When Asthma Attacks, Metaphorically Speaking

[originally written for The Vista]


“Cash rules everything around me. C.R.E.AM. – get the money. Dolla dolla bill, ya’ll.”
- Wu-Tang Clan

The rain has finally died down from a throaty roar to a lethargic, haphazard drizzle. The wind has picked up a little but not enough sweep away the wet, week-old grass clippings still sprawled in clumps across my yard. It’s hard to remain mad or even cynical on a beautifully overcast day like this. But somehow I manage to press on in the face of such adversity to find another gripe I’d like to bring to your attention.

This week’s ramble concerns a subject that has nagged at me for a while now. “Nagged” is really too subtle a word. Poked, pricked, hen-pecked and incessantly rat-a-tat-tatted at the soft spot in the back of my head – where the skull curves down to meet the spine – is more like it.

We college students are born and bred to focus on one thing more than any other in this entire universe – our future. At the beginning of the Fall 2009 semester I was convinced I had an early leg up on mine. A friend and I had started a company in an up-and-coming field and we knew we were destined for success. Despite my best intentions, at almost exactly 12 a.m. April 6, 2010 – my 23rd birthday – I found myself telling my friend-and-business-partner that he could take the company name, equipment, debt and every last bit of the its future and do with it what he pleased.

There are many reasons why I left but they pale more than an albino with a hangover in comparison to the causa de facto. I had become so tautly wrapped up in this company so that I could achieve my dictionary definition of success that I had completely lost sight of the world around me. The whole idea behind this company was that my friend and I were creative people and we would combine our collective creativities to make one heaping helping of success.

Yet, the more I focused on the business and making it profitable, the less I found myself able to create anything worthwhile. Trying to conjure up even the smallest amount of inspiration was like trying to pull a tooth from Great White Shark with my bare hands. The harder I pulled, the more bloody and painful it became till I had severed every last muscle and tendon and no longer had the strength to even grip the damned thing.

From an outsider’s perspective, I am now where so many college students end up after graduation – waiting tables and selling bone marrow on the black market to pay bills, with no definite job prospects and no guaranteed track to success. Then again, if the past few years and this hellride of an economy taught us anything, it’s that there’s no such thing as guaranteed success.
Why then do we wrap achievement like a chain around our necks and anchor it to this Everest-sized mountain we call our future? The more you struggle to pull that massive mount along, the tighter your chain will squeeze till it suffocates the very life out of you.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t strive to attain our goals. I mean, that’s why we’re in college, right? Study hard and work hard but for chrissakes, don’t enslave yourself to some terrible standard of accomplishment that keeps you from everything else in your life.

As for me, I have ambitious, perhaps even lofty plans for the future. For now, I’m as content as a restless mind can be waiting tables and writing verbose ramblings for your student newspaper. Most importantly, I’ve taken that chain of achievement from around my neck and hold it firmly in my hands. I haven’t breathed this easy in months.

An open letter to my King Kongressman

You told me

To follow my dreams

But in my sleep

All I can see

Your teeth

Grinning like knives

Back at me

I forgot to remember

This is my past:

I hope it's not raining @NMF

Bike rides



Mowing got cancelled



Norman Music Festival preparation





Rain makes sleepy pets

Intellectual conversation at its finest

[last night, in the last few seconds of the 2-3 minutes standing on Clint's front while he drunkenly jams the wrong keys into the wrong locks]

CLINT: Did your twat let you...?
ME: My what? My twat?
CLINT: Your twat girl.
ME: My wife?
CLINT: Yeah, she let you out of the house?
ME: Yeah, to come take care of your dumbass.
CLINT: Exactly!

[Clint finally unlocks door and kick-swings it open]

CLINT: Bitch!
ME: Who?
CLINT: Fuckin' bitch!
ME: Yes, you are.
CLINT: Yep! That's what I'm sayin', man! Fuuuck yoooou!

[Clint stumbles into house and falls on floor as the door swings closed]

ME: G'night, Clint.

Dear Professor Clark,

I was running late to class but as I cranked the key in the ignition, I discovered my car battery's deader'n a gay marriage bill in the Oklahoma legislature. So, now I'm just absent. I understand we do not have class Thursday due to advisement. I will email you this week the unorganized mess of prose and notes that is my feature-so-far.

You'll notice I'm not as far in actual for-print writing as I'd hoped. I have been dealing with an intense and intensely frustrating bout of writer's block and not just on this story. I literally sat down a week from last Thursday to work on some creative ad writing for my business and found I just could not come up w/anything. I switched to my feature story and then my film script, both with the same result. I was able to write non-creatively (tests, business memos, etc) but nothing requiring any amount of formative thought. I tried every trick I know in the book to pull myself out of it. Nothing worked until this past Sunday when an idea for another film slowly crept into my head over the period of about an hour. I started scribbling and soon found myself moving onto the ad and my feature story. So, I'm back on track but late as usual.

Sorry, again, for missing class today. If it makes it any better just know I'll be on my porch, whiskey in hand and computer on the lap, sculpting the ramblings of a stoned trainrider into an explorative essay on one man's idea of freedom.


-ryan

Thank Christ I’m not a bird dog.

I’d be wrangled up, taken out behind the tree line and shot dead where I stood because I was apparently no longer able to sniff out a pile of my own feces two feet in front of me, much less moving, hiding prey. A one-time master of my craft, I would now be more worthless to Farmer John than a willing virgin to a eunuch. I would have no voice with which explain my simple, temporary problem– I have fallen a tragic victim to a terrible, unrelenting head cold.

My sinuses are crammed fuller than 2nd Street at four in the afternoon and, despite all the Kumbocha tea, green tea, black tea and whisktea chugging and vitamin C huffing, there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. Yes, thank Christ my life does not depend on my for-now defunct olfactory.

It is because of my plight that my tongue now squelches and squirms against the roof of my mouth in a desperate attempt to relieve the burn from my most recent waste of $2.10 - the Starshmucks “Highway Robbery” flavored green tea. I’m not even in a real Star-gimme-all-your-bucks drinking a real “Highway Robbery” tea.

Although, I’ll admit, this student-centric façade in the Nigh Center does a damn good job of imitating the real thing – overpriced drinks, overloud music and overfriendly slingers. I’m talking the kinds that wear such a god-awful, toothy gape of grin that, as I approach, I don’t know whether they’re smiling or baring their teeth in preparation to let out a throaty growl warning me to stay away from their precious ground bean juice. “Take ‘er easy there, Killer. I’m not after your hot-enough-to-melt-the-sun coffee. No, instead I think I'd rather scald my already raw throat with some of your green, boiling water. What’s that? Why, yes, I would like to pay the price of a vacation home in The Hamptons for it.”

The scene continues in my head, or it would if I didn’t have “Lean on Me” blaring so forcefully in my ears that the only appropriate way I can think to describe it is “auditory rape.” It’s taken me a great deal longer to write these 474 paltry words than it should have, thanks solely to the suffocation my poor thought processes suffer at the hands of such a musical menace.

Ah, to be free of this place and out in a field or a forest, sprinting from bush-to-tree with not but the blinding sun in my eyes and the wind whipping my ears. No expensive faux-remedies torching my tongue. No ironically retro “college playlist jams” beating my eardrums senseless. Just the sun and the wind and, finally, the bullet. Perhaps life and death as a sick bird dog would not be such a terrible thing after all.