Transgenerational Despondence: Part I

From the curb our muscles tensed up so we stretched them out. We gave them a good stretch and ascended an impressive set of stairs. Inside a cool dude in the cool atrium greeted us. The pine and marble only made sense because of the legacy. The hospital was so nearby, I'd get there one day after an explosion, after a series of intelligent decisions culminating in a high test score and an impressive list of misrepresentations on expensive paper. The place was perfect, no further questions Your Honor — though, you have sweat and soda stains on your oversized light brown t-shirt. That's the difference, we all thought. Our thinking was so uninformed it enfraudened things right off.

I had no idea. Let me just do something I know. Everyone else knows it but I'll do it and I'll find something a little obscure. I'll jump all over that and memorize things. It wasn't enough at the beginning and the rear-view mirror was positioned poorly. I met a few people but mostly I met lists. I met lists of words. Common intercourse never really occurred or was ever desired. Thus friendships never formed. This is not to suggest I myself am anything more than a list. I am a list. Some people imagine themselves long lists, but in actuality they're pretty short lists. I haven't met a person in a while. I haven't let myself be a person in order to meet another person. People and lists are indivisible, so there's no point in getting all cynical about people. Some lists are better than others according to different people but that's no matter. How often does a person emerge from their list, rendering the list antiquated and uninformed? That's what's valuable, after all. If the list is never disputed than you're just a list, and when you emerge as a person you're predictable, reinforcing your listness. Well I never even read the list on that place, even though there was a pretty straightforward one readily available. The place is a list.

Erudition never tempted me because I missed the opening gunshot. I was just about to start the backwards 'c' at the bottom of the second upper-case 's' in 'SAS' when the gunshot went off for my first year at the place. I really knew my elementary triangles. You know how some people know shit that isn't life-essential? Well that's how I knew triangles. Some people can hold an egg in their right hand and tell you the size of the yolk, other people can estimate the outside air temperature within two degrees – anyway that's when the starting gun went off. I had a napkin in my collar and an almost-empty plate of linguini in front of me when a whole bunch of the others started running. I didn't even notice. I spun the last good forkfull of linguine against my spoon.

Some people use this head/false-start analogy as an excuse. It's legitimate, you'll never convince me otherwise, but it's not as encompassing as audiences presume the complainers intend it. The complainer eventually goes to the bathroom, washes up, and crosses the starting line. So get off it. It's not a solicitation for as much as you'd think, though really, the solicitation part undermines the whole thing. Which is why it's bullshit that it even comes up, but it does because it's easy. It's a creed. So I'll get off it. The face of manual labor got a facelift, and the prize for doing the new manual labor was similarly upgraded. But the byproducts of the new manual labor proved most appealing. So there we were, a bunch of lists walking around with lists, showing other lists how to be better lists, hoping some lists wouldn't be as appealing to other lists, and crossing shit off our own and each other's lists, disrupting lists temporarily or even permanently, and before you know it the impressive set of stairs were less impressive. We still stretched it out before climbing them and then a list of five iterated through a list of lists about 20 times modulo four.

Along the way I saw some stuff and felt certain ways. I don't even know how much feeling went into the stuff I saw. At the very least, very little of the feeling divorced itself from the feeling of myself. Most of the time ... feeling myself. Which was great, and sad, and all-encompassing, and a perfect analogy that is too taboo to use even in this highly indulgent space. So use your imagination as I use this highly indulgent space, and feel yourself. That may be one of the most ironic things I've ever written, followed of course by this, which is par for the course: self-congratulatory indulgence in a public forum with a highly predictable audience.

And that's the way things went. I indulged myself with “feelings” and enjoyed the terrain, which brings me to my next point about autonomy. Autonomy is a piece of cake, a bag of chips, and a sandwich that you wouldn't touch even though everyone else in the room has mayonnaise pockets on the sides of their mouths. That's autonomy in the big city. It doesn't make sense, it's cheap, and it's gross to you at once and perfectly acceptable after a little superiority-erosion. Anything and everything makes sense in some sense.

Little triggers set me off. In one case, I was triggered and made vulnerable. I grew obssessed and out of nowhere, the far off goal slid into focus, vaguely out of focus, and then abruptly back in under the bright lights, the highway lights, the warm lights, the Main lights. I lost it though, but that wasn't my fault, in a sense. Another trigger set me off and has gone completely unfulfilled. I am set off. 'Vulnerable' doesn't describe it properly because it suggests a susceptibility which is only a part of the whole, and that's bullshit.

So unconsciously last night, I got a little closure on the second trigger I mentioned, which was great. I was working on an assignment about Argentina. The assignment was for some unnamed class that I had never registered for. The point of this is not that I was in a class that I hadn't registered for or that I was completing an assignment for no reason. I had the assignment, I had to research Argentina in order to complete it. Argentine politics actually. So there I was. In the place where I was historically vulnerable to triggers, trying to do some research, and all my closest lists were hanging out with me. The really close ones. The ones whose lists included me, the ones that appeared on my list. I apple-tabbed to the right and turned my head and saw the gatekeeper. The historical gatekeeper, and I wouldn't use the word 'gate' because it's so impossibly annoying, but it's the only word. I had seen the gatekeeper quite a lot here, but only in mythology did she actually guard something so valuable. They were lying down on top of each other, the gatekeeper between us. Why would they be lying down here? No idea. The face emerged and I noticed it first, and in my unconscious state my organs fluttered as they would if I weren't lying down with my eyes closed. All of my closest friends engaged, but I never did. I left, dejected, and had an incredible lightning shock of introspection. I know what to say, I know how to act, I can do this. Before I could speak, however, I was finally engaged. Immediately lambasted for behavior that I can't remember, I started going through the script I had just devised to calm myself down and deal with the pain of committing a crime I wasn't even aware I had committed. I asked for two minutes, knowing that I'd need more than one. We went outside and my back burned as I left. “There's nothing to concern yourself with!” I felt like yelling that behind me, “this is just for closure.” When we left the three-story high school corridors we were in front of DiFara's Pizzeria. I reversed the order that I was supposed to say things in, and walking north down the street, I said, “I know you were appalled by my behavior (which I don't remember), but I hope you know how much you mean to me.” At once she nodded, but the next thing I knew she was clutching a small cannister and was spraying a toxic, white substance at me, yelling. I avoided it but the residue vapors were all around us and we clutched each other's forearms as we opened our mouths without breathing and shook our heads all around as the particles fell around us. Our eyes were irritated and there was a tension now that I will never forget. I finished what I had rehearsed, “You are a strong leader and an incredible teacher, for those reasons you are beautiful.” I said it like that. “For those reasons.” It was a bit of a lie but I knew after I said it that it was the reason why I inverted what I had practiced. I couldn't lead off with “you are beautiful” because I would've gotten maced in the face.

After this we walked back up some big impressive stairs and into the high school corridors. My mouth was enormous. It felt like I had chalky semi-solid growths linked together and tugging on my teeth. I knew that if I bit down my teeth would fall out so I just followed closely behind without speaking. It was such a long journey back to the desk where my Argentina assignment was. Along the way, I put my fingers in my mouth to try and figure out what was in my mouth. It was gum. I started scraping it out and using my fingernails to floss it out of my teeth. By this point I was back with all of my friends. All the lists were there, every one I had met, ever. At a giant table. I sat back down and looked up...my mouth clean.