12/27/04
Welcome to “The Holidays”… that 7th-inning stretch of the calendar year. I’ve got my traditional Christmas cold, courtesy of my boss. So forgive the rambling, ellipsis-heavy quality of this entry. It’s written under the influence of over-the-counter narcotics.
Went to Puerto Rico a couple of weeks ago, to attend a wedding. We stayed at the resort, which was a first for me. I usually get really anxious on vacation. Unless I’m doing something “productive”; making something, breaking something, or criticizing something… I tend to get very antsy. And for me, the types of things there are to do in Puerto Rico (beach sitting, drinking and eating) aren’t things that I consider to be activities. As you may recall, the last time I took a week off, it was to renovate my bathroom.
I especially always loathed going to the beach, even as a kid. I associated the beach with big crowds, constant discomfort, being ignored and eventual sun poisoning.
So, I was somewhat surprised to find how much I enjoyed just sitting around on the beach, in the hammock, with a bottle of Presidente in my hand. Thinking about it, I realize now that what I always hated wasn’t so much the beach… hell, I love the ocean… but people. People, how I hate people. They walk on ya, step on ya, walk on ya, step on ya… and KICK ya.
I deal with other human beings in a strange way. Put me in a room with one or two, and I will try to befriend them. Up the number to ten or twelve, and I become a loud, obnoxious boor… an outsized, amplified version of myself. And with large crowds, I just retreat to that mute ittle kid on the beach. Anxious and feeling like I might have to go to the bathroom at any moment, but I just don’t know where it is, and there’s no-one I trust enough to ask.
I guess I’ve always had to fight agoraphobic tendencies in myself. When you approach every new social situation feeling that the only possible options are fight or flight, it sets your teeth on edge.
A powerful Holiday/Agoraphobia memory from my childhood is being in the local mall while it was closing for the night. My sister and I were in the body of the mall, and my father was in Sears. The Sears door closed, separating us. This freaked me out. The lights dimming to nighttime levels. All the doors to Spencer, Sam Goody, B. Daltons, etc. were sliding down, lowered by tired, underpaid employees who could give less of a shit about my trauma. The security guards trying to rush everyone out, my father motioning for me and my sister to meet him at the nearest exit. And there I am, at least in memory, screaming my fool head off. No wonder my sister kept running away from home.
Apart from the obvious idiocy, here (how in the world did my dad get separated from us for long enough to have the 30-foot wide Sears door slide shut in it’s entirety?), I think I’ve managed to place the root of this anxiety.
It’s those damned safety films they showed us in Kindergarten.
First, the famous “School Bus Catastrophe” type: we see several different scenarios in which kids are rendered into paste, mostly as a result of misbehavior or sheer obliviousness. Scenario “a” spotlighted the importance of your personal awareness of the “zones of death”. When you get off the bus, make sure that you don’t run into the driver’s blind spot, or you’ll end up as a tragic montage of your mother’s shocked, grief stricken face, followed by a dissolve to a blood-stained drawing on blue construction paper, floating down to it’s final rest on the pavement.
The second vignette, the Grand Guignol version, Bobby brings a Bowie Knife on the bus, and shows it to his friends (all the cool kids at the back of the bus). Meanwhile, other bits of action and horseplay – paper planes, spitballs, hair-pulling – cause the caring-but-tough Mrs. Bus Driver (with a sterling accident free record after seventeen years of service) to look away from the road to yell at the perpetrators, and right at that moment…
…a car pulls out of a driveway up ahead…
…Mrs. Bus Driver notices it too late…
…she grabs the wheel in a panic…
…the bus lunges off the road…
…into the quarry…
…kids bouncing everywhere, screaming…
…the Bowie Knife plunges home and the plasma is flowing…
…the bus breaking the murky waters of the lake at the quarry bottom…
…etc. etc. All in gruesome slow motion, of course.
Okay, so now I was pretty scared to ride the bus. Gotcha. Big Yellow Bus=Free Ride to Eternity. So, I lived two blocks from the school. Perhaps I’ll walk to and fro… but, wait, here’s the other safety film.
You know, the one about little Billy, who was walking the two blocks to his house, when a car pulled up alongside. The aging hippy behind the wheel claims to be a friend of Billy’s mother. And he has candy. Billy, unaware of the cruelties of the world (these films were irony free) hops into the ’72 Camino. And they never find his body.
Until they dredge that lake in the quarry, of course.
***
If you check out our "shows" page, you'll see that we have another show coming up in early January. For those that missed our Lion's Den show, I managed to press the band into playing my all time favorite song. I'm not at all sure about the legality of posting this on here, but until the cease and desist letter arrives from Pink Floyd Holdings, LTD., here's Echoes. Half-off, for a limited time! (Note 2/16/05: I've removed this for the time being, since we have an upcoming show where we'll be playing "Echoes" and it's parent album "Meddle" in it's entirey. If you want to hear us play this, come on out. See our "shows" & "news" pages for more details.)
Note for the Spanish-impaired: The Presidente site wants you to enter your date of birth, in Day/Month/Year order. It will then treat you to a Flash-animated freak-out that, I can assure you, is a perfect reproduction of the hallucinations that you will experience from dinking too many of their fine, fine product. Reminds me a bit of the end of "Three Caballeros", actually.
Oh, a link? All right: Since 2004 was just about my most stressful year ever for news, I decided to switch to a much more camling homepage for my browser. Perhaps in 2005, I'll try and find out what's going on in the real world again, but for now: dailyzen.com