Pendulum of SUCK and WUT

Sorry, guys. I have schlacked off, I have schlucked up, I have schlock-blocked you and led you on and let you down. And it's not that I WANTED to inflict a massive schlockular dry-spell on anyone. The truth of the matter is that I tried many times to set something down in this space, but I actually, misguidedly, ridiculously aim for a certain degree of formal rigor in my personal writing-- even within a stylistic medium as "de-regulated" as blogging, even when absolutely nobody and their mom reads the schtuff that I post here (except for you, Kevin Costner; I know that you creep on me), and even as I simultaneously hold myself to an abysmal, Wikipedia-paraphrasing standard in my scholarly work (which is read by about FIVE people! I'm starting to amass a real audience, yo!)... I must craft the Schlock with all of the schlocky craftsmanship that I can muster, and sometimes it takes a while, okay? It's not an exact science yet. I think that my compulsive drive-to-cohesion stems from the fact that I have spent quite a lot of time chilling out with dead male German composers who prized organicism and motivic integration and teleology, and I have absorbed their dead-white-male aesthetic values, and thus even in my blog entries I strive for thematic unity and a logical progression of ideas because I somehow missed the memo that Structuralism has been dead ever since, like two World Wars or some shit happened, and everyone's illusions about objective truth and the redemptive power of Art had been exploded long before I emerged, Caesarian-style and squalling, into this irremediably shattered world.

(That escalated quickly).

No, so really, it comes back to this: remember when I said that my life had, for a time, turned a Cesspool of Suck? Well, I would characterize the last few months as more of a Whirlwind of WUT-- truly po-mo ("postmodern," "weird for the sake of weird") and dizzying and SO MUCH FUN but a little whackadoo and just generally not the kind of raw autobiographical material that one could potentially fashion into an organized narrative with a take-home message. When I am able to tease out a common thread of meaning from the as-of-now unintelligible morass of WUT, you will be the first to know!

So, anyway. To the heart of matters: I go to this support group at PUNY. It is called "Ongoing Challenges of Graduate Life," and I fell into it somewhat by accident back when I first moved to Schmanhattan. Historically I have been wary of support structures, of self-help, of therapy, of anything that might enable me to complain (any more than I already do) and to introspect obsessively and to make excuses for my shortcomings. Man up, Alana Murphy, face the music, dig yourself out of your doubtless-self-inflicted hole! But I decided to give this group a whirl-- I envisioned it as a graduate-school-themed "Stitch 'n Bitch" club wherein I might meet some kindred spirits who were not so intent on projecting auras of bulletproof-ness but who might actually want to discuss the hangups that come with being marginalized, poor, hyper-articulate, self-sabotaging, post-ironic, and generally useless to society. And The Group was exactly that, for awhile! But then we hit some snags: after I thought we had established a rhythm, we fell into an odd pattern of using our allotted hour to debate what we should use the allotted hour for, i.e. "what does this space mean to us? what is the ideal function of The Group? what should our attendance policies be? what is our protocol?" and I started to get annoyed with what I called this "meta-Groupology," this state of perpetual self-defining that never seemed to quantum-jump to the domain of actual insight or productive life-strategerizing. "Guys," I finally wailed, "when can we talk about REAL THINGS?"

And hey, it took some time and some experimentation, but eventually we broke the tautological death-circle and came up with some constructive directives for our Grad-lives. So, in that spirit of straightforwardness, I am RIGHT NOW dispensing with my meta-blogular tendencies ("what IS a Schlockspot for? what do I DO with my corner of cyber-space? what is the nature of space itself? I guess I should pose these questions for about four paragraphs before seguing into a cryptic meditation on my love life or my dog or something"). No. No more! From this moment onward I will write about REAL THINGS. Read it and weep.

So back to the Cesspool of Suck and the Whirlwind of WUT: I am going to throw out the cutesy shorthands and replace them with more categorical terminology as befits a serious inquiry into the nature of ME. The Cesspool becomes "kind of severe and scary depressive episode." The Whirlwind becomes "renewed desire to wake up in the morning, with touches of mania and recklessness and a whole lot of ill-advised YOLO." It has been a journey, you guys.

(I can't type the word "journey" without hearing it in Teacher's voice. When I was about to give my Master's Recital at Bleep U, there I was, waiting in the wings, saying a little prayer to Jeebus that I wouldn't get lost in the Rachmaninoff, and I was just about to step out to perform when Teacher stumbled into the backstage area all disheveled and out of breath. He scanned me with his dark soulful eyes, said, "Well don't you look lovely!" and took me by the shoulders. "Now listen: you've done all the work, there's nothing more to do in this hour, so just go out there and explore, and listen, and share. It's a journey. It's a JOURNEY." I nodded with all the earnest solemnity of an acolyte. And then he said, "Now hang on a minute-- I have to go to the men's room, don't you dare start without me!" so I was put in the ridiculous situation of calculating roughly how much time my teacher would require to get to the restroom, take a whiz, wash his hands, and return to the concert hall. And, by the power of suggestion, suddenly I was stricken with an urgent pee-need of my own... though it might have been a pre-performance nerves-induced phantom pee [yeah, it's a thing with me, okay?] So anyway, these are my inextricably urinary associations with the word "journey").

God, I'm stalling and I know it. Deflecting personal pain with humor and all, oldest trick in the book. Okay, back to the meat of the entry: depression stuff. Ugh you guys. It's hard for me to write about this, not only because my experience was a frightening one and part of me would like to just sublimate it and smile-grimace through the rest of my life like a real pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps Amurrican! but ALSO because I am a f*cking hipster when it comes to the originality of my blogular content, and the depressional-confessional thing has been attempted by everyone and his or her mom. Seriously, it's so mainstream these days! Et tu, Murphy? I am not even joking when I invoke Your Mom: The NY Times and The Daily Beast both recently ran pieces on the alarming rise of suicide in the Boomer Generation, citing all manner of reasons ranging from the failed economy to the erosion of spirituality and community in our society to the digitally-induced isolation of our supposedly hyperconnected brave new world. As for my own Millennial cohort, the author of the blog Hyperbole and a Half has recently emerged as a courageous chronicler of the serotonin-imbalanced condition. (Now tell me, if her blog is Hyperbole and a Half, what does that make mine? Hyperbole and Three Quarters Times a Billion, To the Power of Infinity, Divided by Zero? Has a certain ring to it, I suppose). And there are all the other memoirs, the personal testimonials, the barfy emo effluvium, all those treks to the darker corners of the psyche that are just cluttering up the Web and the bookstores and the library shelves (here's looking at you, Sylvia Plath and Ernie Hemingway and Virginia Woolfie and Johann Mother-Loving Goethe and innumerable other long-dead sad-sacks). Who am I to add to the noise, the tired discourse, the self-indulgence of grievance-airing? Why do my pithy over-edumacated white-girl problems deserve a voice?

AHA. Bingo. That last sentence of the paragraph. Check it OUT. As obnoxious as the sentiment is, it in fact quite succinctly sums up the depressive mindset-- put another way, "my O Schmerz- moments, my pathetic little self-created loops of suffering, are in fact so pathetic and so little that I am going to make myself suffer further FOR DARING to suffer from such trivialities in the first place." Oh the twisted, paradoxical, self-reflexive logic of it all!

So how do these bullshit suffering-loops even get a chance to take hold? And once they've established themselves, how is one able to break them asunder? At this point, in order to adequately explore the issue (which I feel I must)... sigh, I in fact do need to be exploitative of my singular, unremarkable experiences and put them on the internet. I shall term this "The Altruism of Narcissism." See, if an act of self-indulgent exhibitionism on my part can be simultaneously cathartic for ME, the writer, and relatable or insight-granting or at the very least voyeuristically gratifying/ train-wreckingly Shadenfreude-tastic for YOU, the anonymous reader, then by God I will abandon all pretense of decorum and plunge full-speed ahead! Wasn't it Johann Mother-Loving Goethe or some other navel-gazing nineteenth-century German who said, "That which is most personal is most universal"-- meaning, roughly, that specificities define generalities much more effectively than other generalities? And isn't the latter sentence just a perfect example of why I should jettison all the abstract nouns in favor of some juicy "deets" and get on with the story already?!

I. SUCK! Episode One: The Exposition

Did I, in fact, spring neurotic from the womb? Let us not delve too deeply into a genealogical explanation, an epic origin story, but suffice it to say that I am of Irish and Jewish descent and, historically, those are two seriously sorrowful cultures. Genetic predisposition to victimhood, check! Born to kvetch, born to kvell, born to seek solace in the bottom of a whiskey glass, check. (Did you know that whiskey was my first solid food? No, just kidding, my first food was actually quiche. Quiche! In my day, I was totally the bougie-est one-year-old on the face of the planet, although I'm sure that the stakes for the Baby Bougie Prize are much higher these days).

Anyway, I was a sensitive, outsider-y child, expressive and dynamic at my best-- see me rhapsodize about the plenitude of primordial life in the tide-pools on the beaches that I was privileged enough to have grown up roaming! look at me, dancing and ditzy, over-bright and drunk on the wonder of it all. But I fell apart just as easily. That state of revved-up zest, that coruscating joie-de-vivre was impossible to sustain (and also endlessly mockable to my cooler-blooded peers, as you can imagine) and when I was confronted by anything that would throw a wrench into my Utopian child-vision-- cruelty, alienation, injustice-- I would cry and cry, and so I became the classroom crybaby, the kid who lost her shit. (Sometimes I would cry from more pedestrian things, too, like skinning my knee on the asphalt, or being forced by the lunch-lady to drink my prescribed carton of 2% milk when we only drank skim milk at home OF COURSE, because this was the fat-free '90s, come on lady, get with the times!)

My behavioral patterns only became more pronounced after I was visited by the Monster Pubertus. Teachers at my foofy feel-good privileged private Episcopal high school would write detailed evaluations of students every semester, and I was often "incandescent" but "mercurial," somehow not living up to perceived potential because my flakiness, my fragility was getting in the way. And I just wanted to tell them that it was interesting that they would use the word "mercurial," because didn't they understand that said "mercuriality," my quicksilver thinking patterns and verbal acuity (on full display here? or mega-run-amok here? you decide), could at the drop of a hat turn into fucking mercury poisoning, that in the course of doing a trigonometry assignment I could at one moment be marveling at the beauty of a mathematical formula (like a complete tool) and then whoops! without warming my radiant inner world would go all wonky, my thoughts would take a swerve down some scuzzy alleyway and not only would I become painfully aware of my tool-ery (not to be confused with tomfoolery) but I would also utterly lose touch with whatever had, for me, ever briefly lit up the "maths" in some gorgeous metaphysical way and instead I would see a series of cold symbols that invalidated all of the feeling-y feelings that I was feeling and had no right to be feeling in an unfeeling world, and clearly I was going impale my weak soft self on the spikes of this unfeeling world, this mechanistic mathematical world that would never stand for my chaos!--and, in the wake of such chaos, I wasn't exactly going to finish this trigonometry assignment either. I mean, what did one miserable homework assignment matter when NOTHING mattered. (And therefore the squandered potential; retroactive apologies to my teachers if they are reading this [oh God NO please don't be reading this, Former Teachers, it's worse than the stuff I published in the literary magazine back then {a fine peer-edited journal that was called H.I.P., short for "Hormonally-Induced Psychosis." I'm not making this up!!}]).

Being a person of somewhat nauseating privilege, and being emphatically not cool enough to run with a social circle that would further mess me up, I was supplied with enough shrinks and pills and stimulating extra-curricular activities to hack my way through adolescence, after which the rest of my life stretched out, the promised land, the great deliverance, and I shook hands with Dr. Depression, said that "it has been a pleasure but your services are no longer required," and I watched that scary mofo retreat deep into the recesses of my system, dead or dormant. Hardly a trace was left on the surface, like a faint scar from a teenagery pimple that had once throbbed disgustingly and conspicuously but was healed now that your hormones had died down: when you pressed with morbid curiosity on that scarcely-perceptible radius of scar tissue, you "remembered" the pain in some abstract sense, acknowledged that it had existed but you didn't actually feel it anymore, couldn't access the core of that feeling if you tried.

II. SUCK on Hiatus: The Sublimation Years

It's not like I never had a "pimple" again. Adult acne is a thing, y'all! (It is the documented leading cause of Boomer-suicides, in fact).  But, on my own at last, I was able to devise a personal system that kept my loony leanings in check most of the time. I learned to ride my waves of intense blissed-out inspiration, milk them for productivity because I knew that they were unsustainable and they had an underbelly, a dank un-fun flip side that would inevitably follow on the heels of the dazzle-times. Shaky spells, brainfog, periods of being withdrawn and feeling flattened or somehow disjunct, alien. But I developed coping mechanisms. Phone-a-Friend! Take a shot! Come back, come back, find your way to the landing dock and rejoin the human race! And I always managed.

I even learned to troubleshoot, to use an ounce of prevention. You've seen Disney's "Beauty and the Beast," right? (If you have not, get the eff off my blog and fix this right now!) Well, remember when Maurice, Belle's endearing eccentric old dad, sets out for the inventor's exhibition-- "I'm off to the fair!" he asserts with crackpotted enthusiasm, kooky owl eyes wide and head cocked, only to get whacked in the noggin by by one of his own inventions-- and he jaunts off into the woods and sees two signposts, one for the Main Road and the other for a seedy-looking shortcut, but OF COURSE he takes the sketchball route (thus setting the plot in motion) and ends up getting pursued by a pack of wolves and subsequently imprisoned in the dungeon of the freakiest castle you've ever seen. (This sequence scared the LIVING PIDDLE out of me as a small child: when my parents gifted me the VHS for Christmukkah, I immediately spazzed out and threw the cassette into the kitchen trash, loath to revisit the trauma of Maurice's woodland excursion. [The tape was rescued from the garbage by my dad, who was laughing his ass off]). Anyway-- thought experiment. Say you were Maurice, and you had survived that harrowing sylvan ordeal: would you be so keen to barrel down a creepy unknown road again, or would you stick to the map? You would start to know where the bad routes were, the gnarly neural pathways, and you could just say NOPE, not even gonna go there, I already know what awaits so why bother enacting the whole bloody process again?

(Of course, Maurice and co. eventually had to go back to the castle, face the beast within, realize he was an okay guy-- just a lil' misunderstood-- and then defend the fortress against the real villain, Gaston AKA The Patriarchy! And yikes I don't even know how to fit Belle into my schema; you would think that I would identify more with her, that bubbly bookish brunette with a bit of a savior complex, but no, Maurice the whackjob is mah MAN, and the metaphor is unraveling fast now, but the point is this: you can circumvent the deep dark woods for awhile but not forever, you have to go back in for the "third act" and face up to things, and every folk-tale and myth is just an archetypal rendering of one's inevitable confrontation with the self, blah blah. I didn't know that yet, though).

III. SUCK Reloaded: Hemophiliac Attack

So I existed, for years on end, flirting with crisis but always coming back to a safe harbor, just a wee bit "fragile" of emotional constitution-- an image that I was okay with, because it was Romantic and maybe even momentarily enthralling to a few poor suckers out there (and here is the point where I must admit the shameful truth that I sometimes fantasized about being really fucked up, about having a "fun" mental illness that would engender wild bacchanalian attempts at oblivion and forays to the spiritual hinterlands from which I would return, damaged and trembling and haunted yet ethereally, irresistibly fascinating to all worthy onlookers. But no, instead sometimes I just got vaguely sad, vaguely checked-out, carb-craving and prone to feeling unloved and under-appreciated-- and what a trite and prosaic state of being that was, and all the more reason for self-loathing: I couldn't even manage to be screwy in a compelling way!)

For a long time nothing serious came of these tendencies; I always kept the lid on the simmering pot, even when it twitched dangerously with steamy condensation... but then I had this bad breakup last fall, and it kind of blew the lid off of everything. Ugh. UGH. That is THE most commonplace reason for a human being to "ausflippen," so basic, so high-school literary magazine that every fiber of my being wants to press "delete delete delete" and abandon this worn, weary, been-there-done-that territory. Tale as old as time. But, truth be told, it gets to the center of the issue, so persevere I must. To distill the matter: I fell victim to something that I am now codifying as "The Completional Fallacy" (I am officially adding this term to Lady Philosophy's lexicon of "fallacies"-- my major contribution to Academe will be something that I discovered incidentally through my relationship failures! Boom). The Completional Fallacy is this: "I am not complete, I horde within me a sad wounded child, and therefore I require someone to complete me, and this 'someone' had better also not be complete (because what need would he/ she then have of me?) and then we could press one another's injuries together, staunch the flow in a mutual healing process." Pretty fallacious, eh? Now I am not saying that romantic partners should not help one another to grow-- no duh!-- ;  rather I am just saying that it is kind of a bad idea to either deliberately or subconsciously seek out someone on the basis of his/ her instability in the belief that this person will then empathize with you, accept you and your similar inclinations, be the one who will not hurt you as everyone else has [supposedly] hurt you (because you're Irish and Jewish, ergo you're fucked, the world has it out for you, has had it out for you for centuries).

So I got involved with this dude who had a lot to recommend him but who had his own demons, and we entered into this covenant where he was all like, "Tell me absolutely everything about you!" and I was all, "You really wanna know?" and he was all, "Yeah! We need to be vulnerable to each other; it's an act of trust, I'll show you mine if you show me yours, " and I was all, "Okay, deep breath, here you go, here is my messy and potentially very unattractive interior, maybe it's time for me to come to terms with it if you will first," and he was all, "I accept it unconditionally!" and I was all, "Great! Hokay, here you go." ... BUT, since I had put my stock in an well-intentioned yet fundamentally unstable individual, it was not long before my apple-bruises, those imperfections that I had with great difficulty revealed, were flung back at me as insupportable, as burdensome and altogether too much to deal with when he had his own full roster of issues; I was marked "defective" and sent away freshly cognizant of my perceived innate defectiveness. Thus the Completional Fallacy made its Fallaciousness manifest.

It was nowhere near the end of the world, this breakup business! Sure, it felt like I had been cut to the quick, but it was really only a flesh-wound and in fact I was culturally entitled to a sick enjoyment of this initial bleeding-out period-- what better time to soak oneself in booze and consume an excess of fried food and run through one's list of underutilized phone contacts to cash in on sympathy? And eventually the immune system is supposed to kick in where the flesh-wound is concerned; a clotting mechanism gets to work, a scab forms, becomes a scar; time and distance work their wonders in this natural physiological process. HOWEVER, if you tend to depression, or at least to my particular brand of such, then what should be a mere flesh-wound becomes a mortal wound because you lack a specific coagulant, an inhibitor that tells the body to stop bleeding out. You are an emotional hemophiliac, and after awhile it doesn't even matter what caused or catalyzed the injury-- it just matters that your system is "irresilient," cannot buffer. The mind says, "Okay, I get it: this hurt a lot, this was perversely fun for awhile but now I am ready to be done, would like to wake up in the morning without instantaneously thinking, 'Oh fuck, I'm awake,' would like to take a simple subway ride without feeling like I perceive in the faces of strangers the Darwinian cruelty that lies beneath the veneer of civilization, I would like very much to not almost lose my shit in the seminar room when the professor sasses me for being five minutes late because the reason I was five minutes late is because I almost didn't get up this morning but I somehow convinced myself to come participate in this charade, a decision that I am IMMEDIATELY REGRETTING b-t-dubs."

The voice of reason, the self-outside-the-self, wants to put a stop to these destructive patterns once they have lost their initial reckless allure, their cute sophomoric abnegational spree. But the chemically-imbalanced brain has other ideas, it has an override button-- no, the old analogy was better: basically you are bleeding out unchecked, and the further depleted you become, the less capable you are of rationally evaluating your circumstances, and in your supine hemorrhagic position you really kinda lose the impetus to spring to your feet and reverse the state of things.

It is scary and disturbing to lose control-- for example, to experience a moment of levity with a friend, a snap-out-of-it joyous bubble, only to be made acutely aware of the moment's transience because you know that soon enough you'll have to go back into your head by yourself, a boomy domed cage from which nothing good is coming these days. "Don't make me go in there alone!" The pallor and bloodlessness, the Dementors, the encroachment of ick, the colonization and conquest of my entire consciousness by SUCK-- it snuck up on me, the sense that something was wrong, off-er than usual and not amenable to a quick fix or a shoving-under-the-rug. Allow me a few snapshots to illustrate the mucky progression of events:

1. I am in NOLA, Nawlins, the Big Easy, at the annual meeting of the American Schmoozicological Society, standing alone in my hotel room on the fifteenth floor with my head pressed against the glass; the seafood gumbo and the way-too-many-mint-juleps that I consumed the night prior have combined in my body to form a toxic sludge that I would not wish on anyone. I am supposed to be downstairs at this paper session or that networking event, but the thought of all those humbuzzing people... snappy in their conference attire, labeled with their university affiliations, eyes always scanning the room behind your shoulders, and the refrain of "so what do you work on?" and  the sizing up, the peacocking, how do they do it all day, every day?... and suddenly I feel like Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo: the already-formidable distance from my vantage point to the ground augments, accordions, and I have a vision of my forehead shattering the glass and then a perfect parabolic swan-dive to the pavement and I won't ever have to engage in the niceties or the artifice ever again because I am just so *exhausted* ... and then I laugh darkly to myself, a distancing irony swoops in to save me, I am just grotesquely hungover and having conference blahs, and probably more than half of the people who are in attendance here secretly want to defenestrate themselves anyway, it's no big deal.

2. I'm at a small social gathering in my neighborhood with Pablo, an old friend. He and Jana have come up with this rollicking party game called "Suicidal or Homicidal?", the premise of which is that every individual, when pushed to a crisis point, will fall definitively into one camp or the other and it will be obvious which one. They are going around the room diagnosing everyone who is present; when it's my turn to be evaluated, there's an instant chorus of, "Ohhh, Alana's suicidal. Definitely." I give them an eye-roll and a thumbs-up. I almost say, "Pills, uh-huh, definitely pills, maybe a mix of ibuprofen and heavier painkillers and sleeping pills, just enough to go to sleep and check out permanently, no razors for this girl, oh man I really hate blood," but I decide against it because I'm not sure they would know that I'm kidding, because I definitely am but my delivery might fall a little flat.

3. My sister has asked me to sub for her one Sunday at her choir job at a Unitarian church in Crooklyn. (FYI had a brief romance with the Unitarians when I was a teenager and was desperately seeking a spiritual center-- we would sit in drum-circles and sing Native American chants and I would just end up feeling really guilty because we were co-opting an art form of a genocided culture for our pseudo-spiritual self-interest). This morning we sing a version of Bach's "Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben" (that's "Jesu, joy of man's desiring") that is overlaid with an insipid text about gathering together in a community for times of song ("Jesu" is not welcome here!) and I am inwardly snarling at the toothlessness of the whole thing, because I don't ascribe to Lutheran theology or anything but at least it has some friggin' incisors, unlike these people who have just stolen the pretty pleasant music to feel good about themselves for an hour. (And then I think that maybe it is these snarly thought-patterns of mine that cause people to ditch me like the Defective I am). After the service, a couple of sweet eccentric old coots invite me to brunch and I just can't handle it, I am too thick with disdain for them, disdain for myself, so I make an excuse. My phone buzzes as I slip out of the church. It's a text from the sister: "How did it go? It's a nice day, you should walk across the Crooklyn bridge if you can" and suddenly it seems like a colossal insurmountable effort to text back because I am sick with old corroding familial venoms, the years and years of sister-baggage that we are pussy-footing around and I just don't have the will to play anymore, and she shouldn't be suggesting that I go take a walk across a bridge at this particular point in time, what the hell was she thinking?

4. Chez moi, December. It's close to midnight-- the literary hour of reckoning, of crying out, oh how cute-- and I am in bed under the duvet sobbing and sobbing. It won't turn off this time, the shaking, the systemic tremors. I can't even pinpoint a specific thought or event that brought me here (this stopped being "about" the dissolution of a romantic relationship WAY long ago): I can only describe the feeling as "breaking," or, "crumbling," or "falling to pieces," or "cracking up," or "finally snapping," any of those commonplace expressions that we bandy about in our daily discourse, these aphorisms, these stand-ins for experiences that we hope to be lucky enough to never know from the inside. But here I am now in the belly of the beast. I just want it to stop. My self-outside-the-self speaks faintly, from afar, sees the state of affairs and offers this: "Alana. Hey. Maybe it's a good thing that you live fifteen blocks away from one of the biggest hospitals in Schmanhattan. Maybe you want to walk over there right now and, like, ask for a bright fluorescent room and an antiseptic white bed and for somebody to, um, keep an eye on you until the night is over." The self-inside-the-self says, "UGH NO, it would take so much goddamned energy to walk all the way over there to the hospital and even start to explain things..." so I stay paralyzed, face in the pillow, and then suddenly I cackle-snort at the whole twisted line of thinking (you know, that I would totally "off" myself or something were I not so zapped, zonked, and fucking lazy on account of the depression-- funny how it has a fail-safe built in, maybe the disease does not want to kill its host) and I hug myself in bed, and feeble laughter begins to dilute the crying spell and I say to myself-- this is both the inside- and outstide-the-self self weighing in-- that if I manage to ride out the night, I will call somebody up, I will eat crow and not give a deuce about my "image" (because  my image has been degraded so far in my own eyes that how could anyone think less of me than I do?) and I will try anything, yoga, therapy, Unitarianism, chemical supplements, a comprehensive rewiring of the nervous system, whatever, just as long as there is a sliver of a chance that I don't have to feel like this ever again...

IV. WUT!   

And so, really scared and taking things seriously now, I went out and got myself a coagulant, a fairly standard one; I kept the little orange pill bottle in my kitchen cabinet, began the practice of swallowing a green-and-white capsule ritualistically in the morning. At first the meds seemed to swap out my bleak weepy desolation for cracked-out anxiety: whereas before I had slept a fuck-ton and would "come to" as one emerges from a Rip van Winkle experience, now I sprung out of bed at the ass-crack of dawn all fight-or-flight, heart hammering hard as though I had forgotten to take care of something critically important. (And which is worse, Catatonia or Manic Panic? I don't even know. A splash of wine seemed to even the scales for me in those early medicated days).

I opened up to people, tentatively at first and then spilling out, opened up to professionals and then to friends-- most of whom were like, "oh, you too? yeah, welcome to the club, babe, I have my therapist on speed-dial, come check out my pill drawer!"and I was like, "whoa, we are a messed-up bunch! I guess birds-of-a-feather, you know, fellow Defectives... or maybe it's a generation-wide 'phenom,' or a condition of belonging to the Homo sapiens, who knows... and GUYS really we should have talked about all of this sooner, but I was all reclusive and ashamed and going-it-alone for so long and that's the sneaky thing about the condition, innit? that it makes you ashamed and you don't reach out to anyone."

After a little bit of time something started to kick in, a tingling, a Great Awakening. Maybe it was the combination of factors, of a chemically recalibrating brain and of the odd release/ empowerment that comes with admitting that things are not okay even though you have everything... finally the pretense is over, you know? You don't even have to try to exist within the lines anymore. And I entered this wild and wacky life-phase of Uncaring-- not in the sense of apathy or numbness but in the sense of bulletproof-ness, of "Yo dawg, so I really crashed, I mean really crashed because the worst enemy is, like, inside you, the Enemy is not being able to trust your own mind to not suddenly go apeshit on you, to cannibalize itself, and once you pinpoint the source of the poison and commit yourself to managing it you suddenly realize that the whole external world is child's play, it could never even hope to compete in terms of terrorizing you, so suddenly you're all 'Come at me, bro!' with the world and you can start having some serious fun."

My Euphoria Times, my Whirlwind of WUT, could be symptomatically strange to the external observer. Said observer might have thought that I was totally high, like, on drugs or something. (Oh wait). I was possessed of a sense of grand cosmic irony, of perpetual high comedy that was a purification of tragedy, as though my personal pain had passed through a Refiner's Fire and become allegorical and universal (waddup Goethe!) For example, sitting in the seminar room-- the dreaded seminar room where vitality and inspiration went to be euthanized-- I no longer crumbled despairingly at the meaninglessness of it all but I sat there scarcely able to contain my laughter, because here were all these little people like me who were scribbling stuff down in their planners to placate the professorial demigods and they were SO worried! and so earnest! and didn't they realize that just to be alive and to simultaneously want to be alive was the greatest gift that you could ever hope for?

I sat in the seminar room laughing loonily to myself; I tuned in and out of lectures, plucking the choice bits that lit up my intellectual sweet spots and blowing off the rest in favor of reading my horoscope on my iPhone under the table or something (apparently gloomy Saturn was leaving my constellation and I would soon be breaking some bad co-dependent relationship patterns!) I announced to most of my friends and acquaintances that I was going to quit my PhD-- see the kaleidoscope of possibilities out there in the Real World now that I had stopped being so afraid to face things dead on! and then I somersaulted on the matter, because I wanted to singlehandedly, grandiosely revitalize the Ivory Tower as the last bastion of intellectual freedom and BY GOD I could do it! I chatted up strangers on the street and the subway and in the coffeeshops because they had all stories, they had pain in their eyes and now I understood and wanted to reach out!  I went to a conference at Bleep U to give a paper and I finished writing the lecture the morning of. I had salt-and-vinegar kettle chips and beer for dinner about fifteen consecutive evenings in a row. I saw "Showgirls: The Musical" in a nightclub in the company of some guy whose life aspiration was to start a highbrow-lowbrow Philly Cheesesteak-themed food truck in Crooklyn. I asked my parents if they thought I would look good with short hair, and they shuddered and begged me not to be so rash, so naturally I went and lopped off the locks immediately (to great critical acclaim, I add!) I didn't finish any of my term papers or projects on time (the professors seemed to accept my "mercuriality"with a helpless shrug) but I did give two smashing concerts with a violinist (because musical performance is the life force, y'all!) and I wrote a satirical article for Toolyard's independent newspaper that got a few "likes" on Facebook.

One night I met up with my ex-ish person at the pub on my block. We had undergone several months of chilly radio-silence even though he had attempted to re-establish contact on more than one occasion: I fielded the efforts because it wasn't time yet, because on hearing from I still felt a little stab of something unsavory that was directly antithetical to my dippy rainbow super-high... but then, suddenly, the coagulants had taken effect and I didn't really remember the hurt in a visceral way anymore, and I saw that there was a salvageable element to our connection. So we hit the pub, at first approaching one another across the table with slight trepidation, but then the honesty bubbled up (for better or for worse we had a personal dynamic that could not support the superficial for long) and he bought my beer as recompense for "being pretty much the biggest jackass on the face of the planet to you, Alana," and I acknowledged the magnitude of the jackassitude, damn straight! but I also thanked him for, oddly, catapulting me to this plane of fearlessness that I might never have known otherwise. We talked about the fearless thing. "Schmanhattan just kicks the shit out of you," he said, ordering another rum-and-coke for himself, "and I was so insecure and unhappy for so long, and then I realized that ain't nobody got time for that." I concurred, adding that in his formulation,"Schmanhattan" could easily be replaced with "the world," or "the human condition," or "the self" -- you kick the shit out of you. Nobody does it better.

Boy was six drinks deep and it was time to call it a night. The subway was effed up and not running, so I told him that I would wait with him for a taxi; we stood on the sidewalk together in front of my apartment building and he puffed on a cigarette ("remember last summer when you gave up smoking FOR ME?" I said, arms akimbo) and he studied me slurrily through the haze. "Wow. You are really dead set on getting me a cab... you look good in those red jeans, you know..." but then there was a taxi-cabbus ex machina barreling up the block, and I shoved his arse in the yellow vehicle and gave him a peck on the cheek (of the face, not of the arse!) and I promised that we would talk soon, and then I went up to my apartment laughing all the way, incomplete and by my lonesome AND YET totally complete at the same time, a big honking paradox, a Schrödinger's Cat of completionality, a walking-talking Fallacy having the time of her life... 

V. Epilog: The Woods are Lovely, Dark, and Deep

Of course, my new Carpe-the-Shiznit-out-of-this-Diem mode of existing was not sustainable, was like overfishing for wild Atlantic salmon or something-- the ecosystem would not forever support the crazy excessive intensity with which I suddenly fished in the Seas of Life after going without seafood for so long (and I actually literally did re-introduce the delicious pescados and the frutti di mare to my diet this spring after a seven-year streak of vegetarianism-- symbolic gesture?) Eventually there were consequences for the YOLO, there was a spectacular trail of chaos where I had been, my coagulant proved not to be a miracle-remedy and things started to get under my skin again and I wasn't totally immune to banality, fuckwittage, the usual suspects. The untouchability had run its course. I had swung a little too high; what goes up must come down, right? (That's what she said?)

And I started to grasp that there was no finite "cure" for this thing-- that I could know myself and guard against the tendencies to a certain extent but that we were in it for the long haul, I would be no stranger to these patterns. The monomythic trajectory, all of those fairy tales with their freaky forests-of-the-psyche and their cathartic culminations wherein the hero slays the dragon, the demon, the stepmother or the witch-- we would like to close the book triumphant, we would like to say "well that was a satisfying ending! On we go!" but we keep getting knocked back afresh to some point in the exposition of the story... like we were moseying along on the game-board of "Candyland" and we had almost reached the elysian realm of Queen Frostine but then we pulled the wrong card and were punted all the way back to the goopy molasses quagmire or to Lord Licorice's Tower of Terror. Oh SNAP!

But there is tremendous healing in the reiteration, in the looping of the journey (HAHA, "journey!") You're, like, leveling up every time that you embark. Have you read Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse? It's just the best: at the end of the novel, our protagonist Harry Haller the Steppenwolf has been through all kinds of trippin'-- he is hanging out with Mozart, for fuck's sake, and he has just "murdered" his female Doppelganger Hermine (who is really a projection of the self, obvs), and then suddenly all of the people in the scene turn into little figurines. Harry hears Mozart's transcendental laughter all around him and he realizes that he will never be done with the game, that he will traverse time and again the "hell of [his] inner being" (oh Hesse you are so FLIPPING Teutonic sometimes) but that in doing so he will maybe someday learn how to laugh. To know what is in the woods and to go there and back again and to wake up on a new day in spite of everything, eyes a little askew and overbright, to load up the cart with provisions in spite of everything and set out on the road and shout out to whoever happens to be around that I'm off to the fair!...

Expectation/ Fulfillment, Cycles Thereof

I, just like everybody else on the face of the planet, used to think I was really special and original, that my personal experiences were of an unusually heightened intensity and that my tastes and opinions were like totally rarefied. Case in point: when I studied abroad in Schockstria in my junior year, I discovered the paintings of Gustav Klimt for the first time. Well, I had maybe halfway-heard of "The Kiss" before, but had otherwise remained Klimt-ignorant because I had a great many other things to learn about in schmoozick school at Bleep U, like how to accompany an oboe jury while grotesquely hungover how to tell whether a piece of sacred two-voiced polyphony had been composed in 1100, 1150, 1200, or 1250 (true story, I was asked that on an exam once!) Anyway, when I was allowed my fairy-tale semester in Schlienna, my eyes were opened to the asinine and borderline alcoholic behaviors that underage American exchange students will exhibit in a foreign country the many cultural and intellectual treasures that have been bestowed on us by the Schliennese, like psychoanalysis and antisemitism and apple strudel and Mozart-Balls and most of all KLIMT, that sexy daub-er of golden hues and arcane mysterious symbols. I returned to the U.S. of A. all disaffected and world-weary--  the Midwest was one massive eyesore of strip-malls and squat utilitarian architecture and megachurches and how could I revert to such aesthetic privation after having lounged for so long in the honeycombed monuments of faded imperial glory? God, I was sulky. I clutched to my Schliennese souvenirs like Gollum.

One day I was walking past the college poster store and what did I spy with my little eye but a Klimt reproduction? It was right there, lodged between a poster of a glassy-eyed Victoria's Secret model and a chart of pornographically-named cocktail recipes (gotta love college towns). I knew this image from my studies. It was part of the Stoclet Frieze (Schlocklet Frieze, in my jargon?) which depicts the Tree of Life in fantastic curlicues; the tree is flanked by two figures-- to on the left, a woman, austere, vaguely Egyptian, regarding something out of level, critical eyes, and then, to the other side of the tree is the object of her lightly guarded gaze: a man and a woman embracing as if to fuse back together into some essential undivided state, as if to become an androgyne.

So that's the layout of the entire frieze, but the section that caught my eye in the poster store was just the first section, the watching woman. This section is called Erwartung. NO, not "EAR-WART-UNG," stop that. Say it with me: "EH-VAH-TOONG," luscious dark German vowels meaning "expectation." The final section of the frieze, with the couple, is called Erfüllung-- "fulfillment," or maybe, even more literally, "filling up" (giggity!) I cast about the store for this complementary tableau but it was nowhere to be found; it looked like I was stuck with Erwartung for now, with the expectant, narrow-eyed, perpetually unsatisfied chick. Still, it would have to do. I bought the poster, took it home, and jankily scotch-taped it to the closet door of my bedroom: BOOM,  I had brought high culture into the shabby space, just like that. Expectation, yearning, searching,  a reminder of... something yet to come. And I would find the Erfüllung tableau in good time, whenever it presented itself to me, maybe when I stumbled upon real-life fulfillment (whatever that happened to mean-- all I knew was that it had evaded me up to that point, that I was still waiting).

***

In the course of my waiting-for-life-to-percolate, to really get underway, I had to find ways to pass the time. One of my activities was to watch the first four seasons of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" on Hulu. And in the first episode of the fourth season, I was totally called out on my Klimtian pretensions, unmasked for the cliche that I was. In this episode, Buffy and co. go off to college (the fictional University of California, Sunnydale) and it turns out that there is a vampiric subculture of upperclassmen at the school that likes to prey on new freshmen (yes, it's a metaphor-- for anything, really, goths, peer pressure, fraternity/ sorority hazing rituals, etcetera etcetera. I'm sure that somebody has written a dissertation on this episode alone. I once saw an edited volume of "Buffy Studies" for sale at a meeting of the American Schmoozicological Society, no joke). Anyway, these upperclassmen vampire-den-folk like to stealth-attack their victims in the dorms and then subsequently raid the spoils (easy mac? shower caddies? beanbag chairs?) and they also hedge bets on the wannabe-artsy posters that will invariably adorn the walls of the freshies. "Is it a Monet or a Klimt?" they wager in a little throwaway scene, because at UC Sunnydale it is apparently always one or the other.

Ohhh, the embarrassment that I felt. Joss Whedon and company had preemptively mocked me in the late 90s, long before I had even heard of Klimt, and then years later I had grown up and Seen The World and returned to my college town brimming with cultural messianism-- I had come back to tell you all!-- or so I thought, but really I was just playing out a stereotype, I was no different from the nameless, faceless hordes of fictional freshmen at a fictional Southern California university. I deserved to be descended upon by proto-hipsterian vampires and put out of my misery!

When I had finally figured out my escape route from Schroomington, when I at long last had amassed the means to get out of dodge, I peeled Erwartung down from the closet door and rolled her up and put her in a pile of cast-off possessions along with my cheap Target comforter, my plastic pencil canister, all of the collegiate trappings that I was determined to transcend en route to a new identity. Erwartung was going to Goodwill, where she would doubtless catch the eye of some fresh sensitive head-up-his/her-bum eighteen-year-old individual and find a loving home; I, on the other hand, had become a person of refinement, was destined for bigger things, was going to make a splash in the City of Dreams, was off to seek Erfüllung there.

***

This last January, I was in the metropolis of Schlock Sangellis-- probably not too far away from a real-life prototype for UC Sunnydale, come to think of it-- and I was catching up with an old chum, Raphael. And I do mean "old chum"; we go wayyyy back, prepubescent, prehistoric, to childhood piano lessons and goofy community choirs. Back in those days Raphael was a complete oddity: frail, skinny, home-schooled, hyper-bright and shrewd even then, yet so circumscribed by his cultish family upbringing that he lacked some basic human knowledge. (I introduced him to the phenomenon of rap music. Me! Yes!) We went to summer music camps together, caught frogs at dusk, herded our peers together and attempted to sing through fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier. We were SO COOL, you guys. Anyway, the two of us had grown up, gone through this and that, and drastic transformations had been wrought-- he lost his religion, became a gym rat, tanned like crazy, moved to Schlock Sangellis to seek fame and fortune as a film composer, and I became... whoever I am today. And now we were sitting across from one another at a Mexican restaurant in Beverly Sills, having taken a jaunt through the bling-y neighborhood in his convertible with the top down (SO COOL, look at us now, running feverishly away from the misfit past that nipped always at our heels) and we munched a stack of fresh tortillas and updated one another on recent doings and undoings.

Both of us were emerging from rough spells, it seemed, though he had been working on himself for quite some time whereas I was just starting to rethink my coping strategies, i.e. realizing that I had none and should probably fix that. Raphael had an advantage over me, having actually endured palpable hardship and dysfunction in his life. "Let me tell you what I've been doing these days," he said. "Alana, it's great. I've never been so disciplined. I wake up at 6 AM every morning to meditate, and then I read through all these different religious and philosophical texts and contemplate them, and I've pretty much let go of all my anger, my anger towards my parents, towards my crazy exes, my coworkers, I've just forgiven everyone." I tore a tortilla into strips and said, "Wow, that sounds kind of awesome, actually. I want some of your Kool-Aid."

"No, it's amazing. I mean, I'm not perfect. I have to keep at it constantly, I'm always about to slip back into destructive patterns, but once I get to that place of non-attachment, the most amazing things happen. You wouldn't believe it, Alana: the most beautiful women you've ever seen, the most beautiful women in all of Schlock Sangellis! -- they just appear before me. And then they take their clothes off! And then they disappear once they've served their purpose, and I do whatever else I need to be doing! It's great!"

"RAPHAEL!" I exclaimed, punching his arm, "do you mean to say that your virtuous eightfold path or whatever is really just a giant ploy to get LAID? With no strings attached? You're something ELSE. You're making Siddhartha roll over in his grave... wait, was Siddhartha even buried or did he just dissolve into the atmosphere or something? Hahaha... oh, it doesn't even matter... haHAha, Raphael, you conniving douchebag, you rapscallion..." I was entertained rather than offended because I still held this image in my mind of Raphael as a borderline-emaciated little white boy who had legitimately feared the dawning of Y2K and was convinced that his roommate at music camp was a gangster on account of a pierced ear. The newly-assumed "playa" identity didn't quite ring true.

"No, I'm telling you, Alana, attachment and expectation, that's where we go wrong. Think of it like you think about food. You're hungry right before you eat, right?" "Well yeah, I'm jonesing for my chile relleno that I ordered... where is it, by the way?  "But see, after you've eaten the chile relleno, you're not going to keep obsessing over food, right? You're just going to go about your life until you're hungry again, and then you'll eat." I cocked my head. "That's the plan, at least," I said.  "So-- the hot Schlollywood babes, the ones that magically appear before you, they're the proverbial foodstuff?" He grinned. "Well, sure. But I don't overdo it, just like I don't overeat. And yeah, I work out a lot."

***

It took me a little while to furnish my room when I first moved to Schmanhattan. I wanted to do it right, mark the new chapter-- the nascent adulthood, the ensuing fabulousness-- with swanky material acquisitions. No more taped-up posters, no more Target plywood bookshelves or floor-lamps pillaged from the dumpster at Snackwell Parish. Unfortunately, I was also flat broke, so my lavish interior decorating plans took some time to mobilize (and eventually they just devolved into several disorienting Ikea binges in a dystopian warehouse in blighted industrial North Blurzy) but I swore that I would be painstaking in my art selection-- I would raid flea markets in remotest Crooklyn for one-of-a-kind finds, I would never again be the butt of a Joss Whedon joke because my wall adornments were too mainstream!

Then, one evening, I was taking out the trash; I went down to the basement, and what did I spy with my little eye but a reproduction of Klimt's "The Kiss" leaning against one of the recycle bins? It wasn't a poster but an actual painted canvas in a bronzed frame; I knelt down to run my hand over the stucco texture of the image's surface. Aww, how sweet, I thought condescendingly, some college student is growing up and rising above her schlock-art phase, just like I did once! But as I studied the painting, I noticed that it looked like a rotated version of Erfüllung, the "fulfillment" tableau-- this could have been the same couple, only viewed from a different angle, their faces now visible (he's darker than she, gives the impression of having swooped in and taken her by surprise but she just succumbs, sinks into inevitably there in the golden garden). And I felt stupidly affected by the painting-- I had a sudden urge to jet out to the bodega and buy a single fresh fig... but wait, they're not so well-stocked, okay, an orange, then, and I wanted to sink my nails into the peel and breathe in the floral-heavy-bitter scent of the oils... or I wanted to run upstairs to my apartment and dig out the mouldering old copy of the "Song of Songs" that I had stolen from my parents and whisper the tremulous poetry into some imaginary ear.

Aha, I thought, cliches like Klimt are cliches for a reason, because the original things are so good and true that they have been perpetuated ad nauseam. And then I thought, well, shit, I would be a bad person if I didn't adopt this orphan-Klimt. It's not Erfüllung, but it's close-- this must be a sign-- and besides, my walls are awfully bare, and maybe it would serve me well to have swoony Fulfillment watching over the proceedings of my life, and also, since when did I ever turn down anything that had been proffered to me for free?

***

Raphael and I had moved onto some post-meal espresso-- marvel at our sophistication now, remember when we slurped red-white-and-blue popsicles in the summer?-- and we were still riffing on themes of Zen and expectation and attachment and so forth (we were in the South of California, after all; it's a requirement). "You know, you're right, buddy," I said, "expectation just leads to attachment, and then 'attachment to suffering leads', like Yoda said in Revenge of the Sith."

And then, because I'm supposedly a schmoozicologist, and should have a better set of cultural references on hand than George Lucas' desecration of the Star Wars franchise, I started telling Raphael about Guillaume de Machaut from the fourteenth century-- how I learned, last semester, that he was as much of a poet as a composer, and how he wrote this epically involved narrative/ autobiographical mashup called the Voir Dit, the "True Story, " the "Real Real" (I had interrupted class to say that it was like one of those MTV "exclusive" artist documentaries where they're like, "You think you know? You have no idea. This is the diary of Britney Spears." See, I am nothing if not a constructive member of graduate seminars). So anyway, in the "Voir Dit," Machaut recounts how this random fangirl, Toute-Belle (which translates to "totally hot"),  writes to him in praise of his poetic and musical gifts and basically states that she has fallen in love with him from afar, although they've never met. Thus begins a fraught epistolary courtship wherein they send each other poetry, love letters, musical compositions, and it's all so over-the-top: he's like, "Just as I could never count all the stars in the universe, so I could never quantify just how much I want to meet you IRL," and she's like, "I'm dying of longing, you're soooo talented, I played the mix-tape you sent me-- er, I sang through the virelai that you composed, tra-la-la," and they both just can't wait to put their hands on each other and to consummate the damn thing. But then they finally do meet, and... ehhhh. Things fizzle. They maybe have sex one time-- Machaut is vague and euphemistic, Venus comes down to visit them-- and then Toute-Belle starts playing hard-to-get, and then she's seen around town wearing a green dress, and in the Middle Ages green was totally the color of loose women! so she's two-timing him, or worse, and then the book turns into a rambling, slightly bitter meditation on the vicissitudes of fortune.

"See, Raphael, what happened is that Machaut and Toute-Belle set up these crazy expectations about each other, and it just screwed them over big-time! Bit them in the ASS! And stuff like that still happens... I mean, my last boyfriend and I talked so much before we even met-- he was a friend-of-a-friend-- and we said all this ridiculous stuff to each other, like 'I've never known a beautiful soul like you,' or, 'you make me feel like major-major seventh chords,' and I was like 'oh VOM, this is too much,' and yet part of me so wanted to believe that it was real and genuine, our connection, and that somebody could care about me that much, so I went with it. And then we met and just supremely disappointed each other, because nobody could ever live up to what we had imagined, projected... I was just like, 'your hand feels wrong, you are crushing my fingers, bebb, ease up,' and he was like, 'you're so obsessed with trivial things, like, why did you just spend five minutes showing me how to water the mint plant in your apartment?' and I was like, 'your lack of interest in the mint plant is indicative of your lack of interest in the natural, sensual world and also of your inability to nurture,' and he was like 'you just never turn off your manic interest in everything, I can't ever relax around you' and so on, and we just tore each other apart all the time over things like a MINT PLANT. It was really bad! We probably damaged one another's psyches forever in the space of those few months. Fucking expectations! What a fail, man; what an epic, epic fail."

Raphael nodded in a been-there kind of way. "No, Alana, actually, this is so, so great. See, we need to have those experiences, we need to build something up so much that it can only come crashing down horribly, we need to get burned by these unstable people exactly because they expose all of our own instabilities, our weaknesses, and then we learn how to find our centers again, to let go of our expectations of others and accept limitations and eventually accept ourselves."

I raised my espresso demitasse in a toast. "Fine words, my bro, my Sensei," I said. "Easier said than done. But yeah, that's my long-term goal. So, hear, hear: in this, the Year of our Lord 2013, I do declare that I shall make a concerted effort to jettison expectation, to accept the limitations of my fellow man and to forgive their trespasses against me, and to practice more piano and to try meditation and yoga and to stop snarfing Thai-flavored potato chips and scrolling through Missed Connections on Craigslist when the going gets tough. But I shall also accept that I will fail a lot at these things, especially at first." "Yeah, you will," he said, "and it's completely okay. It's part of the process, and it's really good that you know that already." We clinked our coffee-cups together. "Look at us, Alana, we're doing so great," he said, and I saw the old innocence shining through the assumed hyper-masculine exterior, this goofy Guidonic shell of Raphael. We paid up, exited the restaurant, and jumped into Raphael's convertible; he put the top down and cranked up some Kanye West and revved up the engine and we sped away through the hazy hills of Schlock Sangellis, cackling maniacally.

***

So, once you give up Expectation, then Fulfillment strikes. Of course it does. Such is the way of the universe, the first law of human thermodynamics, the Tao of "stop chasing, stop trying, just sit perfectly still and let the butterfly come rest on your shoulder." So there you are, sitting still, ready to turn in for the night, mumbling things to yourself like "que sera, sera," or "so it goes," or "chopping wood, drawing water," and then BAM, in swoops Erfüllung and you're like, oh! really? now?! wait, what?... oh, okay. Okay. Okay! Let's go, then! But the tricky thing is this. Fulfillment comes-- mostly, almost always-- on the heels of non-expectation: it is unpredictable, un-summon-able, and then just as quick to depart. And when it does, it knocks you right back into the Realm of Expectation even though you swore that you wouldn't be hanging out on that side of the tracks anymore. So while your philosophy might have been "Just keep swimming," you are flush with your recent success and are tempted to go deep-sea diving for more of the various mollusks that are rumored to live down there, you want to snatch up as many as you can, extort them greedily for pearls or other pleasures, but the more you pry, the more they will clam up (ha!), and oh look, you're über-underwater now and at substantial risk of drowning or being crushed by the pressure, and anyway didn't you know that the only way to really coax a mollusk open is to steam it gently in white wine, whereupon it will yield its dead flesh to you, plump and delicious?

(Wow, that metaphor really ran off the rails, even by my standards).

Most nights, lately, I try very consciously to undo Expectation, to loosen the nefarious bonds of attachment; I repeat phrases to myself, read a few lines of this or that, make some herbal tea, close my computer and abandon the internet with its insatiable maw of wants and desire and one-upmanship and photoshopped happiness and incendiary comments sections and so forth. How virtuous of me. And then I go to sleep and my subconscious immediately rebels against every inch of the virtue, and I'm having some fever dream where I'm frying up bacon to dump into my vegan soup, and then my dead doggie comes trotting over to me (lured by porcine aromas?) and I rub the velvety spot on the crown of her head, and then suddenly I'm on the subway stabbing my mortal enemy with a golf pencil, and then you were there too (and you were there, and you were there...)

I wake up bleary, crusty-eyed, and Klimt is still on the wall, amber frame presiding over the room, man and woman doing what they always do. Screw you guys, I think, you and your swoopy embrace, the two of you always at the absolute zenith of the Expectation-Fulfillment cycle, preserved for eternity in that moment just after the waiting is over, just when the tension has ruptured, but then just before the inevitable fallout, the comedown, the waning. But I don't have time to stare, to indulge in another Byzantine reverie, because I overslept per usual and I need to go all the way out to Spleens and I'm running late and the subway has been so unreliable these days and I need to get dressed and splash some water on my face and now I don't even know if I'll have time to make coffee, shit shit SHIT...

Villanelle

I would open this, my latest Schlock-offering, with profuse and self-deprecating apologies for my long time in absentia, but I have kicked off roughly 70% of the posts on this site in such a manner and I would so hate to become formulaic! I aim, always, to shock and disturb my readership, a readership that now consists of family members, extended family members, classmates, friends, friends-of-classmates, roommates, ex-roommates, ex-boyfriends, ex-professors, Kevin Costner, and apparently (according to my site ticker) a network of Russian spybots...?

But how to satisfy such a variegated audience, how to consistently manufacture universally appealing (appalling?) Schlock of the schlockiest caliber? I choked under the pressure. You see, guys, the True Creative Process does not jive with the American mindset, not so much: we like to say "chug-chug-chug along, hum away you little machine, maintain an unflagging rate of production for your consumer base"... but I'm more, like, organic, man. When I go, I GO, but there is a lot of dead space in between the going. I'm like the river in that one Schubert song, frozen on the surface for a seeming eternity but REALLY all roiling and tumultuous underneath, just gathering up all of this kinetic energy to burst on the scene when Time commands it!

... except that the past few months are not really deserving of the metaphor of a noble wintry river-- "Cesspool of Suck" might be more accurate. And before I could commit said suckage to blogular posterity, I felt compelled to take some samples of the Cess and the Suck, to place droplets of it between slides and conduct a thorough microscopic analysis; thus, in coming to understand the deepest elemental nature of the Suck, I could hope to transcend it. Of what was the Suck comprised, you ask? It had a complicated molecular structure that I can now break down for you. Part Eins: my encroaching apathy about my program and field; Element-of-Suck No. 2: my chronic worn-down-ness from the teaching job and the numerous other little gigs that I had taken on to make ends meet; Part the Third: still not making ends meet and being super fucking broke all the time;  Factor the Fourth: the onset of some funky health problems including migraines, TMJ, muscle aches, nausea, anxiety, depression, etc. etc., which led me to believe that I might have an undiagnosed food intolerance and which has recently compelled me to eliminate wheat and dairy from my diet, which -- given my already-vegetarianism--  means that I can now eat about two things (quinoa and kale [FML]), and I do kind of feel better physically but GOD DAMMIT I would commit an act of terrorism if it would allow me to partake of some croissant and cappuccino (or, at the very least, some beer and nachos); and The Fifth Component of the Suck: my involvement in a rather spectacularly dysfunctional relationship that briefly blasted a hole through whatever self-esteem I purported to have.

Wow, Internet, you sure snapped to attention on that last point. You were just nodding along on automatic, pretending to listen to me while you thumbed your iPhone and fantasized about bacon ice cream, and then I hint that I'm about to ill-advisedly drop some juicy personal information and suddenly you're all ears. Piss off. I keep it classy, people-- I don't aim to paint anyone in a negative light (although I probably do this to myself unintentionally) and anyway, this is a space for Schlock, not tabloid journalism! And believe me, I would not even choose write about personal unpleasantness WERE IT NOT essential expository material for the ultimate thesis of this entry (and there is a thesis! kind of! I promise!) because even as I begin to contemplate No. 5 I begin to regress, to experience just the slightest clenching of my jaw, the remotest desire to punch a wall in my apartment, and I REALLY would prefer to get my security deposit back at some point so if I were smart I would just abort this entry right now and go nibble on some gluten-free crackers (double-FML!!) and do some mindfulness meditation on a cushion in my bedroom and whisk myself off to some virtuous, beatific plane. BUT for the sake of this narrative, I will press on. See what I do for my Art?

So, once there was me, and there was this composer. And yes, there have been several composer-cameos in the History of Me-- we seem to find each other, probably because in my line of "work" I spend a lot of time with the dead ones in an attempt to get inside their dead-heads, and so I also seek out living, breathing examples to do some cross-comparison  (and, often, to wring my hands and wonder what happened to Beauty, but more on that later). I myself have never written music in a serious capacity, oppressed as I am by the stupefying weight of tradition, of "genii" past who have walked the earth... but I admire individuals today who can shelve their paralysis and attempt something original (even if it sucks, which it usually does) and so I tend to seek out these people-- to learn, to spar and debate with grand passion, to catch, like a contagion, some burst of wild creative energy that might carry me through the mundane business of living...

Back to Composer X and me--  we were volatile, mismatched, no-good-very-bad together. It's okay, it happens, the details don't matter: let's just say that one of us was fundamentally driven by the desire to be the Best, and the other was driven by the need to be Right all the time (try and guess who is who!) and do you see how that would escalate quickly? But there were some rich moments between the blowouts and the tears and the incendiary emails and what have you. We sat at the piano a lot, inventing games like "make up a fugue subject in every key!" or "improvise something in the style of Bartok, and then something in the style of Stravinsky, but don't tell me which one is which: I have to guess!" And I got absorbed in these tasks, a strange intensity overtaking me, and I was suddenly deeply, happily fulfilled  (... until, inevitably, my activity partner and I would have some small difference of opinion that would devolve into the Clash of the Titans). This one time I was screwing around at the keyboard, harmonizing the National Anthem with generically dissonant, cluster-y new-musicky chords, and X threw up his hands and exclaimed, in this frothing impossible mixture of frustration, admiration, insecurity, support, envy: "Jesus, why don't you just go be a composer already?!"And I was like, "Blah blah, I have nothing to say / intimidated by the Masters / spotty knowledge of craft / 'there can be no poetry after Auschwitz' / [the usual platitudes]." And he said, "Just sit down one of these days and try to write something. Something small, a piano piece. Just do it, see what happens." ... "Well, maybe, if there's time. If the muse strikes. If my PhD program doesn't eat me. Heh. Fat chance."

Anyway, soon enough we two were splitskies and much hurtfulness ensued and I was fully immersed in the Cesspool and I was NOT interested in finding any fucking silver lining but was perversely content to wallow in the Suck, replaying the most dysfunctional scenes in my mind on loop and wailing, "WHY? Why did I do that to myself?" Of course, all of this emotional enfrazzlement, this whole "I'm going through something right now, guys" phase, took up a significant chunk of my time and energy-- it was like full-time job on top of my multifarious part-time jobs-- and with such a commitment there was no way that I was going to branch out and try my hand at becoming some kind of creative musical genius. I mean, come on.

***

In December, Johnny Lupus and I dined in a greasy-spoon Chinese establishment that would burn down not two weeks later. True story! We could have easily had our Last Supper there-- pan-fried dumplings, country-style tofu, green tea, fortune cookies, fiery inferno, sayonara. But the odds were in our favor and we were spared that night. Oblivious to danger, we talked and our conversation skittered over many surfaces, but we kept returning to the subject of Johnny's poetry. My friend is quite talented in the art of, shall we say, scatological verse-- he makes my attempts at lowbrow humor look like Amateur Hour-- and one of his more recent "bardic offerings," based on personal experience, took up the topic of toilet cloggage (the Cesspool metaphor extends to this [seemingly] unrelated storyline! look at that!) And, since Johnny was going to stay at my apartment that night, I stared him down with my best intimidating scary face and told him that under NO circumstances was he to do damage to my building's plumbing system. "Well, I can't make any guarantees," he said in mock-sheepishness.

"No, I'm not kidding!" I replied. "If you mess with my toilet, the repercussions will be severe.  You must repay me with... hmmm. Oh, I know! I've got it! This is so mean of me.You have to compose a dirty villanelle."

"... wait, what's a villanelle again?" he said. I tried to remember: "Oh, it's this really strict poetic form, it involves a lot of word-for-word line-repetition and this tight rhyme scheme... it goes A-B-A-A... I think... no, wait... hang on... you know, let me just look for an actual poem to show to you..." At this point I extracted my iPhone from my bag, ran a Google search, found an example by Elizabeth Bishop and passed the phone across the table to Johnny. He studied the grimy little screen for awhile. "Ah, I see. That's a tall order."

"You know it!" I said, retrieving the phone. "But guess what? I'm stepping up the consequences even more. Should you back up my toilet, not only do you have to write a villanelle, but it must be on the subject of The Menstrual Cycle." Poor Johnny Lupus. His eyes widened in horror, as though he were first becoming cognizant of my truly diabolical nature. "Wow, Alana, wow. You drive a hard bargain."

The scare tactic must have worked, because no serious harm came to my restroom that weekend. However, a few weeks later, Johnny asked me to remind him of the name of that one type of poem I had threatened him with-- he wanted to take a crack at the form anyway, albeit on a topic of his own choosing (buffalo wings). I clapped my hands together, thrilled to have made myself useful in some small way, to have imparted my arcane knowledge of the Ars Poetica to somebody who could make good (?) use of it. "Villanelle!" I said. "Villanelle. Hang on. I'm gonna email you another example."

Another example, but what? I was about to consult Google for a quick fix, about to dive into the internet's teeming excess to come up with an easy specimen, when a memory intercepted my Googling:  a path opened up in my mind and it was leading me back, way back to high-school when I was still a wide-open, thirsty creature who trembled at the power of language and took to heart everything that struck me. The memory was a single line, measured and dirge-like: "Time will say nothing but, 'I told you so.'" Oh yes, Auden, my favorite, senior year, A.P. English. I opened an email-window and typed Johnny's address, and wrote the first line of Auden's villanelle and then immediately out spilled the rest, from memory (sans Google!), the rhythms and cadences still encoded from years back. I hesitated before pressing "send"-- some things are too precious to give away to just anyone, they must be shared with discretion, imparted only to those most deserving-- but then I thought, what the hell, and dispersed the verse out into the ether.

They stayed with me for days, those lines, repetitive, simple, cryptic, and true. I whispered them when I was alone, and then at some point my recitations morphed into humming-- first just rough melodic contours, but soon they coalesced into clearer shapes with suggestions of underlying harmonies, and I sat down at the piano and monkeyed around and began to sense tantalizing possibilities of what could be done with this text if it were brought into song, which clearly it MUST be! I had never been so sure of anything, and I could think of nothing else-- I walked around in a daze, hyper-engaged, testing rhythms in my head, playing with different ways of approaching the repetition that is a hallmark of the poetic form, and I felt that maybe, finally, it was time to do this, after years of studying the creative process from the outside, after so much time spent raiding the toolboxes and tricks of the "genii", after such extensive training to become a critic, an aesthetician... it was time for some role-reversal. Would it be any good, this little creative endeavor of mine? Who knew? Who cared? I would try, I would operate according to a logic and a beauty of my own making. And I thought, offhandedly, that there must have been a fertilizing element in that Cesspool of Suck, because after all, don't you need mass quantities of manure to come up with a bountiful field of broccoli? Not to compare my lofty artistic labors to a green vegetable-- must be my restrictive diet speaking there--  no, it's more like this: every phrase that occurs to me, every tweaking of melody to be just that more text-expressive, every little miniscule two-note idea, it all feels like the humble beginning of some momentous shift, a river just starting to twitch to life, a fissure in the ice, waking, waking, waking...

The State of the Schlocktorate

Hey. Hey guys. Guess what? I am in the process of getting a Schlocktorate. Schlock-torate! Haha! This Schlocktorate entails Schlocktoral coursework, and eventually I will write a Schlocktoral dissertation and earn the title of Schlocktor of Philosophy!! Alana Murphy, Ph. Schl.!!! Hahaha... HAHA... HAhaha... ohhhhhh.....

Clearly I am very pleased with my dazzling new bit of schlocky wordplay; however, at the same time I am astonished that this particular, um, neologism did not occur to me until after my blog had been kicking around in cyberspace for over a YEAR. You would think that a website that is predicated on two basic conceits-- 1) my so-called life as a sort-of-aspiring academic, and 2) Schlock (the concept of, and also the linguistic possibilities of)-- would have long ago trotted out a glaringly obvious groaner pun that is capable of welding these two blogular motifs into a single verbal unit of stunning lameness. But as a doctoral/ schlocktoral (!) student, I sometimes miss the forest for the trees-- like, I get hung up on finding a way to prove that Composer X was familiar with Piece Y written by Composer Z and thus was possibly quoting Piece Y in his own Piece Double-Z (whoops, I ran out of letters of the alphabet-- again, forest, trees) and I get compulsive and scary-intense in proving my point and yet I remain blind and deaf and dumb to the inevitable reality that I will not be able to do this stuff for a living forever, that at some point my funding will be cut and I will be handed a shiny diploma and then be made to walk the real-world plank and I will cry out at the last second that no! wait! I have good critical thinking skills and I can read medieval musical notation, so clearly I can also learn to become a programmer or content-builder or business-model-mogul-guru for your cutting-edge innovative outside-the-box startup social media web-design whatsit wait please just give me a chance I have the skills I swear NOOOOOOooooo....!!

(distant splash)

Anyway. School. Schlockorate. Schlockademe. Yes. That stuff. I have not written substantially about my adventures in higher ed here for awhile, mostly because it unleashes torrents of cynicism and anxiety like the one that you just witnessed, and said torrents reek of bratty first-world entitlement because of course I am insanely lucky to even have the opportunity to study something so impractical and take a stab at making a career of it. But I've been experiencing a malaise-y restlessness lately, a sense of stagnation and apathy that is difficult to articulate, and if I do not take the time to articulate it, to adequately diagnose the situation, then I will never have hopes of fixing it, and what is a schlockspot for if not for airing one's grievances and seeking counsel in the densely-populated echo-chamber of the interwebs? So let me lounge theatrically on the cyber-couch for a little while, Dr. Internet: toss me a box of Kleenex, have your clipboard at the ready, and hear me out on this one.

Getting a doctorate in the humanities is a gamble; everyone knows that. At some point in a past quasi-mythical golden age that I've heard rumors of, it was all but guaranteed that if you did the necessary hard labor to get the diploma framed, the dissertation bound and disseminated to a handful of dusty university library shelves, then you could secure a respected position and attain your upper-middle-class comforts, yaddah yaddah. Not so anymore, duh. We schlocktoral folk now exist mostly to give those tenured overlords something to do-- they need a few bright-eyed young advisees, after all-- and to serve as adjunct-y labor for universities, teaching entry-level classes for a fraction of what the Real Professor people receive. Disclaimer: I adore teaching! This is not the issue; I was essentially put on this earth to pace around and be a professional know-it-all who cracks bad jokes that will only be answered by answered by deadening silence or by the light tapping sounds of students who are texting. It's great! I love teaching! It's my calling! The issue is that I might not get to continue doing it after my funding runs out and my appointment is over, based on the dismal realities of the market.

But anyway. That's not even the REAL problem. I had grasped the scope of the job situation long before I had even committed myself to the degree (remember that once upon a time I had planned to become a Schlocktor of Piano rather than of Schmoozicology, which would have been an equally impractical decision). I came into this field of study in full knowledge that it would be a long slog for a big old question mark. But I also came into it thinking, "I am going to be so friggin' INSPIRED all the time! Imma live the Life of the Mind so hard! I'll eat Critical Theory for breakfast, I'll take Schenker Showers in the evening, I'll hum tone-rows to myself on the subway, I will dream of the Well-Tempered Clavier every night. I'll become a bionic super-bastion of musical knowledge, a seer and a prophet, a fearless defender of our culture's greatest artifacts! Hell yeah schmoozicology!"

I wanted to attain this state. I still want to attain it. True inspiration is a giddy drug, but it is difficult to self-generate: it often requires an external motivating force, and, in the moment, in my program, such an effort is not being asked of me. See, I have GRAND AMBITIONS and INTELLECTUAL FERVOR, but I will only act on these impulses if some super-driven upper-echelon heavyweight person is kicking my ass and instilling the righteous fear of God in me. I cannot kick my own ass in the way that I would like it to be kicked. When I try to do so, my thought process will go something like this: "Hmmm, you know what you should do, Alana? You should really read through the Beethoven string quartets to learn them better and to practice your alto clef reading. Piano's right over there. Chop chop. But whoops, your laptop is on the table on your way to the piano, so maybe you should look up a Yelp review of the new small-plates restaurant that is opening in your neighborhood, and also you haven't blogged in awhile and your faithful public is salivating with anticipation, so maybe try to eke out a few sentences but don't forget to check Facebook because something might have happened..."

Do you see the impossibility that is me being left unto myself? I need a hard deadline, a despotic adviser, something, somebody to not cut me any slack. And then I would shine! I would suffer and stress and wail and freak, but then I would break through to the other side and emerge triumphant in a delirium, brimming with knowledge and passion and drive. I want somebody to be all like, "What? You mean you don't know every movement of the Mahler symphonies by heart, and you couldn't sit down and read them on the piano from score at tempo, right now? How could you ever expect to produce a polished argument about this repertoire if you know it only superficially? No, get thee to an iPod and/ or a practice room, load thineself up with information, you turd, and do Gustav proud." See, if someone were to ask me to do that, it would be so great, you guys! I would die in the process, of course, but at least I would die in the luscious embrace of some tortured extended tertian chord.

Instead, my post-post-post secondary education has sounded a little more like this lately: "Well, when a reader interacts with a text, said reading is very personal and so it becomes difficult to say where the text ends and the reader begins, because there is no text in text blah bah Adorno blah blah post-structural blah blah limits of language blah blah so really, just write about something that might not even have an answer! Just explore." And of course I'm like, "so you're saying I can BS this? Done and done!" and then somehow I end up blogging listlessly about this state of affairs during the time that I should be frantically consuming and processing information to appease the Unappeasable Gods of Schlockademe. Huh.

Humanesque

Have you ever felt a little bloodless, a little clammy and zombified, a little not exactly 100%-here-being-now-carpe-diem-tastic, and then you looked down and realized, "OH, it's because my right leg had completely detached itself from my body, of course, but I didn't exactly notice my lack of limb until I started playing the piano again, at which point my missing leg started to twitch over there on the carpet where it had been lying, unperturbed, for several months but was now deciding to rejoin the main, uh, corpus of me, and it hurt like a bitch when the leg started to merge with my body because suddenly the body became aware of what had been missing, had to re-habituate itself to a full range of functioning, had to re-route its blood supply to a whole new promontory of soft tissue and bone, was kicking itself for abiding for so long in such an impaired state and just accepting that this was the way things were but now LOOK, it will soon be able to run and leap and use the damper pedal"-- have you ever felt like that, exactly like that? No? Just me?

...okay, so the leg metaphor was a bit weird. I acknowledge its forcedness, and I acknowledge that I plucked it from a recent life experience in which I had to perform Schumann's Fantasy-Pieces (of the Cello-Piano variety) on an upright with a NON-FUNCTIONAL pedal-- hey, so it was LIKE my right leg wasn't around to perform its role of pedal-depressor, and as a result the should-have-been-juicy arpeggiated sonorities suffered deplorably from a lack of pedally lubricant-- how pokey, how dry, how unsustained and ephemeral and strangled-- and the result was so painful that the listening audience probably experienced a certain amputation of the spirit: "Why is she DOING that to poor Bobby Schumann? Didn't Bobby suffer enough in life, what with the hand injury and the lovesickness and the eventual batshit insanity-- didn't he suffer enough not to be mutilated post-mortem by some schmoozicologist chick?"

Apart from the Schu-mutilation, however, I have not been playing much lately in any serious capacity-- I have been too busy running all over the boroughs of Schmanhattan and Crooklyn and Spleens, accompanying pre-ballet classes for fussy toddlers and lecturing college freshmen about treble clefs and teaching sullen Park-Avenue-bred teenagers how to play Justin Bieber songs by ear, all in the name of making a few extra bucks so that I may comfortably sit in PhD smart-people-class and circle noteheads and connect them with fancy slurs to other noteheads in order to demonstrate the hidden pretty fractally patterns that apparently govern all music and are thus the Undisputed Absolute Truth, and when I ask if the individual composers actually meant all of this stuff and if we aren't just cherry-picking a little bit, I am Shunned as a Nonbeliever-- SHUNNED! and anyway it all feels terribly far away from the immediacy of making music, an act that, due to all of the aforementioned reasons, I haven't been able to engage in recently EXCEPT for the time that I played Schumann, sans pedal, to the chagrin of everyone involved.

But then I was like "Whoa! Schumann! Where have you been all my life?!" and I couldn't shake the thought. Last year I wouldn't stop yammering about another Schu- guy of the -bert variety-- he of the distilled folky essence and the constant yearning for the Beyond, at once formally rigorous and fluidly spontaneous. We were sympatico; we communed frequently and fruitfully. And yet lately I've felt too flawed and human to entirely relate. Those gorgeous universalities, those things-in-themselves-- I cannot affix to them any particulars, any imperfect realities, any places or faces from my own little web of life. And Beethoven is even worse, always overcoming shit with his infallible compositional logic; he shakes his fist at your wallowing human frailty, the bastard!

Enter Schumann. Check it out, man, his name even contains the word "human", as though it was decided that he should be the one to speak for all of us just as we are, and not as we ought to be. Safe at home, I pulled out the Humoreske in B-flat major, an oddball work, close to my heart-- I had started to learn it a few years ago but it became a casualty of the Alana-converts-to-the-Church-of-Schmoozicology period (there are many such casualties) and I never performed it.

You would think, from a name like "Humoresque," that the piece would be a pithy little ditty. I expected as much the first time I heard it... but then there was pathos, lots of it, big splotches, and these wild insane gallops to the edge of pianistic plausibility-- the music switched between the two modes with no warning-- and then the whole thing should have ended long ago but there was more! more material, more non-sequiturial fragmented ideas, half an hour's worth, how are we still going? and then a mysterious ending that neither triumphed nor succumbed, and then I was sitting there applauding dumbly and wondering what the hell had just happened.

"Humoresque," as it turns out, refers to humors in the classical or medieval sense-- fluids, bile, phlegm, etcetera, and the corresponding moods that they evoke in their human hosts. The piece is a traversal of the humors: they possess, they interrupt, they fight, they wane at a moment's notice. (Oh Schumann, you moody motherfucker, I should have known what you were up to). And so now, reunited with the piece after such a long hiatus, I searched the notes. First I searched for myself, and then I looked for old nineteenth-century Bobby too, and then I looked for everyone who had ever felt as we had both felt, and then I noted forms, recurrent themes, techniques, quotations... and specifics dissolved into universals, subjects into objects, only to re-crystallize at a moment's notice as the intimate details of my own life.

***

I had a birthday recently. Now a lady never reveals her age, but I am only partly a lady (interpret that statement how you will) so I can give you some information to go on. Here are your clues. It starts with the number "2," and it is verging on Lateness but might still be riding out the last phase of the Middle Period. (Did you know that the ghost of Theodor Adorno is hard at work on a groundbreaking piece of criticism entitled "On Late Style in the Twenty-Something Years"? I've seen the manuscript, but most of the textual meaning was sadly lost on me since I have yet to really come into my own Lateness, or alternately because I will probably never understand Adorno at any age). Anyway, I am not morally opposed to the celebrating of birthdays-- TREAT YOSELF! LOVE YOSELF! have a cupcake!, they all proclaim-- but I am wary of ascribing too much significance to a single day, because so rarely does the appointed time seem to actually sync up with a rite of passage or a time of personal growth. See the child who has opened all of the presents, has gorged on all of the confetti-fun-cake, has bid goodbye to all of the classmates, and now begins the chrysalis hour in which the magic will take effect and the shining new era will be ushered in, but when all is said and done the child is still just the child, with the child's same problems and fears and the child's plummeting blood-sugar level because the cake-high has worn off and now the child is crying because it's all over and it did not deliver and it won't happen again for ages and ages and now we return to banality, to the endless ebbing and flowing of days and the inescapability of the self.

You would think that the buildup-and-dashed-expectations way of doing things would lose its appeal with encroaching maturity, but it has an adultish manifestation as well. Case in point: until recently, until right around the time that my birthday struck, I had held onto some subconscious, deeply-embedded belief that the tortuousness of my young life ("tortuous" as in twisting, not "torturous" as in Spanish Inquisition) and all of the stumbling blocks and the false starts and the red herrings and the feeling-so-incongruous-with-the-world-all-the-time... somehow I believed that all of this was just "early penance" for an easy and fabulous adult life that was promised to me. (You know, like a fricking medieval serf who endures suffering on Earth because he/ she is duped into thinking that there is an afterlife awaiting and it is gonna be SUH-WEET).

Something specific would herald this glorious Assumption of mine, something like, "I've decided on a new career path that is absolutely ideal for me," or, "I'm moving to the happeningest city ever, the place that only people who have really made it are allowed to inhabit," or, "I met someone who I really click with and we might even LOVE each other," ... and thereafter, everything would be just PEACHY, smooth glassy seas, oars ahead into the blazing horizon! Right? But no, of course even those landmark occurrences-- ESPECIALLY those landmark occurrences, those Facebook-boastful, "like"-accruing events-- come booby-trapped with a fresh set of opportunities for bodily injury: I will stub my big toe on the myopic drudgery of my chosen field, I will whack my head on the financial implausibility of living in Schmanhattan on a student budget, I will lose my right leg to Love, and then I'll be at the piano again, rooting about in the murky forests of Schumann for solutions or sympathy, thinking to myself that I shouldn't need to do this anymore at my advanced age, that I really should have figured things out by now... and then there comes the dawning awareness that I will always need to be doing this because life is kind of one giant booby trap and it shows no sign of letting up anytime soon.

***

There is one small thing that I may have figured out, though. That ending to the Humoreske, the one that seemed to make no sense-- well, that's exactly it. It makes no sense! We expect that Pieces of a Certain [Romantic] Age should culminate in triumph or transcendence, ultimately undoing all of the musical "wrongs" that were incurred earlier-- quite the redemptive model, sonic translation of Jesus coming down to absolve sins and suffering and to tell you, tell you all that it's okay from here on out. And then some other musical narratives finish in high tragedy, or drunkenly or diabolically: the effect (Affekt!) is still clear and decisive.

But Schumann? What does he do? After all the galavanting through humors upon humors-- the interiority and the impetuousness and so forth-- we come to a passage marked "Zum Schluss" : towards closure, toward the conclusion. The end is nigh! And it's a slow movement. Oh okay, I see how it is, we're going to have one of those starry Schumann finishes that gazes out on the Infinite with longing and rapture. But no, this is weird. What does the music want to be? It's tender, certainly,  almost a recitative, almost a love song or lullaby, but then it's shot through with musical signifiers that say "pain" or "disruption" (the fully-diminished seventh chord, the borrowing from the minor mode, the deceptive cadences) and it keeps stopping and starting in fits, overwrought. Soon we understand that two distinct voices are intertwining, dialogue-ing, and then just getting stuck on these knotty chords. This is how it ends? making the same attempt and reaching the same impasse again and again, with no release or resolution? But then the tempo picks up and there are accents everywhere and loud dynamic markings, and now that's more like it! a fitting way to cap off the rambling epic; here's our big brassy coda.

And yet not quite. While the left hand roils with energy and verve, seeming (to me) to recall the Baroque French Overture style-- all pomp and ceremony-- the right hand nods to quite another Baroque idea. It falls repeatedly, it falls by semi-tone over a fourth, three times over: this is a longstanding code for lamentation (almost a cliche). So we have Lament and Pomp together, overlaid, a mixed state! And thus combined, the two modes are no longer pure or straight-faced or entirely themselves,  there is joy, still, and there is pain, sure, but above all there is a sense of throwing one's hands up in wry resignation-- as if to say that yes, there is no way of making sense of the preceding fragments, that the shining dream of totality is dashed forever and now everything is infected with a knowledge of fracturedness that can never really be un-known, but go forth and enjoy the ride anyway (because, after all, you signed up for it) and BLESS THIS MESS.

Cult of Schlock

My best friend from high school was Rivka, and a very pure alliance we had. We were both good girls who never dreamed of skipping class or sneaking out of our parents' houses or putting an illegal substance to our lips; our worst transgressions were limited to starting our seven-paged term papers for English class the night before they were due (seven pages! what an insurmountable obstacle back then, and how laughable now that we have both gone on to graduate school in the humanities and can routinely pull twenty-five mediocre pages out of our arses in a jaw-droppingly slender interval of time) and to talking occasional harmless smack about our classmates, who were cooler than we could ever hope to be with their cars and their amateur ska bands and their scandalous tales of contracting secondhand highs from clouds of marijuana smoke that hovered over the live musical events that they liked to frequent (to this day, I can't believe that they would engage in such risky behavior! Standing in the vicinity of people who were TOKING UP! The kids at my high school were straight out of A Clockwork Orange: HARDCORE, I tell you). Rivka and I, meanwhile, had sleepovers where we would play with her dog and make matzo-brei in a skillet and watch the Marx Brothers and try to stay up as late as possible, whispering and giggling over our twin pillows until one of us inevitably sacked out.

But we were quietly subversive, goody-goodies with a secret stash of black humor. One night when we were in ninth grade, we were sitting around at Rivka's house in our matching flannel dog-print pajamas, flipping through TV channels and hoping to alight on something either of quality or of such un-quality that we could derive sick entertainment from it. That evening it seemed that the meter pointed strongly to "un-quality," because first we came upon MTV's Jackass, where a man in a Speedo was about to dive headfirst into a kiddie pool packed with elephant dung. We watched in fascinated horror for a few minutes until we could bear it no longer (here was unadulterated jackassery, here was scatology in its purest form-- it was like looking straight into the sun, beautiful and terrible and unsustainable). So we continued our odyssey through the channels and eventually hit the ultimate jackpot of Atrocious Syndicated Entertainment-- Kevin Costner's Waterworld.

For the blissfully uninitiated among you, Waterworld is a notoriously dreadful post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie from 1995. In this fine feature film, polar ice caps have melted and inundated the globe, obliterating most human life save a few nomadic factions who roam the waves on their makeshift rafts, getting into petty little scuffles and searching for a mythical landmass upon which to kick-start human civilization. (Can't you just feel that nascent '90s global warming anxiety? I'm convinced that Al Gore watched the very same rerun of Waterworld that Rivka and I stumbled upon in 2000 and, already having been shunted away from the Oval Office, spontaneously rerouted his career from politician to environmentalist in order to ensure that the events of Kevin Costner's epic flop would never come to pass). Anyway, Waterworld was supposedly the most expensive film ever produced up to that point, and it bombed at the box office. Titanic, another nautically-inflected cinematic masterpiece, would soon surpass it in terms of production costs, but we all know how that one fared commercially so it's not really the same story. (Also, Titanic was SCHLOCK whereas Waterworld was DRECK, and therein lies a key semantic difference, my dear friends who are not yet attuned to the nuances of the Yiddish tongue. Look it up).

Anyway, in the movie, Kevin Costner plays a mysterious figure known only as Noah Moses Jesus "The Mariner." He finds this creepy little girl with a mysterious symbol tattooed on her back, and he claims that the symbol is actually a map that will lead The People to mythical Dryland, AKA the not-yet-submerged peak of Mount Ararat Everest. But The Mariner is ostracized and feared by the masses even as he tries to help them. There's something off about him-- but what? All is revealed when an alpha male from the other side gets a close look at Herr Costner and proclaims, with horror and disbelief, that "HE HAS... GILLS!!!" You see, The Mariner has really adapted to life on the high seas; he is quite evolutionarily fit.

So back to ninth-grade Alana and Rivka. We lost it at the gills line, absolutely cracked up, rolling around on the floor and developing abdominal cramps from the propulsive intensity of our silent laughter. The delivery of the line was so wooden, so B-movie on top of the inherent mockability of the subject matter. We gasped for air; I thought I'd never be able to breathe normally again.

When we finally regained composure (this took approximately twelve minutes) we started pondering the significance of The Mariner's fishy anatomy. "Well, it's clear that he's some kind of prophet or Christ figure," I said (we had been learning about Christ figures and other hero archetypes in English class recently-- I distinctly recall that a classmate, a very cool one, had asked our teacher, "So Jesus is, like, one of those Christ-like figures, right?" and I had facepalmed and groaned and internally bemoaned the stupidity of the human race, but now this girl works in finance somewhere and makes more money than I will ever make in my life, so I am retroactively knocking fourteen-year-old Alana off of her freaking high horse already). Anyway, Rivka agreed with me about the religious overtones of The Mariner's character: "Yeah, a Christ figure for sure. Christ with gills!" "Christ with gills!" I replied. "Gill-Christ. Sounds like the surname 'Gilchrist. I wonder why that's even a name?'"

And then my eyes lit up insanely as my neurons started firing off associations (most of these associations being things that I had learned in our mandatory Bible Studies class the previous fall-- see, I used to really pay attention in school once upon a time). "Wait. Hold up," I said, mind racing. "Gills on Christ. There's all this 'fishy' stuff surrounding Jesus... the feeding of the masses with the loaves and FISHES... the walking on water... and remember when he said 'Come, and I shall make you fishers of men and women'? And the SYMBOL! There's the Christ symbol! You know the one, the little loopy fish... it's almost like a stick-figure... you see it as a magnet on cars sometimes... or you see the other ones with the amphibian feet and they're Darwinist symbols... but anyway, my dad-- you know how my dad is chock-full of those religious history nuggets-- so my dad used to tell me that Jesus had a code name among early Christians, you know, when they were being persecuted and fed to lions and everything. And the name was 'Ichthus,' the Greek word for FISH! And that's why the symbol exists. And then there's that Gilchrist name. So I'm thinking... I'm thinking that there's more to this than symbolism. I'm thinking there was a major cover-up. I'm thinking... what if Jesus WAS ACTUALLY A FISH??"

Rivka cracked up again, probably because she now had ultimate clinching proof that her best friend was bonkers. But she played along, and soon enough we had created an entire doctrine, the core tenet of which was the fish-ness of Christ Jesus. We christened our fledgling cult "Osteichtheism" (osty-ICKTHY-ism). This title was a mashup of "osteichthyes," the taxonomical class name for "bony fish" that we had learned in biology recently (again, marvel at our erstwhile scholarly enthusiasm and sponge-like learning capabilities-- long gone, they are) and "theism," a noun or suffix meaning-- well, y'all know THAT one, I ain't condescenin'. Once we had a name, we got to work on the details. We marshaled evidence to support our bonafide bony-fish theory. We composed a pseudo-Gregorian chant for the clandestine services and rituals that we were going to hold. We made plans to convert the masses-- we would confer new identities on our most shining members, grant them "fish names" to denote their status within the organization. Rivka and I, of course, would be the Dear Leaders to whom all members would defer.

We giggled with the wrongness of what we were concocting, we two vaguely Jewish misfit girls who attended a warm-and-fuzzy private Episcopal school that doused the student body with messages of tolerance and respect on a daily basis. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you! We kept our sacrilege a secret from our more sanctimonious friends, and the element secrecy, of course, made the whole thing even funnier to us. (Perhaps some of my current acquaintances of the sanctimonious stripe are even reading this now, becoming steadily more offended and resolving to pray for the desolate empty crater where my soul ought to be... but if this kind of thing bothers you, then I suggest that you get off the internet right now, because there is an abyss of debauchery out there and I am just the very tip of the Debauched Abyss-berg. Seriously, you should just close your browser right now and go turn on Sesame Street [though that might offend you too, come to think of it, what with the show's decidedly New York Jewish cultural sensibility and the black people and the two male muppets who are clearly in some kind of sinful domestic partnership]).

Anyway, our "commitment" to the "faith" flagged as we made our way through high school and became preoccupied with dopey boys and choir rehearsal and Driver's Ed and practice SATs and college counseling and whatever else seemed so life-or-death back then. But we still inscribed the Ichthus symbol in one another's yearbooks and reminisced, from the incomparably more mature vantage point of Senior Year, about that time way back in the day that we created a cult. It was a pact of friendship more than anything else.

Or was it? Poor reader, you are probably sitting there scratching your head and just trying to puzzle out why I decided to add this random-ass story from the Annals of Alana to the selective and authoritative Canon of Schlock (and you are also possibly praying for my poor immortal soul-- again, if that is you, just kindly leave me alone and go watch Teletubbies. But wait. The gay purple one. Shoot.) Well, let me elucidate. I believe that the Osteichtheism episode from yesteryear not only cemented a lifelong friendship, but also spoke a secret yearning on my part to become a cult leader. I shelved this aspiration for a long time, believing that I was not charismatic or testicular enough to hold sway over a population, and resigned myself to a schmoozicological life of obscurity. But then. But then! Last year I created a Schlockspot, the very same one that you are wasting your time perusing right now. At first my endeavor had only had a few fringe supporters, a few die-hard devotees who also happened to be, um,  my close friends or my blood relatives. Slowly, however, the little Schlock-Site started to pick up more hits. From whence emanated the hits? My site-meter was not so specific, but still  it informed me that my Schlocky message was being spread, that the masses were starting to take note. Cult status was within reach. A Schlock-Cult! I could almost taste it! It would be kind of like the Occult, but with less paranormalcy and with more cliched whining about the indignities of the twenty-something life!

Any respectable cult, however, needs a few influential heavyweight members, a few Tom Cruises and John Travoltas. I knew that I had truly broken through when I gained an eminent and well-respected acolyte, one whom I would not have pegged to enjoy amateur scattershot prose peppered with choice words like "dilche," but I would not have pegged Señor Cruise as one to fall at the feet of the Dark Lord Xenu either, so search me. And since I seem to be on a roll with gaining followers these days, I am eying Kevin Costner as a new recruit because he seems ripe for inculcation (doesn't he?) and because he has gills! That could only be an asset!

Also, any respectable cult requires a significant endowment to perpetuate the lies take care of its members. And this, dear readers, is where you come in. You see, I have recently communed with the Schlock Deities and they have requested that all members who seek a higher plane of spiritual enlightenment should donate a sizeable chunk of their income to the institution that gives them answers and facilitates their rich inner life. So without further ado, if you could make out your checks to the Alana Murphy Needs Beer Money Foundation High Church of Schlock Annual Fund, I will see to it that your Midi-Chlorian Count  oops I mean Thetan Levels shit! I meant to write that your MYSTICAL SCHLOCKITUDE QUOTIENT will be raised to hitherto unknown heights, and that your rewards will be great.