Solutions and Other Problems Read online

And that is the exact moment the second wave of drugs hit.

  Initially, my only concern was why there were so many trees.

  They were still plenty far away, but there were a lot of them.

  Too many.

  For what, I don’t know, but it seemed like the sort of thing to keep an eye on.

  I watched them for a while.

  Who knows how long.

  Long enough to become confused.

  I indeed appeared to be outside.

  I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to be doing, but it seemed like it might have been important…

  Did something happen?

  What was it?

  Are there risks involved?

  Who could tell.

  But there was a distinct sense that shadow guys might be around.

  I tried to ignore them.

  They seemed like they might be real, though.

  Upon noticing how scared I was becoming, I made several attempts to reason with myself.

  However, under the circumstances, that turned out to be impossible.

  Noticing the trees again felt like hard proof that something deadly was about to happen.

  I didn’t know what it would be—shadow people, shadow ghosts, shadows turn out to be real, reality turns out to be an illusion and my real body is slowly suffocating deep inside the moon where the body farms are—but those trees were still there, which meant it was correct to have been suspicious of them.

  Here, it is important to remind ourselves that, to avoid undershooting and not being scared enough, I had prepared for this experience by consuming vast collections of media designed by professionals to be as horrifying as possible. I researched what it’s like to be assaulted. I did Slenderman visualization drills. I did a Google image search for “scary picture” and looked at 37 pages of results.

  As it turns out, none of that was necessary.

  All I need is trees.

  Just… trees.

  The only thing they were doing was being there like usual instead of mysteriously vanishing after I stopped paying attention to them.

  That’s all it took.

  The preparation may have contributed somewhat to the overall ambiance of doom, but the thing that delivered the killing blow was trees. I suspected them the moment I saw them. When they were still there, I was sure. I didn’t know what I was sure about, but I didn’t need to be: I saw those trees.

  And there it was: the target level of fear.

  If this had been a real emergency, I wouldn’t have had to feel like that for very long.

  But it wasn’t a real emergency. Two seconds later, nothing had happened to me.

  And it continued to not happen, and continued to not happen, and continued to not happen.

  Which, in my opinion, is the biggest problem with not being immediately murdered by unstoppable spirit monsters. You have to figure out what to do with yourself.

  You know it’s going to happen. It can’t possibly be more than a second away from happening. But it could take longer. Minutes, even. It’s probably going to happen right now, but as of right now, you’re still alive. And because of that, you are fully and continuously experiencing the same amount of suspense you’d feel moments before being strangled to death by puzzle ghosts—and now it’s been four minutes—and four minutes is too long to feel like that. If it doesn’t happen within the next one minute, you need a strategy. But what? Lie down on the ground?

  Lie down on the ground more?

  I started to feel bad for myself in the same way I felt bad for that mouse from freshman biology. The one that survived for three days before the classroom snake finally got around to putting it out of its misery.

  That poor little thing…, I thought.

  That poor little thing can’t handle much more of this…

  But, as long as you aren’t dead, you need something to do. And surviving is something to do.

  A survival situation has to have a leader. Sometimes it’s a good leader, sometimes there isn’t much to work with, but somebody’s gotta do it.

  In my case, there was only one option.

  Sensing the pressure to lead, my first instinct was to give up.

  If I’d been ready to die, this would’ve worked and nobody would have had to be the leader.

  But there was a tiny part of me that wasn’t ready. Just the faintest whisper of survival instinct. The survival equivalent of a piece of rice.

  And it was facing an unbelievably ambiguous first decision:

  Every time I thought about it, I’d get overwhelmed and attempt to give up.

  But death would once again fail to claim me, and we’d be back at the same crossroads.

  As I was looking around for help, I noticed a small trail leading into the woods.

  It seemed more assertive than the other scenery. I decided to follow it.

  Unfortunately, it petered out almost immediately.

  The next closest recognizable object was a hill. It looked relatively harmless, so I climbed it.

  On top of the hill, though, the moon seemed far more aggressive than I was expecting…

  Not knowing what else to do, I found a plant and crawled underneath it for protection.

  And that is a pitiful place to be in your life.

  When you’re alone in a field, hiding under a plant because you’re scared of the moon, you just sort of instinctually recognize how sad it is. No matter how unsympathetic you are, you’d feel some degree of concern for the person who is in that situation.

  And I remember looking at myself and seeing this scared, small creature hiding under a plant, and I remember thinking, “Oh goodness… Somebody should help you.”

  The thing I was referring to was my phone.

  Yes, there was a phone. The whole time there was a phone. But in far-gone places, it’s never as simple as having a phone and calling someone who can help you.

  I tried to get to the options, but some weird number riddle was in the way.

  Because when you’re fucked up enough, technology doesn’t make sense.

  Dig a hole?

  Sure.

  Catch a fish?

  Okay.

  Pee on a rock?

  Why not.

  How about: enter a 4-digit passcode on a tappy-tap screen to unlock this glowing surface full of symbols?

  Under these conditions, a phone seems like a light-up rectangle puzzle from an alternate dimension.

  I felt most simpatico toward the map icon, so I went for it.

  I’m certain I wasn’t using the map the way it was designed to be used, but at least I wasn’t thinking about spookyjims anymore.

  Much later, I remembered there are things phones can do in addition to displaying a map.

  I wrestled with the stranger-in-a-car option for a while.

  In the end, I decided it was worth a shot.

  I thought about calling someone, but I couldn’t figure out how to explain this to anybody.

  The other possibilities didn’t turn out to be especially promising either, so I went back to doing my best with the car summoning.

  I was still trying to figure it out when the car pulled up.

  I felt bad for the stranger. He was a nice man. Sympathetically old and friendly. He did his best to make conversation with me. I did my best to cooperate, but the things I was saying to him… they weren’t in a format he could recognize.

  He wanted so badly to drive me to my home, but he had trouble finding it. We had to work together, and I’m not sure how much I was helping.

  But we did eventually find it.

  The story is not quite over, though…

  Remember what that means?

  Here it comes.

  It’s four seconds away.

  One Mississippi…

  Two Mississippi…

  Three Mississippi…

  Four Mississippi…

  There she was: my neighbor’s 5-year-old, lurking in front of my door like a friendship predator.
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br />   And she saw me get dropped off. She knew for a fact I didn’t need to go anywhere.

  So, at six o’clock in the morning, before I could go in my home—still full-on tripping balls after the weirdest night of my life—I had to contend with this kid on Hard Mode.

  And I thought, You know what? Why not. What’s the worst that could happen? Go. Go, kid. What do you want to talk about? I’m gonna sit down because who knows where this conversation is headed. That’s me, living on the edge… Yeah, kid—whatever you want to talk about. Trains, puberty, speedballs—today’s your lucky day. You hit the motherlode, kid. Go. Do it. Say anything you want.

  I don’t think she expected it to work. She’d been trying and failing to seal a best-friends deal with who knows how many people for months, going so far as to physically restrain her targets, and I think she was a little surprised by how effective it was this time. She could sense the dynamic had shifted and she might need to be the brakes now. She didn’t ask me about the room. We both just sat there, waiting for a topic to arise.

  I can’t remember if she asked me to explain bark or I just started going, but I explained bark to her. I gave this kid my whole bark thesis. And not just the bark thesis—all the potential implications of bark, and theses, and several other loosely related topics.

  Anyway, that is the story of what can happen if you try to power-lift all your fears in one rep.

  The gains weren’t as dramatic as I was hoping, but perhaps it was foolish of me to expect it to work in the first place.

  The Main Conflicts in Life

  17. LOVING-KINDNESS EXERCISE

  I heard that meditation is supposed to teach you how to control yourself, so I found a guided meditation course online and meditated every single day for a week or two.

  In addition to how to control ourselves, we learned things like how to relax, how to be happy, how to have a good day, and how to love everybody. When we got to the part that was supposed to teach us loving kindness, I was very excited. I have always dreamed of being one of the greats in this area, and I was eager to find out whether I’d exhibit signs of promise.

  The way these visualization exercises work is the meditation guy starts talking, and you do your best to keep up. He doesn’t warn you ahead of time where he’s going. He just goes: “Sit. Breathe. Good. Now think of a person.”

  Right away, I was like: GOT IT: ME. NEXT.

  Because I didn’t know the next part was going to be “The person should be someone you don’t know very well.”

  Oh my, I thought. Perhaps there is still time to catch up if I try crazy hard…

  I chose the self-checkout attendant from the grocery store.

  Because I didn’t know the part after that was going to be “Now imagine the person doing what they love the most.”

  How am I supposed to know what the guy from the grocery store loves to do? Is this a trap? Is this meditation exercise trying to trick me into thinking something obvious like “groceries,” and then the next part is a lecture about why you should never assume the grocery guy’s favorite thing is groceries because that isn’t loving or kind or respectful of the grocery guy’s personhood?

  I knew nothing about the grocery guy aside from his association with groceries. On that basis alone, it should have been impossible to complete the visualization exercise.

  But that didn’t turn out to be a problem for me at all. Some forgotten instinct rose up to accept the challenge. And it said, I know EXACTLY what this guy likes. First of all: knitting.

  Groceries barely matter to him. Without a doubt, the thing he loves most is knitting.

  This might have been an understandable assumption to make if I’d seen the guy wearing four handmade sweaters at the same time, or actively knitting a pile of hats, or prancing around in a shirt that said GODDAMN—I LOVE KNITTING!!!! But, as far as I can tell, there was no real basis for it.

  Later, while I was trying to process the fact that this happened, the only reasonable explanation I could find was that the first time I saw the guy, there might have been a piece of yarn on him somewhere. Like, glued to his name tag or something.

  I saw the yarn, and my brain was like: YARN! I SEE YARN! AND I KNOW WHAT YARN MEANS: THIS GUY KNITS, AND NOTHING ELSE.

  The meditation continued: “Imagine your chosen person in a place where he or she feels at ease and at home…”

  Okay, sure: it was a pretty aggressive assumption. A truly promising leadership candidate never would have been so hasty to assume such a specific thing for basically no reason. Can’t undo it now, though. Let’s just put it behind us and do the best we can to be fair to the guy from here. Like maybe for this part, imagine him sitting on a couch in his home. That is a reasonable thing to imagine. Anybody would feel comfortable sitting on a couch in their home… No need to jump to conclusions… Just keep it nice and general…

  Apparently, there wasn’t enough contradictory evidence to put a dent in the initial knitting assumption. That much was obvious from looking at the image my mind created when I tried to imagine this man sitting on his couch in his home.

  He’s sitting on a couch.

  It’s a knitted couch.

  And this is for sure his home. You can tell because it is decorated exclusively with knitting. His chairs, his lamps, the floor—there are knitted squares just fucking tacked to the walls.

  This isn’t merely a guy who loves knitting… it’s a whole alternative lifestyle.

  When you compare the strength of the evidence to the magnitude of the conclusion, there is an obvious and damning discrepancy.

  There’s no way to excuse how much more believable I assumed this was than the scenario where the guy lives in a regular house and sits on a regular couch.

  I don’t want to be like that. It’s dishonorable.

  In a desperate attempt to change course, I turned to extreme countermeasures.

  It got way worse when I tried to imagine him as a pirate. Because I didn’t imagine him as a pirate—I imagined a pirate as him. And, apparently, that means the pirate acts like this:

  You may also notice that he has not stopped knitting.

  The other countermeasures I tried also failed.

  Here is what the image looked like at the time the visualization exercise concluded:

  I see the guy almost every time I go to the grocery store, and it’s weird now.

  He doesn’t know this happened, but I’m terrified he’s going to find out somehow. Like if I make eye contact with him, he’ll see it.

  That’s barely different from finding out that someone you don’t know masturbates to the thought of you as a mermaid. Except the total lack of any detectable sexual motivation actually makes it quite a bit weirder.

  If I find out that someone I don’t know has been imagining that I’m a mermaid, “it’s a sexual fantasy” would probably be best-case-scenario as far as explanations go. Otherwise they’re imagining that I’m a mermaid for nonsexual reasons… like because they actually think I’m a mermaid, or because they felt it was necessary.

  Why would it be necessary? How could it possibly be necessary to imagine me as a mermaid? Does this person want to harm me, and the mermaid thing is the only way they know to stop themselves? Is it to prevent me from seeming like a fish with legs??

  It would probably be similarly difficult to explain why I felt it was necessary to imagine him as a pirate.

  Nobody would blame him for feeling offended. I mean, how are you supposed to feel if you discover that (A) you were selected as the subject of a total stranger’s loving-kindness visualization exercise, (B) no matter how hard they tried—even going so far as to imagine you as a pirate—the person was unable to see you as anything other than the most extreme knitting enthusiast the world could ever contain, and (C) it went further than that. Far enough that they imagined you naked for totally nonsexual purposes. Far enough that by the end, they felt genuinely sorry for how far it went.

  Even if he never finds out the real stor
y, surely he’ll notice how weird I act around him.

  He doesn’t know it’s because I’m ashamed. He’ll think there’s something wrong with him.

  But at this point, what the fuck is the solution? This isn’t the kind of thing you can google instructions for.

  If I want to fix this, I have to figure out how all by myself. And we must remind ourselves that my natural instincts are the exact reason we’re in this situation to begin with.

  So that’s what I’ve been doing.

  For three years now.

  Knitting guy still doesn’t know about any of this. If he ever finds out, I only hope he finds some way to see past the overwhelming and deeply personal sense of discomfort to the good intentions that created it. I never wanted him to feel weird. I never wanted me to feel weird either. This might be hard to believe, but the reason this happened is because I was trying to be a good person. I do not know what I am doing at all, but I’m trying REALLY hard. And trying really hard when you don’t know what you’re doing just happens to be the exact recipe for acting like a fuckin’ weirdo.