Antiquity (2019)
BY ALEX DAWSON
IMAGE BY MEAHA CAUDLE-CHOI
MY MEAT MACHINE IS BROKEN
I haven't had a clear thought in days. Not one word you are about to read has been written without a therapeutic-bordering-on-toxic level of coffee consumption beforehand. Tiredness has defined the last five weeks of my life. It’s not that I’ve done anything. I get out of bed in the morning but never really wake up. All I can do to stay atop the muck of sensation is caffeinate my way into WARNING: PANIC mode, at which point I convince myself I'm okay with dying and end up staring at a spot on the wall for an hour while my roommates tell me their grandmother is in a coma; they’re going to the Bahamas next week; they don't want to watch a drama — they only like comedies.
***
I AM A THOUGHTLESS THOUGHT
These long periods of chronic fatigue mostly inspire a kind of self-destruction. The 'me' inside my head keeps asking itself what it is, what it was, what it will ever be, until insert dissociation symptoms: (a) blurred sense of identity; (b) problems in relationships, work or other areas of your life; and (c) a sense of detachment from yourself and your emotions — here.
If I’m sounding omnipresent it’s because I’ve been doing a six weeks-on/two weeks-off, to-be-or-not-to-be mood cycle for the last year now. Here’s my personally unqualified diagnoses: I express my tiredness and fleeting sense of self through incrementally more socially obscene, sometimes dangerous behaviours. I chase myself to the fringes of psychological homeostasis.
In the summer I had a particularly difficult six-week cycle that staged some noteworthy moments: I’m cutting my front lawn with a pair of scissors in the middle of the night; I’m collecting and making shopping cart pyramids in my back yard; I’m having oral sex with a man; I’m climbing buildings in search of a roof high enough to leap from and finding that the city has surprisingly few.
***
PRODUCTIVE SO/AND/BUT ALONE
It’s been so long chugging through this fatigue that I’m convinced it’s now a part of my essential nature. Like a callus is detached from the nerve endings in the skin but still a part of the body. Something I can no longer feel, respond to, take part in. If I could be said to have a soul, then that soul has moved beyond the canals of electrical impulse and into the brown hull of dead skin bounding the horizon of nothing and something, dormant and teetering.
Schedule: I wake — but not really — and blend together a smoothie of bananas, oat milk and two caffeine pills (400mg). I enter and exit one of hundreds of Starbucks on my way to the library where I sit at a computer for the next two hours, opening and closing Word and Thesaurus tabs like a heel-toe-heel-toe rhythmic tap dance. ‘Notes to myself’, it begins each day, reading mostly like a modern Meditations, if Marcus Aurelius were a clinically unstable retail worker, popping SSRIs like grapes on a vine and living merely to service his empire of cached internet porn. Like a letter to someone who may or may not still be alive. I enter maximal productivity state. My self moves thoughtlessly into my fingers and when I’m empty except for some tingling dendritic flares I grow cagey with the groups of people walking by, secretly defending my loneliness as introverted preference. How alien would it be to take interest in a stranger’s company?
At twelve I’m off to work. My manager gives me some warning about this and that. Business has been slow and I worry about getting the boot. I look to see if I can clean anything but find myself instead assembling a book called DELI THOUGHTS from an emptied order form booklet and a collection of jottings by my comrades at the Rustic Sandwich Factory (though we shamefully answer to 'employee of Quickie Sub’).
I staple some things together and glue a tiny strawberry I find behind the toaster oven onto the side jacket flap. Instead of rotting, the strawberry has condensed into a solid, brown and golden flecked teardrop emblem. It’s perfect.
***
A DOLLAR A DAY KEEPS THE REBELS AWAY
Hello,
and welcome to: DELI THOUGHTS
a collection of writings by the workers of the Rustic Sandwich Factory.
At the RSF we believe you are more than a cog in the machine! You have value! So, you make sandwiches? What? Is this it for you? You have perceptions worth sharing!
The man got you down? Us too.
Enter Here>
Page 1.
The 'buying/selling' relationship format I am expected to adhere to in this place is evil. I vow to not participate in it!
If I hold my pee long enough I begin to understand trigonometry
A man came into the store who is so old that every step he takes is attempted suicide
No one can focus on what they're doing because we're wondering if he's going to die and if our face will be the last he ever sees
One girl is fixing her eyeshadow
His walker rattles and squeaks like a dying rodent each time he walks back and forth to get napkins
He addressed a random woman beside him as “darlin'”
I accused him of stealing napkins and told him to leave — everyone applauded
***
FUNHOUSE MIRRORS
I return home feeling emptier than usual. The pulse of life seems to have died in the silent neighbourhoods I walk through. Garbage is strewn all over the streets. Living room windows are flooded with the cold light of television screens, drawing in the viewer’s energy to animate itself.
At home I cook a pot of quinoa and squirt a puddle of ketchup in the middle. I'm ashamed by how much I've come to enjoy Giant Tiger's ketchup. It’s not because I’m better than Giant Tiger. It just seems to capture the cultural excess I’ve been trying to articulate since I was a preteen. We don’t need it; it’s not good for us; if it adds value to our lives then our lives are sad. It’s a wasteful, excessive, luxury product. Images of my childhood McDonald's diet flood through my mind. Eating Big Macs with my sister; the golden finger of mother earth dunked in hot grease; birthday parties in the sinkhole play pit. Isn’t it odd that some trivial sensation could be such a powerfully self-producing trigger?
This line of thinking leads me on a week-long journey to see what other things inspire reflections of myself. It just so happens that during this week my housemates have all left and I’m alone in the house. Here are some actions that characterize my adventure:
I'm re-reading Jpod while Google Home plays Norwegian black metal; I'm wearing jean shorts in a pub in twenty below weather; I’m piling mail from the CRA in my bathroom sink and lighting it on fire; I'm learning about the 'Ketchup Wars' between Heinz and McDonald's from CBC Radio One; I'm drinking a can of beer while watching Rambo: First Blood in a public library at 11:47pm on Valentine's Day — and I'm alone; I’m going to pee in this urinal god dammit if it takes me all night; I'm looking in a mirror repeating the words 'Bitch, you have no future' from Kill Bill Vol. 2.
***
FICTION IS NOT REAL—YOU ARE
When my roommates return I find I’m happier encountering other humans throughout the day, even if the elongated introspection had a more noble purpose. In all the moments of the past week I’d yet to escape the detachment with which I entered. Although there’s a part of me that wishes I could permanently embody the self-assured obscenities these moments present when they’re translated into words, I find they pass through my own life depressingly quick. I’m at a crucial point and need more time.
On Saturday evening I head downtown to make a series of purchases I don’t need. I buy new jeans ─ which I wear out of the store ─ a large picture book of modern art, a burrito with extra guac, a funky lamp shade, cheap cologne (which I douse my new jeans in), and now finally I sit in a bar, having ordered and drank several mediocre but expensive cocktails, and stare at a debit machine that keeps displaying the word 'Declined'.
I stand and say “thanks” as if it went through and hustle out of the nearest exit, twisting down a side street and then an alleyway. The air is warm and stagnant like the inside of a tool shed. ‘What the fuck did I just do?’ a thought asks another thought who shrugs his shoulders. Heavy steel doors layer the alley walls; weeds protruding from the cement cracks in front of them. I follow the ebb and flow down and away from the restaurant whose cocktails I just not-so-accidentally stole. My eyes feel droopy like the bottom of a wet shirt. Fatigue. There are no cats or rats or mice or flies—from what I can tell the weeds and I are the only living things here. I turn a sharp corner and all of a sudden am bathed in the bright neon lights of what at first glance looks to be a hot dog stand, but upon second and third glances is a kiosk selling … steel pots? Flickering LED lights say what I suppose should be ‘Insight’, even though the ‘I’ remains dead and unlit. Behind the stand a weatherworn man with tough leathery skin is rubbing what looks like orange peels wrapped in leaves around the inside of a pot.
“Young man,” he calls out in an airy wheeze, “you look in need of some insight!” He holds up the pot with a toothless smile. As I approach there is a pungent scent of cinnamon.
“Who are you?” I ask. Thunder tumbles like a bowling ball. He continues methodically rubbing the pot in mint and orange peels.
“A kind of organ, I guess you could say. You know that place where things appear from and disappear to? A collection of electricity, technically speaking. You start the melody and I sing it back, am I right? Not at all sounding the same, just inevitably so.”
A coughing spasm overtakes him, and he drags his forearm across his lips and nose. The full-blown delusional kind of schizophrenia you see in dramas, I’m thinking.
“O-kay, well I can’t buy whatever ‘insight’ you’re selling. I don’t have any money.”
“You don’t understand a damn thing, do you?” He says and looks very disappointed all of a sudden, the lines in his face swelling like ruts in fresh mud. He guides me over to a brick wall. His hair is oily and knotted in the pink neon light. His face is indefinite but one that I have the strange feeling of recognizing.
“This is not special,” he tells me and places the steel pot over my head. From the inside my breathing echoes in my ears, aromas of all kinds swirl and enter my nostrils, becoming something more, something just on the tip of my tongue.
***
OFF–SCREEN EDITORIAL DIALOGUE
"I don't get it."
"Welcome to the 21st century. We live in a world where if you fuck a man's wife the odds of him actually getting off to it are higher than ever. It’s called cuckoldry and it’s a top ten Pornhub category. Libraries used to be for reading books; snapshot 21st century and they’re seating arenas for people to sit quietly and scroll. Ultimately we're all trying to be happy but are only willing to sacrifice so much inconvenience to get there. If he really wanted to be happy he would recognize that trying to attach it to something else is only prolonging the inevitable disappointment he’s bound to feel when the meaning it produced dissipates the moment he acquires it, thus commencing the gradual decline into cheaper forms of entertainment as all fronts of new opportunities seem to vanish before his eyes. He would recognize that all preferences are just inherited hardware from a time shortly after tree-people became land-people, and that our culture is a corporate circle jerk that primarily takes advantage of this. And yet with all this being said he’s still giving into his preferences because all that matters is that he knows what he’s doing so he can stop when he decides to stop but he will never stop because this decision is an illusion. It’s all fucked. Wisdom is ornamental. Advertisers run the world. God is an Instagram booty model.”
***
NOTES TO MY SELF—WHEREVER YOU ARE
Even though having projects will make you a happier person, ideally you are sufficiently happy without any scheduled dopamine hits. You can be I-less and directionless and still content with being. Don’t fret about the possibility of this. Hollywood shows us time and time again that when life projects go bust a person’s existence can be rendered absolutely meaningless in a split second. And yet you tie your happiness to projects because you have so much biological incentive to; the feedback is continually released energy and positive emotion. Stop this cycle. Meditate, consolidate, proliferate.
Don’t neglect your history, but don’t mythologize it either. You have one like everyone else. There are particular and there are general experiences. You are not a story. No one is.
Keep up with family, friends and lovers. When you can’t remember who you are, they will remind you. You are not the same as you were then, but you have a core; change expresses but cannot define this core.
Remember the time Syd cried in your arms after having sex? She told you that she wished her first time had been like that. It was heartbreaking. A diamond you took from her heart and placed into your own. Crying with someone you love is like having the extra shovel you need to dig up the reservoirs of sadness inside yourself to make space for happiness. Don’t let your sadness turn from gold to flesh and rot inside of you.
***
THE SUN IS ALWAYS RISING
On Sunday morning I unlatch my door and make some coffee. I let the warm steam billow up into my face and place my hands high on the cupboards, gently stretching my shoulders. My mind is blank. I feel a strong compulsion to laugh but cannot think of anything funny. I pour two cups of coffee and walk the house room to room, each one cluttered with more noise than the next. Music, voices, miscellaneous living. I quietly ask if they want some coffee; I tap my foot on the door; I push against it with the weight of my body.
Hello? No one answers.
I go back and sit on the kitchen floor with my coffees, resting my head against the white drywall. I am alone but content. I am tired but awake.
You're half asleep in a diner eating pancakes. A hand slaps you and you realize it isn't a stack of pancakes but someone's throbbing cerebrum on a plate. You take a scoop with a dessert spoon. You're in a suburban trance, a thousand retail hells, a glowing insomnia. You're laughing and crying and typing. You're hysterically self-affirming: I am Alex Dawson. And now you're not..
Image: Meaha Caudle-Choi, Antiquity, scratchboard, 2019.
Edited for publication by Wednesday Bell, as part of the Professional Writing and Communications Program.
The HLR Spotlight is a collaboration between the Faculty of Media & Creative Arts and the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences and Innovative Learning at Humber College in Toronto, Ontario. This project is funded by Applied Research & Innovation.