Saturday night finally broke me- not that I haven’t been broken before during this year but Saturday finally did me in. The cause? Simply trying to find something to watch. Nothing is appealing to me anymore and anything anyone recommends isn’t gonna do it because I just might be tired of TV? I’ve realized the itch that I’m trying to scratch is found in a conversation at 11:35pm with someone’s weird friend in town at a house party I wasn’t expecting to be at. The fulfillment I’m looking for comes when an outfit surprisingly clicks when you thought you had nothing to wear and there’s going to be a photobooth at the bar you’re going to. So scrolling through every single streaming service is doing nothing for me because what I truly want to do is not be anywhere near my couch.
I know this year is a series of fine! and ...not fine. Mostly it’s a ...not fine but usually I can clear my head enough to see how fine! can come back into play. However the way I clear my head is like in Eternal Sunshine when Joel grabs Clementine’s hand and tries to hide her in secret places so the memory of her won’t fade away- except I’m hiding the parts of me that are truly scared about our dismal reality and future. I’ve been able to hide these thoughts deep when I see that the Covid numbers are on the decline or when I meet up for a SoCiAlLy DiStAnCeD hang. I’m excellent at hiding them by going for a run and actually feeling my lungs breathe and my body move. And I hide the real scary long term realities into the deep dark trenches of my brain by watching my favorite shows and reminding myself I want to be a writer! I want to create art! I want to one day just sit at a dumb bar and have a date go bad and as I laugh it off in the bathroom find that I’ve yet again smushed another Glossier lipstick in my purse. So not being able to run or go outside and losing my interest in television has uncovered all those hidden scary realities I thought I had properly tucked away and so I finally broke.
What my bad intrusive thoughts have yelled at me all year.
I knew something was afoot because last weekend I went to a cabin and I did ~drugz~. My only two goals for doing them were I didn’t want to assign meaning to anything that might cross my path and I didn’t want to make any decisions, just let whatever happen without me choosing for it to happen or examining why it was happening. That’s it. I didn’t even say them out loud to my friends because by doing that I was making a decision to assign a meaning to an experience. It felt contradictory and I just wanted to… be. I didn’t want to come across some magical hopeful realization to set myself ablaze and ready to take whatever life throws at me next. I just wanted to sit and experience what was in front of me and let that be enough to guide me to the next thing. And of course hours later I would be saddled with a huge decision on whether to stay or go that night from the cabin because that gender reveal fire was the real thing ablaze and our AirBnB host made sure we knew there was only one way in and out of the mountain.
We figured it out and obviously we are safe but setting a goal to not make any decisions then being faced with a pretty crucial decision, all the while the walls around me are swimming and my hands look like doll hands, was not ideal. Maybe the least ideal circumstance to cross my path that night and that’s considering hours before an actual bat had flown inches from my face.
Also I’ve created this absolutely unhealthy habit of bringing my phone to bed with me and watching YouTube videos to help me fall asleep. Initially it was a lot of Bon Appetit (oops) and then I moved on to gardening videos. After my whirlwind romance with the Breaking Bad universe, I started watching cast and creator interviews. I’ve now graduated to my most unsettling obsession: animal encounter videos (more specifically bear encounters and attacks).
My roommate also uses her phone to fall asleep at night but she listens to soothing guided meditations. I, on the other hand, usually click videos that say bear and two cubs chasing a hiker in Alaska or Surviving a Double Grizzly Attack. Just some variation of a heart elevating bear/human encounter to drift me to sleep because it’s less scary to me than the smoky pandemic season we are living in. I don’t know why I do this and please do not try to tell me (I don’t want any assigned meaning remember!!). I like living in my blissful ignorance that I am somehow just attracted to bears right now and in no way is the world preparing me for an eventual bear encounter and equipping me with all the right tips (hey black bear, I’ll say some kind loud words to you as I slowly back away and grizzly I’ll see you with my head down on the ground and my hands behind my neck protecting all my vital organs).
So Saturday night- the night it all broke- I opened my phone and clicked Bear Gives a Warning Bite as I settled into my nightly terrifying routine. That night was the 6 month mark of staying inside away from my friends and at the same time I was forced further inside by toxic wildfire air. It was just not a good night all around so I was relieved when this video introduced me to a BBC documentary called Bear Family and Me. After watching a handful of videos about a wildlife cameraman named Gordon who spent a year with a family of bears, I decided I was in love with both the bear family and this man.
Gordon and his family of bears, and also me and my family of nightly bear videos
Before I cemented my love, I did a google search to make sure this guy wasn’t problematic and the show wasn’t hitting any unethical nerves. Both checked out so I bookmarked the full doc to watch later. One of the clips that made me interested in the doc was Gordon gaining trust with a bear cub named Hope since their mother Lily had been gone for too long. I watched him lovingly offer her formula and talk sweetly to her as she climbed over his back to get walnuts he had in his hand. I was excited to see this story further play out in the doc until I noticed a news article about the show. An absolutely devastating blow was thrown at me, in my weakest of 1am pandemic wildfire moments, hours after I cried because I just wanted to breathe the same inside air as my friends, when I read that Hope- the cute bear cub I had just fallen in love with- had been shot dead by a hunter shortly after the doc wrapped. Which meant, HOPE WAS DEAD. Please no more meaning I hate it here! Stop!
I will approach this hunter with nuance and empathy because apparently this individual had a good relationship with the bear handlers and promised to never shoot a collared bear. Unfortunately Hope slipped her collar and her fate was sealed by this gross trash monster (okay I’m done with nuance and empathy, fuck this guy).
Sure this would be a good moment to point out that my goal to not decision make or assign meaning both failed and that the universe is more connected than I want which can be really beautiful in the end. However, fuck that. Hope the bear cub is dead and I would pay one thousand dollars to drink a Tecate on the patio of a bar I would have paid one thousand dollars a year ago to never go to again. I’m still looking for no assigned meaning in the details of life so here are a bunch of sunsets from last week that I cannot believe I saw in my lifetime and I truly cannot believe these eyeballs got to see them on some really nice mushrooms (overall the weekend was a raging success despite people trying to blow up the world by announcing their kid’s genitals).
Last pic is taken on the deck of a house that no one was living in so we snuck in and I am 100% positive it is haunted.
re: what’s going on
-Just one single thing since my brain is full of smoke: Thank you to everyone who reached and made sure I knew about this. Feeling seen in quarantine hits the best.
I’ll be back in two weeks with hopefully at least 4 more things going on :) Bye!
I have way too many bear videos pulled up now 😂