Seething is a very satisfying process, because it lets you get good and pissed off without actually forcing you to interact with someone who might (God help you) get pissed off back. Seething is what allowed me to stay in public high school instead of going to a very private, very well recommended and very secure juvenile detention center. On any given day, my mental body count was somewhere in the hundreds. There was one extremely excruciating Wednesday where I nuked the school.
I wasn’t an enthusiastic student. Just an obligated one.
And there you have the two great driving forces in my life: Obligation and Guilt. I always think of them as two whiny, pretentious individuals, one of whom looks like my mother and one of whom looks like me after forty years and forty drinks (is that mutually exclusive? Whatever).
I was never very fond of alcohol; the fumes make me think of gassing up my car, and the results are reminiscent of my days wrangling four year-olds – who were, now that I actually make that comparison, probably more rational and articulate than my drunken, college-educated friends. Alcohol, the great equalizer.
But let’s get back to seething. I am a person who holds everything inside, like a homemade volcano or a Maltese cocktail. I listen to people ramble on about their woes and their terrible relationships and smile and make all the right responses, while inside the soundtrack consists of machine guns, B-movie screams, and more gore than even an NC-17 rating would cover. Seething – the pastime of the American (college student).
Occasionally some nut-job gets his hands on a gun while the CEO of his brain is down in Maui for a vacation and has left the guy who fixes the photocopier in charge. This tends to lead to what the media likes to call ‘massacres.’ I’m sure these occur everywhere, every day, in all social environments. (It’s like throwing darts, only your professor never actually falls over with a feathered projectile sticking out of his shiny forehead.)
While I was sitting at my desk and seething tonight, I was also worrying about all the things stacking up on my mental Sticky Note. Rambling, incoherent, irrational, all-important, all-consuming, and maddening. The adjectives are as numerous as their counterparts, and just as intimidating. Getting anything done is rather like standing behind the starting line of a 10K run and looking at all the career athletes lining up on either side of you. You, in your Spandex and hideously ugly sweatbands, suddenly feel fat and slow and stupid and out-classed in every regard, and self-conscious on top of all that. Somehow American society has reached a pinnacle of hypocrisy: we are both individualistic and comparative. I’m only as good as the next guy, and he’s only as good as the one next to him, and so on.
My seething tonight came courtesy of chocolate candy and MSG. Like the lab rat that presses the pleasure button until he dies, I indulge myself with poor quality food and repeatedly fall into a crashed state where I am simultaneously lethargic, overstimulated, sleep-deprived, malnourished, and courting scurvy and constipation. This state is accompanied by paranoia, crankiness, irrational mood swings, tears, laughter, disorganization, and bizarre rants. My next blog will be called “Rantings of a Rabid Chocoholic.” It sounds poetic and appropriately screwball for the Internet.
This in some ways is probably what taking amphetamines is like: racing heartbeat, unfocused vision, delusions, rants, rapid-fire and incomplete thoughts, inability to function and diarrhea of the mouth (fingers). Wheeeeee. I’m also stressed to the point of lunacy and I feel fineeeeee.
There is clearly no point in continuing. I don’t even know where this was going originally; we took a little detour, and I forgot to ask for directions. There was the image of a young woman in a daffodil colored coat, walking her daughter to school. Maybe I’ll go and write about that, now that I’ve shoveled the shit out of my brain and smeared it all over the wall.
I promise I am not the psychopath I seem like. All I've had to eat today is an apple, a blueberry scone, a box of cheap take-out Chinese, and M&Ms.
Ba-boom.
WolfGrrl
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