All Rest and No Play make Jack a Crazy Bitch

Oh, hi Johnny.

Every year about Halloween, I start wondering if the basic components of my personality have changed, and I'm now a person who can watch horror movies. I have lots of pseudo-intellectual excuses for watching The Shining last weekend. I'm interested in the horror movie as modernity’s morality-imparting mythology, Jack Nicholson as our puckish, trickster God, and the subconscious machinations that find supernatural violence entertaining. I just read Stephen King's excellent memoir, "On Writing," which inspired all kinds of deep thoughts about literary snobbery and populist storytelling. I also just wanted to give myself some cheap thrills.

I started watching it Friday night, and I only made it through the first few scenes of bloody elevators and dead sisters when it got too scary and I had to turn it off. Big mistake. There is nothing more frightening than a void for my imagination to fill. I thought about it all night, in between crumbs of Ambien. The next day, in the daylight, I bravely got back in the ring. No Goddamn movie is going to get the best of me at two in the afternoon.

The rest of the film was scary, but not as bad as I imagined. At least the plot resolved. It imparted its cultural messages, both comforting (good triumphs over evil) and dubious (writers are insane, intuitives get axes in the face). The Magical Black Man sacrifices himself for the white protagonists, as usual. The innocent woman and child survive, free-floating evil retreats to its lair, and I attempt to escape fear through intellectual deconstruction. Business as usual, in other words. Nothing to think about late at night. 

Unfortunately, I did think about it late at night. I wish I could say that identified the most with the psychic child, or the courageous wife, but I have to say that Jack Nicholson had a point. Living in an isolated house, unable to leave, interacting only with two other people, trying to sustain yourself on creativity alone: isn't this basically a recipe for insanity? Isn't this a sort of unhealthy and unsustainable way to live? Wouldn't it drive any normal person crazy? And, now that I think about it, does it seem at all familiar? Like anyone else's life that I know? Ummm…uh-oh.

I'm not making out with corpses yet, or chasing children through hedge mazes, but the plot does hit a bit close to home. Sometimes it's hard not to scream, "Give me my fucking life back!" at the empty space between my bed and ceiling. Sometimes it takes effort to calmly hold a teacup and suppress the urge to smash it against the wall. So far only one teacup has become a casualty of my illness. I am mostly fine and okay and even happy with my life as a privileged, rural invalid; then suddenly I am not. Somehow the rage has to be vented, and I understand how good destruction can feel.

But I also think it might be time to change some things, to see if I can circumvent the rage and the destruction that seem to always come back no matter how I express them. I've done some healing over the past few months, and now I am at an awkward stage between extremely sick and really sick. I'm getting a lot better at sitting upright on couches, and I'm a champ at making ten minute meals. It's been almost two years since I've done things like order food in a restaurant, exchange money for an item in real time, or walk down a sidewalk. But if I can sit on a couch at home, I think with a little ingenuity I should be able to sit on a couch in a coffee shop. And how much would I love spending my ten minutes of kitchen energy at a thrift store? Just wearing shoes is exciting at this point. Think of all the adventures I could have in the mundane world outside my home.

Yelling "Give me my fucking life back," makes several false assumptions. Who am I yelling at? Nobody except myself can give me my fucking life back. And do I really not have my life? Or in my stubbornness am I just not accepting the small things I can do because I want everything at the same time? Going back out into the world is intimidating for a lot of reasons. It's going to take humility to accept my limited abilities in the world of people with "normal" abilities. It's going to take a lot of careful energy budgeting, last-minute planning, realism, monitoring, and laughably tiny goals. It's probably not something I can do very often, but I think just getting out a little bit would make my world so much bigger. More time drinking coffee in public is less time drinking whiskey with evil itself.