The Fantastic Fear of Everything
Tuesdays suck for me.
I don’t know what they are like for you, but if you were to combine Wayne Newton played loud (or played at all…I hate my parents…to this day), stale marshmallows, the weird sensation of the skin of a live snake as you reach in your eighth grade girlfriends terrarium, and the sight of gutted-deer-road-kill on a slow turn on the highway between Big Sur and Monterey packed in a car of wanna be modern hippies who only do gummies (won’t bong it) and think yoga makes them cool or untouchable. Something like that. Different? Nah. That’s the wrong word.
Tuesdays make me want to cry. Like I almost did in that car. Fucking Beth had to say ‘awwwwwwww, poor little deer’ while Derek was like ‘that’s wicked’ and my eyes were swelling up, but if Derek saw me…it’s like last Tuesday when I almost cried, but the guy at Chipotle said my name and I had to walk up and get my already getting cold to the point of mildly palatable burrito, so I stopped almost crying…kinda like that…I just stop and fake smile.
The trick to fake smiling is imagining that the guy slowly pressing the register keys at Chipotle, or wherever you eat fast, shitty food, is your old high school principal. Not that it’s about an old dude working at Chipotle because that is neither funny or not funny. It just is. A thing. Not a usual thing, but it’s semi-normal, or should be thing. The principal thing is more about it bringing back, for me, having to pretend I didn’t just ditch third period to stare through the window from outside the school into Jenny Lynn’s math class. We didn’t have any classes together. Not fucking one. I got 20 minutes at first break and maybe another 20 at lunch. The line at the cafeteria was way too long and I always danced in place, peeved as all get out, anticipating passing by her picking white bread and peanut butter out of her braces from a safe distance.
‘I’m a normal kid Principal Issacs. Hi. What’s up?’
Every shitty thing that has happened…most likely happened on a Tuesday.
Not all the shitty things…ever. I mean shitty things that happened or will happen, and they will happen, to me…they happen on Tuesdays.
Most of them.
Friday mornings for some reason are of an unusual height on the bar graph . Like just the morning part. By noon/one o’clock, mostly clear.
How do I know that Tuesdays and some Friday mornings and occasionally Sunday afternoons (that’s when I used to start getting nervous about school on Monday and it’s kinda stuck…like still)…I know all of this because I have been journaling since I could spell. Well, before then because I have pages with ‘kat’, ‘pasgetty’, and ‘perskrichun’ written on them.
When I endured being 14. Sometime in that year, I titled the journals The Fantastic Fear of Everything (Especially on Tuesday).
So, to answer your question…
Wait, that wasn’t a question. It was a statement.
Did I say that out loud? Is there anyone else here?
To explain why, to anyone that might have heard me…that’s part of the explanation.
Reading back, it doesn’t sound like much of an explanation.
To sum up…
Why? Who am I? The meaning of being born, why do I feel like something is smothering me, franchised bagels, porn, fruit in Jello, that fucking Jenny Lynn, I hate my belly button, those pants everyone is wearing look like shit on me. Why?
Do I smell? I think I smell weird.
Do you think flies ask themselves ‘why is he swinging that hand towel so close to me? Is he…is he after me?’
I feel bad sometimes (while at the same time feeling super frustrated) if I miss a couple of times and I’m trying to spy him, but he keeps flying passed the Nagal print that hangs in my bathroom and I lose him. I fucking hate that.
There he is.
Fucker.
Hold on.
I’m gonna nail this sucker. I’ll be back.