Brooklyn Woman

A Publication of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle

OCT. 10, 2003 issue

The World According To Me

By Ryn Gargulinski

PEOPLE, PEOPLE EVERYWHERE…AND IT MAKES YOU WANT TO DRINK

There’s a scene in the movie “Barfly” where Wanda asks Henry if he hates cops.  “No,” he says in his off-the-cuff, genius poet who just happens to always be drunk way. “But I seem to feel better when they are not around.”  Do you ever feel that way about people?

And we’re not just talking huge crowds cramming the bus after a Stones concert in New Jersey (surely a surly bunch).  But wanting to avoid your fellows, your neighbors, your best friend and your mother.   Well, you often desire to avoid your mother.   When you want to avoid your house plants you know you are in some really deep Dinty Moore.

This, my friends, is called isolation.  Webster’s 506^th edition in Creole, Chinese and Sanskrit defines “isolation” as “the incessant urge to hang opaque black fabric all over your face.”  Maybe that’s what irks Michael Jackson.

You want to avoid huge crowds.  You want to avoid small gatherings.  You’re not even going to poetry readings.  You even despise entering the kitchen area or bathroom at work, places you are destined not to be alone.

New York is not the ideal place to feel this way.  There is really no way to get away from the swirling masses.  How can you pretend the man with Zima breath breathing down your neck in a crowded subway does not exist?  How can you hide when you are duly exposed – night and day – to the deli man who automatically serves you a coffee black, no sugar; the homeless gal holding a sign that says she needs shoes; the would-be mugger who curses loudly when you see him crouching near a dumpster and decide to cross the street?  Someone is always watching.  Someone is always waiting.  Someone is always there – constant and impenetrable. Like the scar beneath your nose from when you were two and needed 14 stitches after running into an end table…it just won’t go away.  Big brother, big sister, Tiny Tim and Little Debbie are watching. 

How are you supposed to isolate when in this mess?  Fortunately, with the proper “training” you may be able to isolate in a packed room full of people.  The side of your brain that is wearing a smiley face T-shirt that states “I hate you” can regress into its sordid chamber while the “façade” conveniently takes over.  This façade is programmed to smile pleasantly when mandated, responding to weird questions with “I am fine.”  The façade may even thank them for asking.  The façade will appear “normal” to your bosses, coworkers…and even your mother.  This façade will be full of shit.

Sometimes you just need to isolate – and that’s OK.  There are moments on this torrid earth when nothing but curling up in a warm tub with peppermint incense and a true crime book about a man who kills his wife and chops her up into little pieces to feed their children will do.  But alas, we cannot live on minty scents and tales of maniacal murders forever.  Besides, the bath water DOES eventually get tepid.  Unless we know of a good lighthouse out in the middle of the Indian Ocean where we grow our own coconuts to survive, we must eventually rejoin society. 

One method is simply throwing yourself into the social scene.  Yes, this will itch like a hair shirt and hurt like the dentist.   But it may just be what you need to jostle you out of the “I just wanna die” frame of mind.  It’s like plunging yourself into a 90-foot pool without a lifejacket.   You will immediately pick up the dog paddle where you once left off.  Or drown “like a wet rat in the rain” (another “Barfly” line).

It may also help you to snap out of “I hate you” mode if you ask yourself why you feel this way in the first place.  If you are convinced that being stalked by a madman with whom you thought you were once madly in love has nothing to do with it, you really need more time to think.  Grab another “romance” novel – this time about a wife who kills her husband.  And you may, although it may seem so alien, want to call up a friend and talk about it.  People need people even if it surely does not feel that way.   Our heads alone can be dangerous territory.   Writing, drawing and talking about it helps.   After all, even Tom Hanks, on an island, had a volleyball.