Springtime In Spiralbound
i.
I have decided to become a new person this spring quarter: my class schedule is printed and taped to the wall above my desk, spent three hours designing the template, picking the colors—100% attendance, even if I fall a bit from that, at least 75 should be fine, just over 40 is an improvement—fuck didn't I start winter like this?
ii.
Three weeks into spring: We don't watch films. We discuss theories. They hand us lenses and tell us to take careful measurements. They hand us mirrors and tell us to reflect vetted color. Mind the glass: they focus our arguments for us; stay inside the frame: they pick our words to make it easier. Debate the great theorists, they challenge us. We love rigorous disagreement, they insist. They pick the fucking language I can use. The structure, the style! It's not writing. It's oxygen deprivation (mind hypoxia). I am seething with anger. Too embarrassed to let anyone see it. Too righteous to let it go. 60% attendance.
iii.
I'm so tired
I hate myself for what I've done
haven't done
to myself
for myself
iv.
I have very few friends left. It's difficult to maintain the fiction of friendship when you deteriorate in front of someone's eyes and they say nothing.
My roommate has been dragging me to parties at his girlfriend's house the past few nights.
I don't remember much about the beginning. We were drinking light beer and talking of revolution like two kids complaining about shitty movie sequels. We were talking of corporate greed and how the hell we could get things done. He was ranting about willful ignorance when his girlfriend sneered at us for being so fucking boring. He looked around at the crowd pushing against us, embarrassed they might be thinking the same. He suggested a round of shots with a placating look in her direction and a pat on my shoulder.
We weaved through the crowd towards the suspended kitchen light. We spilled out from the dark into an eddy of bodies huddled around a plywood bar. It tilted precariously and would topple by the end of the night in a shattering of shot glasses (rounded by college witticisms) and martini glasses (shaped like alien genitalia). The only thing left unscathed would be the plastic handles of vodka that my roommate started pouring.
There was a click of glass and the liquor went down with the sting of an open wound.
She called for a larger round, and as the shots were poured, she pulled friends out of the amorphous mob, because the drinking of ten dollar paint thinner undeniably required the maximum amount of people, all wailing something resembling a war cry, all chanting with something approaching religious fervor.
Their faces imploded in strange patterns then dissipated back into the dark side of the room, still chanting: shots, shots, shots. She was led away by the hand of a friend, and we both watched her round denim shorts fade away.
The naked light bulb swung to the vibrations of a subwoofer shuddering against a nearby wall. We talked of what happened last night and what we hoped would happen tonight, how bad we felt this morning and how we'd keep it all down this time, what we remembered and how much we had forgotten. Having too much of last night in black, I didn't want to stay to hear it filled in, so I took advantage of his girlfriend coming back to make a blind exit.
Outside I paused to look at the tumultuous crowd of debauchery prowling the street and it seemed to me they all had somewhere to go. Some lucky few had even found their party on the street. These were the screamers, the most inebriated, perhaps, the best pretenders. Moving as a herd under a sepia filter of streetlights and the ubiquitous but ignored supervision of a police patrol, they were separated into the two lanes of traffic not by the ranch hands with guns but by some innate urge for order. As they crossed paths they studied each other, envious of what they may be missing, disguising their insecurity through smirks they hoped would say: you fools are going the wrong way, the real party is this way.
I walked on without their smirk or any sense that they shared my immense desire to feel nothing.