The Bats, “Fingers of Dwan” from Free All the Monsters
I forgot to chomp my many special pills before walking out the door for my “thrice-weekly” appointments with the shrink. I realized this before I reached the Good Man’s office, but couldn’t afford to turn around and get well… so in I went for what turned out to be a 100-minute long session. About school. About me. finally. returning. to. school. And the paperwork that such a thing entails.
By the time we’d hooked these banal tasks up to my bloody psychic innards, and connected my major depression to the physics of essays unfinished, research coming apart like a leaf from a legal pad dropped in the ocean… well, by that time I really began to notice that I was missing my medication.
For me there was one kind of shame that accompanied the acceptance of psycho-pharmaceutical help, another that came with recognizing the side effects and their impression upon my living, and yet another that resides in the recognition of actual, physician-induced chemical dependency upon them. I returned home to my paperwork: in this case, a plea for just a few more weeks’ extension of my leave of absence before I will allegedly return in glory to academic study. I have crawling skin, an itchy brain, saggy eyebags that feel pierced and penetrated and lacking only tears. I cannot even urinate without some pyscho-somatic diversion rising up. Dental dams and butt plugs, anxiety and depression. It’s taken me hours to do the mere cutting and pasting necessary to complete my overdue minute task, yet another temporary admission of defeat, the sort of which you’d think I’d be used to by now.
Out of charity or some other perversion, the two kind blokes I know enough to like in Ann Arbor have invited me out to a nice rock show tomorrow night (Easy Action, feat. John Brannon of the Negative Approaches and Laughing Hyena.) I hope by then I can “muster up the gumption” to want something besides this house to pant in.
My wife bakes these cookies with a zesty orange peel frosting that I cannot resist, and now is the kind of time that one succumbs to targeted overeating, which produces a targeted self-loathing. Better to loathe your body, and your inability to discipline it, than to put on trial the totality of your being. It happens again and again. Maybe you can see now? I’m not getting my ass back in school soon because I’m better; no, it’s just that the comforts and security afforded to a sick person have become unbearable.
Anywho, the Bats. Like the Teenage Fanclub of today, they’re in no hurry about anything. Don’t you dare say this track sounds like 10,000 Maniacs, because it damn well doesn’t. And unlike with Teenage Fanclub, rock critics will perpetrate drone strikes on your home if you ever speak ill of the Bats. (If you are mean about The Clean, I’m sorry, but it’s off to Abu Ghraib. Fuckers’ll desecrate holy books in your presence without even asking your denomination.)
Forgot again. It’s pill time again. The Bats album’s stopped playing a dozen minutes ago.
