ZAMM

Maybe I did the right thing. I turned down that new company and their offer of a 15% raise. I still don't know why I did that. It feels like the wrong thing now, but I was trying to listen to my intuition. I am re-reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance at the behest of a friend of mine who did a Tarot reading on me and found that almost every card looks like I'm stuck. She had an intuition that there was a book I needed to re-read, a book that I'd been reading when I had my first knowing about addiction. It was her theory or intuition that I'd missed something in that book, that I had been presented with a fork in the road and had chosen the wrong path out of fear. ZAMM sprang immediately to mind. I hadn't read it since I was 20.

Back then I was finishing up a long stretch of intensive whiskey drinking. The King and I had decided one night as we were locked in another hot game of Lakers vs. Celtics on the Sega Genesis (I playing Phoenix so as to control Tom Chambers, the ultimate weapon, he had that swooping and unstoppable double pump floater from the far wing -- seriously the most devastating video game move I've ever encountered. The only thing that kept me from scoring every time was my own capacity for boredom. What I ended up doing was trying to keep within striking distance and then coming back in a mad rally with Chambers scoring that floater from all over the floor, his pixellated blond shag knifing through the crowd, while the King mashed the buttons of his controller and stared at the screen with fixed smile of pure hatred) that we would continue to drink, for 90 days, exactly what we'd had to drink that night, which as it turned out was a fifth of cheap whiskey.

The end of the 90 day stretch coincided with my birthday. I remember Detroit was cold and dark then, buffeted by winds and intermittent thaws which left large patches of sodden earth exposed and the streets perpetually shining with moisture. I was so sick from all the whiskey that I could barely make it out of bed. I dragged myself to my classes, green and bloated, and then I dragged home to the whiskey and the King and another game of Lakers vs. Celtics. After we'd finally finished I'd take myself up the stairs and collapse in the bed. I couldn't sleep. I read more ZAMM. On my birthday I was lying in bed with a terrible hangover, reading ZAMM and it happened, it seemed that the world inverted for me and I became a ghost trapped behind glass and I lay there while wave after wave of fear washed over me. Eventually my fear of lying still overpowered my fear of movement and I got up and went to class in a daze. I remember thinking that something essential had broken inside me. I didn't identify so much with the antagonist in ZAMM, that is, I didn't feel that I'd fallen off an intellectual tightrope, but I did feel as if the some essential buffer had been removed and that I was grinding against the hardness of life. I understood the problem in the book on an emotional level.

Poor sap. What a mess I was. It was raining. I was wearing a thin leather coat. My professor stared at me with concern and kindness as I smoked a cigarette and babbled something about Kant (even in my outcast state I didn't anyone to think I'd had a breakdown over a pop-cultural darling like ZAMM. If I was going to lose my mind I wanted it on the record that I'd done so over some recondite work of philosophy, that I'd been devoured in some remote jungle of ideas). Nothing was real. Not even my own voice. The hallways echoed unpleasantly. The rooms were too large. The people buzzed like insects. I couldn't intellectualize it. It was in my body, in my ears. I drove home in a panic. It was in my hands. Whatever I touched became unreal. Even the dogs became unreal, they seemed like fiendishly clever constructions of stuffing and glass.

So I'm reading ZAMM again. And it's not half bad. And I'm waiting for the answer to come. The book posits that being stuck is a requirement for answers. Well, good, because I'm good and stuck. And I'm still not sure I should've turned down that job.