Le jeune Ahmed (Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2019)
On the first day of grade two at Woodlands Elementary school, the teacher Mrs. Templeton asked the class what we had gotten up to the previous summer. When it came to be my turn, I began to excitedly tell a longwinded story, which has always been among my favourite things to do. I had just started in with animated glee on a football game I had attended at McMahon Stadium, which has always been adjacent to Nick’s Steakhouse, which I thought was a really cool place, when out of nowhere Mrs. Templeton shut me down, moving on to the next student. This simply confirmed for me what I had already suspected: I was going to hate grade two as much as I’d hated grade one. Mrs. Templeton was a very large woman. Years later when I was working an office job downtown, a fun coworker of mine in her early thirties who had a Rottweiler and who I liked to hang out with told me that her boyfriend had gotten drunk one night and confessed that he used to pick up fat women so he could take them home and tit-fuck them. To each their own, I suppose. I never got the hang of being polite and ingratiating in the patented Canadian style. When I started drinking at the age of thirteen, I found that it numbed the pain, but it also made me giggle and talk even more. In high school, long before I was diagnosed with bipolar 1, I already realized that I was only able to be conventionally charming when I was depressed. Alcohol is a depressant, but it only makes you depressed unpredictably. An oldtimer in Alcoholics Anonymous once told me and a room full of my fellow alcoholics that the difference with being sick with alcoholism, which is a terminal condition if not treated, and being sick with cancer is that people sympathize with you when you have cancer. If you are an alcoholic they just think you are an asshole. Fair enough, I figured, I am very frequently an asshole. There was always a lot of trauma in my body and hopelessness in my soul. Put alcohol on top of that and it operates as an accelerant, liker gasoline on a fire. I was six-years-old when the Challenger disaster happened on live television and it traumatized me badly, largely because I had become a fan of Christa McAuliffe, the social studies teacher and non-astronaut who was sent along with the mission for public relations purposes. I am very glad that I did not know then what I found out the other day: the crew module survived the explosion and it is likely that everybody on board was alive for the nearly-three-minute plummet downward until they hit the water at terminal velocity. Even worse and more insane is the fact that originally they hadn't planned to send a charismatic civilian to teach lessons about space over video relays up there along with the professionals. They initially intended to send Sesame Street's Big Bird (the problem being that the eight-foot costume wouldn't fit in the module). If Big Bird had actually been in the Challenger when it exploded I simply would never have recovered.
I was smoking too much cannabis for too long, starting approximately around the time I determined to set out to make my record Yevgenia, of which I still have a few hundred copies if you or your friends want one. I am legitimately still in cannabinoid withdrawal and last night I had a nightmare so intense it was more like sleep paralysis. I was basically asleep but I was desperately afraid somebody was going to break into the house and torture me for days. Suddenly I was driving down Elbow Drive south of Glenmore and flood waters were rapidly rising ahead of me so I had to turn the car around. In a flash I was in some ominous woods on foot then suddenly on my back with my feet shooting up in the air without my willing it or controlling it. I had the conscious thought that I might be dead and this might be the afterlife; I was absolutely humming with pure terror. Then I found myself at the door of a small house in the woods. There was a little handwritten note on the door that said, semi-legibly: what the fuck? I was too terrified to ring the bell or knock. I tried to say hello, but it came out as a barely audible wheeze. I woke with a start, shot out of bed, and said what the fuck? to nobody. Then I said: okay, I think I interpret this...if you are all alone by nature or design, however obnoxious and unbearable you may be, no matter how kind and considerate, then you are lost and have nobody. Please don't do that to me again...
No comments:
Post a Comment