I don’t know why, since what we talked about was so depressing. It’s times like these that make me realize that Eric knows what he’s doing after all. I can talk about seemingly random stuff and somehow he puts it all together, and in the end I feel a little better, without having a clue why or how.
Twenty-One
Zeus’s punishment of Sisyphus at first seems comparatively kind and gentle. It didn’t involve fire or serpents or destruction. While Gods and mortals battled it out around him, people getting murdered and kidnapped and beheaded, there was Sisyphus, bound to his quiet task of rolling the rock up the hill.
He just kept trying.
Up, up, up.
Until it was time to go down, down, down.
Uncle Freestyle says that when the sun rises, the hungry lion knows he must catch the slowest gazelle or starve. When the gazelle rises, he knows he must run fast to escape the lion. Whether you are a lion or a gazelle, when the sun rises, you better be running.
Go to school
Do my homework
Pass my tests
Take on more work hours
Eat
Be nice to people
Stop chemicals
This is my list of goals that my teacher, Ms. Dally, made me do.
It should be easy, but I don’t know how normal kids do it. Do they try hard in school for the good marks? For the praise from their parents? Or because of the guilt? Do they attend classes because they actually like it? When they sit down to do homework, is that all they see in front of them—their homework? I just don’t get it.
I try to be normal. I clean off the kitchen table before dinner, sharpen my pencil, and open up my textbook. My eyes stare at the page. It’s torture. School work is part of some alien world. There’s no intensity in it. It’s just “doing.”And I’d rather be high or answer the phone or fight with my mother. There’s this whole chaotic world swirling in my mind while I stare at these tidy textbook pages and try to learn about soil profiles and dangling participles and factoring equations and Je suis, Tu es, Il est. And I just can’t bring myself to that clean, linedpaper calm. It’s like standing in the middle of a hurricane and someone passes you a book and asks you to recite poetry. And you’re just, like, what the fuck? I can’t do this now. Don’t you see what’s happening around us?
I try. I really, really try.
I spend two weeks going to school and I work on the weekends. I only smoke dope—no chemicals, drinking, pills, or coke. I take extra shifts at the clinic so that when Ally calls, I tell her I’m too tired to go out.
But being sober all the time is boring. That’s just a plain fact. So is chilling at home. There are only so many movies you can watch, books you can read, only so many times you can listen to music, before you just feel like you’re rotting away. And when you get bored, it’s like falling into this sucking, trapping black hole that swallowed all the shit you usually successfully avoided thinking about when you’re busy or stoned. And then you’re stuck down inside all that guck, and it’s awful.
So I try to keep out of that hole by doing sober things. I decorate my bedroom wall with magazine photos, creating a huge floor-to-ceiling collage. I finish a book almost every two days. And I decide to get an early start at making the animals’ Christmas toys for work. Christmas is my favourite time to be at the clinic. It’s also a good way to get out of spending all day cooped up with my mom and Crystal and Freestyle and whatever assorted boyfriend my mother has at the time. I have a good excuse to leave the apartment for a few hours in the afternoon, and when I come back everyone is so drunk they barely notice my return. I started the tradition two years ago, when I began volunteering. I make little presents for every animal that has to stay in the hospital, whether they are sick or just abandoned by their families who’ve gone on fancy vacations. And on Christmas Day I borrow Freestyle’s stupid Santa hat, jingle some bells, and go cage to cage to give each animal its gift.
I can’t predict exactly how many dogs, cats, rabbits, and whatnot there will be, so I start my sketch ideas in October and make at least