grant_maierhofer ~ in_the_time_when_my_memory_fixated_on_the_death_of_princess_diana

I forget the exact situation, but it happened: someone interested in the difference between art and entertainment turned on some Beethoven as loud as it would go, and asked the listeners if they were entertained. Something on that order anyway. I do think there are complicating factors here. I don’t look at images of Gunter Brus to feel entertained exactly. I don’t read about John Duncan’s works or listen to Atrax Morgue because I want to escape exactly. And in turn I don’t believe I seek this sort of work because I’m a particularly sick person. The violence and horror in the world committed by apparently average individuals leads me to believe that there might not even be such a thing as a particularly sick person. And when I open the pages of de Sade, I’m not caught up in some sort of reverie, and when I’m watching certain films I’m not in a state of pure bliss. I think these encounters are, however, a form of entertainment, the same as when I snuck behind a house at the end of a cul de sac one night, in my father’s neighborhood, and walked in darkness to the top of a large hill there, and climbed a deer stand in a tall tree and looked down at the city below. It was entertainment and it was experience, and I did need it. The more like that you do, though, the less you need to sit with your face in a book. And the more you do have your face in a book, the less you need to compulsively masturbate and have a sad cum, as all cums are inevitably sad cums. I’m drawn then to the figure of an artist who is at odds with the world, and doesn’t try to mend that distance or break from it but rather sits contentedly out on their little homemade island, sending back the occasional record of what they’ve been doing out there, beside the world. I think that this sort of thing is less and less desired in a world where entertainment has become almost as important and significant as food and water, but that doesn’t mean it’s dead and rotting beneath some museum.

The watch my father died with is a silver Tissot that frequently pops off of my wrist because of the design of the clasps. He didn’t leave it to me or anyone in his will but when I asked my family if they’d mind if I had it nobody protested. The battery on the watch is dead and the only local jeweler I’ve gone to for the watch in the past was recently shuttered and so for now I’m stuck in the small town in Idaho where we live where we were when we heard about my father’s death. It was sent back with his effects and an autopsy written out in Greek which felt very strange to try and make sense of. I enjoy having the watch nearby and I enjoy not knowing much about the watch because the watch’s value is sort of all its own and it could be from Walmart or be worth ten thousand dollars and I wouldn’t be aware. I wouldn’t care. I like things this way. When I was younger I liked to spend time in the basement of my parents’ house. My father had an office down there and we stayed out of it. He used the bathroom down there in the mornings and none of us used it. I remember playing video games on a small TV with my brother and my sister and a variation of our friends. When the death of Princess Diana happened I remember watching about it on the TV with my mother. My mother was attached to something Princess Diana represented and all I remember is feeling like it mattered. I remember scenes of people in mourning. This was my first real introduction to the end of the twentieth century. I believe the massacre at Columbine High School was the second, I was nine years old.

Is the difference between guilt and shame that we deserve it? I’ve felt guilty about things that I don’t know if I deserved. Whenever I feel shame, though, it seems clear that I deserve it. The medicine I’m on, the therapies I’ve done, they try to alleviate these feelings using misdirection, and sometimes it works and even makes sense, but I still cling to shame more than other feelings. If art can only conjure a mood, I would hope to conjure an art of shame, a mutual shame to be shared between two failures of the moral order. When my father died I was thinking about this kind of thing constantly. I spoke to several consecutive therapists about it. I spoke with my wife about it, all the things I felt ashamed of, and she finally had to shut me up—I wouldn’t stop talking, I had a seemingly insatiable appetite for confession, which is probably why I always loved AA and NA meetings but hated working with sponsors. A room full of fresh faces is always going to forgive your shameful ramblings far easier than the same sad person you’ve been talking to for weeks. Even now, I feel compelled to apologize to you, and hope to be forgiven. I would welcome your apologies, for anything, and I would forgive.

I have it, the filth, the nausea, the paranoia, the readiness, the thoughts, the wetness, the dampness, the putridity, the saturation, the passivity, the violence, the criminal, the disgust, the sickness, the damnation, the water, the leaking, the urine, the excrement, the garbage, the vileness, the trash, the self, the wandering, the gasoline, the kerosene, the mud, the muck, the oil, the coarseness, the bodies, the blood, the light, the steps, the melting, the dead animals, the cannibals, the ugliness, the piss, the spit, the cum, every moment, I have it, the eyes, the organs, the failing livers, the jaundiced body, the yellowed skin, the burnt flesh, the wars, the body, the bodies, the murders, the corpses, the self, the mirror, looking into one’s own eyes, the filth, the scum, the rot, the compost, the nausea, the disgust, the sickness, the horror, I have it, all of it, every drop, there within me, and I am looking at the world.

When we arrived in Minnesota a friend of my sister’s picked us up there, and it felt strange, arriving and having this be our introduction to this place where my father was now dead and we were now in mourning. I haven’t had a lot of experience with mourning which I guess makes me lucky. The world has always been at a slight distance for me and I’m grateful for that but when we returned home and saw this distant face of this distant person at this gray and empty, sprawling airport, it felt bizarre. I would’ve liked to meet my mother there getting off the plane. I would’ve liked for her to see my children and for us to reunite in a brief, sad embrace in the parking garage before we drove home. Things are never working out how you want them to or even how you hope they don’t. You’re consistently anxious about how things are going to happen so that when they finally do you’re inevitably let down and depressed. This is the situation and it never stops. Life is always letting all of us down.

When we were in the car driving home it was my father’s car and my sister’s friend was driving and my kids were in the backseat with my wife and we talked about religion and a creek by the friend’s house and drove home in periods of silence and I remember feeling happy to be going back to my father’s house then, and not thinking too much then about how sad everything was. I had a message from my father on my phone that I wouldn’t delete until much later and it was nice knowing it was there. We hugged and kissed our family members when we got home and I think some people maybe distant relatives were visiting to help out and give us food and things and it was good to see everybody. Other distant relatives would be making their way to the Midwest over the next several days and we would all be staying together and my wife was wonderful about asking how I was doing because I have a tendency to go silent when lots of people are around. I’ve never dealt well with crowds. Something in me shuts down and I can’t find a way out of it. Even in the car heading back I clammed up, this stranger, I just wanted to be home. My wife would look at me, though, and we’d roll our eyes, or we’d text each other, and it helped. Marriage, when it’s best, is that ongoing huddle between two similarly-plighted friends, in love and making fun of the world.

The summer before my father died when my wife and our kids and I had driven to Glacier National Park to meet my father, my mother and my brother for some vacation days, I couldn’t have known the importance of it then—the last real trip with him. We had brought the disc that contained my son’s MRI results after he had had some seizures and it was clear he was having trouble. Shortly after being born my son had contracted Meningitis and we thought that would be the worst of it. Then the seizures came and partial blindness came and favoring one side came and it felt like it was never going to stop—I lived a lot in denial then. I was always trying to deny things. I still try to deny things. I tried to reject the idea that anything was going on with our son because nothing had been wrong with our daughter and my relationship to our son felt largely the same. It turned out he’d had a stroke in utero, causing part of his brain to effectively shut down and after all the dust of these appointments and hospitalizations were settled it was clear that my son had cerebral palsy, and I probably struggle even now to remain aware of that fact, no matter how many times these moments repeat in my skull like cut films. My father used to say how awful he felt when I became type one diabetic because he was a nephrologist, and he worked with patients on the bad side of lives with that sort of difficulty. My son is one of my only male friends, and even then when he was a baby going through all these things I tried to just be present because I wasn’t sure how to deal with anything. At the time we were acquainted with a lot of different new parents, and several were facing very dire situations, and I’ve tried to remain aware of that, even if sometimes it doesn’t do a thing. I just want my children safe and happy, that’s all I want. If they’re able to experience that then I’m O.K.

I don’t remember much concrete material from when we first arrived home. It was interesting because for the first time in my memory everybody was there, and they weren’t about to leave, because we were dealing with something that would take some time to see through. My father died in Greece, on a painting trip. The leader of this trip knew my mother and called her to tell her, but there were also calls and correspondence from the Greek funeral home there that was taking care of my father’s corpse and beginning the slow process of flying him home. Although he would eventually be cremated, it apparently made more sense to embalm him there and fly him home. Getting home, then, only felt like a small step in an arduous walk that wouldn’t be resolved for several weeks. I was relieved to be free of teaching for a bit, but it didn’t help matters much. We were miserable. People kept randomly weeping and needing to be talked to. My children were passed around as little beacons of warmth and hope, especially for my mother. My father’s siblings were making their way to us. Whether or not somebody’s there doesn’t matter if you’ve spent enough time with them in a particular place. It’s like the dreams I’ll have about my father still. He was a vital part of my life for such a long time that I couldn’t avoid thinking about him or feeling him around if I wanted to. Being at his house, then, and being surrounded by these people who wanted to communicate and wanted to commune on the occasion of his death made him as present as ever, even as I felt this growing void. I think the void, though, was disconnected from his actual former presence in life, so that the two things exist forever simultaneously and neither cancels out the other. That’s as effectively as I’ve been able to articulate the feeling, I think, and it’s something I try to process day after day and week after week and month after month and year after year. He’s there. I’m not.

It felt good to be able to say fuck you to every living and dead thing in the universe because my father wasn’t there anymore. Fuck you to Elvis Presley. Fuck you to the rest areas on highways. Fuck you to phones. Fuck you to writing, to art. Fuck you to speech. Fuck you to every billionaire. Fuck you to Bono. Fuck you to hospitals. Fuck you to my Luvox. Fuck you to my Seroquel. Fuck you to my insulin. Fuck you to waking up. Fuck you to every job every person’s ever worked. Fuck you to water. Fuck you to the right. Fuck you to the left. Fuck you to the center. Fuck you to New York City. Fuck you to California. Fuck you to my kitchen. Fuck you to Greece. Fuck you to shoes. Fuck you to reading. Fuck you to listening. Fuck you to you. Fuck you to you. Fuck you to you. Fuck you to me. Fuck you to my entire life. Fuck you to everyone. Fuck you to cars. Fuck you to every insurance company. Fuck you to music. Fuck you to pants. Fuck you to sex. Fuck you to Freud. Fuck you to Gilles Deleuze. Fuck you to money. Fuck you to sleep. Fuck you to Joyce. Fuck you to coffee. Fuck you to tea. Fuck you to instruments. Fuck you to medicine. Fuck you to everything ancient. Fuck you to Proust. Fuck you to poems. Fuck you to chicken. Fuck you to eyes. Fuck you to healing. Fuck you to dying. Fuck you to this sentence. Fuck you to this sentence. Fuck you to this sentence. Fuck you to this sentence. Fuck you to this sentence. Fuck you to this sentence. Fuck you to this sentence. Fuck you to this sentence. Fuck you to this sentence. Fuck you to this sentence. Fuck you to this sentence. Fuck you to this sentence. Fuck you to this sentence. Fuck you to this sentence. Fuck you to this sentence. Fuck you to this sentence. Fuck you to this sentence. Fuck you to this sentence. Fuck you to this sentence. Fuck you to this sentence. Fuck you to this sentence. I am not interested in a new way of looking at the world, or life. I do not hope to find an openness in the work. I only hope for my small life to mete itself out in minor steps in no particular direction as the noise of life gets ever quieter and quieter. Before I’m old and shitting myself and watching the same film over and over and over while my family awkwardly whispers in the kitchen, I’ll throw myself from some window. I’ll find it, any building anywhere, and go as far up as I’m able, and I’ll make myself a minor news story in the evening. Defenestration and the noise of my life will be forever quieted, the matter of my flesh buried without a box underground with two acorns scattered over it and my legacy to be forgotten. I don’t hold onto this world. I don’t hold onto life. You don’t hold onto something that wrongs you and continues to do so. You let it sleep like the noise of your mind and living and you wander out some day and set it free as you turn back to the middling existence you’ve established there. The plague overwhelming things. The year 1666 Pepys is frantically scribbling London is on fire the great plague is overwhelming everything and Newton is watching an apple fall near to where some bodies are buried and the world is collapsing as they know it. There’s no further reading to do. There is the work, it is in front of you there, and you must return to it, as he returned to it. As the citizens returned to the city after they’d watched it burn up all the disease spreading madly. The burning forests in California. The smell of fire as you walk out to take the garbage out on a warm Monday evening in Moscow, Idaho, your family getting ready for bed inside. The forests are burning as they were the night you arrived in the place. Ascending a mountain on a tiny road and to the left up on the mountain fire was racing down and time was moving and your wife-to-be was asleep and you would arrive and you would assemble the sleeping bag bed and you would shop at the Dollar Tree for months and things would get no closer to making sense but you would persist and maybe that was sufficient.

We had been sitting in the basement on this leather furniture my parents had purchased that I would constantly get stuck to after laying down too long watching TV or falling asleep. I believe we saw it on the news but my parents had already known and told us what happened. Our babysitter, a nice college student with long curly hair, who had stayed with us while my parents went to Russia, had died. I believe she died in a car accident. I believe she was the one who stayed with us while my parents went to Russia, though I’m not sure. My parents went to Russia for about a month, to adopt two young boys. Adoption, at that point in the 1990s, was in vogue. Another family had adopted a Chinese boy. Another family my parents were closer with had adopted a Russian boy. A few months before this my parents had sat us all down to say they were getting a divorce, I think—in retrospect I’m not certain this happened, and yet the memory is there. I believe my older brother was barely over ten at that point, if that, and all of us kids cried so much that my parents decided they couldn’t get a divorce. Then came the plan about adoption, and I’m not sure how clearly related they were to my parents at the time, but whatever the case I think they were doing their best—it’s very difficult for me to differentiate between things I’m certain happened, and thoughts, or dreams, or tricks my mind plays on me. My father worked a lot, and my mother was prone to depression and anxiety. My father’s sexuality wasn’t brought up to us until later, when they would finally fully get divorced, and so for the time being they were going to Russia, and we were staying back for a month with our babysitter, who would eventually tragically die. I remember, perhaps because I was about six years old, a powerful closeness to this babysitter. I remember being excited to come home from school and have her there. I remember giving her hugs. She attended the university in the town where I’m from and even though I would someday return to the same university to pursue a bachelor’s degree it felt like she was impossibly mature and cool, and I never felt that way about myself or anybody my age when we were the same age as she was when she passed. My parents had given her small things to give to us each day that they were in Russia. They were there for a month. I can’t remember any of the things they gave to us but I do remember sitting around with the babysitter and watching things, or eating, or reading something. People talk about the change in America after 9/11 happened. I don’t remember that change. I remember, though, how it felt to have a babysitter you were close with, and this sense of their life as fundamentally important to yours, and this admiration you had for them which often blurred with a sense of awe or attraction to their beauty. When I was that age I remember hearing about Hitler, I don’t remember who told me. I always had this fear that Hitler would come to our house and take me away. I remember once when it was night and a babysitter was at our house and I woke up having been severely troubled by a dream about Hitler. I remember my babysitter wearing a yellow sweater from the university she was attending. After she passed away, a friend of hers became our babysitter, and they were similar. She came to my father’s funeral, or to my father’s home to visit with us, and I remember briefly feeling as young as I’d been when I’d really known her. Both of them had this warmth that I can’t explain. I remember watching Disney movies in the evening after spending the day with friends swimming, or rollerblading, or playing video games, or something else. I remember sitting in the porch of my father’s house where they had this massive TV lined with wood that had a vinyl screen. It was probably 1998, maybe 1999. I remember that comfort and it’s how I felt toward the babysitter who eventually tragically died. This too is all blurred with the death of Princess Diana, the same relationship to the television and this overwhelming sense of tragedy, met with the closeness of my family then.

I remember the meetings after my father died. I don’t know when we found out how he died. It was strange being back at his home knowing he wasn’t going to walk through the door again. I felt bad having people take care of our kids or leaving my wife with them when I talked with my family about his funeral. The thing that nobody tells you is that death is like everything else in life. If you’re an anxious, stressed-out person, experiencing death is going to be like that. People try and push back against this sort of thing by having impulsive sex or getting drunk, but when everything settles back and they’ve got to look at the situation they’re faced with, it’s going to feel like everything else has felt in your life—this constant presence of a dull and inexpressible ache, this pain. I don’t know what medication I was on when my father died. I remember his siblings coming to our house and playing games together and talking. I remember all of us sitting around the TV watching something or playing video games. It wasn’t really nice though. It was calm, and it wasn’t bad, but it didn’t really feel like anything. People asked me things and I said whatever you say back to people who have asked you things. I never learned how to just talk. I’m always lying and always indirect and I haven’t even stayed with a therapist long enough to tell them that. My father died on September 11, 2018, I think. I might have the year wrong. I stopped noticing things like that after our first daughter was born, and now I’m basically brain dead.

I would have you know the work and engage it and when you’re finished with it. I would have you take it, all of it, and put it over the drain in the shower. Pack all of the pages of the work you’ve assembled over time on top of there in a sleek little mass, covers and pages of text or images bleeding through. Then, do something you don’t intend to tell anybody else about, take a spray paint can and paint over the front of your body. Randomly but remain within the area of your flesh that will be covered by a shirt and pants. It’s sticky and uncomfortable. The paint is thick. It’s up to you whether to cover your genitalia. I did because I think it’s sensible to spend a day or more with this secret thing happening under your clothing that you’re not going to tell anybody about. Then turn on the shower. The ways the books are shaped and distinct will leave some room, ideally enough, for water to drain so that your shower doesn’t just suddenly overflow. Stand on top of the work that is there, this work, and slowly knead your feet into it, letting the cold, or burning hot water spray the paint on your flesh and fall into the floor you’ve assembled there on top of all this text. This is the relationship you should have with yourself and with the work. An author is there, with you, and would prefer this sort of treatment anyhow. Take time and let this develop as it needs to. Turn out the light. Sit down on the mass and try to distinguish between the texts and images you’ve got there. Call it your shame, and hold the experience close to your heart forever.

I remember my babysitter being one of my first experiences with death and I also remember the death of Princess Diana. At the time I didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand her desire to watch TV constantly after 9/11 had happened either. I was staying home faking sick and I changed the channel. Looking back, though, I think her processing of Diana’s death must’ve come from a place deep within her, the teenager who watched with her parents and eight brothers and sisters when JFK was shot. The only thing that could really be done then was to pay close attention. To watch the TV and communicate with those people you see every day and try to move forward in this situation that feels impossible. That level of fear isn’t something people get much experience with. If they do, if say they live in a third world country being constantly bombed by other countries, if say they work in an emergency room in south Chicago and don’t get through a shift without removing bullets from a stranger’s guts, if say they’re a woman in Juarez, Mexico, if say they’re a woman on planet earth, if say they’re a child on planet earth, if say they’re in a stretch of aggressive methamphetamine addiction living on a reservation in Minnesota, if say they’re on the run, if say their father violates them, if say they’re schizophrenic, if say drive a bus, if say they’re a working mother, if they do, if their daily life is this way, if they see it, and they live in fear, and they witness new depths of fear each day, there are ways of coping the world as such passes judgment upon, none of them really adequate to deal with anything at all, and each opening up new caves within the chest that hold no light.

When I was young before I would’ve really had the words for it I would’ve called my anxiety a discomfort. There’s a level of anxiety wherein every moment seems vaguely connected to an electrical socket reverberating a dull wave of constant paranoia and that’s the kind of anxiety I’ve always had. I was first medicated for ADHD because that was in vogue in the 90s. That medicine made my weight plummet and my interest also and then I was hospitalized. We watched videos recorded by my 3rd grade teacher before and after I was in the hospital and it made us all laugh, my family. I was skinny and mumbling in the first, and jovial and average-looking in the second, separated by the month of outpatient treatment in Rochester, at Mayo. We laughed I think because the only alternative would’ve been to read into it and wallow a little. I didn’t want to do that and I didn’t want my family to do that and so we laughed. I don’t think it’s bad. In fact I think it is bad if you’re incapable of laughing at the previous self. People are ridiculous. Being human is unbearably stupid. The second you stop being able to laugh at what an idiot you’ve been might indicate something dangerous. The anxiety, though, or discomfort, has always been there. In fact, laughing helps the anxiety. I don’t need to drink coffee. I don’t really need to smoke or anything like that. Sometimes I want to but it’s not worth it. If I have coffee my anxiety is simply worse, and I’m twice as awake as I already was by way of my anxiety. As an addict there’s often a temptation to find the end-all-be-all cure for my condition but it doesn’t exist. Just like the ideal scenario in which to write. Or something in the past we regret or want to return to. None of it is real, and life is about acknowledging that when you’re faced with it.

I remember my life in the 1990s and I lived in Wisconsin and the parents were drinking Miller Genuine Draft and we were in the backyard and I was a pervert. I remember my life in the 1990s and death was in various places and the elementary school I attended had a bomb threat called one day and I thought it was one of those big black cartoon bombs with a fuse burning down, in someone’s backpack. I remember my life in the 1990s and I went to Shopko with my middle eastern friend and he bought the Nas album with the gold cover. I remember my life in the 1990s before I became diabetic but not before I had depression and anxiety and ADHD and was hospitalized in Rochester, MN. I remember my life in the 1990s and Columbine. I remember my life in the 1990s and Wendy’s. I remember my life in the 1990s and the yellow school bus and giving notes to girls and never getting a note back, a little void there. I remember my life in the 1990s and the rooms at my elementary school and the bathrooms where I felt safest. I remember my life in the 1990s and going to Noah’s Ark at the end of the summer and those days feeling like they lasted forever with someone who would eventually commit suicide. I remember my life in the 1990s and being at my friend’s house and kissing his sister and she was younger than me so I bit my hand and ran downstairs and said she’d bit me. I remember my life in the 1990s and feeling fucked up like I wouldn’t ever fit anywhere but then I had eye surgery the summer after I was in the hospital and my neighbor came over and gave me a Super Soaker and I lifted my eyepatch and it was very sunny and the summer was just starting, and I missed the last day of school—when they’d have this massive carnival—but when my neighbor came over I felt good. I remember my life in the 1990s and that summer I sat watching TV most days and they’d play movies I loved at night and I’d watch them downstairs in the nice cold basement and I felt good. I remember my life in the 1990s and watching professional wrestling and feeling whole. I remember my life in the 1990s and Ritalin. I remember my life in the 1990s and LA Gear. I remember my life in the 1990s and my neighborhood. I remember my life in the 1990s and going to the movies. I remember my life in the 1990s and VHS tapes. I remember my life in the 1990s and Grunge. I remember my life in the 1990s and Behind the Music. I remember my life in the 1990s and constant television. I remember my life in the 1990s and complete hysteria gripping everything. I remember my life in the 1990s and Y2K. I remember my life in the 1990s and moments on screens, video cameras. I remember my life in the 1990s and Pizza Hut. I remember my life in the 1990s and drinking soda. I remember my life in the 1990s and the haircuts. I remember my life in the 1990s and sleeping in. I remember my life in the 1990s and a sense of completeness, and my family, and the moonlight, and once my father was brought home drunk from a neighborhood party, carried up the steps and old voices are telling me what to do and I don’t get it.

This friend once, I don’t know why the two of us were at his school. He lived in a part of town that meant he went to a different high school. Before that we had been very close. I don’t know if the both of us were addicts. I know that I was. We were curious, though, and we liked escaping stuff together. He was a nice person, probably the nicer of the two of us. I was sort of an asshole. I liked to escape stuff. I liked to leave the world and I didn’t do all that well in the daytime. I went to a high school whose colors were purple. He went to a high school whose colors were blue. We were at his high school in its large gym watching people play basketball, I think. There were people there we knew and we always liked being in the stands with people. We were good at being funny in those situations. I don’t think we were high when we got there, but we were trying to get high. We would’ve taken anything. That was something that bound us. I don’t want to tell you his name. My name is Grant Maierhofer, I can’t imagine it matters. I sort of had a girlfriend at the time but I was a very fucked up person in a lot of ways I wasn’t prepared to really think about too much. That’s where the drugs came in then. I think I was fourteen or fifteen years old. He was older than me and had his license. He smoked Camels. We would drive around a lot, with all sorts of people. We had gone there I think to find drugs. That was the hope, anyway. It was daytime. The way we talked, the way we interacted with the people around us, the way we joked even, it was clear we weren’t really fitting in with them. In good moments we didn’t really want to fit in with them, but sort of hover up above them. This day, though, was strange. The middle of the day, watching sports that we didn’t care about. One of our older friends was obsessive about basketball. I envied him that, I remember. We went to a gas station then and bought a box of Benadryl and he took half and I took half and we went back to the school to watch some more and then we drove around smoking cigarettes until later when we went to my mother’s house and I fell asleep in the basement in the middle of the afternoon and didn’t wake up until much later when my friend had gone and I was very confused. I remember going upstairs and there was a bottle of antidepressants I hadn’t taken for a long time so I took a handful of them and they didn’t do anything to me but it was something. They were blue. Stout little blue tablets I poured into my palm. I think I found a bottle of gin or I took some other pills or I drank some leftover beers I had in my room that were warm. After I’d consumed this stuff I took a long shower and then I remembered that it was the day of my brother’s graduation party. He was a couple of years older than me. I don’t know if this was before or after when I relapsed, the first time. I can’t keep things organized all that well in retrospect. I remember I went to the graduation party and I sat by the keg that was full of root beer and I pulled the hose for the beer keg over to me and drank awhile there. I think I took some clothes off and jumped into the pool. This wasn’t the sort of party where people jumped partially-clothed into the pool. Our family was there. All these people were there and I did this impossibly stupid thing. I looked like a gigantic fucking asshole. I can’t believe what a moron I’ve been. I can.

I can remember feeling as though the end was always looming, and so I did what I could to ensure it never did. I only went to sleep when I was so fucked up it was impossible to do anything else. I only took time for myself if it was to fulfill some other addictive thing, to masturbate or take drugs on my own, to drink or watch TV. I was always looking for the feeling of being absolutely immersed in a stretch of being fucked up. In the morning when my mom drove me to school I would go into the gas station and buy a bottle of water, some gum or something, and a box of twenty Nyquil liquigels. I’d take them all before school. I never fell asleep from those. Benadryl was stronger and made everything feel much stranger, like there was speed mixed in. Closer to Sudafed, to meth. Nyquil just sort of took the edge off of things. I was always trying. I look at the world now and I see that everyone is always doing some version of what I did. I’m even doing it, writing this way. I do it when I watch TV. I do it when I eat. I do it when I take medicine. I don’t take too much anymore. When I was using I might just take a random sampling of anything they’d put me on. I remember when I was younger nearer to my mother watching the TV as tragedies ensued in the 90s I could feel the edges of days and the sorrow that broke through there. My mother and I have always hated Sundays. The only time they were anything was when something exciting could happen and you could sort of melt into the week without thinking. Otherwise there was always sorrow there. It wasn’t drugs until I first took any at eleven years old and from then on it’s all it was. It was films, or food, or drinks, or moments, or situations that I clung to back then, watching my mother watching the TV.

I’m only really interested in the sort of writing undertaken by people apparently equally capable of a profound hatred that can sometimes exist in the hearts of people at the end of their rope. Falling down. I stand alone. I will never forget the color of the light outside the window in the room where I was hospitalized for depression and whatever else when I was seven. The wound there, started there. It was a gift given to me by parents who were confused and doing the best they could because it gave me access to that visceral place below the tar of self and ego that wells up in the heart and allows an individual to escape life at need and separate from the mindless nodding dogs lining the street. Oh please. You feel this way but then there’s something empty there. The assumption of this emptiness in their heads winds up doing less for you than fantasizing their thoughts. The anger in the face of a cashier. The fury in the hands of a waiter. The suicidal thoughts of a bus driver. I want to hold onto that. I want to hold onto the hatred I feel within when I stare at the sorry state of structures in the world as it stands. I want to go to the beach and lay there in the sun until it’s freezing in the dead of night. I want to wade into the water with my pockets lined with rocks. I want to pick up a large rock and walk slowly into the water and just before my head’s submerged I want to lift the rock high up there and drop it right on the top of my head and collapse slowly into the moving water there, the little cloud of my blood and brain matter billowing out, softly. I haven’t found a lot of peace. I’ve worked to find peace and I’m usually only met with a short reprieve from a day of anxious thinking. When I was young I would take the drugs. Me and my friend would take any drugs that were put in front of us. We would go to secondhand stores and spend the day trying on clothes while we were very stoned on painkillers and whatever concoctions a gas station offered. This is for him.

I do not wake up and feel the necessity of work. Beside my bed there is typically a number of books from which I’ve read fifteen pages or so. When I was a kid I did not keep books around me. I started to write in a rehab center, or before that, in the hospital, or something. I don’t remember when I started to see things a certain way. I would always obsess, fixate. When my parents got divorced my OCD became more pronounced. I would move my fingers and fidget in sequences of five. I was medicated for a time then. I might’ve had it before. I’ve had doctors since then wonder whether it was tied in with my alcoholism. That’s the biggest problem with addiction. The longer you’re able to stay clean the more your brain wonders whether you were ever really an addict at all. You’ve got to find ways to remind yourself. OCD helps, oddly enough. I can see how extreme those thoughts are and the feelings therein and I realize that if I were to take a drink, or if I were to use drugs, I would need such a syrupy quiet to coat my brain that I wouldn’t stop until I was a corpse, and even then I’d probably haunt the living over it. I remember being an emotional kid. I remember looking down at my desk and wondering why I didn’t seem to feel like the kids around me. I remember being in first grade, and second grade, and third grade, and moving from classroom to classroom until it was all done and I went to an alternative school to test out of high school after I got sober for the last time. Once my mother went away. Twice maybe. Once her depression had so overwhelmed her that she needed to seek hospitalization, help. Another time I don’t know where she went. She might’ve been visiting my younger brother. We had this felt material at home. I realized that I could make her a simple vest to wear using the felt, and so that’s what I worked on in the basement while watching TV for most of the day. I gave it to her at the end of the day and like most mothers she was kind and supportive of this thing I’d done. I’d never done anything like that before and I haven’t done anything like that since. I don’t understand.

I was a little fucked up kid and prone to lots of inward hatred even then. I hated school. I hated waking up in the morning. I hated my family. I hated nearly everything except television. I still hate most things. I spend most of my life trapped in my skull. My skull hates me. I hate my skull. I hate to think. I hate music. I hate recovery. I hate the AA meetings. I hate walking. I hate getting fatter every day. I hate the anger I put out into the world. I hate that my kids may know me as an middling loser. I hate that I’m so fed up. I hate America. I hate everywhere else. I hate to read. I hate to learn. I hate to see the world again. I hate sitting down to write. I hate my phone. I hate the people. I hate the street. I hate church. I hate art. I hate the artists. I hate the music. I hate the city. I hate Idaho. I hate the world. I hate the president. I hate the internet. I hate their talking. I hate my body. I hate my legs. I hate my gender. I hate my face. I hate my race. I hate the bicyclists. I hate the runners. I hate the meatheads. I hate the anorexics. I hate the actors. I hate the writers. I hate the antiseptics. I hate the writers. I hate the image. I hate Twitter. I hate speech. I hate the forest. I hate the snow. I hate the wars. I hate the films. I hate the conversations. I hate the classrooms. I hate the talking. I hate the spinning world. I hate the sun. I hate the straights. I hate the liberals. I hate the conservatives. I hate the days. I hate the stores. I hate the countries. I hate the books. I hate their piling up. I hate their opinions. I hate my fat gut. I hate the masturbation. I hate the showers. I hate the cars. I hate the windows. I hate the workers. I hate the rich. I hate the organizations. I hate the fraternities. I hate art.

I remember taking a shower downstairs and trying to meditate on thoughts of my own death. I thought of taking a rifle and putting it up under my chin sitting there in the shower and spraying my brain and blood up along the white wall for someone to come and see. I thought of going out and buying a bottle of vodka and sitting in the car taking pill after pill until things started to get blurry and then laying my seat back to ensure I choked on my own puke. I thought of going to the lake where someone had killed himself and doing it in the same way, paddling way out into the center of the water, having a cigarette or something, then jumping in and swimming as far down as I could until I choked, the taste of acid and vomit and muddy water my last experience. I thought of going over to these highway bridges by my father’s home and walking up and toward an incoming semi on the side of the road, jumping out into the middle when they were close enough and being spattered and crushed by the massive machine. I tried to breathe very heavily there and take the thoughts completely in and expel them fully when I breathed out, adding a new means of dying where that one left over and over and turning the water hotter and hotter until an hour had passed and my wife was knocking at the door, confused by what was happening.

When I was a kid I remember being inside my own head in situations where I was inside my own head later in life as well. For instance, it was rare that I would have a session with a counselor or therapist who I did not envision having sex with. As life went on it became clear that I could envision this with male and female therapists alike. The America of the present moment seemed most interested in what people have to say if they weren’t just average white heterosexual people, and for a time I emphasized my bisexuality because of that—I’m not straight but I’m boring in other ways—but it’s also a thing that was basically always there, as well as the occasional feeling of gender dysphoria wherein I see a woman and imagine being her because of the way she seems to so comfortably exist in the world. I remember farther into the past when I really felt the need to explore whatever sexual leanings I seemed to have, so I’d go online and talk with men and talk with them over the phone and it became clear then that this too was part of me. Older men mostly, I’m not sure why that was. I think I tried to explore it in Postures but I bet I failed there too. The title says more than the book ever could. I’m an opportunist dilletante little shit. I remember coming out to certain people. I’m keeping to myself. The thing always is to keep to yourself. What would you hope to know about me, given that I believe in privacy? What do you know about me, given that I believe in secrecy? Who said that? Gilles Deleuze said it. He said if I stick where I am, if I don't travel around, like anyone else I make my inner journeys that I can only measure by my emotions, and express very obliquely and circuitously in what I write. He said other things. He jumped from the window of a building when he was old and an illness was unbearable. He had no fingerprints. His fingernails were kept long because of it. My own perversion seemed to materialize in tandem with my treatment for whatever ailments I seemed to have in my brain. It started with the therapists though. First the one at my elementary school where I was seven or eight, who I’d imagine having sex with while we talked about my thoughts and I frequently lost my lines of thinking because of it. It’s rare that I’ll be in a situation with just one person where I don’t think about sexual things. It’s a problem. I’m sick to death of it. What do you know about me, given that I believe in secrecy?

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maierhofer

© Grant Maierhofer. Reprinted with permission from Shame, published by FC2/The University of Alabama Press.

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© Grant Maierhofer. Reprinted with permission from Shame, published by FC2/The University of Alabama Press.

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maierhofer