From: garrettmeek74@yahoo.com
To: ceciliabedelia15@hotmail.com
Subject: I have to tell you this I’m sorry
Date: Thur 7/15/04
Time: 2:58 AM
Cece,
You know how some lights have those dimmer switches? Where you can adjust them to any brightness? I used to think that aliveness was about being on or off alive or dead but I realize now that it’s like one of those switches, that being alive has many brightnesses to it. you can be dim for so many years that you dont even know it, you mistake it for bright, like for the only bright you’re capable of, but then something happens that turns up the switch and youre like oh right this is life. This is what people have been talking about.
Is that corny? good, I’m trying to be. I’m trying to be a normal human being who other people recognize as a fellow creature and say: hey there’s a human being who might even I don’t know own a spice rack or a leaf blower. Obviously, I own neither but I want to be mistaken for someone who does. Ive been in the Land of Hümanz for too long and I want to get out before it’s too late and they lock the gates on me forever.
You never asked what happened to me in San Francisco but I should probably tell you now because thats what people with spice racks do, tell things to each other. I don’t really know why I ended up there except my dad was living with this guy I couldn’t stand and I’d dropped out of college and I wanted to move someplace where I didn’t know a soul, where no one would hug me and rub my back and insist I hadn’t killed anybody. San Francisco was as far from Middlebury as you could get, at least without going to Alaska. also I wanted to be somewhere that didn’t have snow. Back then snow to me was like kryptonite. It was the ash of my old life coming down. I dreamed about it all night long. Id close my eyes and it would immediately start blizzarding like the fuzz on a TV set.
So I moved to sf and got a job canvassing for the Wildlife Conservation Society because I needed to pay my rent and that’s what I’d always cared about most in life, animals I mean. (Well skiing too but I was never going to ski again for as long as I lived.) Starting when I was a kid I loved animals, not in the sentimental way that most people love them but in a deep trueheartedmonklike way that had to do with not being very impressed by human beings, probably because the human beings I knew i.e. my parents were often yelling at each other. even back then I hated the way people sentimentalized penguins and pandas and dolphins, all the charismatic megafauna, preferring the ugly weird animals that did incredible comic book things to survive, like the Malaysian ant that explodes like a bomb and sprays deadly toxic goo all over its enemies or the blue-tailed skink which can break off its own tail just by thinking about it and leave it squirming on the ground so it looks like a tasty snake. Or the hooded seal! i had books and books about these weird amazing animals, I had them all memorized, like a catechism or something, and it was a kind of worship now that I think about it if you define worship as wanting to get as close as possible to the mystery of creation.
Anyway I was out canvassing for the Wildlife Conservation Society trying to get people to sign a petition about stopping the shark fin trade or protecting polar bears from seismic testing in the Arctic, something like that, but first you had to talk to people and explain why the petition was important and I was no good at that. In fact I was probably the last person in the world youd want approaching strangers on behalf of the polar bear (Mr. Charismatic Megafauna himself) and asking for their addresses. I was sleeping two hours a night because all I saw was snow, I’d lie down in bed and my heart would start going, the panic would begin, but even this was better than actually sleeping because I always had the same dream, I was up on the mountain again except it was clear flawless ice at my feet instead of snow and i could see Elias’s face, see it turning blue however many yards below me, I had fifteen minutes fifteen minutes fifteen minutes, I would have to watch him die while I dug. what’s more I couldnt shower very often because the roommate I’d found on a flyer at some taqueria was this mildly epileptic guy who played fantasy games on his computer all the time and walked on the balls of his feet and took half hour showers every morning when I needed to get ready for work.
So I stood there with my clipboard looking like a lunatic. People crossed the street to avoid me. I could see them coming down the sidewalk and they’d do a little whoa-there swerve and get as much distance from me as they could. And that’s when I had my first episode, the kind Ive told you about. the light turned gross and everyone started to bounce when they walked and to look like impossible creatures and I felt that bug on the face feeling, felt this disgust come over me not just for the pedestrians on the street but for pedestrians everywhere, on every street in the world, blah blah blah. I wanted to spray them with a giant can of Raid or better yet explode deadly toxic goo everywhere like the malaysian ant and die in the process because I was human too. The strange impossible feeling went away after a while but not the disgust and I stood there on the sidewalk without moving for the rest of my shift, like a Beefeater or something, and something wonderful happened which was that people stopped avoiding me and began brushing past me as if I wasn’t there, I didnt exist, and I began to wish that they were right.
After that I quit my job and began to stay home all day long, surfing the internet for the first time in my life, one of those dial-up connections that was like waiting for water to boil—I wouldn’t have even known what a webpage was except for my roommate—and feeling more and more disgusted with people. It wasn’t just what I saw on the newsfeeds, the ways in which we were destroying the planet, the burning of fossil fuels of course but also the soil erosion deforestation plastic pollution ocean acidification overpopulation habitat degradation wastewater contamination, one -tion after another, so wholesale the destruction that it was almost funny: the strip mining for kitty litter, the estrogen leaking into lakes and making male fish produce eggs, the songbirds too stoned on Prozac waste to eat or mate, the deadly bits of glitter in the oceans that fish gobble up because they think they’re food. disco balls in their stomachs! But it wasnt just this, it was the internet itself, which seemed like a gigantic endless shopping mall beamed into our homes to get people to buy more shit, more more more, stuff stuff stuff, which of course human beings couldn’t actually throw away. That was the internet’s actual real purpose: to spread our shit all over the planet. Or so it seemed like to me. if it wasn’t getting human beings to buy more shit it was devoted to their mating, which honestly disgusted me most of all.
That was the real problem: I couldn’t stand to be human. So I decided to stop. I found the phenobarbital my roommate kept in his bedside table and took the whole bottle or whatever was left of it and drank a beer for good measure and waited for the snow to bury me alive. And it would have buried me except my dad called me out of the blue. I don’t think I’d talked to him for a few months, i’d stopped returning his calls, but he had some kind of premonition and called me and I answered the phone and he could tell something was wrong, I was slurring my words, I think i might have even told him Id been eating glitter, and he called 911. So the doctors saved me. they gave me activated charcoal and dug me out but I was still a danger to myself I guess because they 5150ed me. I was in the psych unit for a while, in a halfway house for a lot longer than that. Suffice it to say Ive flushed my fair share of SSRIs into the ecosystem. and then the odd jobs busing tables and taping drywall where I had to totter around on these long metal stilts and now of course throwing bags at the airport, basically a hydrocarbon bonfire, helping people destroy the planet so they can see a glacier or two before they’re gone. But that’s another story.
You’re getting married in two days, to my best friend in college, and you know what’s demented is that Im looking forward to the wedding even though it’s going to be one of the worst days of my life. I’m looking forward to it because i get to see your face again. Isnt that fucked up? When I see you it fills me with the opposite of disgust, which I know doesn’t sound exactly like high praise but for me is sort of like the return of the world. It’s like I stop being a mess of exploded thoughts for a second and am just happy to be a human, a human looking at another human. i used to feel something like it when I was skiing and I wasn’t thinking about anything except the sun on my face and the softness lifting me like a hand and i was floating through the world in a way that was a rare special thing. On my computer keyboard I can maybe describe it this way: [ !!! ] > ∞. I haven’t felt like that in a long long time.
I’m drunk I’m sorry. It’s 2:43 in the morning. I think ive lost my mind again. I can’t sleep or eat or even watch TV because my only ambition in life is to see your face again as soon as possible. I don’t know if Im miserable or happy.
I know I said those things about marriage being a fascist institution. I have these beliefs I feel very strongly about when I’m talking to other people out in the world but when I think about them in private they start to seem kind of arbitrary. like they could just as easily be the opposite. The truth is you make me feel like I could actually do something with my life, maybe finish up my degree and go to grad school and become a wildlife biologist, focus on something else’s survival instead of my own.
Why am I telling you this? I dont know. You probably think I’m crazy. (well, that cats out of the bag.) I guess what I’m saying is that I probably had a vESTED interest in telling you what I thought about marriage that day. And then later you smiled at me. I saw you looking for me downstairs even after Id been such an asshole and you saw me and your whole face kind of changed like you’d been climbing a mountain for a long time and youd seen a view finally, remembering why you were even there, and that was basically the last time I slept. Did I imagine it, that your face looked like that?
i’m going to confess something to you: I BACKED INTO CHARLIE’S FENCE ON PURPOSE BECAUSE I WANTED TO HAVE AN EXCUSE TO COME BACK.
Charlie told me that he found you on the porch in the middle of the night looking at the stars. Are you maybe awake right now too? Is it possible youve chosen I don’t know baboons instead of raccoons, all because of a misunderstanding?
G