people talking for no reason
Hey! I hope you are all well and that you have had a relaxing week thus far. I know the world is in a strange place right now. Just try and take care of yourself. If you happened to have missed last week’s entry, I have attached a link here.
I’m back in Atlanta now. I love this place, but I hate being here. There’s something about being at home that makes me feel stationary. Part of the issue, I think, is the routine in my house. It’s like everyone is rotating on the same axis they have been for years. Sure, things change around the house, furniture is moved, rooms are painted, drawers are reorganized, but all the changes are strictly cosmetic. Oh look, the cat has short hair now! Wow the pantry is so clean! I can’t stand mundanity and that’s a personal weakness.
I never understood still-life painting. Great, you painted an apple. It looks great. It looks like an apple.
I have nothing to complain about. All things considered, my routine at home is great. I wake up around 9am and eat breakfast. Mom gives me two or three small tasks (usually IT related) that I need to get done that day. I procrastinate through the rest of the morning. Eventually, I go on a run or go to the gym or do both. I eat great food. We always have great food. I have a music space set up in our guest house in the backyard, so in the afternoons I make my way out there and do some work on personal and commercial projects. It’s all great. Great. It is great.
The issue is in the in-between. Dad circles an article in the newspaper and leaves it on my bedside. Mom asks me what I want for dinner. Dad asks me how my French is going. Mom asks me what my plans are for the day. “We gotta get you flights.” We always have to get me flights.
For a few days this past week I stayed at my friend’s home in Huntington, Long Island. The town is sleepy, but nice, filled with public parks and two-dollar-signs-on-Yelp restaurants. I stayed with my friend, their mom, stepdad, and dog in their home five minutes from the beach. Overall, the stay was lovely, but one night we sat at the lunch table for thirty minutes discussing foods we like and dislike. My friend’s mother asked me what I think about pickles, how I like my eggs, if I like olives pitted or unpitted. I felt like I was going to explode. I was just sitting there, my body perfectly erect and noticeably stiff, quivering with every word. I can’t do mundanity. I didn’t want to change the subject, I wanted silence. This is no fault of hers, this is a personal failure of mine.
Later, we went to the beach. It was a small, but beautiful beach on the Long Island sound. We sat in beach chairs overlooking the bay dotted with sailing yachts and motorboats. It was hot, but the breeze gave us light reprieve. I was trying to read my book, but kept getting distracted by the teenage lifeguards’ conversation with an older man. I remember the man was built how many older men are built, barrel chested with thin, hairless legs. He was lecturing the young lifeguards on fitness, dictating to them what he knew of Michael Phelps’ daily routine and how that has influenced him. He told them that he works out “a ton”, but just can’t lose any weight. He said “that happens when you get old like me”. He said he eats too much. Eventually, the man left mid sentence and dove in the water.
After he left, the lifeguards began chatting about therapy for some reason. The girl lifeguard said she wouldn’t be a good therapist because her patients would say “I wanna die” and she’d say “same”. I thought to myself, “I’m so tired of people saying they want to die. It’s played out. Tell me something new!” The boy lifeguard said, “if I was a therapist I’d just give my patients like obvious solutions, like I’d tell them to just like get over it.” The girl responded, “Oh my gosh I wish my therapist was like that!” I am no better than these lifeguards. I envy them. They are not any more simple than me and I am not any more complex than them, they just have the ability to be content with mundanity.
I hate people watching. I hate people listening. It’s not that everyone’s the same: it’s that everyone is different in the same ways. The boy lifeguard said he wouldn’t want a therapist because he doesn’t like to talk about personal stuff. He said “think about how many millions of people survived without therapy. They just like lived.”
I’m looking at dozens of anchored sailing yachts. The old man swims in circles outside the designated swimming area.
When I come downstairs in the mornings in Atlanta, the living room TV is on one news network and the kitchen TV is on another. Usually my mom is on the phone with a repairman or an IT guy or a veterinarian or a hotel or an airline or a doctor or her sister. I sit down with my cereal and she asks me a question that I cannot even fathom answering with all of the stimuli invading my senses. She doesn’t notice the overload, she’s used to it. In fact, my mom can’t live without it. We have to play music or turn the TV on at all times. She hates the quiet, especially when we’re eating. She blasts Coldplay or U2 or Van Morrison to drown out the sounds of our chewing. She hates the sounds of chewing.
I’m no different. I have my headphones in at all times. In fact, I’m listening to the Minecraft soundtrack as I write this in a Starbucks because I can’t write in the silence of my own bedroom or the cacophony of my kitchen. I love the private anonymity of the public. Every night, I listen to scary stories to fall asleep. No joke. I listen to hours upon hours of stories of ghost hauntings, abductions, camping nightmares, and paranormal experiences. It relaxes me. I can’t do silence because my brain decides to fill in the blanks. Every time I close my eyes, I think about something horrible. Before I sleep, I try to calm my mind by telling myself to think about things that relax me, but instead, my brain immediately focuses on the worst things I can possibly think of. I tell my brain to be quiet and rest and images of my loved ones hanging from the ceiling invade my mind. I know I love someone if I see them dead when I close my eyes.
In my last days in New York, I was dreading coming home because I knew that I would fall back into my routines and reassume my place in the cycles of the home. Two summers ago, I would walk ten to fifteen miles everyday in the sweltering Georgia heat just to escape the mundanity of my home life. Earlier this summer, I’d just take whippets from a can of compressed air and space out on the floor of the music room listening to some deep-SoundCloud ambient music. Most of the time I wish I could just be high and then die.
If I avoid the people I love then I won’t think about them dying as much. I hate when people call me their best friend. I cringe every time someone says they love me. Why is it so humiliating to be anyone at all? My mom says she loves me every single time we talk.
“What’s your plan today”
“I’m probably just going to find a cafe to write in for a bit and then maybe work out.”
“Sounds good, I’m going to Publix. Do you need anything?”
“Nope, all good. Thanks.”
“Got it. Love you.”
“Love you.”
It has always been this way and I wouldn’t want it any other way. It took almost two decades for my brother and I to say we loved one another. I remember crying on the sidewalk in Princeton. I had come with my parents to drop him off for his first year in college. It wasn’t the first time I had cried in front of him, but it was the first time I told him I loved him. I was just sitting on the ground, bawling and saying how much I loved him and how scared I was to be at home without him. I will never forget that fear. He said he loved me too and it almost sounded like someone else was saying it. I wonder if that’s how he heard it too. Years later he told me I’m the only motherfucker in the world who can make him cry. When we call now, we sign off with “I love you.” I wonder if it will ever not feel strange.
I’m ready to be able to love the normalcy of life. I want to love the in-between. I want to love the silence, the small talk, the repeated conversations. I want to love every part of the people I love. I want to love all of the words and all of the movements and quirks and habits, but right now they just drive me crazy. It all just makes me feel stagnated. Everything needs to be new always. I need more! More! More! More!
Almost daily, I scroll through dating apps looking for someone who will change my life. When I look at profiles, I barely even think about the individual. I think about what I would be like with them.
Give me something horrible. Give me something obscene. I’m so scared of everything else.