Shotgun Downswing: 2023 07 04

2023 07 04

"In the last thirty days have you had thoughts of harming others."

"Harming others?"

"Yes--"

"No, not others."

Moving my body to untrap my hooked arm from under the pillow I'm blinking at my phone's "phone" app glowing in the dark half-dazed, half-remembering I'm really here in this bed enduring without much opposition the uneasy derangement of that feeling when you know you can't go on but you don't know what the alternative is. Specifically: I've been encountering a quantity of pain and emotional unhappiness I can't get myself to believe is real.

"In the last thirty days have you had any--"

"Man--"

I'm rubbing my eyes. Waking up.

"Man, look: I'm in an abusive relationship, I don't know what to do about it, and it seemed like talking to someone might help. I already filled out a bunch of forms, and--"

"Are you in physical danger? Has she hit you?"

"Abuse, man. Ab-use. I mean I'm being put to bad use, a use for a wrong purpose."

"What?"

G-d I'm dumb. I get out of bed and start walking toward the kitchen, wondering where the coffee is. The thought makes me calm down a little.

"I'm being hurt and it hurts, ok? I pay you guys a lot of money. I want a therapist. I'm not gonna ... gonna let myself go out like this. OK?"

He clears his throat.

"I understand. Just a minute while I put you on hold."

I'm digging through the fridge looking for oat milk when my phone vibrates and I think "That was fast." But instead of KP.org texting me, it's my ex -- A.

"Lol damn unfollowing me on Twitter fake + gay"

***

I'm not happy to hear from A. In fact it arouses in me some emotion between hatred and disgust and whatever Bill Murray felt while filming the movie Groundhog Day because this has happened a half dozen times before. We break up, she moves on, finds someone else, they break up with her or ghost her and then, because nothing frightens the core of A so deeply as the thought of one single night of chastity, she will decide we should be in touch as friends. But this time, I'm not going to play along. She was hanging out with her friend -- my ex friend, ex bandmate -- C and the thought of her makes me want to vom. Taking a sip of coffee I text back.

"Pardon. No offense. Just don't want to be reminded of C/that scene. Don't wish you ill, and hope you're thriving," I lie.

She texts back a thumbs up emoji.

***

Coffee in hand I'm downstairs on the sofa in my studio, plucking at guitar while listening to the hold sound on speakerphone -- not so much music as a rhythmic beeping in what I hear as the key of D. I'm legitimately surprised by how much hate I feel right now. Me, a Libra -- who would have thought? Both toward these people I used to know, and this beeping sound, and the whole constellation of events back to whatever combinatorial process was inscribed on the starting conditions of the universe that lead me to fill my life with such annoying and utterly shallow people and to be myself no better.

It feels like I've been on hold for an hour. I've finished my coffee. I've written a little song that goes:

I'm a cockroach/

on the shotgun/

downswing/

I'm never rebounding,/

and I don't want/

counseling./

I just want to feel that/

shotgun/

downswing/

I can tell you're better without me./

and I'll sleep/

so soundly.

***

By midafternoon Kaiser has assigned me a therapist and the song has gone in whatever direction it was going to. My dad's review: "Not sure about the tone of the lyrics, but on the other hand rap gets away with much worse." He doesn't like that it's needlessly mean. But if he wanted to stop me from being this way he had eighteen years to intervene so who's fault is it really.

I'm EQ'ing bass when A sends me a text saying she's sorry, she's sick in paris right now, going in and out of fever dreams, and she fell asleep before she said what she wanted to say. What she wanted to say was something about C, but whatever it was, it fell short of "Alex, I apologize for taking the side of a woman whose head whistles in a sharp breeze," so I disregarded it and continued angrily scratching away at this ableton project. GFY.

It feels good to be upset. You know you're not lying. "I'm fucking angry, so I'm fucking yelling," and so on as I write this song saying It's so ugly/ the way you never get enough of me/ even when I treat you so smugly/ You always have to be the most 'pick me' with my face scrunched and then, providentially, a work client calls me. This incredibly kind old woman, Martha, who works in the admin of a Christian hospital in Mission Hills, and I answer and of course... in my best telephone voice we have a very tender and friendly conversation about some sad little piece of malfunctioning hospital infrastructure for five minutes which ends with me smiling into the phone, goodbye, it's lovely to hear from you as always and I hope you have a very pleasant rest of your day, and then I'm staring at the Ableton window realizing of course it's all a lie; it's the opposite of how it appears:

I think I'm angry and so I must react to an emotion I am not in control of. But the emotion doesn't control me, I was able to turn it off at a moment's notice -- in fact it's just a tool I'm using for some other purpose: to give me permission to whip a scorpion's tail at shadow puppets of people I care about or wish I cared about. Why would I do it? What do I gain? I lean back in my effete, overpriced Herman Miller embody chair and rub my temples and mess up my hair with my fingers. It's got to be something like: I say "I want to die" because really I want to change, but I am afraid that I can't. Or I don't want to acknowledge that much of this unpleasantness with A and C is my responsibility, my fault, or... Wait a minute. I have a fucking therapist now. What am I doing writing this in my journal. I can just fucking talk about it.

***

The next day I listen back to the song. It's alright, tbh.