Introverted Excesses

Close to a year of guitar lessons and I’ve finally learned one of my favorite songs, Beetlebum by Blur.  This song is still sex to me and was sex to me before I knew what sex really was, meaning it was at that point when sex is probably the most awesome, because it was still idealized, imagined, and perfect in a naive and hormonal teen’s mind.

I listen to it now, nearly 15 years (Jesus Christ! 15!) after I first heard it and it can still make me cry, if I’m in the mood after enough wine, and feel absolutely gutted out with the most naked longing and desire.

It was the first song I listened to before leaving for Ireland by myself when I was only 20.  Even now, I still regard as one of the best things I ever did in my life because I was fucking scared to do it.  I’m more me now because of it and I can still feel that high, tinged ever so slightly with anxiety because aren’t all the best highs in life best peppered with the slight marinade of fear.

lazybookreviews:

Contrary to what you may have heard in judgey comment sections and in the wider culture, it is entirely possible to be just as happily self-absorbed after having a baby, if you are really really committed to it! You don’t have to magically transform into a better person after all. Promise.

Which is why I’m leaving her with her dad for an evening next week so I can go see Breaking Fucking Dawn with friends like a BOSS.

Back in Boston to visit a friend while Husband’s in India because otherwise I succumb to hermit tendencies while home alone in Austin. There there is traffic on a Saturday. I’ve forgotten what this is like and enjoy being reminded. I recall the Red Line of the T where bad shit happen to both my friend and I on the stretch between U Mass and the first Quincy stop. For my friend, a homeless lady had a baby, like the true head popping out and landing onto the floor of the train in a pool of blood moment. A homeless man masturbated next to me during rush hour. Good times on Boston’s public transportation.

Trapezing has a distinct amusement park flavor to it, similar to such bucket-list activities as bungee jumping or skydiving or swimming with sharks.  Yet, safer.  Perfect for control freak, hyper-analytical, calculated risk taker types.

When you arrive at your class to learn the art of trapeze, it will most likely be composed of a small group that ranges in age from collegiate youth to women who look like your mom.  You may find yourself regarding the older ladies with a rather cocksure arrogance; perhaps because you have an innate confidence in your own sense of grace due to the many years of dance you took as a child or because you were captain of the soccer (yes, soccer) cheerleaders in high school or because your middle name is Grace.  These would be arrogant correlations to use in order assume automatic trapeze prowess. 
   
On the climb up the mast, a newly acquired fear of heights begins to emerge.   The exertion of climbing up the thirty foot tall ladder leaves you breathless and more than a little shaky.  Upon reaching the platform, the harness they’ve sausaged you into down below (because you are never fully safe until you are sausaged) is hooked onto the safety line.  Ideally the brain’s goddamned, animal self-preservation mode should just cut it out at this point but, no, that’s not gonna happen and regardless of your common sense comprehension of the purposes for both the harness and giant net below to deter  imminent death, the adrenaline-rush leaves you light headed and drained.

There is also the matter of the actual trapeze bar itself.  No one ever mentioned this.  It must weigh twenty pounds.  At least it does to arms which are trembling and fatigued from the climb up.  The trapeze master command you to lean way, way out past the lip of the platform, which is over two stories high, and grab this heavy motherfucking bar that wants nothing more than to take you with it against your will, while they hold onto the back of your harness with maybe a pinky or two.  And sorry, trapeze instructor, but you just don’t know them well enough to perform these kinds of trust exercises, even though you would like nothing better than to just be chill and normal and GRACEFUL and just do what they’re telling you to do but, damn it fight or flight instinct, this is not REAL danger, this is supposed to be fun! 

But your body continues to betray you because it doesn’t know this stranger and it’s not keen on trust exercises of any form even when it knows the person you are being asked to trust, which is probably why you were a virgin till twenty-three.  And then because everyone is standing there watching you silently panic and you don’t want to annoy anyone any further by holding up the line, you jump.  You hold on for dear life with your measly T-Rex arms, as the velocity of the arc you are swinging down into reaches its gravitational peak making you feel like a heavy, pear shaped pendulum whose bottom half weighs far too much for the upper half that spends the majority of its physical expenditure trying not to slouch over a keyboard at a desk all day to support.  And then you realize you’re screaming. 

All thoughts of performing the trick they taught you back on that cocky-ass ground vanish from your mind as the trapeze vortex hurtles you through space and time, as gravity and the laws of physics finally win out and yank your graceless, leaden, fear-stiffened body from the bar and face plant you into the net that thankfully stops you from hitting the wall like Wile E. Coyote.  You didn’t even get to enjoy the full swing and return.  The trapeze has slung shot you like a rock at Goliath.  Trapeze seems more like some abruptly interrupted zip line ride.

No one says a word as you pick yourself up and hobble across the net to disembark with as much dignity one can possess while attempting to walk on a surface akin to a deflating bouncy tent.

“Wow, you certainly are a screamer, aren’t you,” the instructor exclaims.  All you want to do is keep walking right out the door to your car and drive home.  Instead you get up there and try it again and again, with very little improvement, save that you remember to stop yourself from screaming on those go-arounds.  On your third try, you rip a hole in your palm (trapeze stigmata!) because your hands have sweat through all the chalk and you finally decide to call it a day.  You are the worst student in trapeze class but, as the instructor says to you on your way out, “Hey, you didn’t give up, did ya?”  No, you didn’t.  It is of no matter that you will never, ever attempt that again.
   

Go to bed at 2am, get up at 5 am to feed the dog who is nagging you, somnambulistically eat a vanilla cupcake with chocolate filling (thank you, Betty  Crocker Fun-Da-Middles), go back to bed.  The subsequent sugar spike and drop will tweak out your subconscious and produce incredibly vivid dreams about being forced to play poker at gun point in a parking garage amongst other things.

Also see: Prozac. It won’t really do anything for you while you’re awake but it will almost completely suppress your ability to have an orgasm and cause the daytime zombie you to feel the strongest narcoleptic pulls of your life while sitting at your desk at work, but you will dream in Technicolor about things that your normally would never dream of.