Your Head Will Collapse If There’s Nothing In It

I’m losing my damn mind. And I’m very thankful for that.

It happened Saturday night, when I managed to lose my iPod twice (and as I type, I just spelled that twise, as though I were a recent transplant from 18th century London, or perhaps drunk). The iPod isn’t what is important. It could just as easily been my keys, my wallet, passport, medication, anything “important.” It just happened that it was my absent iPod that brought about this sea change.

Let me roll it back a bit. This weekend, I participated in
filmerica.com’s “72 Hour Video Shitting Competition.” They give you some parameters and then you have 72 hours to shit out a short video. If you do this, you will be forced to submit to group rule, forego sleep, eat nutritionally dubious food and spend a lot of time standing around in the heat. As any cult leader will attest, these are some pretty happy tools when it comes to breaking someone’s will. I spent the last day of the shoot in a bit of a rage, due to my lost iPod, and my unwelcome quiet time in the car. I had looked for it in every conceivable place, but I was confident that I would find it after the shoot. Not so much. By about 4:30 on Sunday afternoon, it was becoming clear to me that my iPod, much like an antisocial cat, would be found in it’s own sweet time. So I adopted a new policy of “fuckit.” And yes, that is spelled correctly.

I had emptied my book bag time and again, torn apart my bedroom twice, and rooted through garbage that had been sitting out in triple digit heat before I began to think that there were, perhaps, better ways for me to spend a Sunday afternoon. “Better ways” in this case might have involved throwing myself down the stairs for a while.

There was a huge amount of rage involved in this decision. And even as I think about it now, it still pisses me off. Why? Well, I’m not what you would consider a competitive person, in the conventional sense. Growing up, and into adulthood, I rarely give a damn about how I compare to other people. I rarely feel the need to “beat someone” at something, save for those tasty times when I can make sure a highly competitive person fails. Instead, I have spent my life competing against myself. I always think I could be a better friend, a better son, a better worker, a better student, whatever. And in this case, I realized that I had no one to blame for my situation. It was my fault, because I had not been a better, more conscientious person. I was careless with my shit, and I left myself holding the bag. It was as if the Seth of the night before, like some kind of Langolier ghost, was laughing at me while he hid a four hundred dollar bauble somewhere that I would never find. He was beating me, pwning me if you will. I could not beat him, no matter what I did, and my rage, my frustration, was his trophy. So I did the only thing I could do. I conceded the match, packed up my gear, and left the field defeated, but a better player for having learned from my failure.

I may have been reduced to listening to CDs in the car, like some damned animal, but I was at least in control of myself. And I took control of my Sunday afternoon. After all, there is an ever-increasing number of iPods in this world, but the number of Sunday afternoons I have gets smaller each week. And I’m going to try like hell not to spend any more of them fighting with myself.

Oh, and I found my iPod the next day. I’ll just say it was hidden in plain sight and leave it at that.

[and to my reader(s) in Korea: Anyong Haseo! Drop me a line sometime!]