paranoia

May 5, 1998

I had to buy cigarettes. There really wasn't any maybe about it -- I was being driven out of my mind by some sort of mad machine and the only course of action I could think of at this late hour is more poison. Conventional and easily obtainable, unlike cracking a small capsule of Zyklon-B under my nose and waiting for sweet escape from my senses.

This is already taking a bad shape. Using phrases like "sweet escape" is the first sign -- no, not the first sign. The first sign was long ago and far away, so much as to be forgotten. It's just that the machine and the damnable weather was (is) getting to me again and I'm finding myself talking in trite easy phrases without even catching myself, or thinking twice about it. All around bad. What's worse is that I can't think of anything better; like the cigarettes, it's just my mind reverting to its deep internal logic. The one that has been burned in by forces I like to think that I make it my business to scoff at. Well, I've really always maintained that there isn't any use in fighting it. In fact, it's not even anything new or dreadfully insightful -- the system was created to serve us, and now we exist to serve the system. Bumper-sticker dogmatism. The sort of thing that thousands of high school students, myself once included in that number, think they're especially clever for stumbling over. It's just the biggest trap of all. Like in 1984, when Winston Smith is shown the true nature and aims of the Party: now you know, for sure, that there's no use in fighting it.

At the gas station, the clerk was engaged in a lively conversation -- I say lively in the two o'clock in the morning sense of the word -- with one of his cohorts about a mutual acquaintance. All I caught in between being distracted by colorful wrappers and fluorescent lights and paying for the cigarettes was "Did you see? He's got some new pussy." I presumed, correctly as it turned out, that he was referring to the virulently unattractive blonde with the poodle coiffure waiting in the black sedan alongside the station. She was the sort that refuses to give in, in her own little way, by applying layer after layer of makeup to the point that she looks plastic. Whorish, I say, without a puritanical bone in my body. Just purse those lips and I'd be half-tempted to search her body for an inflation nozzle. No, on second thought, I wouldn't touch her with yours.

I have to take the back way in returning to the dormitory; I have to avoid the main roads late at night. The ambient light rests on the edge of well-lit and dingy, and it terrifies me. I only go the front way at this hour when someone's along with me, because there's unspoken menace in two. One person, typically, wandering around late at night with a downcast gaze is actually going somewhere, and can't be fucked with anyone else, nor will they want to start something.

I've lit a cigarette by this point, and it's not helping. I'm not surprised by this, and truth be told, I repeated this fact to myself as litany for the full seven minutes it took to walk to the gas station. I knew that it wouldn't help, I knew full well that there was (is) no way to counteract the effects of their machine and I went ahead and tried anyway. I felt (feel) like a spurned housewife, or a cornered fugitive, who when faced with insurmountable adversity fights back with absurity. Throwing whatever is at hand at the menace, actually thinking for a second that a well-aimed handful of change or a spoon is going to turn the tide. No, all you can do in this sort of situation is make it angrier, and now I feel (felt) the humidity pushing itself into my pores. It was the sort of night air that can very feasibly grasp a knife and fork.

As I walked along the back way, I saw someone stumble out from behind a dumpster. Walking away from me, but still, I imagined him catching sight of me, most likely from the lighted tip of my cigarette. He'd demand one, and i'd tell him to fuck off, not wanting any sort of human interaction at this point, least of all from some menacing stranger. This would send the man over the edge that he's been teetering on for hours, days maybe, and with a stubbled roar he'd thrust out his arms and attempt to clamber up the ledge to get at me. I'd have no choice but to kick his face in, once, with a steel-toed boot, and it occurs to me as I watch my feet carry me away from this potential violence that I'd probably enjoy it. Then the reality sets in; the old homeless psychopath's face would probably burst like a blood sausage, as all the veins and capillaries were shoved as close to the surface of the tired skin as possible long ago by alcohol. Blood would issue forth from the broken face all over my shoe and up my leg, and then I'd really be fucked. Not that I'd anticipate any sort of legal repercussions, which by the way I really don't need at this point, because I'm certain that the police find dozens of beaten anonymous bodies every sunrise and don't give two shits about them. There's the justice as it applies to those with drivers' licenses, and there's the justice of the discarded.
It's the fact that his blood would probably be racing with god only knows what, in spades, and when I tried to take off my shoes, those diseases would rush into the many tiny cuts all around my fingernails. Maybe it's a vitamin deficiency, but I've had them as long as I can remember. Little strips of skin just peel away.

But my feet have carried far away now. And he's just a frightening memory. If he'd only known that I'd played out a confrontation with him, a complete stranger, up to and including the point where I'm asking the night watchman at the dormitory for rubber gloves so that I may undress safely, he'd probably die laughing. I guess that'd make two of us, if my vocal cords weren't tied in a knot.

It was the worst night to be outside, but I just didn't have a choice. I was just propelled. My room was stifling, sleep was impossible because my body felt (feels) like a knot, and my roommate who seems to be very sick is breathing raggedly. Every inhalation sounds like it's through tightly-stretched plastic wrap. And then, someone decided to take a shower, at two o'clock in the morning, another ubiquitous asshole jock who wants the entire world to know exactly where he is and what he's doing at all times. Doors slam over and over. The stalls in the bathroom are flung open and slammed shut. Even the water in the shower stall seems to burst into life with some sort of violence. And worst of all, at least for me since I've been living with this sound for months, is that this is the anonymous asshole who has bells of some sort on his keyring. Just hearing them gives me the chills, because I know he's put them there in yet another act of egregrious belligerence. I'm making noise, lots of it, here I am, here I go, out of my fucking way. I've been entertaining a fantasy that I ram a spike through the back of his neck until it pushes the bloody cracked adam's apple out the front; I would of course shove it into his mouth, so that his last thought would be the realization that he is naked.

Sometimes, I am afraid that I will actually do this. It's not the act that frightens me; it's the punishment. According to some scale of psychological maturity I had to memorize somewhere along the way -- and just look how well it stuck -- I'm on the lowest tier of moral development. Whatever. My morals are the ultimate in flexibility.

Right now, the ethernet isn't down, but it is running very slowly. I'd rather it were completely dead, because there are so many reasons, bad ones, for its present behavior. And the least of those is technical difficulties. I know, rudimentarily at least, how connections of this sort work, and foremost on my mind is the idea that someone is logged in to my computer at this very minute, doing any number of horrible, invasive things, and the only trail of slime they're leaving is that of slowness. And there isn't really a damned thing I can do about it, other than turn the fucking thing off -- but if they can do it once, they'll do it again, and they are nothing if not patient.
Now I'm wondering if "egregrious" is even the correct spelling, or even a word, for that matter. Maybe I heard something like it, once, got the context clues all wrong (not to mention the spelling) and now there's this new bastard word that means all of jack-shit to everyone but me. And hell, even I can't put the meaning into words.

But I'm still walking back from the gas station, and thinking to myself that I like the German word much better. Tankstelle. It brings to mind, for me at least, the tactile feeling and weight, especially, of fueling an automobile, and it's comforting. The form is the purpose. Crickets. They're not out, tonight, which just goes to show that an addicted man is far beneath an insect when it comes to rational thought. One night, though, there must have been thousands of them, all on the rear wall of one of the many business buildings on campus. The wall was a rough black mass of twitching chitin and antennae. It made me wonder, at the time, what exactly would possess that many crickets to swarm all over a single surface, and more importantly, whether or not they'd ever get it into their heads to do the same to a human being. What would they do then? I don't think they bite; perhaps they'd just swarm for swarm's sake, and the victim (me in this mental picture, naturally) would either die of suffocation or of sheer existential terror. It always goes back to terror.

I round(ed) a corner and the dormitory is in sight, again. I retch, lightly, and a small glob of puke catches on something in my throat. Perhaps my dignity. This is when I realize, for something like the thousandth time, that this happens almost every time I come back from the gas station this way. At the very same spot. It makes me think of a machine, big insidious hulking churning machine, at the very basement of the building, sending outward and upward an enormous cone of artificial fear and defeat, and I've stepped right into its radius. It would make sense, that they'd want it that way. That they'd build such a machine, if they could. And there really isn't anything to say that they can't, either -- machines can do almost anything. This is what the other people who can feel this don't realize, or perhaps they try to ignore it, or maybe they just don't ever bring it up. Just like me. They want us to feel scared and defeated in our boxes, so that we feel that there's no choice for the future but to keep coming back, back to the schools and back to the exams and back to the dormitories, so that maybe one day this fear will end, and there will be no reason to feel defeated and small. We live in a cult of higher education; people believe that it is the catalyst, perhaps even the only one, for True Freedom. And maybe now it is, thanks to that sick engine of self-fulfilling prophecy. I'm sure I don't have to spell it out.

The humidity, I thought, is really going to kill me. It's one hostile shade away from comfortable fog; it's just this thick oily gray skin, a filter, hanging over everything. It made me think: "I want to die," only I immediately catch myself and invalidate that throwback to my self-indulgent youth. (Which i would like to think is distant, but I know better.) I don't want to die; I just want to be thoroughly unconscious until I can be gently slid into a better tomorrow. Because I really do think that things will be better, if I could only get away from them.
I don't fit the category of a classic paranoid (so I'm not, so there) because I don't have delusions of grandeur. I have no idea what on earth they'd want with me. I don't do anything special, you see. I don't excel in my classes, I'm not some sort of psychic engine of destruction, I'm not an insurgent... I'm not anything. The only thing at all interesting or unique about me are the little details, the sort of things that make everyone different. I would only be of interest to a special breed of voyeur; this is not unlikely, though. Once someone gets powerful enough, the tendency seems to be towards a long and speedy slide into depravity. And there is nothing -- nothing -- to say that they wouldn't choose me out of millions to spy on and rub their hands over. The fact that I constantly worry about it must make matters all the more amusing to this type. Can't you see it? The longer that their game goes on, the more fulfilling it becomes; it ceases to be a simple collection of trivia and personal data after they make their first move. After that -- they want to see how, if at all, the subject responds. Did he notice our subtle probing and meddling? And their responses, their investigations, their gaming, mutate accordingly.

(And now I realize that their machine circulates banality like an atomizer; it's one thing to notice and it's another to point it out as if you're god's appointed expert. Yuck.)

Right. So I sat down to have another cigarette, in the vain hopes that it would calm my nerves. I feel my mind going again, and that strange urge to be run over by a car returns. This is not good, but I've come along to the point where I can identify it as such, at the very least. I'm sitting on a wall, and further down the wall, closer to the door, there is a group of three holding a canvas. There's chattering among them, about what I neither know nor care. (Another word that i like is "download". It feels heavy. It brings to mind a bucket filling up with rocks, one by one. Literal, but reassuring somehow.) Until that is they get out their lighters and try to set the canvas on fire. For some reason, they're having a problem with this; it doesn't catch right away. I don't want to stare, because I don't want to be asked if I have a problem. People will ask you, "what's your problem?" without actually wanting to know, just to inform you that you're a hair's breadth from a beating.

At this point I picture myself as a crazed old man, spending every penny on antiseptic sprays and soaps. It isn't a happy picture, but I just want people to stay the hell away. My mind, it's going all right, with due haste and I keep forgetting to buy Mother's Day cards while I'm out. So now I only watch their antics out of the corner of my eye, and occasionally I hear little snippets, proto-sentences, like "look at that shit burn" and "it's running all over the place". I assume that they mean the paint. I'm really overwhelmed with curiosity; what is painted on this canvas? Don't they like it anymore? I imagine a stalker, a voyeur of a different stripe, watching me go about my daily, boring-as-all-hell business and then going back to their hole. They live alone and their mind burns with saved-up images. And then they paint my picture; they've been working on it for weeks, and it's not just a simple portrait, it is decadent and depraved and every stroke seethes with sinewy hate. The violence, of course (and as usual), is implicit. Again, I catch myself and attempt a correction: WHY? Why would they bother? There is no answer. Some people are just insane, and others are just born receptacles for their sickness.

But someone took the time, and when you get right down to brass tacks, a lot of it, to make what they're presently destroying. Putting aside, for a moment, the simple question of production: someone worked, and saved up the requisite amount of money. Then that someone went to an art store, bought the canvas, brushes, and paints -- maybe all at once, maybe over time (which strikes me as much more tragic) -- and came home. And then that someone spent an untold amount of time translating thought into painted image, whatever it was. And presently, it is being destroyed by three guys with cigarette lighters at two o'clock in the morning. This is why I don't find destructive performance art as nifty as I once did; this is why I honestly feel sickened by acts of blatant and permanent vandalism. It's a tragedy, all of it, because someone stepped through everything, a whole series of someones actually, to create what you've just heaved a brick through for the one thousandth time. Will smashing a television on stage really bring down big media, and raise people's standards? How many fucking times has this been done, and how many would-be avant garde revolutionaries have patted themselves on their goddamned hooked backs for it? No, no, no! It's nothing new, you little pieces of shit, and somewhere in some fucking factory, someone is watching liver spots grow like spilled coffee on the backs of their hands, churning out TV after TV so that you, the spoiled whining uninspired malcontent, can smash it and shout some slogan, or maybe show a disinterested crowd your dick. If you found out that your livelihood was the source of someone else's derivative, cynical amusement -- if you actually watched this violation of the eight hours a day for the rest of your life -- would you not puke all over your shoes? For these little shits, being jaded is some sort of aphrodisiac. I hate them for not caring.

I do end up going inside. I didn't have to swipe my ID card for the night watchman; by this time, he knows my face well enough. He knows that I come and go often at night, and don't pose anyone any harm, and that in fact I'm actually pretty friendly. So he looks up, sees me opening the door, nods his acknowledgement, and goes back to staring at his tiny television set. I wonder if he knows that he may never see that guy again. Ever.

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