Flow. Part One.

It’s called a thrisis.



Or at least that’s what some cutesy Gen X-er labeled it to sell some of those cutesy pink-covered books at the front of Barnes and Noble. It’s mindless bullshit like chick lit that gets published these days, that is spoon-fed to the masses. Not like my books. I drum my fingertips against the nicotine-stained Macbook and remind myself that the only thing that stands between me seeing my titles on the shelves at B&N is that pesky application and review process. Somehow a month has passed and my memory is like sieve. Why haven’t done the paperwork?



Oh yeah, I’m having a thrisis.



With no one to share my joke with, I light another Marlboro Light. Another day in the North Country – the third day in the row of snow. Only an Eskimo and their supposed fifty names for this sky dandruff could tell the difference between morning and evening. Constant white falling toward the thick white ground leaves me feeling like I’m at the bottom of a grave watching the dirt pile up on my chest. The plows and sanders rumble down the hill and down the road, cutting through the fluff like nostrils clearing a path through a pile of cocaine.



Cocaine, now there’s something that could help me write. Help me rediscover some passion. It appears that my brain is experiencing some sort of limp dick complication. It can’t be ADD. I’m thirty. But synapses aren’t firing right and since the Celexa I stopped skating razors across my forearms. So it can’t be depression. And despite the pseudo-demensia that my doc attributed to ten years of borderline personality disorder and medications, it can’t be just memory. This swiss cheese brain of mine. I’m like a fucking gold fish. Five second of memory that no ‘to do’ list can save. I’m writing now, I’m even wearing pants and sitting at my computer. I have a –



thrisis - a mid-life crisis for those in their mid to late thirties



Mid to late? Goddamnit. I got my period at eight and now I’m ahead of the curve again. Deep drag, the kind where you’re ensured that something’s sticking, that the carcinogens are in your lungs long enough to really burrow deep in pink tissue. Twenty-two years of wasted eggs, of fertile ground left fallow. I’m convinced that by the time I get ready to have kids my ovaries will only be spitting out dust.



Have you ever used Google as an 8-ball? I type, “Will Janice ever have kids?”



Press enter. Shake the black orb. First article up – “meet the women who will never have kids.”



I stub out the cigarette and peel the label back on a container of Activia Light, Raspberry flavor. The pooping yogurt. This is what life has come down to. Starring at snow sitting in my childhood bedroom eating food to help me poop. I feel about fifty years too early on this one.



Perhaps I’m some kind of young, female Bukowski. He sure wrote about shit a lot. Maybe if I do people will think I’m edgy. I consider other adjectives people will assign me. I’m tired of “fat,” “troubled,” “crazy,” and “different.” I can do my own marketing, I can manufacture personality and persona. There’s this whole world out there and I know deep in my gut that I have something to offer. I am a brilliant twisted genius and within me I hold answers and secrets. I could slay this world and earn fame and accolades. A fucking contender, right here.



I swallow the thick pink load, sweet and cold on my tongue. I am too lazy. I am too heavy and too melded to this chair, to this floor, to this ground to fly.



And the worst part? I don’t think I even fucking care anymore.



I’m feeling lucky, Google. Give me your prediction, give me your definitions.



An apathetic individual has an absence of interest or concern to emotional, social, or physical life.



The opposite of apathy is “flow.”