Dolphin Lighter

Weight off my chest.

The hot chocolate has my name on it. The winter bends away from me as the break draws to a close. I have not seen much of the snow for I have been nocturnal. An anxiety rests within me as if a great pain will visit me but winnows away at the last moment, my hackles remain raised and my shoulders bunch.

It is not fair to say that I have grown tired of myself because that would not be the case, I am acquainted with that feeling well enough to know when it is happening and it is not happening. Even though I repeat the words over and over “I don’t want to be this kind of animal anymore.” I can’t shake it, the animal. I shop for crossbows and watch Instagram reels on my laptop and when I turn away I turn to some sedation similar enough that when I return to before I realize that I am standing in the same spot.

In part this is because I work a gruesome job where the managers say thank me with a smile and a a minimum wage paychecks. I have been slacking intentionally. Something no one will ever tell you is that when you go work a job, often your first job you will do your best because everywhere else you are told to do your best. There is no reward for doing your best when the wage is minimum. There is no one jumping at the chance to pay you more. You do enough, you do more than enough and it will not matter. I did more than my share and got nothing for it. I did less than my share and got nothing for it. Do not burn the wick at both ends hoping that they’ll give you more wax. The system does not reward effort, it rewards results. You could move a million units and there would always be more. Fulfillment centers leave me so unfulfilled. The night shift. Harrowing. Many idiots will tell you that everything is boring right now but they are wrong. Start reading books at your job.

I am filling out an application for a study abroad opportunity and the question it would like me to answer is “how have I overcome ambiguous intercultural situations?” which really just feels like they’re asking me if I am racist. I am not racist but it’s not a checkbox it’s a 650 word minimum and now I need to talk about how I love the world and the people within it, that I dislike the word “overcome” because it is similar to “triumph” and I don’t believe that there’s anything to be gained from triumphing over another culture. I don’t expect tearing apart the question itself is the answer they want to hear but so often I sit down ape like and pick flies out of my hair, gnats, grooming myself, picking apart without any intention of putting back together. I don’t want to be this kind of animal anymore.

I hope they accept me even if I duck and try to answer something they did not ask. I finished the script for a short film a week ago. I have sat on it, not revising though knowing it needs revisions, trying to figure out how to make it something real, intentional, good. I cannot suffer mediocrity in my own work which will surely be some cruel joke if you’d like for it to be. The script is layered, the story is odd, it’s quiet, I wrote it and then I read it and I realized all of the things I was trying to get off my chest and scared, like a kestrel from a car crash I flew away from the idea that personal would be powerful. I do not want to be personal. I do not like being on the internet, that when I look things up my government name comes with it, that even by telling you this, I am giving you a target, something to look for. It’s all damnation. If I do go through with it, which I will, I’ll be anxious to talk about it, I am always anxious to talk about what I do. Sometimes someone will say I’ve done something well and it shatters me in a small enough way that I can still reply in affirmation, with thanks. Pity gets most nowhere higher than the weight of their sorrow.

The film I’m writing takes place all over, the plot came to me after the symbolism did and I put it together backwards. It’s recurring that I figure things out backwards, using context that hasn’t been created to install clues and then work to the context. I read Susan Sontag’s On Photography over the summer as I climbed down the side of a mountain. I’d sprint a leg and read at any shaded nook I could find, catching my breath or balance. There’s something attractive about running down a mountain, something attractive about good writing, both catch a breath in a way the breath often disagrees with. After I finished On Photography I became scared, dreadfully scared of cameras. I had months where I felt insulted if my picture was taken, frightened if it was done without my knowing. I took less pictures. I looked at pictures less. I realized what I was afraid of was not pictures but the voyeurism I was involved in. Before this point I had a camcorder everywhere, recorded everything, found myself disappointed with it. I realized the camcorder I carried around had become a social crutch, no words need to be said with one eye on the viewfinder, people pose and continue and you kill them in that pose and that nervous little “haha is it a video or a photo” that they ask. I have hundreds of videos, of friends, of strangers, nothing truly voyeuristic, I’m not recording sex, not recording intimacy, not sticking the camera through the peephole. The camera became a shield and as the shield grew in size I shrunk, barely able to hold the weight of all of these memories hoping that just one of them would be award winning in the right degree, just beautiful enough to be bracketed on the editing timeline and turned into something pretty to post on YouTube. It was disingenuous. It was a severe emotional nudity that unhinged me even as On Photography slammed my door open, held a camera up to my naked body and hit record. I realized on the side of that mountain that there was nothing of note in the recording itself, in the videos I had taken hoping that the video would bring me closer to my friend. I hardly even shared them. What I was really achieving was drawing closer to myself. There are times for cameras. When I film my film I will be surrounded by cameras. Part of the film is about hiding behind the camera, about pathologizing the ways we survive, about not wanting to be this kind of animal anymore.

I am as scared of hiding as I am of being revealed. The future that I plan on building for myself will be in some manner nude. I cannot hide behind every mug that I sip from, I cannot build a future by destroying myself. The camera knows none of this and for too long I thought the camera knew all, cameras are only good for framing, the rest is to the actors, all the worlds a stage.

Slipping and smashing open my jaw and watching the fillings fall out of my teeth. Flipping the world on its side and bisecting it, one square squelch to another. I have not grown tired of myself, I have grown tired of not knowing that I can change, that I am pliable, that I am my own making future. I have grown tired of learning this and not putting it into effect. I’ll realize that I’m changing only in hindsight.

Last night I sat in a bar, drank a Pilsner Urquell and looked at my dolphin lighter mini bic case. Tonight I file an insurance claim.

-N