nighttime all week was a marathon of crying and barfing. At least once every hour, I was ripped from my sleep by frantic barking. SOMEONE AT DOOR! Dog seemed to be screaming. SOMEONE AT DOOR WE ALL GOING TO DIE!!! He would run back and forth between front and back doors and I’d have to drag him back to his bed and calm him down. By the time the hair on his back settled down and we both tucked back in to sleep, I’d have about ten minutes of rest before waking again, either to another emotional meltdown over nothing, or the unmistakable hurrrk hurrrrk sound of a dog about to paint the floor with his stomach contents. 1am, 2am, 3am, wake up, get dog, calm down, clean vomit, calm down, wake up, get dog, clean barf. Repeat. Wake up at 6, clean up more barf, go to work.

I left work early on Wednesday, intending to take Dog back to the vet. At this point, he needed an IV because his gums and nose were dry and his body was basically drinking itself for survival. I ran inside, grabbed his leash, and lead him to the garage. “We’re going for a ride!” I exclaimed, placing the emphasis on the word “ride” because he knows it means GETTING IN CAR LOOKING AT THINGS GOING TO A PLACE and those are all things he likes to do. “Going for a ride, going for a ride!” I kept saying as I jammed my key into the garage door lock. We had fifteen minutes to get to his appointment. I jiggled the key in the stiff lock, this fucking lock, always an asshole piece of shit lock stupid–SNAP.

I stood there staring in disbelief at the broken end of the key in my hand, and the rain started to fall. Dehydrated Seizure Dog took refuge under the porch and watched me as I stood there staring at the jagged end of my key in the shitty lock. I’m pretty sure he knew we weren’t going anywhere, but I was still trying to fucking figure out what was happening. Okay, so…key stuck in lock…door still locked…car on other side of door…

After about an hour of noisy lamenting (from both of us), I finally wised up and walked to the grocery store in the rain, where I bought several liters of Pedialyte, under which I submerged a piece of chicken. After several minutes of piercing side eye and quizzical head tilting and some what the fuck is this shit?? whimpers, the dog set about the task of slowly, laboriously lapping up the Pedialyte to get to the chicken. We went on like this for days, me drowning tiny bits of food in a hydrating solution intended for FUCKING INFANTS and him whining and complaining about the unfairness of life and just wanting to throw in the towel and then finally just fucking drinking the shit. Then The Pants came home and, like flipping a switch, the furry motherfucker decided that life was worth living again. Now that the Alpha Male is home, Dog has gone back to his previous lifestyle of completely ignoring him and instead following me everywhere I go, begging for more chicken.

What a terrible week. How is it that you can be scared for the life and well-being of something and want to break their goddamn stupid fucking face at the same time? Is this what parenthood is like?

shitty writing

Writing is a weird thing now, for me. It’s the only thing I do that makes me feel like I can’t do anything. I sit down to do it and can’t seem to push the noise of failure out of my head. Why are you even bothering, you suck so bad. This is a waste of time. But! But but but! Think of all the other things I did today that were a waste of time! Think of all those hours of EXTREME HOUSE HUNTING I watched! Think of all the couples wandering through empty homes, commenting halfheartedly on the crown moulding, prompting mock enthusiasm for one another, because they’ve already actually bought the house they’re going to buy and are re-enacting this entire futile search for the cameras! What about all the time they’re wasting, huh? Time that, in turn, forces me to waste my own time! Yeah but in the end, they bought a house. They accomplished a goal. When’s the last time you did that? You suck.

Ashley wants room for a candle making studio and Steven wants a garage for his camping equipment and knife collection and both just want a house that you knowwww SPEAKS to them like, you know?

Every week after writing class, I think about quitting writing class. I guess it’s served its purpose in that it’s forced me to start writing more often, but I leave there so dejected about everything and feeling like this has all been another exercise in uselessness. When I enrolled, I thought that maybe the class would be filled with funny people who wanted to learn how to write about their own lives. Really it’s a class full of people who want to start writing for the fun of it. Which is totally fine, but I can’t help but feel like I’m missing out on something by having to sit in a room for three hours a week listening to the same girl rehash stories of different times she’s shit her pants and how cute/quirky/fun it is when she does it. It’s anti-inspiration. It’s like soaking your heart in bug spray.

You would not. beliiiieve. how hard people laugh at pants-shitting stories. If class was held on the roof of a building, I’d go ahead and tip myself off the side at the first mention of a rogue turd in this girl’s underpants. Goodbye, everyone. Shit’s been real.

I don’t know how to say what I thought would come of this exercise. I guess I thought I’d be inspired and held accountable to crank out new writing every week. I didn’t expect to be surrounded by people who get high on the parts of constructive criticism that can possibly sound like positive comments and shut off their brains and decide they’re done for the day. I didn’t expect to be surrounded by people who say things like “I think anxiety is much easier than depression because you have so much more energy!” I didn’t expect to be surrounded by people who don’t want to actually read a book, or who didn’t even consider that a requirement to being able to write something: you know, that you might want to read some writing every now and again?

So I leave class in the dark, shaking because I’m hungry since I missed dinner and shaking because I’m angry that people with so little meaning or even interest in meaning in their work are so goddamn confident. Or maybe they’re not. Maybe the shit stories are the symptom of a deeper fear, and they’re just really good at hiding it (by covering it with feces).

Confidence is a difficult thing for me. Most of the time I enter a room with other people in it and think what the fuck am I doing here?? Most of the time, I feel like I’m hulking around the world with a Sloth face, calling BAYBEE WUUUUUTH to anyone who will listen. I feel like the blobby guy from the mucus commercials. I went to a show this week and as we stood in the crowd, my friend asked me something along the lines of whether being in a crowd made me feel like I was doing alright in the looks department. “Oh my god, no, not at all,” I said. I told her that nothing makes me feel duller and uglier than being in a crowd. It’s like being swallowed by the world and shown how really meaningless you are.

Hello, would you like to have a conversation?

This is all very overwrought because I’m tired today and I have dark circles under my eyes that won’t go away. Mostly I wish I wasn’t so far up my own ass all the time. Mostly I wish I could see below whatever is hiding under stories about poop and have some kind of appreciation for the humanness of it. Mostly I wish I could focus on the fact that people are all just little baby birds in the road hoping they won’t get smashed by an 18-wheeler.

Mostly I feel really, really bad for writing about the time I shit my pants.

I used to go into my sister’s room and dig through her bookcase. She also had an overflow book storage area that was the top few drawers of a bureau. I’d dig through there, too. She always had something I could borrow and read at least a couple pages. Most of the time, though, whatever she had was too cerebral for me, so I’d paw through stuff and read the synopsis on back covers to see if there was anything about horses in the book, and if not, I’d usually discard it.

Have just realized I never read Born to Trot and am requesting it from the library right now.

I would read literally anything about horses*. Especially if it was written by Marguerite Henry, who wrote about those big ol dumb ponies in a way that made me believe in pony magic, for real. It also made me cut up my horse calendar every year and tape the pages to my wall until there wasn’t room for anything else. I had a boyfriend in junior high for about a week and when I showed him my room, full of horse books and horse statues and horse pictures, he said, “So you like horses, huh?” and I shout-screamed YES. So excited was I to answer the question that I practically barked it at him and he took a step back and handed me a little Valentine bear and rolled away on his skateboard and never came over again. (I buried the bear in the yard and smashed a piece of dog shit into the dirt on top of it with a garden spade, but not until years later and after lots of crying into its synthetic fur. My stepdad was like WHY IS THERE DOG SHIT ON MY SPADE and of course I had no idea. Maybe the dog?)

I loved horses so much that I would beg my mother to buy me Horse Illustrated when I saw copies of it at the grocery store, and when she did cave and buy me one, I’d wear out the glossy pages by flipping through it constantly and reading every article and studying the diagrams of hoof injuries. There was a feature article once about a revolutionary technique to fix broken legs, and I remember being enthralled by the news, as if it would really change everything about the world and my life in general, and I ran downstairs and yelled “MOMMY THEY CAN FIX HORSES’ BROKEN LEGS NOW!”† No one was as excited about this as I was. “Think of all the horses that will live now! All for me to riiiiide!”

My sister did not have a lot of horse books, but I checked just in case. I was digging around in there one day during the summer after fourth grade when I found a book called Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas DeQuincey. The front of the book had a skeezy looking guy draped over a bed in some kind of bad shape. I had no idea what opium was but just in case it had something to do with horses I thought I should read the entire back of the book. So I did, and this lead to my very first panic attack!

NOT ABOUT HORSES FYI

Thomas De Quincey, it seems, was born in 1785 and died in 1859. Between those years, lots of stuff happened to him, like, uhh, being English, and also ships were invented, and he smoked some of that sweet sticky opey yum yums. Then he wrote a book about it. But what stuck out to me was that he was born in the 1780s. Which was the same decade of a different century in which I was born. The year of his birth within that decade was only three years from the year I was born in my century. So if he died in 1859, I would most likely die three years sooner in 2056. Which would mean I only had a FEW YEARS LEFT TO LIVE OH GOD I WILL DIE SOMEDAY

I spent the rest of the day trying to ignore the terrible realization. This was probably the first day of many days I spent trying to ignore terrible realizations! Nothing’s so bad as long as it’s daylight and you’ve got stuff to play with and people to talk to. At night, though, everyone goes to bed and you’re expected to stop talking and thinking and just go to sleep. Up until that night, this was easy, but the night I realized I would die, I just sat up in bed for hours, shaking and crying and turning lights off and on. I closed the toilet lid and stood on the toilet so I could watch my face swell and contort while I cried into the bathroom mirror, washed with dull yellow from the night light. I was too young and dumb to realize that just because an opium addict in the 18th century didn’t live for more than 74 years, it didn’t mean that I would be resigned to the exact same life span. I was also too scared to realize that 74 years is nothin’ to sneeze at. I was more obsessed with the whole “this is about the span of a normal human life and that’s because death exists.” So I stayed up, night after night, thinking about dying. I remember the house as being empty and creaky, of smelling different and feeling cavernous and lonely.

I can barely remember resisting sleep as a child and not knowing why, or thinking of bedtime as a sad time, something to be avoided as long as possible. But also, being awake after everyone else seemed very sad, too. As an adult who understands more about how a child’s brain works, I’ve spent some time thinking about what was probably going on with me during those first trips to Panic City. First, my family had just moved into a new house. We hadn’t been there for an entire month before I had my first panic attack. I had gone from sharing a room with my sister, our twin beds 4-feet apart, to being in my own huge bedroom, all by myself. Moving is fucking stressful! Sure, I didn’t have all the responsibilities that adults have, but adjusting to something like that is difficult for a child. Second, everyone was busy unpacking and working and I was running around like a crazy person because if anxiety makes me a slobbery mess at night, anxiety and lack of sleep make me a terrifying cokehead during the day. So basically, the response to my behavior during daylight and my inability to cope at nighttime was GO TO YOUR ROOM AND STOP TRYING TO MAKE EVERYONE CRY. YOU CAN COME BACK WHEN YOU ARE DIFFERENT. Everyone was annoyed with me and tired and grouchy and I was dealing with feelings that were way over my head, so my brain thought oh hey, seems like a good time to think about the concept of your IMMINENT AND UNAVOIDABLE DEATH?

I don’t know a lot of kids these days but I certainly don’t know many of them who are obsessed with illnesses. I read books about Hiroshima victims dying of leukemia, and then I had leukemia. I watched part of And the Band Played On and then I had somehow contracted AIDS from a toilet seat or a tiny cut on my hand or from being in the girls’ locker room at a rival school during an away basketball game. Because of a certain camp counselor, I was convinced for fucking years that the sharp pain I often got in my right leg was leg cancer‡ and that I was definitely dying. I’d lie in bed at night, sweating and crying and thinking about how to tell my mom I was going to die of AIDSkemia because sometimes I got dizzy or had weird pains or felt pukey. If they’d had WebMD back then, I’d have straight up died from anxiety.

In college, I went two weeks without sleeping because I thought I was going to have a heart attack. I lost 20 pounds so quickly that it started to hurt to eat food, like my stomach forgot what it was supposed to be doing but had been enjoying its vacation so much it would rather just sit there and churn out gas bubbles and not turn anything into valuable energy. I went to the doctor and she told me I was having panic attacks and severe IBS and that basically all my problems would go away if I would chill out and stop drinking coffee all the time.

Still convinced she was full of shit and that I was dying, I called her every single time I had a heart palpitation. I was really trying to get her to see her error, because while it would have been sweet revenge to die and let her know how wrong she was, I was pretty sure I’d rather be alive to have her apologize for misdiagnosing me. I read internet forums written entirely by people who had been diagnosed with the same thing. They all went like this:

Becky1101

Well just got back form the dr today. He says the heart palps r from diet meds but wants to put me on Lexapro. Are you crazy? I said! If there is one thing I kno its that Lexapro causes stomach cancer!

2bys2

DO NOT GO ON THE LEXPRO WHATEVER THEY SAY. LEXAPRO IS PROVEN TO CAUSE 5 TYPES OF CANCERS INCLUDING STOMACH COLON BACK AND LIVER. I MADE THE MISTAKE OF GOING ON IT LAST SPRING AND NOW PROBABLY HAVE STOMACH CANCER BC ITS HURTING ALL THE TIME NOW CAN’T EVEN KEEP MOST FOOD DOWN PROBABLY DYING!!!! WAITING TO FIND OUT IF DYING AT NEXT APPT

eric_anderson_p24

I have a friend who died from SuperCancer due to similar drugs to lexapro its not a pretty picture. have been off my antianxiety meds for 3 weeks now and definitely feeling more safe from SuperCancer. I am now just dealing with spots on chest that may be some kind of sarcoma or possibly shingles??? Does anyone have pics of shingles they can share thx

And on and on and on, because rational, sane people who have been healed or helped by whatever modern medicine suggested they try don’t go on forums and talk about how awesome life is now. They just go do life. It took me a VERY long time to realize that. A very long and arduous time. It also took me a long time to realize that my doctor was totally right, and she had me figured out, but only because she had tons of other patients who were acting exactly like me. I didn’t really feel too bad for jamming up her voicemail with tons of frantic calls about how I thought maybe I was going to drop dead that afternoon. I only realized that she really knew what she was doing when I called her from a crowded train and had this conversation with her:

Me: I just had a really bad heart palpitation! It was like really fluttery for a few seconds and then it was like BANG like a big gulping feeling!

Her: It’s probably the amount of sugar or caffeine or both that you had today. It’s normal for people with anxiety to have this anyway, but with your diet–

Me: I’ve hardly had any! All I had today was a can of Arizona green tea and that’s just green tea!

Her: Well, if you’re really that concerned, you could come in for an EKG–

Me: OH MY GOD WHAT IS THAT? NO!

There was something about the tone of her voice: a little bit exhausted, maybe from dealing with people who were actually sick and then having to return phone calls from crazy people who had been reading too much Internet and drinking too much caffeine and not dealing with their emotional problems. She scared me by mentioning an actual medical test which, when it really came down to it, we both knew I was too chicken shit to commit to. So I decided to at least pretend I was not sick until I either a) died, or b) felt better?§

All natural! Plus 40 grams of high fructose corn syrup because you drank the whole thing.

There was never a time when anyone sat down with me and talked to me about my feelings when I was a kid, so I wasn’t sure that I had them until they had manifested into Something Else. The Something Else has continued for the rest of my life. Figuring out where and why the pattern began has not helped in putting a stop to it: I still lie in bed and think I’m going to die tomorrow, or The Pants is going to stop breathing. I still lie awake in the dark feeling really lonely and sad and the first thought that comes to mind is You probably feel this way because the dog is going to die someday. So I reach down to the floor to make sure he’s still breathing. Really what I should be doing is reaching under the feeling itself to find out what is hurting or howling or really bothering me. I do that sometimes. Other times, it’s just too difficult to catch the frantic 9-year-old on her 500th revolution around the dining room table at top speed and calm her down and find out what is really scaring her. Sometimes I just don’t want to know. I’d rather just think that maybe I’m possibly dying, a little bit, maybe.

I think it would be really nice to die when I’m very old and there’s nothing much left for me to do. I imagine I’d live in a small house on a hill in a little town out in the middle of nowhere, and that I’d know when I was going to die, so I could invite all the neighborhood children in to my horse library, the world’s largest, and say “Take anything you want.”

Would that be scary? I hope that wouldn’t be scary. I mean it’s not like I’d be saying COME GET MY HORSEY BOOKS I DON’T NEED THEM ANYMOOOORE HAHAHHAHAHHAHAH *hacking cough* *dies on porch* *lifeless body rolls down hill into town*

* Also donkeys! Brighty of the Grand Canyon was about a wild donkey who got attacked by a mountain lion, then saved by a cowboy who earned his trust by putting a pair of overalls on his front legs to keep flies out of his wounds. BRIGHTY!

† They cannot.

‡ It was and is sciatic nerve pain that haunts me to this day. (Or possibly leg cancer.)

§ I did not die, I felt better later.