I've always wanted a brother.
This is a thought which propels me through life like an outboard motor; leaving a muttering, ruminant wake behind me.
Or perhaps it's a father. Hard to tell.
Regardless, some kind of masculine figure.
Like a statue at the foot of my bed.
Or a painting, one of those English Lords with their hounds, on the wall opposite my bed.
I don't really use my bed to sleep anymore.
My grandmother didn't either, after a time. She'd piled all the toys from each Happy Meal she'd bought over the last three weeks on top. Clothes in plastic, books, papers. A mound of ephemera.
Her bedroom always had a strange smell, and the shades were always pulled.
I have a few friends, though I would consider none of them brothers.
In fact, I get teary-eyed when I see a father-son moment on the television.
Even if it's only a commercial.
Sometimes I'll see a group of guys walking down the street and I become cancerous with envy.
They walk so easily in tandem and I, I trip over my own damn feet.
I am somewhat afraid that I will turn into my grandmother. She wandered through a kind of fog that only she could see, towards the end. And always worrying.
Maybe it's a family disease. A external locus of control. Nothing to do with me except for how I was put together. Faulty parts.
Car manufacturers usually recall those cars whose brakes are faulty.
When I drive, I like to drive very fast.
I remember I turned off my headlights one moonless night in the country.
Whipped around the curves like a frightened ingenue in a noir film.
Almost crashed.
I don't drive so much anymore, though I miss it.
I'm a pedestrian. I hate that word, and I love most words.
Borborygmia, for example.
Or anaphylaxis. Medical terms really are the best. Granuloma, dyskinesia, catatonia. Fomite, dendrite, neuropathy. Cortex, intravenous immunoglobulin. This last, I know, treats hypogammaglobulinemia, a primary immune deficiency, and inflammatory diseases like Kawasaki's disease.
They say you can't learn anything from television. I tell them, everything I learned from television, I verified on Wikipedia.
Just kidding. [citation needed]
And so in the waning days of November.
When does a month start to wane? I suppose it'd be right after the half-way mark.
Today is November 13th. So I suppose this is the gibbous days of November.
The sun is still near to us. Not as near but still near.
I wonder exactly how far it is.
Aphelion is a good word, too.
So is perihelion.
The closest approach of Pluto is called perihadion, and farthest is apohadion. -hadion from Hades, which is hell. I like to call the closest approach of Hell, when times are really bad, perihadion.
Everything is circles. I used to draw circles, endless amounts of tiny, inked-in circles whorling across the margins of every notebook page.
That was in middle school.
My teacher told me to “cut it out” and I took scissors to each page in defiance.
Or maybe I didn't, maybe I just wanted to.
This, as I write it, is kind of like a memoir and kind of also like a conversation I'm having with myself.
At least I can be guaranteed of an intelligent conversation.
I think that's one of the worst jokes ever created. Just as bad, if not as bad, as a diner in a restaurant holding up their empty plate to the busboy and saying
We didn't like it very much.
Oh you sly dogs. How clever you are.
But still you have to smile and laugh as if it is the first time you have heard it.
An amnesiac would make a better waiter than me.
Really only someone with retrograde amnesia.
Like that guy in that movie. Couldn't make new memories.
But then how would the waiter remember the drinks?
He could tattoo it on himself.
He does anyway, metaphorically.
And somehow it's easier to make friends when you lie, even if it's just a little one. Everyone lies, I think it's just easier for most people to gently elide over the truth with something fictional.
Novels exist because of this. So do movies, and television.
I spend a lot of time in front of the television.
I am usually biting my nails until they bleed.
I am usually also stoned.
I prefer to say “high” because stoned sounds so violent.
Giles Corey leaps to mind.
The farthest approach of a black hole is termed an apomelasma, and the nearest, perimelasma.
Perhaps that would be a more adequate descriptor of the bad days. The lonely days, when it feels like there's a great sucking thing at the foot of my bed.
Or at the other end of the couch, where I wake up.
In the hole where the statue would be.
Or the painting of the English lord.
Some days I feel like Colin, the puling, pathetic invalid from The Secret Garden, jealous of Dickon's wick.
No innuendo there, Frances Mary Hodgson.
If this were a play, I'd list out the people I know like a dramatis personae, so you'd be better acquainted with them.
I don't “know” many people.
Who does, really. We all just kind of hang around each other relative to each other's natural gravity.
Someone the other day was telling me that we don't know why gravity exists, we just know it does.
I met this someone in the great gray hallways of the Internet.
I imagine the Internet is full of the sound of doors, constantly opening and closing. Some of those doors have locks and deadbolts.
I met this person because all my life, I have wanted a brother.
I put the laptop at the other end of the couch and leaned back like I was just waking up and there he was.
Just his face, but he was smiling.
Through a beard.
I have always wanted a beard.
I'm almost to the place where I have a beard.
Though when I was buying cigarettes the other day, the guy at the register said he didn't recognize me, that I had more “fungus” on my face.
I haven't smoked in six months.
Three weeks ago, I started again.
That might be why.
Not that he said I had more “fungus” on my face, but that six months had gone by.
Why he didn't recognize me, that is.
When I look in the mirror, I don't recognize myself.
Not because of my beard.
Though that might be why I grew it.
To dysrecognize myself.
I don't think that's why, though it's a theory.
That could also be why I tried to kill myself.
So everyone else would dysrecognize me.
I don't think dysrecognize is a word.
And when I told you that the Hum was worse that day, I said it while making kind of this phrenological semaphore over my skull.
You said sometimes, you speak so dramatically.
I tried to pretend it didn't hurt but it did anyway.
When I was a kid, my teachers always said I was “sensitive.”
I imagined all of my nerve endings somehow closer to the surface of my skin, sometimes even sticking out of the pores, like invisible tendrils waving ethereally in the wind.
If someone got too close, I'd get shocked, like an overabundance of feeling would incapacitate my brain.
Kind of like a reverse jellyfish.
A therapist told me that I have an eidetic memory for negative things people say about me, so I tried to apply negative mnemonics to learning.
Flashcards, if I got them right on the first try, earned me one lash of the whip.
Just kidding.
Though in fourth grade, I did pretend to have epilepsy. I did it so convincingly that they scheduled an EEG for me. Electroencephalogram. I remember laying in the dark and hearing the scribble of those little pens over quadrille paper.
I remember thinking it looked like a seismograph and I wondered if they were looking for earthquakes inside of me.
I suppose, in a way, they were.
My grandmother, along with all of her other junk, had a silver can that, when shaken, continued to shake seemingly of its own accord. It was called Earthquake-in-a-Can.
Maybe that's where I got the Hum. Like the Bottle Imp. From the Can.
100% Genuine California Earthquake! The side of the thing read.
The things they teach kids.
I am of the opinion that you ingest what you learn and sometimes what you ingest can make you sick if it's not cooked properly.
The cooking properly comes from the teaching.
We don't have enough good teachers. There's only a small amount of people with the patience to cook, and even smaller amount of those who want to be paid a small amount to do it.
We all wish we could do something with our lives that didn't equal out to money, though we all do it anyway.
Money is the universal language. It's accented by different denominations, from different countries.
I would prefer to be dumb.
Or have my metaphorical tongue cut out.
Rather than speak money.
There's no grammar to money, no tense. It's all present tense. I have this amount of money. Now I do not have this amount.
Today I have to decide if I have enough nickels in the paper roll to buy lunch. I already know I don't.
I speak so dramatically.
And when I told you the Hum was worse today, I meant it, and I did everything I could to try to get you to understand, but I wasn't speaking the right language.
If I gave every person a hundred-dollar bill before I asked them if they understood what I meant, I bet every single one of them would say yes.
Though you really should account for that contingent of the honorable.
And of course, the wealthy. The wealthy look at the hundred-dollar bill like I look at a penny on the sidewalk.
A tails-up penny.
Of course you were concerned. You're always concerned. You should be.
And every week at the end of my session she asks me about my safety. It's a polite way of asking if I'm going to cut the cord.
Off myself.
Kick the bucket.
Jump off a bridge.
Take too many pills.
I say things like no, no. Absolutely not. I couldn't.
Truth is, I could.
But I won't.
Freud calls it Eros and Thanatos. The life-urge and the death-urge.
I prefer Libido and Destrudo, or Destrado.
I will, someday, write a book entitled Destrudo, or Destrado.
The death-urge.
Everything has an opposite.
Except for me.
Then of course there's the two sides to everything I think.
The Apollonian and the Dionysian.
The classic internal struggle.
Maybe I am a collection of multiples that each have their own opposite. A collection of multiples has no singular opposite, other than a collection of no multiples, which is essentially a black hole.
Perimelasma. Sounds like a type of cancer.
I suppose a black hole is a kind of cancer, like a tumor on the skin of space. Perimelanoma.
I am told that I catastrophize. That means I am always thinking about what will go wrong rather than what will go right.
During my session last week, the therapist asked me if I had been diagnosed in the past and if so with what.
In the mental hospital, they told me I had Borderline Personality Disorder. This means I have mood instability as well as idealization and devaluation episodes. It also means I have unstable interpersonal relationships.
I have started keeping this journal to chart my thought process. This is why it isn't the most reliable.
Nothing about me is reliable.
Some people say that the term Borderline Personality Disorder should be renamed to Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder.
I think I like the first term more.
They diagnosed me within a half-hour. Opened up the DSM-IV and pointed to the entry. F60.31 in the ICD-10, where it says traits relating to BPD are influenced by genes.
Think they would've recalled me by now.
My attempts to recall myself ended badly.
Swiss physician Theophile Bonet used the French term “folie manico-melancolique.”
This basically transliterates to craziness of a manic and sad nature.
In 1946, Melanie Klein first used the term “projective identification” to describe the following feeling.
I see you feeling something and you can't feel it, so I feel it for you.
But I can never know how you are actually feeling, I'm just imagining that I know.
A kind of emotional contagion.
I have a very vivid imagination.
You are very catching.
All of you.
Or perhaps I'm the one who is sick.
Seems that way.
I find that alcohol is the best medicine for my brain but the worst for my heart.
The cigarettes don't help either.
I find that cigarettes are the best medicine for time but the worst for my lungs.
I miss cocaine.
I was trying to talk to one of you when I ended up in the hospital. I was trying to tell you how I felt and I think you were uninterested, or you had enough on your mind.
Years prior, at four in the morning, we sat on the curb outside your house and you said I could call you anytime.
You said you'd always answer.
You never did.
Proves to me that you shouldn't rely on things said at four in the morning.
Or past midnight.
Or at all.
Lately I've been drinking a lot of coffee (black) because I miss the rush and twitch of amphetamines. It helps me write. I am halfway through a novel that I'm afraid I won't finish and harbor this secret intimation that it's already dead in the water.
Floating corpses, mottled flesh, belly-up.
I think we drank a whole fifth of whiskey between the two of us that night.
Maybe a few shots of Dr. MacGillicuddy's, too.
And some beers.
What I had to say spewed out of me and hit the sidewalk with a sickening slap.
All I could hear was the racheting ricochet of billiard balls. The jaw-crack of stick hitting cue ball.
Your blank eyes.
I walked down the yellow lines the whole way home.
I stole six Xanax from my sleeping roommate and took a blade to my arms.
Maybe it was less than six.
Or more.
I remember the whorling police lights outside the window. Someone called the cops.
It was me.
Or it wasn't.
The ambulance ride to the hospital, about ten blocks away, cost $600.00 USD.
Six years later, I still haven't paid it.
Or maybe it was five.
Years later, that is.
It was the night before the fourth of July.
A blue piece of paper made it okay for them to bring me to the mental hospital.
Terrible name for a place like that.
Hospital, that is.
I woke up and wrote poetry with a pencil that I had sign a safety contract to get.
I wrote about a Holocaust victim whose name was Eva. I don't remember the poem now but it had to do with God.
In the hallways, a kid with a beard and holes in his socks walked endlessly around.
Peripatetic. Another good word.
With a Bible in his hand.
I asked a nurse what happened when he finished.
She said, he starts over again from the beginning.
She didn't know how many times he'd finished and then started over.
I didn't ask.
I met someone else there, too, and his name was Seth.
I tried to teach him how to solve a cryptogram.
He kept pulling his pants up because they wouldn't let us have belts.
When I left three days later, I left the cryptogram for him.
And my phone number.
When I left, I got in the van and the radio was playing “Doctor, Doctor” by Robert Palmer.
I thought that was weird.
When I got out of the van at my house, the radio was playing “Sick Sad Little World” by Incubus.
Or perhaps not, though I remember the song was appropriate.
I asked the driver if he had a tape in there, playing all these songs, like someone would play scary noises on Halloween.
He didn't.
And I didn't ask.
Though maybe I should have.
Fifteen minutes after I got home, one of you knocked on the door. You hugged me very tightly.
I remember that I was confused as to why you were hugging me.
We stood in the door at the bottom of the stairs where I had been dragged out by the paramedics.
Or maybe it was the police who hauled me out.
I wonder how the neighbors felt that night.
I moved out of that apartment years later and returned to it one drunken night.
With two guys.
They put porn on the TV and I said I had to leave.
I'm glad I did.
Though part of me wishes I'd stayed.
My old bedroom got turned into a game room.
There was a dartboard on the wall where my bed used to be.
I think I did drugs fifteen to twenty minutes after we stopped hugging.
We used to call it Diet Coke, because it was Adderall.
I was the one who made the joke first, though it became widely used and I was never credited.
At this time, I guess it doesn't matter.
You used to call it Orange Sunshine, but the pills weren't always orange.
We also did Concerta.
I remember one time we were on our way to Boston in Lindsay's car and I was separating the capsule to make sure none of the green, non-snortable bits were in the mix.
I loved that feeling. Utility. Functionality.
Having something to do is important to me.
They say sharks can't stop moving, or they die.
They even sleep while they've moving.
Violent sleepwalkers of the deep.
Although I guess you'd have to call them sleepswimmers.
Aquatic sonnambulocomotion, perhaps.
I never learned how to swim.
I almost drowned in an inground pool when I was six.
My mother doesn't know how to swim, either.
My uncle had to save me.
I am mildly hydrophobic as a result.
I have dreams of driving over a bridge when it collapses.
I could probably make it to shore if I tried.
How hard is it to keep yourself afloat?
Not speaking metaphorically, of course.
My therapist tells me not to let the anxiety get ahead of me, and I reply that it already has.
That's usually when she asks me about my relative safety.
I say no. No, of course I can't do that. I couldn't even if I wanted to.
She always appears unconvinced.
I think I might scare her a little.
I kind of hope I do.
I told my therapist about the Hum.
When I say I told her, I mean that she had me do a freewriting exercise and I wrote about it.
I wrote that the Hum is worse today.
That was the first sentence.
I may not have capitalized the h.
I wrote how my thoughts are like comets streaking across the sky.
Over the gray, tilled fields of my brain.
Caressing the fields with their hairy tails.
Lighting up everything with an eldritch luminescence.
Eldritch is a good word.
So is etiolate.
Though they mean two completely separate things.
At one-thirty in the afternoon, the sun is already going down.
I was so excited to discover I have $25.00 in my savings account.
I was disappointed when I discovered I couldn't withdraw it from the ATM.
T.S. Eliot's 'Rhapsody on a Windy Evening' is one of my favorite poems.
The last twist of the knife.
I was disappointed when I found out that it was the basis for the song “Memory” from Cats, the musical.
I generally like musicals.
Especially Sondheim.
A Little Night Music is my favorite.
Probably because I also like Ingmar Bergman.
It's not gloomy, it's profound.
La lune ne garde aucune rancune.
The loops are getting smaller, though there's more to say. Recursive iterations tighten the spiral each time.
The last twist of the knife.
T.S. Eliot says,
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
When I say I love you, I mean it.
Or I don't.
The heart speaks a language the tongue is deaf to.
All thuds and growls and sighs.
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