Remember that poem about death?
Good evening pr afternoon, morning, namaste, whatever,
who cares. Guess who’s got a little ol’ case of the severe grumpies?
Guess who’s got a case of end-of-modern-civilization blues? Guess who is sliding headlong into a flaming dumpster of anxiety and depression?
ME.
I did have a PET scan this morning. This always cheers me up. Just kidding. PET scans and their aftermaths are so dreadful for me (because I am part insane AND according to 23andMe .00000008 percent Japanese) that I would rather drink a glass of boiling water than endure this shit.
Then don’t, I say to myself. Then don’t do this anymore. Go slinking off for some joke medicine in Mexico like many other smart women before you.
And I realize that while don’t IS a viable (and sometimes appealing) option, for some sick, sadistic reason, I want to try to buy myself through my forties.
And I wanted to drink today, reader. I can’t even tell you how I wanted a drink, and still do though the desire has subsided. I wanted to do a shot and drink a bottle of wine. I wanted to get shitfaced. It’s the first time in my sobriety that I’ve felt that urge. 181 days sober, I have some tricks for dealing with this urge. Today, I held the feeling in my hand and scrutinized it with as much interest as I would bring to any artistic or academic subject of interest. The feeling — “want to get drunk” is a flight response
from the pain of fear.
I held the feeling in my mind’s eye, and realized the feeling was that of a big, scared kid, too. Oh, reader, what I could have done if I had learned how to manage my fear in a healthy way at thirty instead of waiting another 15 years . . . My life may have had a very different shape. Nah, scratch that:
my life would have been so much easier, and so far less rich.
So what to do?
Read poetry, mull things over, break life into smaller increments (in education we call this approach “chunking”), don’t fucking drink. My basic, essential “survival” tasks are quite easy: eat food, drink water, take meds, thank god, don’t drink, try to get some sleep, rinse, repeat.
In Social Studies, I am about to teach the students (per their request) about World War I. Anyone who knows me must know that I was particularly happy that this was a subject area of interest to them because it has long been a subject area interest of mine. And I would contend the Modernists have more to teach us right now than ever before. My strange great-grandparents are reaching back to me, saying, “Look. Be still. Look.”
They also say, “And don’t drink. Trust us. Not fuckin’ worth it, my friend.”
Guess what? Roughly a month into being a middle school teacher, I’m turning into a fussy grammarian. The misuse of the ellipses in the above meme makes me insane, and two months ago it wouldn’t have bothered me much at all.
Language, like the show, must go on. Some rules must go with us into the New World.
. . . [This is how you do ellipses. Not, “…” or god forbid “….”]
On that note, reader, I’m off to listen to do some lesson planning on WW I, aka the “B-side” to WWIi. I cannot believe the floods and immediately thought of The Wasteland’s “fear death by water.” I won’t be teaching The Wasteland in middle school English. I may be a good teacher, but I’m not that fucking good that I could effectively teach The Wasteland to a bunch of middle schoolers, though now this feels a little like a dare to myself.
My job, readers, is hard because I am educating children in a pandemic, in a time of great social and political instability. No degree ever prepared me, or any of my colleagues, for this mighty work.
Hopefully the PET scan will show no disease progression, and I can return to being the active, contributing member of society I try my level best to be. “Do no harm, take no shit” — that bumper sticker is basically my religion right now.
I’m learning. The learning curve, for this era in our lives, is fucking steep. Especially for those of us who are past forty, and not retired.
Especially for those of us, who have chronic health conditions.
Especially for those of us who have made unthinkable sacrifices this year, which is to say all of us, and so we need to be patient and gentle with one another. How can we (I mean American teachers) educate our (and your) children when some of you are turning school board meetings into belligerent riots? I would say a good 1/3rd of the country has completely become unmoored from the ship of humanity.
So what to do?
Look at it, I guess. What am I afraid of today? I’m afraid of losing my ability to be Productive because I’m sick as a dog on late stage Capitalism. Kafka was right. This is all kind of fucked up. I’m turning into something — hopefully not a cockroach or a corpse — and the metamorphosis, like all such deep changes, makes me feel so very adrift some days.
Wednesday, I started sorting a deck of tarot cards (I kind of can’t believe this statement represents my truth, but it does) for deeply philosophical and pedagogical reasons, and I thought of the Victorians, those weirdos. And so I leave you with some poetry about tarot from a Bastard Poet who was raised, no doubt, by weird Victorian-ish European Americans:
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
[. . .]
One must be so careful these days. — Eliot, The Wasteland
