Desperate. The last thing that people wanted to be. The last thing, at least, that people wanted to be seen being. (A subtle but important distinction, yes?)
Desperation had Jove by the jugular. He walked around in its acrid fog, from night to day, from class to class, from push to shove. He looked out of its eyes at the hand-holding couples on their way to the swanky bars where they would pretend to do their homework over beers, kisses, and mid-afternoon sunshine. He wrote about it in his journal and drew its monsters in the sidelines of his notes.
It’s not that he didn’t count his blessings. It’s certainly not that he didn’t thank his lucky stars he had won a lavish position in the “arts” part of the liberal arts community (“liberal,” as it turns out, was somewhat of a euphemism anyway) and he now was required—not tolerated, not discouraged—yes, required, to dance his heart out several times per week. This alone was far and away reason enough to float to dreamland every night in a bed of delicious satiation. But no such bed awaited him at night. Jove had made a practice for so very many years of feeling downtrodden, incomplete, desolate, misunderstood, and—yup—desperate.
No, it’s not like he woke up one day and chose it. No one does that, do they? “I think today I’m going to feel alienated from my kind and impossible to appreciate, and I’m going to deal with that by eating too many Nutter Butters, farting a lot, and hiding in my bag when people come by, digging for something that will make me feel momentarily important. I will also write with a smug look on my face so that people don’t approach me and so I can rest assured that they will think I think I’m better than them. Lastly, I will throw an internal tantrum when I step in a puddle with my new shoes, cursing god and all the angels and most of all my sad, sad shitsack self.” Humans don’t decide these things outright. They tend to make it up as they go along, riding on autopilot, filling in the gaps that make sense with the status quo. “I feel like crap: must be a good reason…” And thus, reasons come flooding in.
Not that young Jove was depleted of Very Good Reasons. He still had a constant sense of ungrievable loss that he had never, ever been without. He still had a family who denied, denigrated, and disowned non-normative gender expression [1]. He still had only a few years of space from his experience with sexual trauma, having found out in the midst of depressive isolated teenaged angst that things were even worse than they seemed. He still had a daily mix of attraction and revulsion with his brethren, a melée of confounding, turbulent, simultaneously-occuring desire and hatred. He still had a guilt-ridden white-kid trust fund and a growing arsenal of supplies for an imminent cathartic guilt-clearing of personal and public interest. He still had his large front teeth and too-serious nose.
But the habit of desperation did not survive on explanation. It was not affected by the presence or lack of any of those Very Good Reasons. In fact, it had become shorthand for the reasons, which meant that even though the reasons would always be there to back it up and give it weight, they were not even readily available for examination. They were all zipped up in a file marked “Desperate.” To manage this, one has to search for and download a free extraction application, after making sure it isn’t full of viruses and spyware, and by the time it downloads, oh yeah, one has to re-start one’s computer and agree to all the preliminary set-up options, and then, even after all that, sometimes the application doesn’t support the file type, and one has to do the whole thing over again, this time being very vigilant to seek an application that includes the right file configuration for the contents of “Desperate,” and then, finally, if it all works out, one can wait a few minutes while the giant file called “Desperate” is unzipped and made ready for perusal. And, if one is lucky or stubborn or touched, one will still remember why the file was so important to read in the first place, and one will spend hours on end getting lost in the maze of well-rutted justifications of the psyche.
This is not a recipe for becoming less desperate. [2]
The mantle of desperation that Jove wore around like he was clothed by Ichabod Crane, it did have one notable payoff. It made for some invigorating stage work. Jove’s dancing was second to none, always at the ready to burst forth, a lava flow from somewhere hot and dark within the deep. When he pulled that realm into being, there was nothing in the world that could hold it back. Fellow dancers would twirl to a stop. Instructors would hold their breath and squint their eyes. Dust bunnies would flee the scene. And Jove—firey, storm-brewing, rock-generating Jove—would be in five places at once, hands to the invisible sky and body rolling yards below the ground, gulping air into his cannon and blasting its molecules into color combustions no eye would allow the mind to discard.
All in the name of Desperation.
A great critic would say it was worth it. A great artist would say it could be no other way. A great lover would say it was exquisite, courageous, and unnecessary.
Jove said it was survival, as he packed up his sodden clothing into a flimsy vinyl bag, leaving his curious dancing partners without another word.
And when he got home to his chilled, unsatisfactory bedding, he cried the tears of a survivor, triumphantly sad and sadly triumphant, leaning into the sharp edge of his only weapon.
-**
1. As well as, if one pans back for a wide-angle view, anything else out of the ordinary, anything that didn’t match their curtain patterns.
2. It is, however, free, voluntary advertising for a program called jZip that requires none of the aforementioned bullshit.