A Musical Note

You still wake up to an alarm clock, though you rarely have anything to do anymore; it makes you feel productive, that radio alarm clock, a productive, informed member of society.

Riiiiiing.

“Gooood Morning, Heartsville! / This is Tank comin' atcha. / The voice of reason, the voice of the season…”[1]

            Smacking the alarm clock, you regretfully climb out of bed. You’re grumpy at the moment, but it’s worth it because you need to feel like you have a purpose. (“It’s that little flame that lights a fire under your ass.”[2])  And waking up early is just what it takes.

“…the student-run radio station here at Heartsville High…”[3]

In high school there was purpose.  You had energy and expectations and hope for the future. “There is a chance that [you] can make it so far / [you] start believing now that [you] can be who [you] are.”[4] And you did believe that you could be who you are. You could succeed. “[You] can do that.”[5] 

And they encouraged you. Your parents perhaps, your peers, teachers- many people did. “You’ll be swell! You’ll be great! / Gonna have the whole world on the plate!”[6]

Later, you found out that all the fame (“I'm gonna live forever / I'm gonna learn how to fly”[7]) and success was not so possible.  You’d graduated from college, and all of a sudden, the thoughts occurred to you, “what do you do with a B.A. in English? What is my life going to be?”[8] You thought of all the adults you knew, and how they had regular, boring sorts of jobs, and how you had always kind of assumed that you were special.  You thought to yourself, “please, God, please, don't let me be normal!”[9] But you were forced to settle down with a job, and “your life [became] a routine that repeat[ed] each day.” [10] You understood that “no one cares who you are, or what you say.”[11] You realized that you were “facing a dying nation of moving paper fantasy / listening for the new told lies,” [12] and that nothing you did was going to change that. Walking down the street, everyone else could “'look right through [you] / walk right by [you] / and never know [you were] there”[13] This was not how you had expected things to go.

It had all started one day, one morning, one of those days where you could just feel that something was about to happen. “Could it be? Yes, it could. / Something's coming, something good.”[14] And indeed! On your way to your not-so-exciting job, past the drug store, but before the park with the blind homeless man, you saw her. “Yes, I knew my morale would crack / from the wonderful way that you looked!”[15] you thought to yourself. You walked beside her; not too close to be creepy, but close enough to be sure you would be noticed.  But she didn’t acknowledge your presence, and not the next week either, when you passed her again. “Everyone gets noticed, now and then, / unless, of course, that personage should be / invisible, inconsequential me!”[16]  Why does she not look?

But then you decided that this was getting ridiculous, that you were not going to meet your future wife without a little more work on your part. So finally, after a few months, you got up the courage to stop her, and to talk to her. “[You] hit it off right away.” [17]

“Throwing a football or swimming in pools,”[18] you enjoy doing everything with your new friend.  Thus, when you asked, “Sometime, do you think we could fall in love?”[19] You gave her a ring, and inquired about the far future.  Because “When you propose, / anything goes.”^[20] All was good, “so, [you] started living together.”[21]

“Who knew? Fantasies come true.”[22] Your fantasy, the one you had developed over and over again on your lonely way to work, became a reality.  For a few months that is, before her insanity stepped in.  She had understood that “From […] a feeling she's getting too old / a person can develop a bad, bad cold!”[23] But this was more then a bad cold that she was developing. You’d come home from work and find her crying, “Bat monster! Bat monster!”[24] The voices, the hallucinations, who knew where they were coming from. All you knew was, she needed them to go away.

“I don’t know how to love [you,]”[25] you said, as you watched her writhe in pain.  She had been calling for death, “Bleed me, beat me.  Kill me. Take me, now! Before I change my mind.”[26]  She became so desperate- you could see it in her mannerisms; hear it in her voice and her words. She needed your help to end her suffering.

In some cases, “The more you ruv someone, the more you want to kill ‘em.”[27] And on some level, this was one of those cases. She got so sorry, so needy. She had attempted suicide on multiple occasions, but had failed at each account.  You couldn’t stand to see her suffering, her crying, her pain.  Finally, she made, made you step in.  You told her, “Be my lover, and I’ll cover you.”[28]

You did.

“Oh, see, see how I die!’[29]

But you turned away then, you had to deny her final wish- you couldn’t stand to see this happen.  You “leave her, leave her, [and] let her be now.”[30] Only when her body was quiet did you dare to reenter the room.  You stared at her, all silent and stiff in the bed, and it was then that you began to absorb the implications of what you had done.  “But I only did what you wanted me too.  Christ, I'd sell out the nation, for I have been saddled with the murder of you.”[31]

There are the cops, the lawyers, the therapists, the judges. You used to know you had done the right thing, but they began to wear you down. “You've started to believe / the things they say of you / you really do believe”[32] that you are a murderer. They said that you would be “damned for all time,”[33] and you believe it.

People screamed at you, “I'm amazed that men like you can be so shallow, thick and slow.” [34]

“You're very wrong!” [35]

 “How could you ever have done that?”

But somewhere you thought, “I betcha you would have done the same!”[36]  She was in pain, so much pain. Yet maybe you understood that while “sometimes [you’re right / [and] sometimes [you’re] wrong,” [37] “that was wrong! So wrong!” [38]

            That’s when you got pretty depressed yourself, and perhaps you experimented with “Hashish” [39] to compensate. “I'd like to be not evil,” [40] you decide, “but a little worldly wise.” [41]

 “Cocaine / Marijuana / Opium / LSD.”[42] Maybe you became discouraged, and visited a therapist in hopes that he might “bring [you] to the light.”[43] The man with the clipboard was full of “harmony and understanding; sympathy and trust abounding.”[44]  Still, you were scared to open up. You thought you had a decent grasp of your situation, but he asked, “if you're so wise / then tell me - Why do you need smack?”[45]  You started wondering. In the past, it was always “put down the bottle and we’ll say no more,”[46] but for some reason, this time, this new approach, wheels turned.

            “I should tell you, I should tell you,”[47] you decided.

“No day but today.”[48]

So you opened up to him, and you shared your story.

            Sometimes when you wake up to your radio alarm clock, you do have places to go. Sometimes you usher in the theater where you spent many long nights, now decades in the past.  You never forgot her, you never got over her, but you did learn to deal. And being someone else for a few months, a singing, dancing person whose conflicts are solved in a three hours time, that played a big role. You’re not quite “happy in the end,”[49] but sometimes you’re content. “Who could ask for anything more?”[50]

Boxland

We went for a walk on Shattuck- we went into lots of stores and talked to the employees.

            “We’ve come for your recycling. Do you have any cardboard boxes we can have?”

            We went behind the curtains, where no regular customers are allowed to go. We filled our arms with cardboard boxes.

            At a bike store, we got two bicycle boxes filled with bicycle boxes. We had to drag them; they were so huge. Mia wanted all the bicycle boxes, but we told her no, two sets was enough, They barely fit into the car as it was.  She wanted to homeless man’s boxes as well, but we wouldn’t let her take those either, It wasn’t nice.

            We built boxland with cheep, stinky dollar store duct tape.