A Glimpse Into an Anxious Mind

       There's a game I like to play on my way to and from school on the Port Authority Trans Hudson train. See, if I just stand still holding on to the monkey-bar-looking handles that swing back and forth like every other sap, I'll lose it. I can't keep my mind still, ever, for good reason. If I stop for a just a second, I have no other choice but to think about all the stuff I have to do, even if I don't have to do it for three weeks or more down the line. Obviously it's the same reason I can't fall asleep at night unless I'm liquored up or hopped up on Tylenol PM or, very rarely, everything in the universe is in its absolute right place and I can lie still.

       I'm digressing. The game I like to play is really easy, and I doubt I'm the chief inventor or anything like that. What I do is, I make all the people on the train or on the streets or anywhere else characters in a little book or play or movie going on in my head. The movie has been screening since birth. I make the situations starting from the moment they were brought onto Earth, what they are doing at the moment I first encountered them, and what they are going to be doing later on in their lives. You might think this is just regular Dave being judgmental, but that's only half-correct. Every story needs its characters and I'm making mine the way I want them. If you can't have control over your own life, you might as well get a hold of somebody elses, even if its just over your morning coffee.

       For example, the couple in their mid thirties on Monday morning's commute are holding hands and both of them look very nervous. The girl on the left is named Marge and her husband's name is Maxwell, but he goes by Max. In high school everyone used to call him Maxwell just to make him mad. He developed a whole inferiority complex over the second syllable in his first name, for Chrissake, but learned to take it out on the football fields as a linebacker. He even got recruited to play some crummy D2 school out of high school. Lucky for Maxwell, Marge has a thing for the jocks, and they started dating at the end of sophomore year.

       Now Marge is a 2nd grade teacher on the upper west side, but it's possible she teaches art, too, now that her school had to start cutting out some employees. She's nervous, and not just because she's afraid of her colleagues getting the ax, but because she's expecting, 6 months, pregnant in fact. Maxwell, who heads an air-condition installation business, has been entertaining the idea of cutting and running, but it's just because he's anxious (it's their first kid, after all). He won't leave her, though, and they will raise a beautiful daughter. They will move out to the suburbs of Putnam County in March of 2015, just when their little girl, Rebecca (named after Marge's mother), is about to start first grade and Marge is pregnant with their second child.

       I create these people in my head in about 15 seconds, and then jump rambunctiously to the next person. Of course these people are real, they have flesh and clothing and feelings, and so they are real but I like to imagine who they are without knowing a damn thing, or only a few damn things about them. And chances are I've done the same thing to you, before I met you and became close with you (and I am very happy I did, become close to you, that is).

       Sometimes I let the people do the same thing to me. I turn my head so they can see my rat's nest mullet, or I swivel my board around so they can wonder what the hell "BEAT IT, YA' VAL JERK!" means, or I play with one of my dangly dagger earrings and let them make a character out of me. You might call this posing, but again, you'd only be half-correct. I mean, I suppose I am posing, but so do we all, and you're a fool if you think you're any different. No one is truly "I-don't-give-a-shit-about-nothing" the way we like to think we are. Whether you acknowledge it or not, you are a character in somebody else's storyline running in his or her mind.

       Take one of my fellow-students in my English class: an obtuse, bulging boulder of a woman. She certainly goes out of her way to make herself a character, and in the story of my life, she is one of the biggest villains around. She makes a point to tell the class "I don't like ta' reeeeeeeed. I got a three year old kid and it's taken us a year to get through dis' APHA-bet book and we still ain't done with it." Hardy-fucking-har. What are you doing in an English class, then? She makes me sick. To be honest, all those women in their twenties who get knocked up and bring a kid into a crummy world make me sick. Call me insensitive, like I don't know already. Why should I feel sympathy for them?

       Sometimes, just to make myself angry, I look over at her in class. She never talks, unless it's to tell us that she would have killed the dog in the book, Z For Zachariah as some kind of gag as if she wants to have a laugh with the class. She always has this terrible look on her face: her paper-thin eyebrows are always raised in a fixed state over her tiny spectacles, lips puckered up like she's Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson or like she's surprised at something even though she's not either of those things. It's a face that makes me know she's destined for a job at the Department of Motor Vehicles, or upstairs in the Registrar's Office; another sticky red piece of tape in the rubbish-heap of bureaucracy just to get back at Earth for dealing her a crummy hand. She leaves the absolute second that class is done. She makes me hate her and she makes me hate myself even more than I hate her for caring so goddamn much about my caring. I'm depressed just thinking about it.

       Yes, the woman is a villain but sadly, most people start off as villains in my storyline. We can only go by our life's experiences, and mine have shown me how ugly people can be (myself included). Therefore, my instinct is to assume that somebody is not a good person. It's a habit I desperately want to correct but I just don't know how and someday when I'm in therapy, this is the chief illness I want my psychologist to correct. Sure, there are so many wonderful people in my life, so many in fact, I often think I don't need anybody else at all. And hey, you! I'd bet my Arizona money that you reading this are one those wonderful people. But I can't help but think you're just an exception to the general trend, and I feel sick around my throat and hot around my forehead to tell you that. I am genuinely sorry.

       Every once in a while you will come across the people who make the day worth it. They can be the most insignificant extra in the storyline, just like the woman in my English class. But, unlike the woman in my English class, these people stand for something good and allow a fragment of hope for the future to seep into my life.

       Take the man in the Christopher Street PATH station. His only job is to make sure young punks and money-less thugs don't hop the turnstile. Now, think about that: your occupation, your one task for the day is to snitch on the people who don't have a buck seventy-five, and watch the people who do have the cash carry on about their lives. Sounds awful? But instead, my friend a few dozen feet below street level chooses to make it the most exciting job in the world. You might think he was an astronaut by the way he decides to carry himself. He always smiles and shakes your hand, or more often, holds out his fist to give you a little pound as you walk in and out of the station. "Alright! Alright! It's Thursday people! You know what that means? One more day until Friday! Look alive!" Then, noticing me- "Whoa! We got the disciples of Tony Hawk in the building! Give it up, y'all!"- offering a salute and a pound. He is the one person in the world who can call me Tony Hawk just because I have a skateboard, and I will not only be not frustrated, I actually enjoy it. I smile and laugh and ask if I missed the uptown train, and he grins and tells me, "Yeah, something like that. Don't worry, there's one in ten minutes," and so, I end up not worrying and my anxiety is erased, at least for the moment.

       I think about this man a lot and why he chooses to keep himself so positive with a job that so many people would consider “meaningless”. My closest friends have tried to explain to me that some people are just genuinely nice, so then I feel lousy for bringing him up. But sometimes I think it's a matter of geography; that it has a lot to do with the fact that he is in a job quite underground, separated from everything else that makes up the sad reality of life upstairs.

       So if you're wondering why I haven't been updating regularly, it's because I don't really have time, and if you want to complain to me, you can find me at Madison Square Park, looking at teenagers obsessed with comic books, admiring little siblings riding Big-Wheels or spying on young couples, as I try to convince Sam to hold Emily's hand for Chrissake.

       Say your prayers for me.