As I sit here procrastinating, irrationally hoping that I can somehow, someday figure out how to stop time, it occurred to me that I will probably never be whole again.
Strangely, I don’t remember being formally taught about wound healing in medical school, and I only remember having one didactic session during residency. I’m sure we must have covered it somewhere, probably in pathology during the second year of medical school, when we learned about inflammation, but my memories of those days are pretty faint.
All I seem to remember is what I wrote when my brother managed to tear every single ligament in his knee back in the day.
From the things that I’ve seen in the past 6 years, it occurs to me that wound healing only really closes things up. It rarely if ever actually reverses things to where it used to be. In other words, all wounds have permanent effects. What is gone is gone.
I think about my dad, and his damaged heart, and while he is in particularly good shape for someone who threw a clot down their LAD, there’s always going to be scar tissue there. A section of his heart has died, and it’s never going to come back.
And while the Romanticists waxed poetic about the heart as the seat of emotion, it’s ultimately really just a muscle. But we are starting to understand that emotional wounds are just as real was physical wounds. Hence, the diagnosis of PTSD, but that’s another rant entirely.
I’m not entirely sure what precipitated this thought. I’ve been interrupted five or six times now since I started this post, and I’ve forgotten what I originally meant to write. But I was just packing up to get ready to head back to S.D., and it occurred to me how I still haven’t recovered from something I realized about 10 years ago. No matter what I did, no matter how I tried to change, she would never feel the same way about me the way I felt about her.
I have to admit, for the most part, I’ve gotten what I’ve wanted out of life. Now, granted, I haven’t really wanted many things. I mean, really wanted it, where it felt like I would die if I didn’t get it. Even though I’ve spent lots of sleepless nights agonizing about my convoluted career path that nearly didn’t materialize, and even though I’ve worked pretty damn hard to achieve what I have, I remember having given up, and accepting the possibility that it was never going to happen, and being OK with that. Well, mostly OK.
And I’ve certainly had my little heartaches from time to time to time, fantasizing about things that were never going to happen. But they never lasted as long, and were never as painful, as that original wound. In a lot of ways every incident since then has merely been a reiteration, a repetition, of that time. It’s like my own personal Groundhog Day. Every day is exactly the same.
A lot of it is plain old stubbornness, maybe. Although it’s more like learned helplessness. Once I realized that it didn’t matter what I did, it occurred to me that I shouldn’t even bother trying. If it’s never going to happen, then there’s no point.
So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I don’t try, then of course it’s never going to happen, but I guess I just never want to get to that point again, to that point of wanting someone so much, and yet realizing that I don’t have a chance.
Bn will always ask me, how do I know for sure? Of course I never know for sure. But I can guess pretty damn well. And, practically speaking, an infinitesimal probability is pretty much the same thing as no chance.
I talk a lot about the probability of dying alone. I have to admit, it’s a terrible feeling to believe that no one will really miss you when you’re gone. But it’s not going to kill me.
- Brand New “Millstone”: a punk rock retelling of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
I used to be such a burning example.
I used to be so original.
I used to care, I was being cared for.
Made sure I showed it to those that I love.
I used to sleep without a single stir,
‘cause I was about my father’s work.
Well take me out tonight.
This ship of fools I’m on will sink.
A millstone around my neck.
If you’d be my breath, there’s nothing I wouldn’t give.
I used to pray like God was listening.
I used to make my parents proud.
I was the glue that kept my friends together.
Now they don’t talk, and we don’t go out.
I used to know the name of every person I’d kissed.
Now I made this bed and I can’t fall asleep in it.
Well take me out tonight.
This ship of fools I’m on will sink.
A millstone around my neck.
If you’d be my breath, there’s nothing I wouldn’t give.
Throw me that lifeline.
This ship of fools I’m on will sink.
A millstone around my neck.
If you’d be my breath, there’s nothing I wouldn’t give.
I never hit the brakes,
there’s no time to save him.
He just ran out in the street.
Anybody know his name?
I think I recognize him.
Sure it’s him?
He sure as hell paid for that mistake.
So take me out tonight.
This ship of fools I’m on will sink.
A millstone around my neck.
If you’d be my breath, there’s nothing I wouldn’t give.
To save my life tonight.
This ship of fools I’m on will sink
A millstone around my neck
If you’d be my breath, there’s nothing I wouldn’t give.
- Nine Inch Nails “Everyday is Exactly the Same”, the industrial rock take on the Myth of Sisyphus
I believe I can see the future,
‘cause I repeat the same routine.
I think I used to have a purpose,
but then again
that might have been a dream.
I think I used to have a voice.
Now I never make a sound.
I just do what I’ve been told.
I really don’t want them to come around.
Oh, no.
Every day is exactly the same.
Every day is exactly the same.
There is no love here and there is no pain.
Every day is exactly the same.
I can feel their eyes are watching
in case I lose myself again.
Sometimes I think I’m happy here.
Sometimes, yet I still pretend.
Every day is exactly the same.
Every day is exactly the same.
There is no love here and there is no pain.
Every day is exactly the same.
I’m writing on a little piece of paper.
I’m hoping someday you might find…
I’m still inside here.
A little bit comes bleeding through.
I wish this could have been any other way.
But I just don’t know, I don’t know what else I can do.
Every day is exactly the same.
Every day is exactly the same.
There is no love here and there is no pain.
Every day is exactly the same.
- N.E.R.D. “Sooner or Later” the R&B finale, explicating Murphy’s Law, and the typical course of what happens whenever I find myself infatuated with someone.
Sooner or later it all comes crashing down (crashing down),
crashing down (crashing down)
when everyone’s around.
I bet you would’ve paid up all your cash down (your cash down)
and not make a sound (to make a sound)
but everyone knows now.
So your sad
about the moment
you lost your love (damn),
you couldn’t see her leaving. (You were gay.)
And that sucks, don’t it,
‘cause God yanked the rug,
and holding your heart will not help you breathe.
Sooner or later it all comes crashing down (crashing down),
crashing down (crashing down),
when everyone’s around.
I bet you would’ve paid up all your cash down (your cash down)
and not make a sound (to make a sound)
but everyone knows now.
It all comes crashing…
down…
It’s over. Leave it.
It’s over. Leave it.
It’s over. Leave it.
It’s over. Leave it.
So your sad,
and you should own it
that you fucked up (damn)
you thought that you were the team. (You were gay.)
And now your opponent,
he wears your gloves.
A nightmare just ate up your dreams.
Sooner or later it all comes crashing down (crashing down),
crashing down (crashing down),
when everyone’s around.
I bet you would’ve paid up all your cash down (your cash down)
and not make a sound (to make a sound)
Everyone knows now.
It all comes crashing…
down…
It’s over. Leave it.
It’s over. Leave it.
It’s over. Leave it.
It’s over. Leave it.
So your sad,
Could have had so much done.
You blew it off.
Your chances passing you by. (You were gay.)
Time waits for no one,
and it costs for a loss.
A cosmic joke.
Should you laugh or cry?
Sooner or later it all comes crashing down (crashing down),
crashing down (crashing down)
when everyone’s around.
I bet you would’ve paid up all your cash down (your cash down)
and not make a sound (to make a sound)
but everyone knows now.
it all comes crashing…
down…
It’s over. Leave it.
It’s over. Leave it.
It’s over. Leave it.
It’s over. Leave it.
It’s over. Leave it.
It’s over. Leave it.
It’s over. Leave it.
It’s over. Leave it.
It’s over. Leave it.
It’s over. Leave it.
down…
It’s over. Leave it.
It’s over. Leave it.
It’s over. Leave it.
It’s over. Leave it.
It’s over. Leave it.
It’s over. Leave it.
It’s over. Leave it.
It’s over. Leave it.
It’s over. Leave it.
It’s over. Leave it.
It’s over. Leave it.
It’s over. Leave it.
It’s over. Leave it.
It’s over. Leave it.
It’s over. Leave it.
It’s over. Leave it.
Apparently one of my neighbors is either reminiscing about the past, or feeling heartbroken, or both, because he/she was playing this song from TLC from yesteryear:
I never asked for this feeling.
I never thought I would fall.
I never knew how I felt
‘til the day you were gone.
I was lost.
I never asked for red roses.
I wasn’t looking for love.
Somehow I let my emotions take hold
and guess what, all at once
I’m in love.
Oh, I miss you so much.
I long for your love.
It scares me
‘cause my heart gets so weak
that I can’t even breathe.
How can you take things so easily?
Baby, why aren’t you missing me?
Why did I act like you mattered?
It was silly of me to believe
that if I just opened my heart
things would come naturally.
Joke’s on me.
I did not ask for love letters,
so why did you give them to me?
How could I let your intentions
get hold over me?
So in love,
so naive.
Oh, baby.
Oh, I miss you so much.
I long for your love.
It scares me
‘cause my heart gets so weak
that I can’t even breathe.
How can you take things so easily?
Baby, why aren’t you missing me?
And, oh, how I hate what you have done.
Made me fall so deep in love.
Got no cure.
You’re the only one I want.
That I love.
Oh, baby.
Oh I miss you so much.
I long for your love.
It scares me
‘cause my heart gets so weak
that I can’t even breathe.
How can you take things so easily?
Baby, why aren’t you missing me?
Baby, why aren’t you missing me?
Baby, why aren’t you missing me?
—”I Miss You So Much” by TLC, on Fan Mail, 1999
What a way to wake up in the morning.
It’s about 3am and I’m utterly exhausted. I’ve pushed myself to the brink for no good reason and I can barely keep my eyes open. I’m not entirely certain what I’m trying to prove here.
I try a reconfiguration to see if it will make a difference, and I guess I’ve proven to myself what she knew all along once upon a time, that my attempts at fixing things end up being mere rearrangements. I don’t so much clean as reshuffle. Things move around, but nothing really changes.
The sea metaphor always comes easily, particularly in the deep dark night when I’m feeling lonely and abandoned. And I kind of wonder if this is what it’s like to be shipwrecked in the middle of nowhere, with no hope of rescue. You’re bobbing up and down on the waves like another piece of flotsam, just drifting.
I imagine that even if you’re in the deep South Pacific, you’d start swimming. The chance of actually hitting land is virtually nil, but what else are you gonna do?
Still, the thought of trying not to drown for days upon days—alone and with no one looking for you—just steals my breath like a punch in the gut. Trying to imagine that much continuous bleakness and emptiness is quite literally more than I can bear. The idea of never reaching shore is absolutely appalling.
But that’s what I’m faced with: to keep swimming, although with every day, the chance of rescue comes ever closer to zero. The idea that I’ll ever touch dry land again before I die is becoming increasingly absurdly implausible, to the point of becoming utterly fantastic.
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
The first instinct has always been—will always be—to flee from impending disaster. As far as I can tell, I’ve played this game as tight, as taut as I might ever play it, given the circumstances, given what shape I’m in, and I really couldn’t have hoped for more. It wasn’t about not being enough (although that may be true) nor was it about not being true to myself. That’s all there is, there ain’t no mo’. I’ve been down this road so many times, the thought of even one more trip makes me utterly sick.
The open sea beckons, the only thing that seems to accept me. Not so much because the sea really gives a damn about what happens to me, but because there’s really no other place to go.
Time to let the spinnaker unfurl. We’ll run with the wind until it stops. I’ve really got nothing left to say. If you want to find me, you’ll know where to look.
the slow, legato silence, by intervals, by measures
frame by frame, ignition, combustion, explosion, boom boom
that’s my soul up there, in particles and all aerosolized
like an ashen rain falling upon my haunted visage
I taste the firestorms of the fall, and the endless winter
that followed, on its heels came spring and that harrowing
catastrophic thaw, now the floodwaters crest, come summer
sun burning and my soul withers, my soul crumbles to dust
and still there are no endings, just fraught nerves, the pain reminds
you are still alive, against all reason, beyond all odds
in this echoing silence, I am forced to ask myself,
was this thawing worth the inevitable disaster?
my words unspoken, my song stilled and silent,
already I can see it coming like a wave rushing
washing upon the shore, foaming and spraying, gurgling, roar
on the verge of breaking right upon you, crashing down like
a shattered, suddenly shorn mountaintop, cut down mid-rise.
Are the days awaiting, the nights laying awake, alone
in the cursed glow of the full moon, or the mocking glare of
the shimmering stars or with all the lights in your room lit,
striving in futility because the dark is too much
its unbearable weight crushing you with your self-doubt, your hidden shame
wondering if mistakes were made, or if you failed because you suck
or if you were driven by fate, unable to avert the speeding arrow of time
Quite predictably, I am in love with a robot.
I watched “Wall-E” yesterday and the movie was pretty much all that I hoped for.
But besides eloquently illustrating a sense of vast alienation, and the difficulty. fright, and outright terror provoked by trying to connect with another soul, and besides its obvious eco-friendly/anti-Wal-Mart agenda, it also utilizes some classic tropes of Western literature. I can imagine English majors having a field day with deconstructing this movie.
I blogged earlier about ”Wall-E” before I had even seen the movie. But Ken Turan’s review pretty much hit a lot of the high points. In 2708 (give or take a few years), the Earth is inhabited only by cockroaches, and by sentient robots whose job is to take the gajillion metric tons of garbage that literally cover the entire surface of the earth, and compact it all so that it takes up a hell-of-a-lot less space.
Apparently, a distinctly Wal-Mart-like company called Buy-N-Large has managed to destroy Earth by sheer consumerism. There are trash heaps the size of the Empire State Building, and the air is perpetually brown and hazy, kind of like L.A. in the 1980s. So Buy-N-Large has this brilliant idea of sending everyone out into space, cruising around in Spaceship Titanic-like liners until the robots get the “waste management issue” under control.
Over the course of 700 years, though, it seems that there is only one functioning robot left, and his centuries of isolation have left him a little eccentric. From the googolplex number of pounds of trash he’s sifted through, he has managed to pick out a few geegaws and thingamajiggers that have piqued his fancy, including a Rubik’s cube, a spork, and quite possibly the last surviving plant on all of earth. And he has a thing for the musical “Hello, Dolly.”
Wall-E’s shy and clumsy courtship of Eve is really cute, no matter how trite and cliche it is. Still, going after a chick who has a high-frequency laser cannon—and isn’t shy about blowing things up with it—when you’re just a lowly trash compactor—well, that’s the stuff of fairy tales.
And either there is something seriously wrong with me, or Pixar did a really awesome job with getting me to care about the fate of two pieces of metal, plastic, and electronics. Nevermind that their fates happen to intersect with the fate of all of humanity. But when Wall-E finally gets to hold Eve’s hand, and remembers everything, it got me right there, you know?
The other scene that was predictably tear-jerking was when Eve is treated to a view of her own security cam (which was on during the time she was in stand-by mode, unconscious.) She sees Wall-E watching over her 24/7. never straying from her side, and she finally realizes what is important to her, and sometimes not even her Directive is as meaningful as caring about another entity.
And the way that she says, “No. No!” and it actually looks like she—a robot!—is about to cry, when Wall-E gets engulfed in an explosion and she thinks he’s been obliterated—that was really cute too.
And then the very beginning, when she gazes back at the spaceship that sent her, and when it’s gone, she starts having fun flying. That made my heart swell.
The eco-friendly, anti-consumerist agenda is pretty transparent, and if a kid can come out of that theater believing that having too much crap is a bad thing, then humanity may survive after all. The key sequence of this movie is when the Captain realizes that the plant is wilting and starting to wither. He gives the plant some water and it eventually starts to thrive. “All you needed was someone to take care of you.” Juxtaposed with his recent curiosity about Earth, he realizes what is manifestly necessary: Earth needs people to take care of it.
But the allusions to Genesis take the cake. There are a lot of ways to read it. The name Eve is obvious.
One way is to think of it as a perversely inverted form of Genesis. Wall-E and Eve—the creations of humanity—stumble upon the plant—an analog to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. In a reversal, it is Wall-E who offers Eve the plant, who, upon taking it, ends up being transported back to deep space, with Wall-E tagging along in the name of love. The finding and the taking of the plant result in the disturbance of the status quo—the knowledge that humanity learns is once again bittersweet—but this time, they are returning to Eden—the entirety of Earth itself.
From here, it is possible to read it as a subtle indictment of fundamentalist Christianity. Far from being the source of all sin, the plant, and the taking of the plant, frees humanity from a mechanized, barren Eden of consumerism. It is the guy following orders—Auto—who now plays the role of the serpent by insisting—first verbally, and then physically—that the Captain not partake of the Knowledge reserved to only the gods.
The film also gets its political digs in. The last Earth-bound CEO of Buy-n-Large utters the famous phrase “stay the course,” which is now bound to be remembered in the history books as W’s most singular moment of complete insanity, the tipping point from which American Greatness plummeted into the dark abyss of mediocrity.
And merely following orders without thinking for yourself ought to be criminal in of itself.
Overall, the movie was really enjoyable. I definitely want to watch it again.