magical bingeism
love in the time of comfort shows / 100 eps of solitude
My heartbreak halts the rotation of the earth.
My joy has urged souls into cocoons of transformation.
My sadness can flood a whole home with despair.
I got a big woe™ in me.
Nothing devastating planted it there. No particularly tragic upbringing. Just a perpetual hum of offness, a panoramic discomfort, as if i vibrate at a different frequency to the rest of the world. I used to wish for some incalculably traumatic event to befall me. At least then the big woe™ would have a heroic origin that could make it legible to myself and the people who cared about me. Pretty crazy, huh? Best I got is a reflection on an early memory.
When I was six, I moved into what became my family home in Hertfordshire, England. The first thing I asked was where’s the chimney? my father (or mother, I don’t quite remember) replied we don’t have one. I asked well, how is Santa Claus going to get in? My mother, or perhaps father, said he has a key.
I thought about it for weeks. Maybe months. Maybe days.
When I was sat in a circle with the rest of my classmates before the winter holidays, everyone was going around, sharing what toys they’d written in their Christmas letters. It got to my turn and said I didn’t write a letter because Santa Claus isn’t real.
(Record Scratch)
Somewhere in the circle, a girl started crying. The teacher hauled me out of the room and asked why did you say Santa isn’t real? I replied well, my new house doesn’t have a chimney. My dad and/or mum said that Santa Claus has a key to deliver presents… Do you expect me to believe that dude has a key to every house on the planet? How do you even get a keyring that big?!
I laugh whenever I think of that story. Flawless logic within the confines of the information I was able to process. But even then, I didn’t like being taken for a fool.
The teacher told me I should take it back. But that would be a lie, I said. She replied: Just pretend. Lots of things happened in my six-year-old brain that I’m able to articulate retrospectively.
In that moment, I was taught lying is okay, encouraged even, in the preservation of a greater good, which was at odds with everything every adult had said to me up until that point; that I should never lie.
I was tasked with protecting my peers from a truth that would hurt them, a.k.a I was told to be the adult – the first in a long line of times where my savviness meant maturity beyond my age was expected of me. In the midst of an immobilising lack of simplicity—of conflicting moralities and colliding realities—there was a demand, really a choice, that was whipping the balance scales of right and wrong into a frenzy in the playground of my mind.
I’m sure my teacher thought it wasn’t that deep. Just tell a little white lie. But I was six years old and everything was deep. I had only just learnt how to handle the icky feeling in my feet when a stone works its way into my shoes.
Okay, I said to quiet it all. I’ll take it back.
My heartbreak halts the rotation of the earth.
I sit in the overwhelming quiet of the aftermath with all the suspense of a horror flick. the painful collision of realities, of my mistakes misshapen by their mistakes, of shortcomings clarifying the glaze of tinted rose, trying to make sense of the frenzied fluctuation of my inner balance scales. The easiest thing to do is just blame myself. I already vibrate out of sync with the rest of the world! Of course, I’d vibe out of sync with a partner. Self pity is effortless, true accountability is hard when you’ve never seen it up close and in love, blame is woefully unproductive. What matters most is:
Will you do better moving forward? or will i have to move forward without you?
(Top answer: Option b—Without)
When my heartbreak halts the rotation of the earth, I binge-watch tv.
I’m totally justified in holing myself away. I banish pain to the left ventricle and wrap myself in bedsheets and order Deliveroo and stay far away from anyone the big woe™ could swallow and gorge myself on the intricacies of made-up people’s lives. M’m consoled by their neatly packaged character arcs, the algebraic solutions to their narrative-driven problems. i’ve lived through countless lives this way.
A couple of heartbreaks ago, I binged Jane the Virgin (2014). fuck, that was a good one! gnawing on the love triangle of Jane, Micheal and Rafael as the bonfire of a relationship that’d begun monogamous and gracelessly slid into polyamory roared in the background. I was hooked for days!
I ran out of episodes of Jane the Virgin before I’d recovered fully so I followed it up with My Crazy Ex Girlfriend (2015). I don’t remember anything about that show. It’s funny how heartache muffles memory. A physiological act of self-defence, no doubt. I do remember Nipsey Hustle being forever changed by witnessing the grooming practices of Rebecca Bunch (Rachel Bloom) and deciding to apologise to women he’d wronged.
It got the first and only laugh out of me that whole month.
My heartbreak halts the rotation of the earth and I binge-watch tv.
I’ve racked up a lot of cinematic mileage in the cocoon of my duvet. I feel the stories building me back into someone ready to get back out there again. I’m shrewd enough to recognise what’s going on. The curse of knowledge is that being aware of the chasm between your insight and actionable change doesn’t make either any easier.
In the popcorn kernels of shame, the privilege at being able to vegetate for weeks without dire repercussions slits my emotional gums. M’m immobilised all the same (sometimes wishing for some traumatising horror to force me to move). Soon, I tell myself get up, man up, strengthen those psychological biceps because resorting to long conferences of tele-hypnosis is selfish and silly.
Selfish and silly and complicated. Bingeing is productive, sometimes. When I wrote my short story, Yawn of the Pond in a feverish, fortnight-long haze, I barely slept. I admire people with vigilant writing practices, distilling the explosiveness of their creative energy into a sensible, daily regiment. I write in bated bomb-blasts (you’re tuned into one right now, iI’m writing this at 4:46am on the day after my birthday because I had a eureka moment this piece’s angle as I was walking home through the empty night with a dead phone). I wrote Yawn of the Pond in one such explosion. After years of masticating on the premise, a fortuitous set of circumstances pushed me into finally attempting to tackle telling the tale. Thus, I sat at my desk, put Rick and Morty (2013) on the TV behind me and turned the sound down to a barely audible volume.
I’ve seen Rick and Morty front to back countless times. It’s been a sleep aid (although I find myself waking to skip Season 3, Episode 9: The ABC's of Beth—that episode freaks me out on an astral level) and at this point, its a begrudging fixture of my life, able to function as an entertaining, automated drone of inspirational ambience, as thoughtless as breathing, cemented in importance to the point where my little brother and I fire off quotes to one another without even thinking about it (ironically, a quote we revisit often is from The ABC’s of Beth. Whenever we’re bantering and one of our jokes fall flat, the other will let out: Whatever you say, Stone Cold Steve Austin!).
Rick and Morty’s perfect compound of sardonicism, whip-smartness, fantasy and emotion made it excellent background fuel for my bizarre tale about a supernatural hunter from Botswana trying to find a missing girl. According to Binge Clock, it takes 24 hours and 15 minutes to watch Rick and Morty from beginning to end, which sounds about right, I remember reloading it about 9 or 10 times. I doubt I’d have finished my story without it.
What’s a nigga to do when his emotional crutch is also a functional aid for his artistic craft?
I spoke to a friend of mine. She’s been trying to navigate her ADHD and her vocation demands a lot of video editing. She confessed that her last batch of projects were extremely difficult. Video-editing is not the kind of activity where she’s able to “put something on in the background and lock in”, she has to dedicate all of her senses on one task and the volume of work multiplied by the amount of concentration made her physically ill. I’ve never understood anyone more.
I’m weary at bingeing being a coping mechanism for my heartbreaks but intrigued by it being a creative stimulant for my art.
And still, there’s one more feeling, glimmering in the soup of it all.
My mother, bless her, took a trip to South America and brought home a Peruvian flu. When my throat started getting gooey, a candlelight of joy flickered at the forecast of getting sick. I got to hole away and re-acquaint myself with the absolutely bananas rollercoaster ride of Scandal (2012). Towards the end of the series, when everyone’s moral compass had gone haywire and the show’s internal value system stopped even trying to make sense – I found myself confronting the flicker.
Was it really joy? Or was it relief? Relief from having an excuse to not participate in a world that just doesn’t seem to make any fucking sense? Where a pandemic can wipe out millions and the foregrounded debate is should we or shouldn’t we wear masks, all for world to go back to the exact same, flawed way it was before? Where celebrity deaths garner more care than genocides? Where human civilisation is participating in environmental self-harm of the only planet we have; microplastics in our blood and carbonisation of the breathable air and the trees are on strike and garbage islands corroding the ocean and have you noticed there’s less bugs than their used to be?
…Was i excited to get sick because it meant I wouldn’t have to get up and pretend—with family, strangers and anybody in between—that I’m okay/unaffected/able to regulate all this? (…My confrontations, it seems, are just a maelstrom of inquiries).
I think, the big woe™ might just be my patient-zero heartbreak.
When Isat in my strange new bedroom and ripped down the magical curtain of Santa Claus’ existence, reasoning my way out of childlike wonder and then coerced to lie to preserve the naïveté of others even though dishonesty had been drummed into me as a cardinal sin. Was it then? Or some other time? Before, or after, or the cumulative experience of a world so ubiquitous in its senselessness that it renders me nonsensical to myself?
But oh, how bingeing quiets the mind. Abed in says it best Community (2009):
“I can tell TV from real life. TV makes sense, it has structure, logic, rules, and likeable leading men. In real life we have this. We have you.”
You’ve got me.
And my heartbreak halts the rotation of the earth!
…But people will always keep moving anyway.
My heartbreak halts the rotation of the earth and I suspect that I’ve always been heartbroken.
So perhaps, I need to binge-watch my own life for a couple of seasons. Find the gift-wrapping for my own character arc. Pull up a whiteboard and figure out the existential algebra of my own narrative problems.
My heartbreak halts the rotation of the earth and perhaps it’s time to find a way to spin the world on my finger—even if I have to do it with the big woe’s™ tears streaming down my face.
