More Harm Than Good
The night before my roommate’s appointment, we taped an anatomical diagram of the head and neck onto the dartboard at Flounder’s and just went at it. We knew so little about legitimate rituals back then because we didn’t have the internet. I accidentally left a piece of black tourmaline in my lunch sack overnight and then the next day the toaster broke, but I’m not sure those things were related. We’d spent the whole day ironing out my roommate’s identification card for student health services and then subjecting it to the traumas of the laminator in an effort to make things appear more official. Needless to say, my roommate was listless and agitated and couldn’t partake in any self-medication aside from a transcendental meditation cassette tape and some eucalyptus-infused tube socks. I read aloud from an Erica Jong book I had never returned to the library, but that made things worse. An article in Sassy once described how some people are most comfortable in the role of caretaker, and will therefore wilt when having to assume the role of patient, or maybe that was a research piece from Eighteenth-Century Studies. I began to wonder if my roommate’s spirits would be lifted if I demonstrated unfortunate behavior, such as hyperventilating upon discovering a water bug in my bra, or downing a caplet handed to me by a man dancing his marionettes to Boz Scaggs on the corner. This was before we had what is today known as a sheet mask, and people got high on things other than bath salts, so instead I staged a tableau vivant of The Death of Marat where Marat was actually a doctoral student in a nude leotard covered with shaving cream and sick in the bathtub from Mountain Dew sours, which I still avoid. When addressing groups of prospective graduate students, I always close with this advice: find yourself a roommate strong enough to lift you from the depths of your worst idea. What is a node, anyway? I had written on the side of the bathtub in cherry Chapstick, but I’m uncertain if the message was ever delivered.
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Late August Edition
Kids today have no idea what a thrill it was to flop the JC Penney catalog open on a lap and peruse both the toys and the fashions intended for back to school, even if nothing would meet the dress code’s rigid standards. My roommate’s dissertation began with one such statement, followed by action sculpture involving decommissioned fluorescent bulbs and handfuls of confectioner’s sugar representing the after-product of tears. I recalled how Seventeen convinced me I would turn heads in blue mascara. My boyfriend claimed no memory of back to school or riding the bus to school or sitting in a classroom, only the hours he spent standing in a cinderblock smoking shanty getting rained on and feeling something weird on his tongue. With this information my roommate blanched and returned to a typewritten tract about how memories are an indication of depth, and certain case studies are as fruitful as a shoebox filled with cedar shavings. I remembered my friend Starla who shoplifted so many items it was like watching a tumbleweed romance a littered fairground. At the fair, my charge was to sell raffle tickets using any means necessary, including spitting, intimidation, flagrant catcalls. After I dispensed their change, the fathers got right back in line. It was late August and excitement was limited. My roommate’s dissertation included a multimodal component where I was asked to pee on an upholstered wing chair. Even after a quart of Hawaiian Punch I was unable to perform. Of course the chair represented unresolved friction with the bourgeoisie. My boyfriend claimed that the first time he set his wallet on fire it was an accident, and after that he realized he liked it.