Currently viewing the tag: "maudlin"

Night of the Hunter style

By On July 19, 2010 · In As I Am Now

shelleyIt’s hard to find a good shrink in this town. I’ve been seeing the same person for several years* and she’s the only psychiatrist I can find who takes my crappy insurance and will return my phone calls. So I go to her, even though I often get the impression that she’s not actually listening to me during our sessions. There are the times when she’s looking at her BlackBerry. There are other times when I feel like I’m on the phone talking to Antarctica or something because when I finish saying something she waits 30 seconds before responding, and she’s just…blinking at me. (This could be something they teach in Shrink School. How would I know?)

There’s also the matter of the form I fill out every time I go. All patients have to fill out the front. On the back is For Office Use Only. And it’s this rather unsettling checklist that’s meant to encapsulate everything about how the Patient is presenting that day. There are 40 or so categorized items, ranging from “Patient is ☐ dissociative” to “Patient is: ☐ over ☐ under talkative” and “Patient is dressed inappropriately: ☐ too hot ☐ too cold ☐ suggestively.” It seems like something Patient really shouldn’t be able to look at, and yet there it is.

So then when I sit down and start talking she starts working her way down the checklist, and since the couch is situated 15 feet away from where she’s sitting I can’t really tell what boxes she’s checking, which then makes me kinda anxious so I’m almost certain “Patient is: ☐ anxious” is one of my greatest hits.

Anyhow. Have I mentioned she takes my insurance?

So I have 15 minutes with her every month. She’s written a couple of books about Jungian themes in film or something like that and on more than one occasion I have left with a prescription for Ativan and the recommendation that I watch Fritz Lang’s M. Last week I mentioned something that prompted her to bring up Cape Fear, which then prompted me to wonder aloud whether the bad guy was played by Robert Mitchum or if I was just confusing it with Night of the Hunter. This prompted her to dash over to her computer, saying “I just have to find this out now, it’s going to bother me until I do,” to look it up on IMDB.

I would say that searching for trivia answers on the web during a session is an unorthodox practice, but then again, I’m a latecomer to this sort of thing.

(Oh and speaking of hunters, my mom gave me an LL Bean gift card for Christmas which has proven to be about as useful as I suspected it would. I’m having trouble finding anything I want or need, though this scary Leaf Monster suit is very appealing. It doesn’t come in small sizes though.)

*And look what good it’s done!

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Magic, fear, and superstition

By On June 24, 2010 · In Danse Macabre

It’s been fun watching the jerkwad morning news people on Fox pretend to care about the World Cup. One of them finally broke down this morning and said, “I don’t know about you but I can’t wait for the real football season to start.” I watch this sort of TV at the gym, particularly when MTV is replaying some show about Queen Latifah for the umpteenth time. (Does anyone in the MTV demographic care about her? I would think they know her only as a smart-talking, sexless sidekick in shitty summer movies.) Good for you, Fox dude. Be honest. I won’t think any less of you.

So, my gym has decided to switch from a scan-card system to — get this — fingerprint recognition. There’s not even conditioner in the showers and yet we have to pretend we’re at the NSA? (I don’t even have that technology at work. I have a card-entry door that’s been propped open since before I got here.) I balked initially until they said my other option was to show a picture ID every time I came in, which seemed somehow…inconvenient…in comparison to the theoretical intrusiveness of a fingerprint scan. Well, I figured, my fingerprints are already on file somewhere (vestige of the post-Adam-Walsh-scary-man-gonna-come-get-ALL-the-kids era) and 23andMe has my entire genetic sequence, so…two tears in a bucket, etc.

Speaking of genetics, I have been slowly tracing a very tiny branch of my family tree back 200 years. Until last week, I honestly thought that my people didn’t even come down from the trees until the 1939 World’s Fair. It turns out that no, we go back quite a ways…to Newfoundland. Newfies! It’s a wonder I can even read. Something else I’ve discovered about my family, though I can only conjecture based on the tidbits of data I’ve dug up: They were fucking miserable. (See! I was BRED to be this way!) They wended their way through the provinces, stopping for awhile in Ontario to be, from what I can tell, subsistence farmers. Look at this map. That’s Marlborough Township. See that little red rectangle? That’s the property owned by my great-great-great-grandfather and one of his sons. That’s it. At the turn of the 20th century, they got to NY, where the men worked as boilermakers and shipbuilders at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and eventually they all died of the various diseases one gets from working in the Navy Yard. This would probably explain why my great-great-grandmother was working as a laundress at a private school in Long Island in her late 60s, according to the 1930 Census. And oh, to sing of the misery on my grandmother’s mother’s side of the family. Her great-grandfather became a widower with seven kids in the early 1900s. He, too, worked at the Navy Yard. I don’t quite know what he eventually died of, but as of 1930, he was still alive…and committed in a mental hospital upstate. Meanwhile, my great-grandmother went on to get married three times and, at some point in the 60s, destroy all our family documents so that none of us will ever know anything about our ancestry beyond where they lived when their families finally abandoned them. Whee! I knew that this might be a depressing exercise, but I had no idea it would be this sad.

Now I’ve depressed myself. More. Anyhow, back to happier stuff…

Actually, this is a bit sad (but a good interview): Dr. Demento: Off The Air, But Still Happily Deranged. I loooooved listening to Dr. Demento when I was an awkward, Monty-Python-quoting adolescent.* Every Sunday night, 11 pm, on PIX 106, the Capital District’s Home of Classic Rock, with headphones plugged into my clock radio. So, to end on a happy note, here is the great Bonzo Dog Band, Tubas In the Moonlight.

*I have also seen Weird Al in concert.

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Yup, still hate work

By On January 19, 2010 · In As I Am Now

…Even after (or in spite of, depending) two giant cups of coffee. I’m feeling scattered, because I have lots of stuff to do this week and I [totally and completely lost track of what I was typing just then, because I decided to do three other things simultaneously, all of which are probably half-assed].

As such, this post will have no real narrative arc.

N and I are officially sans automobile. Last week we were trying to get our 20-year-old station wagon inspected before the current inspection expired, but our usual mechanic–who generally holds onto our car for weeks at a time, like it’s car rehab or something, and then returns to us a rejuvenated car with a more clearly defined sense of purpose–couldn’t fit us into his rather busy schedule of holding onto other people’s cars for weeks at a time.

So, our inspection expired and we drove our illegal automobile over the bridge to Greenpoint, where the mechanic wisely looked under the hood before he even began the inspection.

“You need two new struts and this hose needs to be replaced.”

N and I have discussed precisely how much money is too much to throw at a car with a Bluebook value of $50 (and that’s because it has a tape deck). “How much would all that cost?” N asked.

The mechanic motioned the garage owner over.

He started out, “Yeah, you’re looking at probably $90 for each strut, plus $65 labor for each side, plus this hose–well, the hose is like $20–but we have to remove the axle to replace it, and that’s like two hours right there…” at which point I stopped hearing anything except for an old-fashioned cartoon adding machine.

He seemed to think it was a totally reasonable amount of work.

N and I turned to each other. “Maybe we should just put it up on the Free section of Craigslist,” N suggested.

“Yeah, I guess that’s our best bet.”

And it really was a bet, because part of me was hoping that maybe the owner would make a counteroffer of, say, $75 to repair everything. But it was only a really tiny part of me. Paramecium sized.

“Well, hm,” the owner said, lighting up an unfiltered Camel [Aside: They still MAKE those? I can't believe it] and looking like he was trying to convey Deep Thinking in a game of charades. “The mechanic here needs a car.”

The mechanic looked vaguely embarrassed.

“Do you want the car?” We both asked this at the exact same time, our voices probably an octave higher because of our excitement.

The mechanic shrugged. “I could probably do something with it.”

“It’s a great car,” I offered. “Runs really well.” And that wasn’t even a lie! And even if it maybe were a little bit of a lie, the guy’s a fucking mechanic and the car is fucking FREE. Take it take it take it take it take it, I willed him telepathically.

He shrugged again. “Okay.”

I’d like to say that this was an act of altruism and generosity, or, as N’s parents would say, a “blessing.” But really, it was the opposite of selflessness. We dumped that car like it had a curse on it.

Hooray! I took the plates and registration and we marched over the bridge home, feeling a little sad. It felt like the walk of desperation you make when your car breaks down. But in this case, we were abandoning it.

Well, not quite, because the next day I marched back over the bridge to bring him the title and clear out all our cassette tapes. I patted the back hatch in a totally detached way, like I was trying to convey Old Yeller in a game of charades. Goodbye, car!

I wonder if we’ll see him driving around? Or will he opt to dump it in the East River, something we considered more than once?

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RIP Jay Reatard

By On January 14, 2010 · In Danse Macabre

There’s Roz Chast cartoon from the New Yorker, in which someone’s looking at the obituary page of the newspaper, and the headlines read “Two years younger than you” and “Your age on the dot” and it’s one of the few Chast cartoons from the past 20 years that don’t seem clueless and twee, but anyhow, I can’t even speak to how sad it is to discover that Jay Reatard, who was five years younger than I am, has died. I had no idea how young he was, because he was that much of a fucking genius.

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