Sometimes I get questions about how I come up with material. Do I carry a notebook? Does it just come to me? Do you think you could stop emailing and asking me to send you the overalls I wore in the ‘Forever’ video? And, aside from John Stamos being a total dick, I’m flattered because it never even occurred to me that I have material, just a few zingers that could be printed on the inside of Laffy Taffy wrappers.
The short answer is that I kind of come up with it as I go. The slightly longer, might-be-considered-a-mental-disorder answer is that I use a hand puppet. Sometimes I get stuck and sit at the screen long enough for me to eat an entire sleeve of Oreos and since that only takes about two minutes, I usually spend an additional hour biting my nails. It’s a habit I’ve had nearly my whole life and one that I’m not particularly proud of. To remedy this, I started using a hand puppet that goes by the name of, “Klappar Vild” which apparently just means “glove puppet.” Way to try, IKEA. I’m pretty sure it’s some sort of crocodile or dinosaur but either way, it’s not at all effective at being bad-ass since it not only has felt teeth but rounded felt teeth. That’s why I’m comfortable sharing my feelings with it.
Or rather, ideas. I never intended for it to be this way, but I found that if “streams of aluminum robot tears” sounds stupid coming from a glove puppet, then it will likely be even worse once written down. By now, Klappar and I have forged quite a bond. Check out these bedroom eyes we’re exchanging:
Targeting Nich Lachey's solo music career is too obvious. Next.
Klappar even lets me know how dumb it looks to show just one of my eyes and since the “I’m growing it out” excuse never works, my inferior non-puppet hand fixes it for me.
I really should just get a notebook.
I bought a space ant farm. Don’t bother re-reading that sentence because it’ll probably sound just as stupid as it did the first time. See, spending money on things that no one needs ever is what unemployed people like myself refer to as, “responsibility.” Other things that qualify include watering plants that are only kind of dying, creating a to-do list entirely dedicated to renewing library books and making smoothies without ice cream.
The thing about responsibility is that I don’t have it. I mean, I do my own laundry and am able to feed myself, but when it comes to getting things done, I’m about as successful as Andy Dick is sober. And it’s incredibly hard for me to admit that. It’s hard to admit that feeding myself is for me, somewhat of a small victory. Because I could make an entire scrapbook out of all of the times I would sit in bed and think, “I need to eat something” but refuse on the basis that it just wasn’t worth the effort. And instead of colorful photos with labels like, “Graduation!” and “Pool Party!” there would be a photo of me looking like a ham in an old Oksana Baiul shirt accompanied by, “Made It to the Couch!” and “Got a Glass of Water!”
I can laugh about it all now and in truth, I laughed about it as it was happening. But it was really just a placeholder for the real laughter that I hoped to have after I was done living my life as a hamster devoid of an exercise wheel. But now I’m faced with a set of atrophied doin’ stuff muscles. Even now, I’m struggling to push through writing about my life as a feather desperately searching for something more than intermittent gusts of wind. The “ugh” part of my brain wants to simply end this with, “Yeah so it’s basically just hard to do shit sometimes because I was like, depressed and shit.”
But there’s more to it than that. Tasks come into my life innocuously and leave as unattainable desires. Want becomes a byproduct of my own avoidance. And I let it happen. I allow something as simple as sending an email go from, “This will only take a minute” to “Well I should probably check Twitter” to “Gotta pee” to “Holy shit Teen Mom is on” to “Okay well I will put ‘write email’ on my to-do list for tomorrow.’” Eventually, tomorrow turns into a week or more and with each passing day, it gets exponentially more embarrassing to complete the task. It’s like talking about this awesome movie you saw called Sixth Sense and it was so wild because holy shit Bruce Willis was dead the whole time sorry that’s kind of a spoiler but seriously you have to see this movie.
However, ants are industrious and, unlike myself, aren’t burdened with credit cards that are all like, “Those 6-inch pink glitter heels aren’t so cute now, are they?” Ants build and forage and create very distinct, pheromone-driven societies. The other cool thing about ants? All of the workers are female. Males in any given colony are used solely for reproduction and die soon after, while queens can live up to 30 years. I get horny just looking at this ant farm.
Here you will see no fucking ants
The only problem is that I can’t find any. I’ve been trying for the past two months and all I’ve got to show for it is a search history that could probably implicate me in a couple of cold cases. Things like, “How to buy an ant queen,” “How to start an ant colony” and “I want ants because they really inspire me and maybe I could even feed them sugar from my mouth like that time on King of the Hill when Bobby was controlled by an ant queen.”
Predictably, most ant-related results usually involve methods for getting rid of them instead of how to cradle them in your nutrient-rich space gel and mimic their habits. But I’m not giving up. In the process of learning how to go all Donald Trump on my life (but in a good way), I’m also getting comfortable with the reality that I’m going to have to turn over a lot of rocks to find what I’m looking for.
But, hopefully not as many as I’ve had to turn over in my quest for ants.
Sometimes I get kind of down. But in this context, sometimes is closer to Denny’s hours of operation rather than an afternoon of sulking over not knowing what to have for lunch.
Usually I deal with it by opening up a lot of very serious documents with the intention to bust a productivity nut all over their little square faces. Then, I shuffle through iTunes for six hours. And that’s how I keep this little tugboat of depression in motion.
There are times, however, when I stage an intervention. On myself. See, the thing about staging your own intervention is that it’s the worst idea ever. For me it involves a lot of bargain bin compliments like, “You’re really good at fishing things out of the garbage disposal” and telling myself that, while Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” is a good song, I should probably distance myself from it for a while. At least until I can get through it without feeling envious.
After I’m done listening to “Everybody Hurts” (loopholes, people), I buy myself something. I don’t necessarily subscribe to the Sex and the City endorsed philosophy that buying shoes will inevitably attract men who will buy you even more shoes, but I do subscribe to candy. Which is why I bought 84 ounces of peanut M&M’s. And a giant jar to put them in.
The other side of my face isn't visible because that's where I hide my cleft palate and club foot
At first I was like, “Target, you losers, I can’t believe you just let me walk out of here with the makings of the best plan ever crafted.”
Then I got home. I washed the jar. I laid out the contents of my rehabilitation in front of me. The high began to wear off and I found myself transitioning into a paranoia-induced panic attack. I worried that I might eat all of them, kind of like Saturn did with his children but way less mythological because this was real.
I poured them into the jar thinking that, since I sometimes find chip clips to be too burdensome, they’d be safe there. Of course, I double-fisted the jar a few times before fastening the lid, but after that something weird happened. I didn’t go back for more. It just sat there next to the television, completely unmolested.
The M&M’s outnumbered me in a big way and my refusal to rectify that was a refusal to create superficial problems for myself in order to avoid my actual problems. M&M nausea is easy. Self-acceptance is hard.
I still haven’t figured anything out, but at the very least, I have four pounds of sub-standard chocolate reminding me that I need to.
In my quest to not be an immobile vessel of butterfat and negative feelings, I’ve been reading self-help books. Not the types that offer hollow solutions, but the kinds wise enough to recognize that people who seek out self-help books don’t really want help, just confirmation that they never needed help in the first place.
And if there’s something I can get behind, it’s undeserved validation. Which is why I’m halfway through Life Is a Verb – a book that encourages readers to live intentionally through reminders that death clutches to the collective undercarriage of our lives along with exercises that involve dancing kind of like Paula Abdul after too many Klonopin then writing about how it makes you feel. According to my answer to the prompt, my dance made me feel, “kicking legs maybe.”
Luckily, the book is a bit more articulate and while I don’t expect it to eliminate the days where I wish I could crawl inside my mattress, sometimes I’m reminded that there’s a whole world above it, waiting for me to tempt the frame beneath it.
And that’s how I, awkwardly, spent most of my Saturday night.
I went to Stanislaus National Forest to celebrate America’s independence and pizza and other things but mostly pizza. But before the pizza, I went hiking and probably caught the plague.
There’s an inherent danger when it comes to any outdoor activity. Things like sprained ankles, dehydration and sun burns. Those are just the things that can happen to you without even having to try. I’ve done plenty of stupid things intentionally – swam in nearly freezing water, approached an 1100lb bull elk, and one time, even mixed some Country Time into tepid water and drank it. But walking straight into an area infested with plague is so stupid it may as well be referred to as the rhythm method.
The sign circled in the photo is where I saw the, “You’re about to get plagued” warning. It basically tells you to stay away from small woodland animals and ticks, since they’re the major carriers. Armed with this gentle suggestion that, for most people with functioning risk assessment faculties would translate to “Don’t do it,” I sprayed myself down with 100% DEET, gagged because of the sudden gust of wind that directed the poisonous mist into my mouth, and went on my way.
After around the 11th time of thinking that the same patch of dirt on my ankle was a tick, I ditched Plague N’ Save in search of pizza. From there, the rest of the weekend was a blur until I woke up with a sore throat the morning after returning. In other words, I had swollen lymph nodes – one of the main symptoms. I rushed around my apartment looking for the thermometer, which is what I do in order to know whether I’m going to overreact by taking an ice bath or drinking eight cups of green tea. I couldn’t find it so instead, I wondered if the plague was the kind of thing where, assuming I didn’t die, I’d get to eat a lot of ice cream during recovery. Eventually, I did what any medically ignorant individual would do and resorted to Google.
Check out the guy whining about having the wrong tax code. Dude, I might have the plague. You just have a minor inconvenience. Predictably, my Google search didn’t yield much more than a barely literate Yahoo Answer and lots of links leading to information about the plague over 600 years ago. So not only was I kind of swollen and achy, but I was also grossly anachronistic.
But I’m fairly certain that I don’t have the plague. To be safe, however, I’m clearing my search history before I go to bed.
