When life’s stress piles on, I rarely alter my approach. I raise an eyebrow, think huh, and continue on my merry way. From lower back pain, to the uncontrollable spasms and extreme fatigue, I somehow blind myself to the howling gang of angry monkeys digging claws into my shoulders. A vertebrate has to snap before I get a clue.
Sometimes, though, after exhausting all possible nothings, I figure a few things out.
Meander with me for a second.
During the mid 90′s, two of my friends from childhood left our hometown to follow me to Minneapolis, where we shared a downtown apartment. For myself and one of my friends, it was the first time we’d lived in a city. Not so for the third friend, Rich.
He’d previously lived on campus at an art school in Portland, Maine. He was (and is) an artist in as many ways as I can think. He’d pick up a drum, a guitar, a brush, a pencil, a bunch of junk, you name it, and create something special with them. I always envied that.
One day during the hot Minneapolis summer, while sitting around the apartment, he grabbed a pad and sketched a picture of me. It was quick and cartoony, but definitely me. After he finished drawing me, he slowly and very carefully drew a series of lines behind me. It was the outline of a square box. Because Matt’s always in a room.
It’s true. And painful. I’ve taken steps to be less roomy, but it’s still a succinct analysis. Now that I have a family, I’m trying to change that. There’s a lot more non-room activity than there ever was before. I hike and walk. But what caused me to be pushed into rooms was set into motion by circumstance.
When I was a kid, my allergies were merciless, and chiefly focused on anything that grows. If it had leaves, I was allergic to it. Also hay, pollen, and anything with fur. Every attempt to spend time in the woods was punctuated by constant hacking, nose-blowing, and sneezing. Even if I did manage to make it into the forest, mosquitos would completely ignore my friends and have a party with me. So much for the outside.
Our family tried to have a pet, too. I might have had fun walking a dog, but my father’s even worse allergy to animals was so acute that one week with a pet hamster nearly caused him to asphyxiate in bed.
I wasn’t the boy in the bubble, or anything. I did play outside, but rarely in the woods. But those circumstances are factors draw a clear, clean line to the present.
Now follow me back.
And so am I.
The room became my comfort zone, so the computer became my tool of choice. Over the years, computers changed and quickly grew out of their status as the latest glorified HAM radio to become chiefly a communication tool.
A shit-ton of media is at my fingertips.
I can play games, chat with friends, make plans with other friends, read newsfeeds, catch up with family, get irritated at news, get more irritated at other news, watch videos I can’t unwatch, and watch the most random stuff I never would have known existed back when I was a kid. Basically, I have collapsed in exhaustion from a day of over-stimulation - too much time with too many glowing rectangles showing too many things.
It happened so slowly. But here I am, now coping with anxieties that, while not caused by the room, is surely exasperated by it. Now I’m adjusting my habits. I’ve pruned the newsfeeds, weeded out the controversial political stuff (and not just stuff I find agreement with), blocked the ads, and ignored every possible fluffy/irritating social network source that I can. I must.
When the gears in your head move quickly, the internet has a way of accelerating them to speeds that are red-hot.
Maybe I’m reading too much into all this. It wouldn’t be the first time. I just know that the road from back then to right now sneaked up on me with a fierceness that I’m only appreciating now. The things I carry with me, the traits I identify as so much me have origins that live in my past. I don’t see most of them; this is just a sliver of a single thing I happened to catch sight of.
My biology led to the room led to the computer led to media saturation and overstimulation. It’s not for nothing that we’re reading so much about taking control. I think I understand now, more than ever, that we really do surf the internet, but most of us don’t know how to swim. We click to stay ahead, afraid to fall in, getting anxious with each time around.
Anyway, I’d like to ditch a few of those monkeys the next time I make it to shore. My back’s really tired and it’s hard to navigate the waves with a tower of screeching simians.
