So this is Macarena, and I captured this image of him while he slept peacefully, as quiet and still as a newborn babe. I'll tell you more about him later. He's the one who got me into this idea of the 30-day Kill Your TV Challenge. He leaves messages that taunt me on his voice mail answering machine, he interrupts my day with heckling, and he even once called NPR to complain about me.
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But I don't want to talk about that guy right now. I want to talk about anxiety.
See, I'm working through a flawed premise here. I mean, I don't even watch tv, so it's really not that big of a deal for me to give it up. It will be harder to give up Netflix, but much harder to stop the periodic checking of email and social networking sites throughout the day. This isn't Walden. While I'm curious about what life might be like if I stripped it hair's breath closer to what seem like essentials, I can't claim that I'm doing much at all.
But, in talking about tv, and the Internet, and diet, and nutrition, and the dog, I sit here very much a crabby weary veteran of a year that's just begun. I'm sick of 2011 and we're only four months in. I'm tired of peanut allergies and autism and the Tea Party and dubstep and staying indoors and World of Warcraft and the health insurance debate. I'm sick of being poor. I'm sick of the noise, the constant buzz around me that never seems to die down. I'm sick of being alone and I'm sick of being apart. Just like you, unless you're some damn monk, I'm a map of anxieties about gluten and grass-fed cattle and getting up and going to bed.
I know a little bit about anxiety, from a medical perspective. I once had a panic attack and it was one of the most frightening experiences of my life.
Late in my career as a college writing teacher, I was standing in front of the class, and a sudden wave of absolute fear came over me. I began sweating uncontrollably. Class had just begun.
I felt as though I couldn't breath. I know people often talk about this experience as an analogue to drowning. And it felt not as though I was drowning - it really felt that I was drowning.
I told the class that I suddenly felt sick and told everyone to leave. The students stared at me, slightly worried, but mostly relieved, I think, that they were getting the time off.
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From there, I drove straight to the hospital. I was convinced I was dying.
They admitted me and I vaguely remember talking to an older doctor. He was prescribing anti-anxiety medication for me. At the time, I didn't have health insurance, and he explained that the treatment options for me were limited.
At one point, a police officer burst into the room. He stared at me, and I stared at him.
The doctor asked him what was wrong.
"Nothing . . . I just heard . . . there was a problem."
We had been talking quietly the whole time, so this made me feel even stranger. It was as though I had somehow projected my sense of absolute confusion, even though we had been talking with civility and with a great deal of objectivity about my experiences.
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The medicine he gave me had terrible side effects. The next day, I dragged myself out of bed and managed to get to a local Burger King. I hadn't eaten in a day. The sky in town looked brown, like filthy water. Inside, the customers began to seem reptilian. I didn't feel threatened by them - I felt completely invisible to them. It was similar to the scene in the film version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where the casino patrons become lizards.
When I got home, I threw away what remained of that medication and have never again tried to take a medication to relieve anxiety.
That was over six years ago. Fortunately, I have never experienced it again, although, because I still have no idea what brought it in, I occasionally get a slight chill wondering if, and when, it might strike again.
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And I mention this because, well, when it comes to anxiety, we get fucked in all ways. Medically, technologically, emotionally. Technology has somehow conditioned us to keep watering it, to stroke it, to keep tickling its binaries at the expense of relationships and sleep and work and self-worth. It's as though modern technology has outpaced us in evolution: it has created the must full-proof system for reproduction ever known, better than the cockroaches. It seemlessly propagates while we gleefully fork out cash to keep the digital parasites fed. The wormy little lines of ones and zeroes are feasting on our brains!
So, if I'm going to spend the next month or so confronting the nature of anxiety, it seems I'm also going to be doing it within a specific context: that of technology.
And I will do so without reference to Heidegger or to the Levellers. I simply want to see for myself.
As an epic poet might call out to the Muses to inspire him to sing, I ask, oh Muses, only to see, please. Just a little light.
I'm afraid it isn't clear just yet.
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