Please welcome today’s guest writer, Justin Majetich (’13). Justin is a musician, currently residing in Grand Rapids, MI.
Process:
You wake up to a life that is better than the one you were just dreaming.
You wake up and your commitments are vastly disproportionate.
You wake up happier than you were yesterday.
You wake up having a panic attack.
What’s triggering?
When your life is everything, you risk the obvious negation.
1. You push into the night, and there’s no one to see you off, no one to linger with, no cognitive energy to sustain your wavering existence.
En route to some vacuous dugout on the fringes of the city, you pass an unremarkable number of cars—all motoring uphill, as you are descending. You ponder the urge to rupture each of their windshields with a stone. This is a new urge, undoubtedly related to some recent processing, but is it cause or effect? Is that even a fair dichotomy? You stroke your 2014 ego with a gloved hand. Maybe you are something after all.
At the terminus, there is an empty unit with your number on the door. The heat is running; there is a low hum issuing from the kitchenette. Conversely, there is no heat running, and the panel flooring of your studio is stone cold. You flick on the lights and a cat slips through a doorway. You do not have a cat in real life, but here is your hand on the lightswitch and there is your “rock collection” strewn across the coffee table. Coincidentally, both tether you to a fishing trip you took with your father in 1996—the first time you drank your own blood and mouthed the word “limerence”.
Generally speaking, do you conduct or consume nostalgia?
A. Conduct
B. Consume
C. Neither; instead I’ve absolved to never gratify the past with the present. Furthermore, I hate what family I have left and feel no shame for my history of foul behavior.
2. You are at a house party, trying to ride the swell of the evening, balancing Care-Free against Timing Your Dismount, Knowing When To Eject, and Cheating the Inevitable Deflation. As always, it’s a daunting maneuver, but tonight, you are optimistic. You have set your expectations well and drunk just enough wine to affect a coy blush. At the moment, you are chatting with an acquaintance whom you’d like to become more than acquaintance. You wonder if you are pathetic and insincere for desiring intimacy with someone who is to you more projection than person. Said acquaintance makes a skittish joke. You choke up an overcompensating laugh and wince your eyes shut. When they re-open, the house is an inferno. Many of your friends are already ablaze. Some writhe on the floor, others continue to stare blankly from the corners of the room. One attempts to rescue perceivable family heirlooms before they are lost to eternity. The hellfire encroaches upon you.
Do you…
A. evacuate the premise, or
B. stay put for fear your evacuation would leave behind no vacuum at all
3. You are at a house party. Every one of your friends is in the room, but they might as well be M&Ms in a guessing jar.
A. too real
B. *shrug*
4. TELL ME:
Is it possible that your life is already ending? Are you deficient? Are you going crazy? Do you blame your Self or your Ego for this? Have you measured your year by the hurt you’ve endured? Or by the hurt you’ve caused? How many pills have you taken today? Are you satisfied with that number? How many drones have surveyed you? Are you satisfied with that number? How many police officers have abused their power against you? Are you satisfied with that number? Aren’t you a little too on the nose? And isn’t it a little hypocritical, your identifying as a deconstructionist?
A. Yes
B. No
5. As you grow older, you should be developing a greater degree of maturity in your relationships and finances, but you look around you and find your friends are not profitable in the least. Worse yet, they take you personally. You need out! You need a vacation from all this persecution. You need to carve a space in the night where you and your head can hide and process—always processing. Never letting anyone close enough. Incapable of intimacy. Losing your shit. Inarticulate. Undermotivated. Undesirable. Trying and trying and trying…
A. : )
B. : (
C. ; )
