Q:
A:
It’s when the turbulence hits, hanging in midair, or more like the preparing to
endure the sensation that I know is going to like literally quake my whole
being. It’s something irrational that just takes over, and there’s really
nothing I can do about it. Something flawed and scarred in my own estimate of
terror, something that wells up and stays heavy no matter what I do. I just
can’t shake it. It’s not acrophobia or vertigo, really, either. I can be in
high places, no problem. And it’s not like I get dizzy or confused or
lightheaded. It’s more like a combination of anxiety and some sort of deathly fear
ingrained in my subconscious that grabs my sense of who I am and rattles it
until I’m sweating and panicky and completely locked inside of this space that keeps
squashing me in like a garbage compactor.
Q:
A:
No. I’m not sure about that.
Q:
A:
Well, it’s hard to say. One moment you are like totally invincible. And the
next?
Q:
A:
Yeah. That’s true. But I don’t believe it myself. At least I don’t, or wouldn’t
like to, think so.
Q:
A:
Because it’d get too hard to be rational, in that particular case. You’d lose
your sense of perspective on what it means to be you. You know? It’s hard to
explain, I guess. It gets hard to, at least.
Q:
A:
Steamed broccoli.
Q:
A:
Of course! That goes without mentioning. There’s the rumble, that distinct
tremor of dread that snaps me like an electric shock into…what would be the
total opposite of oblivion?
Q:
A:
Yes. There’s a certain peculiar sense of…I don’t know, the absolute loss of
control over what’s happening to me. I can’t get outside of it. It’s like being
bubble-wrapped in anxiety, force-fed this needles-and-pins dread that usurps my
normal means to functionality.
Q:
A:
No. Definitely not. That’d just make it worse, you know?
Q:
A:
Well, think about it. It’s kind of like saying, “The Wild Wild East.” It just
doesn’t cut it. My mustard’s white. My temper’s tin-foiled. Let’s keep this on
the down and up. I don’t want to get snuckered into all this…
Q:
A:
Yeah. Snuckered. Like a portmanteau of snicker and fucker. Snucker.
Q:
A:
Ha. Not really. Never thought about that. But, yeah, it’s like everything gets
ratcheted up. The pressure-- and no, I just had a drifter about cabin pressure
there, so, well, no…anyway-- the pressure, it gets so intense it’s like I could
never scream it away. It’s over and above and beyond any loudness in the world.
For all intentional circumstances there’s no habitual renderings going on, you
know?
Q:
A:
True. But still. One must, you know, get by. And for the most part I’m
terrified of being, well, terrified. That’s more telling, I guess. That’s more
of a here-I-am-rock-me-like-a-hurricane situation. At least that’s what I keep
telling myself.
Q:
A:
In what way?
Q:
A:
Oh. I get it. Tell the girl she’s got potential and then let her drift on away
and do whatever it is that she’s going to do. Real uplifting message. I’d
change it to something like, “Don’t forget your sunglasses, Little Red. There’s
a wolf who’s not quite as hungry as you’d think hiding somewhere beyond reason
and sense. Make a break for insanity if you can.” Or something at least more
spirit-raising than some moldy diatribe of wishy-washy sentimentality.
Boo-motherfucking-hoo, you know?
Q:
A:
Sure. And while I’m at it, don’t you maybe, just maybe, inside of that
potboiler head of yours, think that I might have more guts than you give me
credit for? I mean, look at it. I’m going against every fiber of my fucking
being just going on these flights, bucking every instinct-- no matter how bogus
those instincts seem on the surface, and below too-- just to wrangle myself
into a seat, which I pray to God is a window seat (this somehow assuages the
fear somewhat, being able to look down and see some scraps of land below me,
tiny rectangles of cordoned off green and brown, or just the wing sometimes),
buckle myself in and sit there next to a complete stranger who is usually so
involved in her own magazine and/or head-phoned music to even bother a
nanosecond about some misconceptualized fear residing deep and deadly in the
most primordial places of the heart in the person sitting to her immediate
left. And I sit there, for hours, falling further down this inescapable rabbit
hole, gritting my teeth, nails digging into my palms so hard it looks like my
hands have been attacked by a woodpecker.
Q:
A:
Okay, well if my hands were wood. A skinpecker then. Does that make you happy?
Fuck. I’m just…
Q:
A:
Oh, bull manure chunks. “I want to be stereotyped. I want to be
classified.” See? Well, she-says-Jesus. Anyway. So, what I’m trying to convey
here is the complete full-throttle antagonism of my struggle. It’s almost like
I’m fighting against myself fighting against myself. Wow. That sounds so
absurd. But, hell, that’s just how it feels.
Q:
A:
Oh. Yeah. That’s another thing. You’ve kind of gone and clubbed the proverbial baby seal on the head with that one. Very apposite, Deary.
Q:
A:
Fuck you.
Q:
A:
I know. Sorry. It’s just the squealing shoot-at-first-sight nature of these
things. I get it. So, well, anyway, like I was saying...
Q:
A:
As I was saying, there’s really no perpetualty about it when I back-tab to the
previous browser of my mind’s screen. I’m open to suggestions. It’s just that
it’s really hard for me to believe that any other person could possibly
understand what it’s like to be in that frame of mind. I can’t understand it
myself when I’m not in it. That doesn’t help. It just doesn’t. The trap that I
set for myself is inescapable. I guess that’s my own fault. I make sure I can’t
possibly get out of it, of course without consciously knowing that I’m setting
the trap. How could someone else come up with a solution to something I’ve
carefully crafted-- though unknowingly so-- to outwit myself? It doesn’t seem
that likely to me.
Q:
A:
Could be.
Q:
A:
Excuse me?
Q:
A:
Sure. Sure it does. That makes like absolutely zero cents in the cash bag. I
want to be warm, just like everyone else does. Just not too warm, or too cold.
Thriving in optimal conditions. Something…shit. Something like that.
Q:
A:
Just because. That’s all. Just because. Steam open all my mail. Guess the Crown
back in Royal. Mohair on the seat of my pants, and I sneeze and I sneeze, and
that’s all there is to know. Guesses are as close as you’ll ever get to it.
Q:
A:
If it were that easy we’d all be billionaires of the mind. No. I don’t accept
that. The route least or most taken. It doesn’t matter. We’re strutting around
with ideals stuck in our hats. We’re affectionate without knowing it. The
places we take for granted when we aren’t in them take us for all we’re worth.
Q:
A:
No. More like, “War in.”
Q:
A:
Wilder. More free than that. A partition in oblivion. A muskier scent of being
lost, alone, disenfranchised by disenchantment, the edges…it’s in the edges
that we construct a meager escape. I don’t care about delayed copouts and
battalions of unsaintly rovers mismanaging the resources of the world. I am
this horribly frightened creature staring life into its deepest corners, a
curled ball of trembling and wide-eyed, inchoate nightmares. It’s not worth
even attacking, this anxiously hyperaware state. It won’t go away. There’s
nowhere for it to go.
Q:
A:
No. Definitely not.
Q:
A:
Something felt. The wavering shadows of tree branches like monstrous tendrils
in a steamed-up window. A memory caught in a shape’s sense. More than a
whispering ease to put you to bed with. A streetlight’s pumpkin-orange glow
shrouded in fog. A shambled plod through grains of knowing, and it’s crowded,
pulled too close for anything even resembling comfort. The disregarded mulch of
an over-stewed life. Something unable to be stirred. I kiss my memories goodbye
on each cheek and kill mosquitoes with a tennis racket. It is disquiet at its
most refined and absurd.
Q:
A:
It doesn’t matter. Nobody dreams of me.
Q:
A:
I guess so. One never knows, now does one?
Q:
A:
What’s the frequency?
Q:
A:
That’ll do. They both have their fine side, their reverse gear, and what’s
surprising is how little was apparently lost in the whole scheme of most folks’
lives when all was over for both of those guys. It’s all some sick schmooze
fest now. And I will have none of it. The closed-door clutter of nostalgia and
trend hopping and the mopiest kids on the planet to boot. Fuck that. Seriously.
It all sucks the mighty big one.
Q:
A:
Not if I can help it.
Q:
A:
Circumnavigating the loneliness of what’s stretching so vast and eerily across
the account of things I’ll now never get the chance to know, to have the
experience of going through. In a nutshell? I’m doomed by my own inhibition.
Q:
A:
Yes.
Q:
A:
A highfalutin wrong and nobody’s right. Insincerity is the highest form of
flattery, at least in a place where I’d never claim to be from. I’m taking my
middle name with me to the grave. That ought to put a dull sheen on the price
of gold for the next couple of generations. But there’s always a lot of “ought”
to things in general. As deep-sea shrimp vomit bioluminescence, “ought” leaves
a lot of room for loss to grow tentacles and find more victims to strangle in
their sleep.
Q:
A:
Oh, I know. You’re right…but still…
Q:
A:
Yeah. The seedier, the better. I’m miffed about it for the most part, still.
Things that used to add up are starting to divide and multiply, and at the
worst of times, subtract.
Q:
A:
Dictated by the swinging catastrophes of moods. Simplified, rendered into
neutral slumber, and it’s me who’s mistaking devils for G-rated companions with
cute little bifurcated tails and kid-friendly pitchforks. I am completely
absorbed and annihilated by the dread of turbulence, and when that rollicking
starts? Oh, brother. It’s like my whole personality is shoved candy-over-apple
into the briar patch.
Q:
A:
The short of the long of it? It’s just like…well, acting a certain way to fool
others follows suit, and then, unbeknownst to even yourself, you become that
way, that fool you’ve created to lure others off the scent. The act of acting a
certain way becomes a way of behaving, and you do it naturally and unaffected
at last, with maybe a subconscious wink at your true-blue…well, personality.
And, in the end’s only start, we are nothing but it. Our personality? It is
everything about who we are, who we appear to be, and if it gets slain or
maimed or tortured or dragged through the streets until it burns and writhes in
agony? Well, let’s just say that we won’t be making any appearances, public or
private, except maybe in this redoubt we’ve carved out with trepidation and
distress in the craggiest caves of our mind, this temporary vestibule of our
trembling willpower that locks us up unsteady yet somehow strangely…safe.
Q:
A:
Safe. Yeah. That’s the odd thing. It’s like my mind’s gone into disaster mode,
sensing the direness of the circumstances. It takes my personality and flees
with it to some distant chamber where it can be…well, safe. Even though it is a
place so scary and horrifying and downright scaphism-awful that I’d rather not
even contemplate what it’s like from the outside looking in for fear of getting
trapped right back in there again. Is this what it’s like to see yourself
slowly going insane? It’s such a helpless feeling, really. I never would’ve
guessed.
Q:
A:
A prisoner who’s locked herself up. Selfish, really, you know? But there’s no
way out. I’m steeling myself in a constant forage of miniscule bits of logic
that I hope will keep me sane, always just a blink away from losing it, from
falling forever down, down, down into the abyss.
Q:
A:
I fly.
Q:
A:
Doesn’t she talk about the fear of being late coinciding with the fear of
death? On a purely anthropological level it stems, or one would be led to
grope, from the bisecting of fortitude with guilt-riddled chance. The valise of
her gist-- the argument sours too, you know, around heady stop-and-slow traffic
jams of derisive facetiousness-- is that we’d all be better off staring down
from the high dive…which is really fucking absurd, at least in the opinion of
this pell-mell operator.
Q:
A:
I’m not sure it does. Ever. Scuttle and plow. Reap and bow. Just not so grimly.
I used to think I could stave off my clashes with “the horror” by manipulating
its outward manifestations. But it’s, well, it’s like being upset with somebody
who doesn’t exist. Targets are hard to come by, and for the most part I’m all
out of arrows.
Q:
A:
Indefinite extenuating terms of suffering. It’d pacify a humbler sort, this
call to usurpation that only maybe in a creepy Ayn-Rand sense would work
anything close to wonders. Okay. So let’s strip the fucker down to its
bare-boney essence. Complete deconstruction and compartmentalizing. The
rearrangement of reason.
Q:
A:
Taking maybe as an answer?
Q:
A:
Yep. Sure. And you miss the seven-in-the-morning sunlight, the way trees used
to genuflect in the sheen of it, the dewy air, the glide and swoosh of cars
going by, the quiet rising of another day. An image that keeps getting blurrier as
you pull farther and farther away. So, well, the moon shines its pate for
another go around, and here we are stuck in the time it takes to wish it all
away.
Q:
A:
I succumb.
Q:
A:
Weary but unable to rest. Perpetually imitating motion. It’s the desultory nature
of an over-scratched mental itch that leaps from sheep to sheep in the space
between dreams. I flag down what I can from the humdrum and hang-dried, hoping,
at least, to catch a glimpse of casual boredom-- something I can use against
myself, something to control and fence-in the junkyard of my trepidation. But
the tabetic swirls of moment-to-moment fright cling too strong and overpower any
useful sock-it-to-‘em that I can come up with. Everything’s just some meager
improvisation, and I freeze up, mind blank, and ride woe shuddering towards
quiver-town. Up stream and past all “prefab” means of escape.
Q:
A:
I know. But that’s blasting sand with a squirt gun. I don’t have a choice in
the matter. Giving in? Or up? It never even gets to that point. It’s not like,
“I am woman! Hear me…well, whimper.” No. That’s bullshit. That’s not it at all.
It’s outside of…of…everything.
Q:
A:
In the fine print, the boilerplate of reality’s lost grip, the nutant sway of
yawing deceit that chaffs and coils and regurgitates what it least resembles,
all askew and raw and needling over and over a single reoccurring bête noire
that’s affixed so firmly to skeins of disastrous mind-churnings that I can
hardly distill any temper or guise from it, ever, to use against…well…against
myself.
Q:
A:
The apples of me are falling farther and farther from the tree.
Q:
A:
Close enough. Freud would’ve coughed into his hand, taken a drag of his cigar,
done a quick snort of blow, and then promptly shuffled off to his own demise.
Jung might take a bath. Me? I coddle the curdled aspect of worn-out bliss in
the softest part of my personality, and then whiff and moan, taking just enough
smoke breaks to mind what’s left of my manners.
Q:
A:
Well, shit. My hands are not so small these days, let me tell you.
Q:
A:
Thanks. You too. It’s been…well…something. Definitely something.
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