the things they buried

My name is Chad and everything I have ever done is wrong. It's ok, I guess, because I think many of us feel the same way. There's truth in wrongness. Or something like that. That's what I said one day in English in high school my senior year. Not necessarily wrongness, but fiction, lies. Not because I endorsed them, but because that was the theme. You know... what's the theme? My teacher asked me to answer. About the book we had all, presumably, just read.

The book was The Things They Carried, because of course. A staple of high school and white teen dudes everywhere, which I guess makes it fitting, in that I was in high school, and even though there were not white dudes everywhere, or even close to it, that is how all things are assumed. My teacher was self-described as the "only pro choice Republican teacher on the planet." She once asked me to tell her something that was going on in the world, so I replied - given that it was 2006 - that a recent Pentagon report came to the conclusion that the Iraq War was "unwinnable." She asked me what I thought. Such question seemed a bit haphazard to me; whether that war, a war, any war, is "winnable" is debatable as a sort of ontological claim, and putting that aside, how the fuck am I supposed to know? Like, really? I have no information on troop levels, estimated size of enemy combatants, public opinion on the ground, training progress of Iraqi Defense Forces, nothing more than what grabs headlines and boils down to mainstream news stories.

So I said I don't think it's winnable because the insurgency is too entrenched. Which seemed right. It's basically what the report said. It's what much of the media pontificated. The growing public dissatisfaction with the war pointed in that direction. I believed it! Maybe that was the important part. If I believed it, as a white male, I could be president one day. Look where it got us in 2006, halfway through Bush's second term. Look where it got us 10 years later. A horde of 19 year old white men nod.

The "only pro choice Republican teacher on the planet" said we should have "bombed them back into the Stone Age" if we wanted to win. Alas. I guess it doesn't make sense then that we read The Things They Carried.

What is the theme?

My voice shaking, eyes beginning to tear up, I explained it. The tears weren't because I was sad, it's because this was hard to do. This was an opinion. Stating my case. Extrapolating based on my personal interpretation of a text. I've cried when debating my parents in politics. More than once. Many times more. I tear up at the hint of a serious dialogue between two people. I've teared up over texts. Am I weird? Don't answer.

I explained that even though the book was fiction, even though none of it happened as described, it was getting at a higher truth. That war is hell. That fucked up stuff happens to everyone involved; wanton cruelty, death and destruction, and it doesn't take a Vietnam diary to show that. That's what good fiction does, right? Makes fiction seem like fact? Allows you to empathize? Like Catch-22? Like The Catcher in the Rye? Like The Things They Carried? Like Atlas Shrugged? A horde of 19 year old white men nod.

So did my teacher.

Said teacher always treated us like adults except for when we were shitty and then she treated us like dumbasses, which I suppose is true of lots of adults with teens. I was mostly just trying to survive that class. I guess I did, I got good grades and most people assumed that because I had answered The Questions that I was smart. I knew the actual things they carried! A few months later I'd curiously look at the Sparknotes for The Things They Carried and realized that what Sparknotes had as the theme was basically word-for-word what I had said. It had been essentially regurgitated back at me via LED screen, staring at me as I stared at it. I often wonder if my teacher ever wondered if I went off Sparknotes. If I was right but only because I looked it up. I don't think she did, but who knows. She was smart enough to know about it. Certainly a bunch of dumbass teens were. I've tried to bury that thought; why do I have it? What good does it do? Does it matter? But it feels distantly relevant, like if I knew, I could judge something not of her character, but of mine, that whatever or whoever I was back then made her think that maybe I had looked it up on Sparknotes. I've tried to bury that thought to know avail. I guess I did use Sparknotes with The Scarlet Letter. But that was sophomore year. I've never seen that teacher since. Not once.

A year later in Short Stories and Poetry class at college, during a critique of my dystopic short story (a horde of 19 year old white men nod), a woman dressed as Darth Maul (it was Halloween), made the comment that a specific scene in my story where I offhandedly, casually said the main character's office has blown up, thus explaining the lack of calls about why the main character has not shown up, reminded her of Office Space.

I'm going to be honest; I don't think Office Space exists. I don't know what the fuck it is. I mean sure, I get that it's a movie, I can picture, sort of, the characters, I know some of the memorable lines or moments, but I have never seen it. I don't think anyone has. I have an idea of it, of glasses and haircuts and staples and boredom and that's how everyone seems to communicate, so I have concluded that it exists solely as a sort of cultural simulacrum, or stand alone complex, this creation a lot of, say 39 year old white dudes came up with simultaneously, or thought they did, and now we all just cite it. Like, "ah, yes, that reminds me of Office Space!" (A horde of 39 year old white dudes nod.) Or, "remember the stapler guy from Office Space?" and we're all so convinced that such a mundane lampooning of our mundane lives has to exist, and that it has to be just in that so late 90s way that, well, of course I know what you're talking about!

The good news is that no copies of that story exist any more nor have for a long time. Just like Office Space.

I think every few months I get into a debate with someone about if every story has ever been told. It reminds me of the false statement that history repeats itself. Like, yeah, if you boil history down to "war" or "pandemic" or "authoritarianism" I guess it repeats itself. Guess what!? A bunch of people will live and all of them will die. See! History repeats itself! We can't escape!!! It ignores the fact that every single event is a specific event in that time in which it exists. The fall of Rome was the fall of Rome and happened over so many hundreds of years that it is entirely a process of its own, specific example, and yet I feel anything that falls is now Rome. Oh god, my fucking sandwich just fell on the floor. That reminds me of how Rome fell!

If you boil down everything to a comedy or tragedy or a love story or not then of course everything has been said, because you're distilling everything that has been said to a one word categorization, and if it was that simple we would never even need libraries. Take Ex Machina. It was an alright movie. It was a modern day interpretation, in many ways, of Frankenstein. One reviewer, however, said it was a bad regurgitation of it, just taking old, already told stories and repackaging them. Which is interesting to me. Everything about Ex Machina exists because of the very moment it was made. The constant fear and foreboding and control portrayed by the film is a direct result of the massive, in real life rise of Google and other tech companies and a response to that. A mere 10-15 years before the film came out, the CGI didn't exist to pull it off, and so much of the technology in the film wouldn't have existed or been imagined by the creators. And then we're all taking, if you have any shred of belief in postmodern analysis, our own values and baggage to everything each of us views or reads or consumes, and always will. Maybe one day, someone will grow up and make a movie, and it'll be because when they were 15 years old the saw Ex Machina and it really struck a chord with them, and they'll want to honor that and grow it and do their own thing with it, and some stuffy reviewer in, like, Scottsdale will be like "GOD, this is just Ex Machina all over again" and oh fuck I just confirmed the counter-argument, didn't I? I mean, my hot take is the opposite. It's not that every story has ever been told, it's that no stories have ever been told, because if every single existence is unique at every single moment in time and will be uniquely observed by every single participant, then the grand total of stories told, filmed, sang, painted, danced, and more, is literally infinitesimal, and as a percentage of possible stories, effectively nil. So why the fuck do we keep citing Office Space?

I still think about the time someone ripped a condom off me on our second date and said "let's get that bad boy off" as she did so. A condom is latex. Is it a bad boy? Isn't a condom a good boy? I was her 61st sexual partner in 21 months. I know because she told me. I know it was a horrible thing but nothing happened and so I guess I'm mostly just upset that the line was so cheesy. I should try to bury that thought, but it sticks with me. Like my mind tells me I should be way more upset than I am, and maybe deep down I am, because taking a condom off mid-coitus without consent or previous dialogue is fucked up.

It could be frustration at the fact that I get more writing done when I am sad and depressed than happy. That's such a cliche. It probably fucking exists in Office Space. I don't want to know.

I suppose we're all burying some things we don't want to deal with or remember or suffer from. Some worse than others. It's not a contest... it's not a contest. For an upright animal with a spine I sure feel amorphous and spineless, like the very next thing I have to try to bury, to ignore, to stash away will be the one that breaks me. I still have to try to avoid having sharp objects at easy access at all times. No scissors or knives in a bedroom. Stay out of the kitchen if in a bad mood. This feels so childlike and silly and yet I know it's for my own good, like parents tell their children... it's for your own good. Perhaps I am so fundamentally emotionally messed up and unable to process that this is how I - (a horde of 19 year old men nod) - fucking stop it you guys!

There's a guy at work who thinks I am an idiot. He thinks I am a loser who does nothing with my life (ok, fair), and thinks every mistake I make is another notch in the belt of stupidity I posses. He has told me as such. Other people at work have said how smart they think he is, because he is worldly or knows about foreign countries or politics or whatever. He steals toilet paper from the office. He stole hundreds of dollars of food from a snack box whose employee made commission off of the money it made, so he stole wages out of a working class guy's pocket and then had the audacity to joke about it when the guy finally wised up and removed our snack box. He has also gotten most everything wrong. He waxes and wanes about ancient Persia or Japan or Watergate in ways that are stunningly factually simplistic or grossly incorrect, and I wonder if he is intentionally trying to pull a fast one (I suspect as much), and even when he gets routinely owned by conservatives at work in political debate a very small part of me finds solace in the fact that he gets brought down to the level of idiot with me. But he stands there and fondles his nuts and picks his butt crack underneath his pants while talking to people and pays no mind. I try to ignore his existence but then he approaches me and tries to correct something and I know when I quit part of me wants to walk up to his desk and rip into him and try to defend myself but why bother? My own self-image is piss poor so why do I need to make him think I'm better? He only says to me what I say to me. I don't yell at myself that I am smart. I will bury this thought.

I guess the alternative to burying is projecting, and there's a difference between self-destruction and some sort of external combustion that brings down others. I'd rather not be the kind of person who takes some trauma and makes some unfair summation of all those who orbit any similar classification. Too many bitter, violent people use that as justification for their anger or hate or abuse towards entire groups of people (none of the 19 year old white men nod their heads). Really guys? Really? This is the one time. Come on. Admittance is the first... fuck it. We were all teens, right? All did bad stuff? That's the defense, right? No ability to discern playing hooky and smoking a cig with assault? No subtlety in assessing human behavior? Ok, well, that's cool.

Maybe I'm still wrong. Probably. I have nothing to add that hasn't been said and done better than anyone before me. Even a jack-of-all-trades knows all trades. Even my self-deprecation is boring and contrived. Any tone seems forced and all this post reads like is some aggrandizing nonsense. But that's ok. It was therapeutic on a Thursday night last week when all my thoughts were negative. I guess that's the most important thing. It got me moving on.

Moving on from burying things or not burying things or coming to terms with them. I can live with that. For now. Because perhaps one day in LA someone will be walking from their car to their office with a big stack of papers - a script - and it won't be bound together, and that day will be a big day for Santa Ana winds, and a strong and sudden gust will come through and rip all the papers up and into the air and disperse them extravagantly, swirling and flying and landing everywhere and anywhere, fully a part of the world, of existence, an idea that already exists and already did, now mixed in with everything else as it was meant to be. And maybe a few years later, someone dressed up as Darth Maul, new robotic spider legs and all, will sit and listen as some 19 year old white dude reads off his dystopic fiction, and a single scene of offhanded, casual absurdity made mundane will trigger a memory in Darth Maul's head, a memory from something that doesn't really exist and yet we all know does, and she'll raise her hand and smile and say "just like Office Space 2!" and everyone else, not just the 19 year old white men, will nod.