That Thumb Looks Familiar

I wake up startled, as usual. The surprise reality of 8:00 a.m. scares the shit out of me every time. When will I learn to expect it and not get startled? Haven't I noticed a pattern here yet? Sun goes down, eyes shut, sun comes up, eyes open. Nothing new here, no need to have an anxiety attack every time it happens.

But this is my welcome into each day; the dream world-- my world -- ceases abruptly and somebody else's life begins for the day, a responsible person's life.

This time my surprise wake up is different though, not the usual alarm-from-hell wake up. This time, someone's gigantic swollen hand with brachydactyly type D thumbs I'd recognize anywhere is about to strangle me into my typical day of obligation, characterizing how I'll feel until I fall asleep again that night. I try to push the lifeless foreign arm thing away but what the fuck is happening with my real arms? Why the fuck are they on vacation when you need them? One of them appears to be replaced by this slug of a giant, swollen, clubbed-thumb hand/arm bullshit that isn't reacting at all to my commands.

Where is the obedient arm I remember that could help my docile hand check my nose for crusty boogars right now, that could rub the sleep out of my eyes, that could push myself out of bed, functional with all its submissive digits awaiting instructions from the brain?

For some time now I've had the feeling that I am no longer actively living my life as I once did, rather it is being lived and I'm allowed to watch as if I were watching my own open-heart surgery. I'm a recursive puppet, apparently with an abnormally large maverick arm with a clubbed-thumb hand, controlling its own show, but a puppet nonetheless; no soul, no spark, no ganas, infinitely feeding myself back into my own circularity, leaving myself bewildered by my own uncontrollable control over my own life.

My own abnormally thumbed sadistic hand is holding me down, holding me in place, smacking me in the face to wake up, hurry up, go here, read this document, go there, stop for milk, call the guy to get the dishwasher fixed. The rest of me – the me that hangs from strings controlled by the swollen infidel appendage-- just wants to be left the hell alone with the full use of my capacities, with digits and limbs that mind their master again.

Someone's hand that looks like mine slaps me into the reminder that the laundry situation is no longer bearable. If I controlled my own arm, I might go out and just buy new underwear to avoid responsibility for that giant mountain of dirty clothes that has long since overpopulated the hamper, sprawling out onto the floor, creating a suburb of clothes alongside it now, competing with the hamper itself in size. If I controlled my own arm, it would rest behind my head as I'd watch the pile of clothes grow and mutate, pants giving birth to dirty underwear caught inside their legs. My well-behaved arm would help my hand light a cigarette for me – a much better alternative as an activity for arms compared to sorting laundry.

Then I'm slapped in the face with the tumescent tissue again, as a reminder that dinner must be made -- an event, something acceptable, something balanced, something fit for a proper family with real plates and shit. Popping a frozen bagel into the toaster to calm a single rumbling tummy simply. won't. do. This act would be too utilitarian, giving nutrients to the bloodstream, nothing more, sans the symbolic ritual of it all. If I controlled that traitor of an arm, it might prepare just that and then check off the hunger box on my list of shit I can be bothered to deal with. I'd eat my acceptable nutrient-product while staring at a blank wall without blinking. For dessert, the dutifully complying arm/hand would fetch me a spoonful of peanut butter which I would enjoy perhaps sitting on the kitchen counter, with that same blank stare, my other hand following orders to support my chin and to not dare attempt to mince garlic, wash dishes, or throw away the spoiled chicken in the fridge.

Maybe one of these days, I'll wake up and my arms will become incumbent upon me again, cooperating once again and surrendering to my will and will stop trying to run my life with all their busy activity. The first thing I'll do with my obedient arms is grab the scissors and cut the puppet strings.

Vacation countdown: 26 days.

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Can I get you some more crock pot food?

I might be breaking some blogging commandment that states:

"Thou shalt not blog about blogging"

Or, at the very minimum I may rile up your pet Peeve, making him bark and chase his tail until he barfs up your missing shoelaces.

But I feel I must explain because when you have a friend that usually calls and then they just stop, well, you deserve the courtesy of them stumbling like an idiot through an awkward excuse as to why they haven't called. Actually, you deserve them to buy you like five rounds of beer, but anyway, we'll start with the clumsy excuses.

My problem has been that for weeks now thoughts have come into this very confined head-like crock pot sitting on my shoulders where they have simmered, marinated, and tenderized, and then finally dried up and turned into the beef jerky version of thoughts. But I waited and waited in hopes that they would turn into a lovely curry instead of the same ole run-of-the-mill dried-the-fuck-up-crock-pot-pot-roast.

Fucking crock pots. Everything tastes the same when cooked in a crock pot. And don't go telling me I need to add a can of cream of mushroom and everything will be okay. Please, that is some sick shit.

Rather than serving you the crock-pot version of my thoughts, and instead of reading which just reminded me that I had this unbearable urge to force feed someone a nasty pot roast for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, well, I stayed away.

So what have I been doing?

I've been filling my free time with the opiate of lazy Internet play: planning trips to Sardinia I may never go on, searching for apartments I may never live in, looking up recipes for Lasagna I may never make, drooling over jobs I may never apply for, or PhD programs I'll never submit an application to, reading economic forecasts that may never materialize into reality.

I can fill my days and weeks with this Internet narcotic, a vacation of sorts from a mind that I can open up and pick words from like there's a god damned pot luck going on up there. And I spend my days in that drugged state because the words annoyingly string together in the same damn way and I'm just so bored of it all– telling the same story I keep hearing on repeat again and again inside me. And I'm just staring at this paper plate full of shitty crock pot casseroles and stabbing my plastic fork into something and watching it jiggle as a solidified blob of cream of mushroom and bump into the wiggly jello-inertial-mass dessert from hell and I'm thinking....Oh, fuck this shit, let's go to McDonald's.

These fantasy vacations into the online world of Your Potential fill my mind with purposefulness, and attempt to confirm in me that my life can be, must be, meaningful in some way. I remind myself, no, I beat myself over the head with the argument that I've traded something for experience; loved-ones for a life less ordinary, where I can hop on a flight to anywhere in Europe, maybe live in an apartment that looks onto a quaint Spanish plaza, dulling the dreaded realization that no matter what the fuck I fill my days with, Father's Days and birthdays and 4th of Julys are passing me by and I'm. Not. There.

This brainless virtual wandering allows me to not have to think, especially about my upcoming trip home with all of the familiar anxiety that it entails.

The visiting with loved ones is nearing, which must be good, right? because I miss them so. But as Noble Savage alluded to, the good can only be experienced as such because it is defined by what it is not -- the bad; 'visiting' as the inversion of 'missing', 'home' as opposed to 'distance', utterly incomprehensible as concepts now on their own without the stark awareness attached to them of what they are framed by -- what they are not.

I long for a time when I didn't have to juxtapose happiness with its opposite; when there was the hazy in between, when definitions could be somewhat fuzzy or at least I didn't always see the dialectic staring me in the face, where 'togetherness' didn't make me so in tune to its ultimate undercurrent and its ever-present antonym 'apart'. I miss the gray area of 'potential togetherness' – that my mom might call at anytime for a quick lunch on a weekday, or my cousin might call because he's in the neighborhood and lets go grab a coffee at the Lux on Central. It is not the pure form of togetherness that erases the sad separation anymore, it is only potential togetherness that can erase the awareness that togetherness is always always always the opposite of a life spent without each other. And it's this potential togetherness that I don't have anymore.

So you see, I stay away because I myself tire of this broken record I hear when I click clack cluck away at this keyboard; the repetitive, dulling, unoriginal sound of a heart sick with longing for, not a place, but a state of mind I had once upon a time that I'll never get back, no matter how often I visit. Surprisingly I am all the more heartsick as my holiday nears, as the summer heat beats down on me and I try to find shade in the sparse palm trees of this city which reminds me so much of 'home'. The awareness gets nearer and nearer with every unit increase on the centigrade scale that my body feels when I step outside, or as I fall asleep listening to the familiar sound of the air conditioner, with every day that passes bringing me closer to August and to my trip.

You guys used to be my virtual escape but now I know that some of you get me, and all of you have real pulses that still really beat when I close my laptop and your realness makes you become like the other friends and family that I just don't pick up the phone to call for some reason that I can only explain by stammering my way through something that always sounds the same. In your case though, I'm honest and don't say I've been busy.

Cause I haven't. At all.

So here I am, on a limb. Hoping you'll forgive that my fingers won't stay away from the same keys, forming the same words I have asked you to read too many times now. Hoping you'll forgive me for making crock pot food for the millionth time that you've come over for dinner.

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