Approaching Perfection

I’m sitting in a small wooden chair outside of the head of the writing department’s office.  The aesthetics of these buildings and the way they are decorated betray the college’s proximity to the city.  I would be walking home after.  The entire town is placed here for people to live out a gray life.  The only recreational activities are on two streets of what is essentially a strip mall.  The school is on top of a hill and bleeds into a ludicrously wealthy neighborhood.  It is my second meeting with the department head.  He is fat.  Call me hateful.  Call me unempathetic, but food is primarily utilitarian, and the extreme pleasure people take out of food is disgusting and clearly a marker of some early sexual trauma.  So the head of the writing department is fat, as is the man I hate most, who denies my talent and holds me in complete mystification.  Who takes issue with every word I put to the page and who has the gall to tell me that my work is “incorrect”.  Fat.  That everything I attempt is wrong.  And it has already bled down to me from intercollegiate gossip, which only hatefully functions to bring everyone nearby down, that he is actually good old college buddies with the head of the department.  He smokes heavily, my professor.  Late 60’s, early 70’s and he smokes.  Pathetic.  He looks like a leper—so apparently unhealthy.  As it happens in the life of a writer moving through academia, one is so often taught by the living failure, the fatted tenured cow who judges you and offers advice despite never having accomplished anything.  By the way he talks he cares far more for the school than for us or even the broader art of writing.  The school groomed him and captured him and now keeps him like a domestic animal.  His brain is molasses.  And I sit here waiting to be called into this office, to confer with the head of the department, my second time doing so, to talk about my hated professor and say what?  To what end?   And my boss at my job at the college is awful.  I am forced to sit next to her every day in another small wooden chair.  I mostly just sit there and occasionally file things in some stacked cabinets.  I’m given no office of my own and this is humiliating because of the stress I am under with my work and my schedule stretched so thin around it and the effect this has on my digestion.  I seem to be farting constantly.  I am not allowed my own office and am forced to sit next to her in the little chair all the hours I’m there.  Her life is made out of gossip.  She lives in the same empty suburb as me and everything that comes out of her mouth is empty hateful gossip.  This makes me sure that she is telling everyone about my digestion issues.  And the people in my classes—my peers are all pure social climbers who need to be turned away from.  Everyone is obtuse and stupid and stands against not only me but art and literature in the most general sense.  How much they hate it is all that comes out of their mouths.  So repulsive.  Their entirety is in relishing in opportunities to speak of themselves, of weaving romantic tales of themselves all while putting in zero actual work.  And most if not all of our classes are oriented around providing opportunities for them to do so, to speak uninhibitedly of their own merit.  All the writing and reading happens incidentally.  I suppose this is the college’s game.  Tricking these people into not thinking they are wasting their money—just as crucially their time—by stroking their egos.  They are obsessed with themselves and all there is to do is choke on it.   It is depressing, not only angering, to focus on my peers, to think of them, so I do what is in my power to concentrate on my work.  I am sitting here ostensibly waiting to discuss my work.  Discuss it again, in relation to this professor who does nothing but continuously insult me and condescend to me.  Who makes no effort to meet me on my level and who therefore makes no actual effort to teach me.  Even those with whom I am supposed to find some haven, some common ground—to everyone here I am like the gleaming underside of a rock.  I do everything in my power not to draw attention to myself.  But to hide altogether is also impossible due to both the nature of the graduate program and also the power of my work.  And also the lifelessness of not only the school but the entire town.  The college is like a parasite that attached itself to the larger organism that is the surrounding towns then survived its host by only minutes to leave its garish corpse decomposing on the hilltop.  Constantly there is construction.  Faintly I can hear the machines’ whine now.  Almost every class I take is disrupted by the sounds of construction.  Of large machines moving the earth, digging out the ground and subsequently putting together a superfluous building.  I know it is superfluous because there is already an excessive amount of space.  The existent building space dwarfs the student population.  And this including the on-campus undergraduate housing.  Yes, the place cares only for its own appearance.  Narcissus and the water—absolutely nothing in the glassy eyes of the tenured faculty whose only modicum of an attempt at clinging to reality is in settling only a modest distance from the city.  They all balked and offered tepid commentary following the student worker protests.  The only decent instructors being the underpaid adjuncts who have little job security and are necessarily employed by multiple colleges.  I sit waiting for my time in the office, which will be pointless.  I know how pointless it will be, every once in a while dodging the glances in of people walking down the hall past the open doorway, many of them the supposed writers who populate my classes and I keep thinking desperately and yearningly of the way the cigarette lit upon leaving will taste and how good the air will still smell after last night’s rain, and how good I will feel getting to work on my work, what little time I can manage to give my work, so little time, when I am finally done here, when I can finally detach and dissociate and separate entirely from the charade of being a person in academic society. Everything works to keep me rooted here in my humiliation, away from my work.  Sweat layers in my hands as I continually ring them against one another.  A pressure like my head is in a vice.  Last night, my roof partially collapsed under the weight of rain.  Water leaked from various points in the ceiling and pooled around my room.  I woke up to it dripping on my leg and then noticed all the other spots around my room that were getting soaked.  It was raining on my TV.  Panicking, I knelt down and put my hand around an extension cord lying in a puddle of water on the tiled floor.  I keep replaying that moment of holding it, how difficult it was for a minute to let go, and thinking of it now while examining my burnt fingertips, waiting for my time to go into the office of the department head and say God knows what.  Since my clothes were all over the ground much of them were soaked as well.  My heart was beating after I was electrocuted.  For a moment, still groggy from being awoken by the water, I thought I might die.  Still, I’d rather be home than here waiting in this fake haven.  The stillness of this world affects me.  The doom of this inner suburb is palpable.  Every person, thing, and highway-crossing deer must sit perfectly still forever.  It wakes me up and gets my skin twitching.  I am perfectly awake at 8:20 every morning, on a depressed mattress that around me has formed a pool of my own sweat.  My skin twitches now in this small space, outside of the department head’s office.  For simplicity’s sake I have to, at the very least, feign respect for or at least act in some non-psychotic-seeming manner—like he is not my enemy.  And I sit here, jaw clenched, teeth grating, thinking about that cigarette, thinking about the satisfaction of walking in the cool air from this office to my house two miles away.  Normally I would be home by now.  I would have picked up food from a hole-in-the-wall take-out place on the way home, and I would have eaten it quickly before it cooled even more, having already cooled somewhat from the long walk, and I would have eaten it quickly while watching YouTube videos, and then at the moment I felt full I would have started my work immediately, stopping abruptly whatever video I was in the middle of watching.  So I am irritated already.  Supremely irritated.  And it is all the worse because against my better judgement I have put myself in this situation.  My one decent professor this semester encouraged me to meet with the department head to discuss my options, not knowing, as an adjunct, of the department head’s close relationship with the professor I hated.  If I didn’t have to deal with these people my life would be nearly perfect.  Every day my life is laid out in glorious routine, where my head is cleared both in the morning and after class on my long walks to and from the college.   Walking uphill, down into the valley of the town, uphill again to the college campus.  Past parking lots, strip malls, a highway overpass.  Walking sidewalks only ostensibly intended for human legs.  My life against the grain of greater human transport, all of it begging me to stop—to lay down and die, but I will not.  I am always working.  When my clothing has overtaken the floor of my room, I try to put my mind off of the work and onto the work of cleaning the floor and surfaces so I can ignore them again and continue my work in a seamless rhythm.  Everything in my life oriented around my work and turning life into a wonderful machine as much as I can handle and tolerate it.  It is important to keep in rhythm.  Fundamental.  The only thing to do is to try and match the pace of my working mind.  I am in constant danger of stopping.  And if I stop I would be as good as dead.  To let off, to ease off, would be no different than dying.  I would be assuming a different life.  Especially here where I live.  Everything aligns purposefully for me here.  Everything being completely against my grain. Everything and everyone treating me like an irritated piece of acne on the skin to be monitored while avoiding contact.  Everything working to push me out, to remove me from here.  Like when my boss started talking about the student who sent the email.  News travels through campus fast.   It reminded her, possibly as some unconscious attack on me, of the person who had my job before me.  He was bipolar.  She had known a few in her day.  A few days ago, a seeming lifetime before my wait here outside of this office, I wound up at a lecture by a well-known poet in the school’s library.  I have avoided going to every writing event on campus the entire semester, and now that there are only so many weeks left I have to go to every remaining one to satisfy a minimum requirement.  Another authority in the writing department, the head of student life, was milling around looking out of the windows.  An email had been sent to some professor and other higher ups in the writing department.  There was some indication that the person who sent it would show up at this poet’s lecture.  Sitting on the wooden chair, unable to look in through the blinds on the department head’s office windows, I suddenly feel a rush of energy.  I put my hands with their burnt fingertips on my knees and bounce them up and down.  The email was CC’d to everyone in the writing department, the whole email list, by the writer himself, and seemingly everyone has read it.  Everyone is aware of his mental illness as he has written and talked about it.  Some vaguely threatening language must have given faculty the idea he might show up at the next event, but the email was really a diatribe against the people here, a dressing down of both the faculty and the student body.  I know who he is because I have been to two of the open mic readings that are held weekly, part of my larger goal of meeting the bare social minimum and fading into the background.  What I have learned going to these readings is that a group of students has walked out in protest even more than the two times I have witnessed myself.  One person walks out and more follow in solidarity.  The first walk-out I saw was because of an off-color joke about suicide.  The other walk-out I witnessed was during the email writer’s turn reading—I don’t even know why they walked out, really, as I was so astonished by it happening that everything else about the reading has left my brain.  I don’t understand how someone could be so offended by a person reading a piece of their writing that they feel the need to cause such a gross scene.  The thing is everyone here needs to intellectualize how to act towards other people.  It needs to be reduced to rules and guidelines, because they are all callous—steamrolling their way through life.  They know there is offense to find in the concept, so they walk out on their peers’ work.  Because they don’t have any concept of the emotional effort and vulnerability that goes into the work.  Because they don’t do it themselves and develop no meaningful critical faculties—they don’t care, it’s enough to pay the fee upfront to be flattered in this bucolic environment.  I was then subjected to speculation on his mental illness by the people in my writing workshop the following day—my awful professor gleefully egging them on, wanting to be in on the gossip.  One person cited her undergrad psych minor in her conclusion that the email writer had, in addition to bipolar disorder, comorbid borderline personality disorder and rage issues surrounding women stemming from his relationship with his mother.  Everyone there was acting like openly discussing this in this forum was completely normal and acceptable behavior.  I was the one that spoke up—I had to speak up because it was going on for so long.  I pleaded for us to move on, feeling bitter that I had done my due diligence in preparing for class and reviewing their work.  What makes it worse, of course, what puts the worst taste in my mouth, is that mostly everyone here is white and a woman, and he is Black, angry and over six feet tall.  It’s all too easy to see where the threat and fervor really lays.  And the head of student life scanned the entrance to the library at the poetry reading, out a window from the second floor where the lecture was happening, glassily nodding to people greeting her before it began.  A few security guards stood at the ready, both outside and in, and she talked to them intermittently through a walkie.  The guy never showed up.  The lecture ended.  I had been unable to pay attention for most of it and made it outside quickly to avoid any contact.   I stood at a bench near the library entrance, attempting to blend in with teenagers standing around smoking.  I watched as my peers exited the library in small groups.  They tittered about how the poet had been a bit too “out there”.  I waited for them to clear out so I could start home.  I needed to get back to my work.