DISSOCIATE'S DEGREE

I have never been physically beaten by an administrative assistant.

No one behind the sliding windows has ever hauled off and beaned me with a canned good.

I have even had several experiences of gratitude profound enough to make me wish to gift a Corporate Interlocutor immediately with Many Hugs or Quality Cheese. (It can be abrupt to learn someone’s love languages all at once, so I kept it to strange effusions and a small, wiggling dance when the pharmacist could suddenly, mysteriously “bypass” a $107 charge for repeat antibiotics.)

Nonetheless, if you want to see the definitions of phrases such as “fit of pique,” “failure to thrive,” or “dumpster fire,” hand me a phone and ask me to make ANY call related to my own health, safety, or wellbeing (doctor, dentist, car inspection, computer fix, HVAC folks, etc). Ask me to communicate with any service or institution where the person who Does the Thing is not the one Answering the Phone.

When I am required to advocate for myself through the no-man’s land of brokerage, the Land of the MiddleThems, even just to get my tires rotated, I instantly become a floating island of absolute brain-function garbage.

Among other symptoms, a fly on the wall would note my use of garbled facts, my vague and irritable sense (at best) of why I picked up the phone to begin with, my panic-laced cross-eyed gaze at the paper calendar I keep on the wall, which now seems to be written in Dutch, and the palm-sweat-smeared post-it note with scribbled keywords on it falling to the floor while I forget my own date of birth and the make of my car.

You see, I am terrified of the middle-person, the person who knows a little about the thing that needs to happen, but not a lot. The person who has been hired to handle the situation in place of the people who Do the Thing, because the people who Do the Thing are busy Doing the Thing. The person who has no real skin in the game. (It’s more like a raincoat. They have a raincoat in the game. Or maybe a velour track suit.)

In this space, where the admins roam, it is almost always unclear who knows less: me, the person with the mysterious rash, or them, the person with the keys to the castle and Almost Any Level of Training. I hate these interactions with a venom that would crumple a linebacker because it is completely unclear who is in charge and what the actual goals are. Tremendous waste occurs as these interactions take place, while not far beneath the patter of the stultifying exchange, one or both of us is bored to tears, tickling the edge of homicidal, languidly passive aggressive, and/or crumpling under the weight of utter meaninglessness.

We try to size each other up. We circle, tentatively, hissing. You see, for them, the scuffle (of me insisting on being treated like a human, within a system that either doesn’t provide this person with support and training for that kind of interaction or actively prevents them from giving this kind of treatment to me, all but requiring that they hock a loogey in my eyeball before we part ways) — this scuffle might cut into their lunch break. Which would suck. I acknowledge this. I am 100% in favor of very long and meandering lunch breaks for all.

For me, though, the phone deliberations over what’s allowed and what’s possible and what’s covered and who thinks what is best for MY BLOOD might lead to some anonymous middlethem I’ve never met and will never meet deciding, in accordance with the astonishingly fatuous instruction of an automated system, TO CANCEL MY RX WITH MY PHARMACY WITHOUT INFORMING ME AND THEN I AM OUT OF BLOOD THINNER AND I DIE OF A CLOT TO THE BRAIN.

Does this discontinuity in purpose—between the physician’s job to keep me alive and the administrative choice to rescind my access to a lifesaving drug I am slated to be on until I die of natural causes or else ONE OF THEM KILLS ME— does this disjunction in reason, humanity, and basic intelligence seem to faze my assigned phone interlocutor when I point it out?

No. Because their job is to keep the office running. Not to keep patients alive. That, friends, is the physician’s job. And good on ya if you can find a way to speak to an actual physician, because they are busy trying to treat patients and respond to their own administrative workloads— in order to meet the demands of the administration.

The whole operation has been hacked to pieces and the pieces are in charge.

**When you sever the limbs from the body it is only natural that said limbs should cease to do a very good job serving said body.** They only dimly remember having come from a coherent body at all, in their defense.

*

Administration is necessary in the first place, I would hazard, because of the completely delusional infinite growth mindset of our current brand of crime-spree capitalism. The reason we have a numbed and deeply wasteful layer of slosh between the Thing and the People Who Need the Thing in the first place is because the appetite for more, most malignant in those at the top but suffusing the cultural psyche at large, cannot be satisfied. If growth is the only measure of success in business and American Life, then we might do well to consider that we call cells with unstoppable growth “cancer.”

But instead of lobbing bags of flaming dogshit at front doors to try and change what These Bad People in Power are Doing, as if aggressive and belittling criticism were something six-year-olds are likely to respond well to, it seems to me that while I’m waiting for something not-horrifying to happen, I might look at and perhaps change or shift what I am doing.

Which may be to say: if the culture is doing a stupid thing, enacted most egregiously by those most visible and powerful, there is a 99% chance that something inside of me is doing a stupid thing too, to some relevant extent, whether I see it or not. No one is immune to the culture they come from because it’s the air we breathe.

Take, for example, the automation of appointment-making as a case in which I’m complicit in the mindless numbing-out of humanity: I LOVE, I love, not having to talk to a person when I make an appointment, for anything at all, for the embarrassing and sweaty-palmed reasons listed in the phone call scene above.

HOWEVER. Me blithely dodging human interaction whenever I can isolates me and further reduces my already gallingly sad skill-set (I’m down to marginally inappropriate humor and only mostly-non-shrill insistence for my palette of phone skillz).

Opting for temporary, relative ease over any kind of human interaction or connection is a kind of an instant gratification in negative: yes it feels sort of better or easier right now, but later I’m more likely to find myself robbed of quite a bit. Down the road just a short way from these depersonalized experiences, I will be an organism with ever fewer skills from lack of practice. I will also be a very lonely organism, and the lonely can have even more trouble advocating for themselves, because it gets trickier to remember they are alive and real, and as such, worthy of humane (thoughtful, caring) treatment.

Although having my appointment check-in occur on a computer screen is nice because it’s quick and I’m not required to have feelings or make the talking sounds, it also means that there is no one who can corroborate with their fleshly assemblage of consciousness the event of the check-in. The check-in became an event rather than an encounter, a thing rather than a process. If a check-in occurs at a kiosk in the forest, did the check-in occur at all? In a way, my check-in might as well never have happened, because there’s no consciousness in which it occurred other than my own.

Essentially, I have no alibi from another living creature for being a fellow living creature in that moment.

All characters involved—money and people alike, since both apparently are capable of and have a right to speech in this country— all characters are moving away from the center, the whole point of being alive. Which is to be. alive.

Meanwhile, the living organisms are busy demoting themselves by forfeiting or actively eschewing contact with other living organisms. Everyone agrees, apparently, that we should fade into the West, where one can do everything with a touch of a button, and never have to interact at all.

*

I’ve been reading about the human psychological capacities of association and dissociation. Turns out everyone uses both of these abilities. Poets might be a little too good at association, since they’re the ones who do things like regard administration as dismembered body parts and see kiosks in forests. But all in all, everyone’s got both capacities and needs both.

We have to be able to link related experiences, emotions, sensations, and thoughts together, or “associate” things, in order to move through our lives effectively, with a sense of coherence— so that we’re not just a collection of fragments that have no bearing on each other.

We also have to be able to let go of all the inputs that are not relevant to our functioning and wellbeing, or “dissociate” from those things, let them fade into the background so we can continue functioning without becoming entirely overwhelmed by inputs of all kinds.

When a human’s dissociative processes get out of hand and work overtime, which usually happens because they’re trying to protect themselves from having catastrophically overwhelming feelings, things can start to get really screwy. The quality of life for that person can plummet: relationships, jobs, and general wellbeing can suffer terribly—often in insidious ways, almost invisibly.

Overactive dissociative processes, especially if untreated, can ruin a life, robbing it of coherent meaning. And the thing is, when they do it, they tend to move with sheer stealth. They do not want to be seen. Their function is to protect you, remember, so they make it their business to feel almost completely unobtrusive to the sufferer; they often make themselves appear to be nothing at all. Merely the norm.

*

Yesterday at the food co-op, some mild young thing was booping my groceries (I don’t know what this process is really called because all I can think of is my children’s vocabulary for it— you know, the thing where the cashier scans your stuff and all that booping noise goes on, so we elegantly call it “booping the stuff before we can go”) and she asked if I’d like her to bag my items for me.

“Nah, I got it, I don’t mind,” I said, and eagerly squirrelled the lettuce box into the bag. I’d been watching it come down the conveyor and was excited— nay, frothing— to use it as part of Layer One, because everyone knows that heavy items and boxed items should go at the base of the bag. I abruptly started laughing when I suddenly realized “I don’t mind” was a gross understatement.

“I’m totally lying,” I said. It’s not that I don’t mind.” My giggling accelerated enough to make it tricky to get my explanation out at all: “it’s that I secretly LOVE bagging groceries.”

The young woman immediately leaned in and said in a hushed voice, “It’s so. Satisfying.”

“THE BEST, SO GOOD, LIKE TETRIS BUT WITH HEFT” I said, now snorting and tearing up with laughter.

The whole brief exchange was like a concert I got to listen to at the same time as playing it, with this thick-as-thieves human behind the conveyor belt station providing the counterpoint of her quiet but seductively knowing affirmations.

I laughed all the way to the cart return, and several heads turned to regard, skeptically, my convulsing shoulders and leaking face, but there was nothing I could do about them, nothing I wanted to change, actually.

Several things occur to me about this encounter:

1. It was patently associative— between the young woman and myself, between groceries and video games, between my own desire (to pack groceries) and my conscious awareness of it. Heretofore disparate things were getting strung together, linked, in my consciousness and in hers and between our two.

2. It would not have occurred if there were a self check-out.

*

Do I think we all need to go through the slowest grocery lane and say ridiculous things that happen to be true in order to improve our collective cultural wellbeing? I mean, sure, yes. It can’t hurt. But there’s a bigger picture.

What I think I see in our cultural climate is a lot of reasons to check out. What I think I see in the operational structures that culture has built are a lot of ways to do that dissociating without noticing the rather high costs to the quality of our lives, which is to say the experience of living.

We’re both motivated and facilitated to dissociate from all kinds of things—from other people, from global realities, from our own lived experiences, from our awareness of the particular natures of our own desires and power, and the list goes on.

I don’t think we all have to be on the front lines of war zones, literal or figurative, to push back against these realities in meaningful ways. The subtlest acts can create profound shifts in our individual realities, which—for worse and better, cannot survive very long in isolation.

So I guess I’ll say what I say to my kids when they’re careening around the grocery store, when I’m hoping to get them to remember there are in fact other humans all around them: EYES UP, RATTIES.

If we look up, I think we might see something terribly, stunningly important.

“Human in a Dirty Mirror,” A Self-Conscious, Absurdly Fake-Candid but Hopeful and Also Somehow Genuine Selfie, Precipitated by the Mustard Paint Color Which Causes Me Joy

A note to my readers: any way in which you interact with this and other posts is felt, by this knapsack of assorted limbs and feelings-flotsam, as a vote towards coherence. So thanks.