Brain Damage

Brain Damage – Pink Floyd

Winter in America is cold. And yes, I just keep growing older. For the second year now, I have been bracing myself for seasonal impact much in the way a toddler plays hide and seek: I sit tight, cover my eyes, and think the cold won’t ever find me. Of course it always does. Winter in America is cold. I know the tune. And yes, I wish I could have known enough of winter in America to leave winter in America alone. But how could I have known it was so different from any Dutch winter I have skated through so far? How was I to know that winter in America relates to my kind of winter much in the way the actual act of giving birth relates to what most mothers tell you about it, after the fact?

Mothers rarely mention the pain – of delivering a child, I mean. Sure, they’ll tell you it hurts, or even that it really hurts, but then they gloss over it saying they forgot all about that the second they held their newborn baby in their arms. Cheeks glowing in soft focus, light beads of sweat on otherwise fresh temples. No blood anywhere or mucus. Nobody tells you giving birth can hurt so bad that when the doctor needs to carve your most private flesh in order to help the baby come out, he cuts you in the middle of a contraction, you know, because when you’re in the middle of a contraction the pain is so nasty you won’t even notice someone is ripping your vagina to pieces. Nobody tells you that you pee and crap all over the place in the process, something you and your sphincter probably won’t even take in because you’re too busy not fainting while hanging onto your shredded sanity. What I’m trying to say is, people never really tell you anything worthwhile about things that matter.

So here I am, caught in mid-winter New York City, with no information to go on that is even remotely reliable. Rockefeller Ice Rink and Macy’s Holiday Windows be damned! New York winters aren’t fun and cozy. They’re just plain nasty. It’s not all that cold in the city, really. I spent Christmas in Canada last year – that was cold. New York temperatures don’t even come close to minus 40; your hair doesn’t freeze from just looking out the window.
No, New York winter is wicked in a different way. For one, the incessant wind is so vile it cuts off your breath – which is the only reason you don’t actually hear people moan when they are forced to go outside. But I expected all that. I cast aside accounts the likes of Come on it’s lovely weather for a sleigh ride together as rather implausible a long time ago (even if it is Ella Fitzgerald singing it). I warmed, instead, to tales that at least heed a warning, like Oh the weather outside is frightful (thank you Dean Martin, for telling it like it is). Still, I was quite underprepared for the grimmer upshot of New York winter.

It started with me showing all my usual signs of wintry weather: the glowing cheeks, the numbness in my toes, the stinging in my fingers, the tingling in my ears – nothing new there. I am one of those people who are prone to flushing cheeks, cold noses, icy fingers and arctic toes, even in the summertime. In winter my body tends to act like a tree: it tries to shed my outer extremities. They’ll sprout back up in spring! What makes New York winters unbearable is this new and unexpected feature I’ve acquired. When temperatures drop in New York City, I become electric. And I mean real static. You know how your hair gets electric when you rub balloons off your sweater and then hold them next to your head? I have that. Only, I don’t just get electric when I rub balloons off my sweater, but all the time. And not only am I electrically charged (with all the nuisance of shirts sticking to my hair, my body sticking to my dresses and scarves sticking to hair, body, shirts and dresses alike); every time I touch anything, the static releases – electrocuting me.

I am subject to these micro scale electrocutions where ever I go. I get up from the couch and touch the oven – I zap myself. I walk to the bathroom and turn on the light – I get zapped again. I put on my shoes and open the cabinet door – a jolt. I turn on the kitchen tap – zap. My sweetheart gets up from the couch and kisses me – I zap my lips. I get up from the couch to kiss my sweetheart – I zap my lips again (how does that work?!). A fingerful of cheesecake – it's electrifying. I touch the shower curtain as I’m taking a shower – I'm shocked. I open a window – I scare the pigeons off our balcony as I catch a jolt. I take down the bed sheets – not only do I zap myself, but the crackle and hiss of the pillow cases I’m holding is so ominous that I daren’t go near the laundry bag, let alone touch the doorknob. I can’t wear my headphones when I put on my coat or when I put laundry in the machine – I’ll zap myself in the ears. I plug in my phone – zap. I pick my nose – you get the idea.

At first, I thought it was kind of funny. Being static made me different. I felt special, you know, like I had some kind of superpower – albeit on infinitesimal scale. I could be Electro Girl, or Zappo The Amazing, savior of little things in need of little saving. I envisioned myself recharging AAA batteries in times of need, saving innocents whose lives depended on those very 1.5 volts; I could be an anthill heroine.

That, of course, was three months ago. By now, it is getting tiresome. I suffer from minor scale electrocution about 25 times a day. I tried to avoid touching things. I tried not touching anything metal without wearing gloves; I tried touching the wooden part of the door before touching the knob. I have learned to operate the elevator button with a padded elbow. I tried to keep my shoes on; I tried to keep my shoes off. Sometimes these things work. Mostly they don’t. I tell myself, those 1.5 volts won’t kill me. I tell myself it’s not so bad. But really, it is. It’s very bad. It’s water boarding for beginners. Constant micro-electrocution (and, worse: the constant threat of micro-electrocution) can break a girl. The worst part is nothing to do with pain – all I really experience is a mild discomfort varying from a dull twinge to a sharp little pang, depending on what I touch.

What makes it horrible is that the jolts seem to somehow reset my mind. It’s uncanny. I’ll jump up from the couch with a thought I want to write down (this can vary from a great idea for a story to a possible solution for tensions in the Middle East). As I touch my desk to sit down and start writing, I zap myself, and instantly forget what I was thinking. Not what I was doing – I remember I was getting up to write down a thought – but I forget the thought.
To salvage my possible gem, I sit back down on the couch and try to retrace my train of thought. Sometimes it works: I get a second chance to vocalize my initial idea. I jump up from the couch with this version 2.0 of the thought I wanted to write down (this time it varies from a hunch for the next phrase in a story to a possible solution for tensions in my middle back). I touch my keyboard to write it down – and I zap myself, instantly forgetting what I was thinking – again. It’s like running around in a malicious circle, a hamster wheel from hell.
I’m being micromanaged by a minuscule Nurse Ratched in the amoeba version of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.
It’s like being not quite knocked down by an invisible, painless atomic force – a butterfly, flapping its wings in Tokyo maybe. A tiny moth inside my head, tearing itty-bitty holes into the once solid fabric of my brain. Slowly evaporating it. I am being tortured in the My First Sony version of Room 101. That might not put me in a doubleplus ungood situation, but for the going 2010 free Western world standards I still feel bereft of some basic right or comfort. It can’t always have been like this. Can it?

The dry heat in our apartment must have something to do with it. My sweetheart and I tried to find ways to control our apartment’s temperature. As it turns out, we cannot turn down the heat. We cannot turn off the heat. There is no thermostat. Somewhere in the basement of our building, someone pushes the Heat On button in October, and the Heat Off button in April. We can break (not disconnect: it involves physically smashing the pipes) the heating in our apartment, but that means no more heat in any of the apartments lined up above ours – we live on the 12th floor of a 28 story building – and probably a fountain of boiling water hissing its way from the exposed pipes to our exposed faces. We are currently filling up used tin cans with water and put them inside the heaters to humidify the room. Not only is that seriously poor; it also doesn’t work. There is simply too much dry heat going on, and there is simply no way to be in command of that heat. Apart from opening the windows, there is nothing you can do.

Opening a window in winter means the city grid’s cutthroat wind will blast any coherent thought straight to eternal springtime. In addition to the blistering cold you also let in police cars and fire trucks whoop-whooping their days and nights away on the streets below, plus the black incinerator fumes from the building across the street. We are forced to keep the windows closed, and the overly heated air consequently dehydrates the place, and us, to the point where we get dry eyes, itchy skin, nosebleeds, and, in my case, become static.

So here we are, in the epicenter of the Free World, not even free to regulate our own rented heat; we are forced to share the same temperature with all the other tenants in our building. Our supers assure us there is nothing they can do. They don’t make the rules for heat. They cannot favor some tenants over others. We are not even paying extra money for all that extra heat. How can we complain? We are all equal. We shall all have the same heat. That’s the way it works. If I think I need a different level of room temperature, I will be electrocuted until I no longer know of any different kind of heat than the heat I have now.
I might, in a remote corner of my subconscious, have some recollection of a place and a time where people were free to choose their own heat level, but that recollection is obviously false and must be evaporated.

And so, here I am on this crisp clear February afternoon awaiting the winter’s biggest snow storm yet in this winter wonderland of liberal democracy. Here I lie in wait, in a country whose angry antigovernment TEA partiers are so afraid to lose their freedom that they would rather be chained to hyperbolic patriotism than succumb to an administration resembling anything remotely reminiscent of anything socialist (for any degree of socialism equals fascism and will inevitably lead, if not to straight up genocide, then at least to health care death squads kicking down our parents’ and grandparents’ doors at night). To them, my ongoing winter static and subsequent evaporation is just another Liberal Democrat’s Death by Electrocution – 1.5 volts at a time. Zap!