Who Decides Who's Crazy?

2 December 2006

Arsenal 3 – 0 Tottenham
Adebayor 20’
Gilberto 42’ (pk)
Gilberto 72’ (pk)

Penalty kicks never feel that great for me, and I couldn’t tell you why. Don’t get me wrong, I like getting the points, but I’d prefer a thrilling kick from 16 yards out by Rosicky or something. Penalty kicks are like, “All right, you’re a jerk, we get it, and because of that, we get a shot with about a 95% chance of scoring a goal.” Of course, if we were tied or something, and 80 minutes were gone, I think I’d be singing a different tune. My competitive urges are still rather honorable though, I have not yet fully turned into my dad, who doesn’t give two shits if Man-U goes up 4-nil on a penalty kick, he wants points, he wants you humiliated, welcome to the United! There’s probably a fair amount of swear words that would normally be inserted in there, but I’m feeling tame right now. So, my bracket for March Madness is in shambles. In fact, it’s not even in shambles, it doesn’t exist anymore, as if it had been hit by the Boxing Day Tsunami. Poof, vamoose, &c. Texas A&M lost in the sweet sixteen and Kansas lost in the elite eight; I have one final four team left standing, but of course I have them losing to A&M. We could summarize it thusly: I am fucked. Which is sad, because I traditionally do pretty well. It would appear I am back down with the rest of you people, my dynasty of top-5 finishes comes to a close. I actually wasn’t that sad when Kansas lost. Well, okay yeah I was sad, but somehow I knew that I would just love sports all the more. In fact, I may have found a major school to root for during the normal season. Sure, I can root for Mason, but they’re usually nowhere to be found on ESPN. I fell in love with the way Kansas was playing basketball in this tournament: completely sloppy, but completely athletic. They were a hoot to watch. They’d grab a rebound, chuck it down-court, and a whole three seconds after the rebound, toss it up for the alley-oop. I console myself for their loss by remembering that baseball season starts in a week. That can put anybody in a good mood. A couple of nights ago I had one of the worst panic attacks I’ve ever had, since I began getting them. I get a panic attack probably every few months due to my fear of death. Some background: I am not religious. The first time it happened was about six years ago. So, I was lying in bed, and my thoughts drifted towards death; as I envisioned the nothingness that I believe occurs upon death, the whole thing overwhelmed me: the sense of nothing, the lack of being, the end of consciousness, it hit me like a gunshot. I leapt out of bed (about as literally as that phrase can get) and ran into the living room, where I immediately collapsed. The feeling I experience at the height of these panic attacks can only be described as akin to staring death in the face, or at least what I figure death to be. Every few months, this terror seizes me. At first it only happened while I was trying to get to sleep; but in the last couple of years, it has started to come on in rather awkward settings. A memorable one was when I was taking the bus up to visit my dad, last summer I believe. We were in a tunnel, fairly close to New York City, and the fear grabbed me. I told myself over and over again to fucking stop thinking about it, stop thinking about it, think about your Dad, and the music you’re listening to, put it out of your mind. It worked: I calmed down. I’ve gotten better at controlling them, I can usually shut the anxiety down before I have to bolt and run somewhere, as happened the first time. In fact, about a week before this weekend’s 8.5 on the Richter scale, I was in the car with my roommate, and felt the panic coming, but quickly shunted it out by focusing on the automatic windows. I’ve grown fairly successful at keeping the crazy out. Sunday night, then, was like a relapse. For whatever reason, I couldn’t pre-empt the fear, and it smacked me in the face. I ended up huddled in front of my door, shivering, totally naked (awesome?). I had shouted my usual panic attack slogan, which is: “Oh my fucking God.” Somehow, my roommate hadn’t heard me, or decided to pretend he hadn’t heard me. Maybe he thought I was watching some really loud porn. I sat there for a few minutes, gathering myself and fighting embarrassment. Eventually, I managed to get up and put my boxers back on, and lay down in bed. Every time these happen to me, I feel broken and exhausted; it’s good they often happen during the night, because I can run to the respite of sleep. I’ve described my panic attacks to a few people over the years, and they sort of shrug it off: “Oh, everyone’s afraid of death.” I don’t think most people are afraid like I’m afraid. If you understood the gaping maw of non-existence that I see as death, maybe you’d begin to get a hint of the sheer terror that crashes onto me. The other side of this, though, is that I think this is because I enjoy life so much. If you ever watch me take a train or bus ride, I stare out the window the whole time, enjoying the entire experience of watching the world. I don’t care if the train goes through the seediest parts of Baltimore and Philadelphia, and I don’t care if I’ve seen them twenty times: I’ll look outside like it’s my very first time visiting Rome. Life is amazing, when you think about it: this whole world just clicking together, everything just being. Part of my continuous fascination with all of it is precisely because I’m not religious; my beliefs frame life as a natural creation, the Big Bang, &c. I treasure all of my experiences, even the most mundane. I love seeing things, and feeling them. I love hearing things too: my rich love of music is another example of my infatuation with the senses. That’s really what it is, isn’t it? I love seeing, I love hearing, feeling, tasting, smelling: my interaction with the world, on every level, is vibrant and full. Sometimes it makes me feel like I’m a little kid lost in this huge world. I just want to walk around and experience things; all of my other desires are centered around this one key feature. Maybe that’s a simple goal in life, but I think it’s a great goal. I get shivers, you know, when I listen to songs: not just a few songs, but a huge amount of them. Radiohead’s “The National Anthem” is a marked example of this: the bass line in it cuts a swath through my soul. Just thinking about it makes me twist my foot against my desk in pleasure. This song possesses me: whenever I listen to it I want to shake, to grab things and throw them around, to gyrate, to scream. It’s releasing, energizing, the opposite of the panic attacks: whereas those drain me, songs like this fill me up, they charge me. I’m listening to it right now and I want to take hold of my computer monitor and pull it out if its sockets, swing it like a lasso and catch me some bulls. My love of sensation has ingrained in me a huge delight with life, and because of that, death scares me more than anything I could possibly imagine. I want to keep eating food, I want someone to touch the upside of my arm delicately with their fingernails, I want listen to Radiohead, the Ramones, the Velvet Underground, Beirut, The Smashing Pumpkins, and Joy Division and just groove, I want to watch trees roll by, but more than anything I want to touch soft grains of sand, let them slip through my fingers, as I lie right there on the beach, my face inches away from the beach as the sand rains from my hand back to the earth. I want to smell fresh air after a night rain, and watch snow waft down from the clouds. I want to taste hot sauce, and watch sad movies. Oh, the perfect song just came on. No, not “The National Anthem.” Feist. “I Feel it All.” I really do. I feel it all, and it’s all amazing.