saturday (nosebleed section)
Yesterday I woke up with a nosebleed. What I mean to say is that I woke up and my nose started to bleed. Sometimes you just know, you know? I knew before I saw the spot of blood on my sheet — how does one remove a bloodstain, by the way, I don’t want to buy new sheets — I knew before I saw it that it was blood. I rolled up some Kleenex and stuffed it in my nose and went back to sleep, fitfully, tossing and turning, changing the Kleenex once or twice. I didn’t panic.
I thought, isn’t this what always happens in movies? Someone gets a nosebleed and this indicates that they have ebola or whatever? That they will die imminently from a catastrophic brain injury or a virus or just bad luck? Then I thought about how much anti-congestion nasal spray I had doused myself with the day before and how I had though to myself, I’m using too much of this I’m going to get a nosebleed. I thought about my college roommate’s boyfriend and how she, my roommate I mean, told me once that I should never use nasal spray because it destroys your nose’s ability to produce mucus and her boyfriend would have nosebleeds forever. I remember he played a lot of video games and didn’t like to make eye contact.
I got up and decided the nosebleed was probably done and took Nacho out to pee on the busted picket fence. I wiped my nose at one point and saw blood on my hands so we turned around and went back. I made coffee, ate some fruit, sent some texts and decided to go to dim sum.
The dim sum near my house is expensive but good. It feels worth it somehow. There’s a cheaper dim sum not so far away, in the neighborhood where I used to live, but I don’t want to go there. I tended to leave that place with gastrointestinal distress and there are few experiences I dislike more than waiting for a bus while needing to take a shit. I go there once a month, pretty much. The woman who hands out the little meal card at the front recognizes me now. You’ve been here before, she says. Amiguito, she says.
You walk in and look to your right. A woman, my amiga, asks you how many people you’re with. You say, one, and she hands you a card. You take your card and your drink, she’s offered you tea and you’ve rejected, preferring mineral water, even though the point of dim sum is to drink tea and eat dumplings. You take your drink to your table, which she has assigned to you, and take your card to the steam table in back, where you point to the things you want. There’s usually an assortment of dumplings and sometimes also an assortment of steamed buns. There’s also always chicken feet and tripe and these things that are so much like tamales that I can’t think of any way to describe them except to say that they are rice tamales with chicken and salted egg wrapped in lotus leaf. I think it’s lotus leaf anyway, it’s certainly not banana and definitely not corn and definitely not hoja santa.
I usually get har gao, which are shrimp dumplings, shu mai, which are pork & shrimp dumplings, and either a mystery item or the tamal. The tamal is really filling so it’s a little dangerous with two other things. This time there were no shrimp dumplings so I got this thing I’d never seen before, sweet tofu skin stuffed with carrot & pork in a sweet and salty sauce, the shu mai, and a mystery dumpling that was like some innocuous green with pork. I was grumpy, I woke up in a bad mood, but I liked the sweet tofu skin dumpling a lot. I wiped my nose and it was bleeding. I noticed my amiga looking at me a lot, I wonder what she thinks of me. Maybe she just noticed my nose was bleeding.
After dim sum I went to the supermarket. At checkout my eyes I unfocused my eyes and stared in the direction of the floor, which is something I do a lot at supermarkets while standing in line. Disassociate I guess. Once I told someone my idea of hell is a standing in line at the supermarket, but it’s a very specific supermarket I’m thinking of, it’s the Soriana Mega near the Chabacano metro stop where portions of the original Total Recall were filmed, next to where the first sex club I went to is or was — I think was is the correct tense, it was fun for a while but then got nasty. Anyway I went there once while the air was heavy with rain and while I waited in line hail started to batter the tin roof. Babies were crying, one or two of the twenty available checkouts were open, dozens of managers sauntered around giving unintelligible orders to the one or two cashiers who were struggling to actually get their jobs done. I thought about how I forgot my umbrella and also thought, this is hell. Then I told someone about it, I don’t remember who. Maybe it was you.
Anyway I was standing there with my eyes unfocused and saw stars. A couple of stars, not a lot of them. I felt faint for a second and started to panic. Go to urgencias if you start to feel weak, the neurologist told me. Do I feel weak? I asked myself. As I picked up items out of my cart I would ask myself, is this heavy? It never was. When I had a panic attack on Wednesday it started at breakfast and imploded at the same supermarket, standing in the same line. This is stupid, I thought. Why in the supermarket?
I looked at my bag. I had glass bottle of water, 750ml, a half-liter carton of oat milk, a whole chicken, and some other things. I told myself, this is going to be heavy. It’s normal that this is heavy, this won’t be heavy because you’re about to have a seizure and die on the floor of the supermarket. Maybe that’s why, Jonathan died on the floor of a mall and dying on the floor of a supermarket seems equally absurd and banal and depressing.
As I walked home, I shifted the bag from one shoulder to another. This feels heavy, I thought. I felt my body get faint again. This is what happens when I have panic attacks, I thought to myself. I have to keep reminding myself of reality, like my psychoanalyst told me once: the sofa is blue. The bag is heavy, I am carrying a heavy bag and that is why I am shifting it from shoulder to shoulder. The bag feels heavy because it is heavy. The bag does not feel heavy because I am about to drop dead on the street.
I got home and told Nacho, I made it. He looked at me, his eyes a mix of bemusement and concern. I thought I was going to die, I elaborated. He sighed. I’m not going to have a panic attack, I declared. Good, he said.
I’ve been doing this series of yoga videos to control the nervous system. I mean, not control it necessarily but at least gain some sort of awareness of it and have some kind of way to work with it. They’re on the Yoga with Adriene site, I don’t remember the instructor’s name but she isn’t Adriene. My favorite parts are opening my eyes really wide and looking around like a baby and tapping my forehead, also like a baby. I did these things, feeling the panic rise and then disperse. It’s good to call a friend for company but it’s also good to just address it head on. I realized that my goal for yesterday was the same as my goal for Wednesday, when I had another panic attack, which was to finish putting up acoustic panels in my studio, the first step towards recording YouTube & Patreon videos there, another step towards taking a massive risk and dedicating the majority of my time and effort towards my various creative endeavors, trumpet lessons, composition prompts, reading discussions, recipes, whatever. All the things I’ve done that I’ve been doing, all the things I’ve learned and experienced over the years that I haven’t really bothered to share with anybody, now it’s all I can think about. Sharing my knowledge. Is this the male equivalent of the biological imperative?