I am scared of transportation devices—planes, trains, boats, cars especially—yet I surrender to them, as we all do. I accept the lottery of life we gamble within, daily, as we move about our daily lives. As someone with a painfully loud inner narrator, I often do this, painfully.
Driving through the mountains of Northern California, I marvel at the sights of peaks capped in snow, and the subtle blooms of early spring flowers—all while monster-man has placed my mind’s eye in a speculum. Monster-man is Stanley-Kubrick-style projecting a cinematic scene of the van spinning out at the next bend—the multi-cam edit of us rolling, crushing, plummeting, becoming smaller and smaller—until we’re a ball of aluminum foil at the bottom of a paper take-out bag.
I call it “monster-man,” but self-identified shrinks on TikTok say it’s a form of OCD, at times a form of self-harm, known as ‘obsessive rumination.’ “I guess that checks out,” I can logically think to myself, while monster-man rolls its eyes and exasperatingly laments, “God forbid a girl have hobbies.”
I call it “monster-man,” because more often than not, I find the only appropriate response to be a monotone, dry—“ok, monster-man.”
It’s monster-man who tells me absurd things like, “isn’t it a shame your grandmother didn’t live long enough to see you get this skinny?” while pulling images, in pristine crystal-clear detail—deleted profile pictures I no longer have the files of, playing as a slideshow, cued up to induce embarrassment and shame.
“Do you want to re-live the moment in 2013 when you put your cat down, after he’d fallen three stories and broken his spine? We can get you there, right down to the feeling of his fur!” monster-man will announce, as we arrive to the venue for load-in. “Ok, monster-man,” the only response I can give, for the coming experience is unavoidable.
Merch boxes turned tiny cat caskets, and I am suddenly near tears—stacking my collection of dead pets to the side for Andrea to sort through. I can feel Rondo’s fur, just as monster-man promised, between my middle and ring fingers of my right hand—how it shed on contact, catching on to the dry skin of my ravaged cuticles.
Alternating picking motions of these two fingers against my thumb’s nail alleviates the sensation, replacing it with the familiar, persistent, carpal tunnel aches of my usual stims. Similar to the feeling of disgust which sets in while trapped at a full dinner table after I’ve finished eating, I can feel the turn of emotions during the transition of cuddly-cute to stiff-dead—I no longer want to pet the cat, I feel nauseous, please take it away.