#autopsychoanalysis

When, in the dead of the night, in a feat of insomnia, you’re roaming the library like a wounded Beast trying to cover your ugly body and mind from the piercing eyes of the Beauty of the World, you might accidentally surround yourself with multiple Zizek zombie incarnations.

Angst has the meaning of Fear.  One has Angst.

That’s how the Germans think about the idea.  One can also have hunger or good feelings.

As much as German things delight me, in this case, I’m going to disagree.  I think that fear can have you.  Nicht Ich habe Angst.  Angst hat mir.

The English permutation on the word carries a number of connotations, more recently to do with social disorders, depression and rejection of authority.  Teenagers have angst in the English world.  Or they’re angsty, which can be attractive if they can pull off eye liner and a lot of black clothing.

I’ll digress for a moment.  One Halloween, and the last time by the way, I worked at a haunted farm for an evening.  The experience had a few fun moments but I’ll say that people going to these things are profoundly rude to the actors, most likely because that is the only way they can avoid falling into the fantasy and being terrified.  They use being a jackass to keep fear from having them.

Like I said, it was an experience but I’m not doing it again.

I do wonder however, because I put some good effort into my performance as a less than predictable vampire.  You pick up with a group right after the prior scare and start walking attached to their group.  At some point you open your mouth and they see the fangs and get the idea.

The real trick is to get the scream right.  I used 30 Days of Night to model the scream, it’s not an exhaling sound, you actually produce it by inhaling.  It sounds baleful and hungry and inhuman.

It also scares the shit out of little kids if you make that sound and start running towards them.  You can also get this effect out of adults.

On the one hand, I wonder with some embarrassment if I ever became the stuff of nightmares for little kids: black leather jacket, fangs, darkened eyes and that scream.  I expect that if they had bad dreams about me, they dreamt of the scream.

We can think about that as Terror, it’s not Angst.

In the English sense, Angst has a connotation of temporal, situational fear, the kind that brews over the course of years.  This is the fear that has me.

I fear that school is going to drag on even longer, that I’ll run into funding problems.  I fear that running into that right guy just isn’t in the cards.  I fear that before me is stretched a couple of decades of crummy jobs and an unceremonious and irrelevant death.  Now, I add to my fears that my creative work is doomed to obscurity, that my fiction is crap and that the sum interest that will manifest for my game is so close to nothing as makes no odds.  I fear that my best years have come and gone and that all of my efforts henceforth are just things to do to mark the time by.

There’s an eerie truth to that, because I started at least three of the six major projects I’ve done in the past year exclusively to give myself something to do that felt relevant.  I’m in desperate need of meaningful work, and I fear that the resources that I’ll need to line that up are in short supply and dwindling.

It wouldn’t be the first time that my life burned down.  I’m beating HIV, I beat an abusive home environment, I deliberately volunteered for war, jumped out of a plane and reincarnated myself from dead computer science student to reborn archaeologist.  I’m not blind to my achievements and the difficulties I’ve overcome, but this feeling is torment.

If you examine that list again, it’s full of world shattering events and affairs of import and radical periods of change.  In short, my life has been defined in its most relevant moments by a series of conflicts between people and agendas and microbes.

This horrific sensation has no sense of conflict.  I feel like I’m a predator that’s been caged in a soft, harmless cage filled with pillows and parakeets.  Who’s the asshole I’m trying to succeed in spite of?  Who’s out to wreck me?  What’s the major disaster I have to manage?

Stagnation.

Ghoulish, horrible stagnation.  That’s the feeling.  I mean I’m excited to study again and the academic schedule is sound but I’m pissed that this isn’t already done.  I know I needed the break, I know I needed each break.  Nonetheless, I was supposed to be done with this at 28.  I’m running late and it’s pissing me the fuck off and I can’t find that thing to focus that anger on that will let me put it all in order.  I feel like I lost my hatefulness and it’s weakening me.

I want back the clarity of single-minded anger, I want back “fuck the army I’m gonna go do college” or “fuck That Guy I’m gonna go do war” or “fuck this shit I’m gonna go dig up stuff.”  I can’t put my finger on it.  Fuck whatever this is, but I can’t finish the sentence pattern.

Or maybe I’m just freaking out because my game designing credentials are about to be exposed to the harsh light of peer criticism.  Maybe I’m lonesome?  I’m not sure that that’s the case, I can’t think of any realistic dudes I’m lovesick over so can’t be lovesick.  My social circle is functioning properly, hell we even have a D&D campaign that I’m legitimately enjoying.  No, it’s gotta be productivity related.

Job?  That might be it.  I’ve pretty much mastered the highly complicated and intellectual art of auto maintenance.  Sure there are things I might learn, but they’re detail/perfection things, it’s not a new challenge or process to learn at work anymore, I’m just optimizing how quickly I can pull an oil filter and replace it at this point (I actually suck at the fiddly bits, I use athleticism to keep up by jumping the stairs, saves me about 40 seconds a change.)

But then I’m dealing with the classic dilemma of my past four years.  “Dear employer, I’m a full time college student with not enough time to actually devote to you.  I’m available any day that I don’t have classes, so basically the weekends.  Won’t you hire me in this atmosphere of readily available full-time laborers?”

The alternative is debt, which I loathe even considering.  The hoops I’d have to jump through just to get some bank to agree to let me owe them money would be… degrading, frankly.  I feel like I put aside enough of my pride already when I gave up my apartment.  Being haughty may be among my character flaws but I’ve reached the limit for indignities I’m willing to endure.

There’s also the entirely valid possibility that as my doctor mentioned to me coming out of the flu I can expect increased muscle soreness for about a month and that I need to give my emotions about as much time to recover.  Chemical priorities and all, body redirecting endorphin making stuff to do anti-sick-being stuff and so on.  I’m still sore from squats I did Monday so that’s not something I should discount, I might be bummed out on account of being sick.

On the other hand, I don’t suppose I could think about it with so many items on my mind if that were all that was up.  I mean I’ve dealt with chemical depression before when I started the meds, you wake up and you’re utterly bummed out and you don’t know why, and then you say, “ah, the meds are fucking with me” and carry on, confident in having dismantled the emotional challenge with a Vulcan-esque adherence to intellectualism.

Delving into that management technique here just seems to unravel everything else.

“Why am I bummed out?”

“I might be bummed out from drugs or flu or because it’s FUCKING WINITER.  Or maybe x,y,z and complete rehash of all life mistakes.”

Yeah that one backfired.

And it makes some sense that it did, the other day I was relatively elated with good news from the doctor and projects coming together and school all set up and it was such a pleasant feeling that I could almost feel the crash coming on.  I wonder if I suffer from some kind of manic-depression disorder?  Or maybe that’s how my med side effects manifest?  Used to be I just got really drunk, I haven’t felt like that in a long time, got used to the drugs you know.

Okay, so let’s suppose that the drugs are fucking with me.  That’s sensible.  The flu could destabilize all of my functions and the otherwise managed equilibrium that I keep with the drugs could have been disrupted, leading to depression and anxiety.

The analysis feels good.  It feels good to take it apart and try and figure out where it came from.  Let’s approach it from the situational angle with the same technique.

Suppose I’m failing.  Suppose all my fears are real and I’m slipping into mediocrity as I write.  That would sure as hell bum me out.  It doesn’t seem quite as sensible though.  I just released a novella, I have a game coming out in a matter of days, I have an awesomely scheduled semester gearing up in January.

I’m also not clear on how I need to proceed to make sure that I get credit for Rome and DLI with the school.  Everyone I talk to there is clueless or a secretary whose only function seems to be obfuscating any access to the people I actually need to talk to.  The way it was the last time I imagine I’d need to wait a month to speak to the damned academic advisor and then her utility would be opening a website in front of me.  I can open a damned website on my own, can’t we just change your job title to Academic Record Gatekeeper?

Oh wait that felt pretty good.  Okay, so this is school related.  If I sort out the bullshit with the school administration I’ll feel better.  Yes.  Yes.

but then i'll look away

i'll look anywhere but at the people going through the door and if they say thank you i say "oh! no problem," like i just happened to be standing there propping the door open and they were the beneficiaries of my unwitting courtesy

why