Paralyzer

I have a very specific memory for the strangest and most irrelevant things. I can still remember almost the entirety of Click, written and directed by Adam Sandler (Of Uncut Gems fame) and I can play out the entire film almost shot for shot in my head. I can also remember almost every StateFarm commercial ever made, and make references to the bulldog from that CapIt commercial where they’re refinishing the bed of a truck probably once a week. One of these incredibly specific memories is the first time I watched the music video to Finger Eleven’s song Paralyzer on MTV when I was 10 years old.

I imagine these things are related somehow to the person I’ve become, that somehow Click and the CapIt dog and StateFarm commercials have some overarching import on my current and future self. Part of the reason why it’s so simple for me to imagine that reality is because of how… apropos, the constant memory of Finger Eleven’s Paralyzer feels in my day to day life. The concept of paralysis haunts me like the memories of the dead, it seeps in through the corners of my eyes and digs into my brain. I can’t get rid of it no matter what I do. There will be days where I am full of energy and excitement, and it all fades away as I realize I can’t actually accomplish anything I intended to. Part of me is frozen and prevents me from taking action, letting the day slip away like water through cupped hands, leaving me to watch as drop by drop it slips away, my body frozen and incapable of bringing the liquid to my cracked lips. 

I feel helpless sometimes. Stranded in the flow of time as things pass through and around me like I exist separate from the past and the future in a present all to myself. It’s times like these that are hardest for me to cope with, and I begin to feel the fractures spreading like fractal pallbearers on my fragile sense of self. I’m on record describing how crazy I am, but nothing makes me acknowledge it more than these days where I just can’t seem to begin to exist the way the rest of the world does. I’m not saying I blame Finger Eleven for all my problems but I do think that song residing deep in my psyche for so long was a signifier for times to come. The idea of being paralyzed has sat in my head since I was a baby after all. 

When I was a kid, I would have something one might describe as night terrors, maybe full-on hallucinations, I don’t really know.  I would lie awake in my bed, and watch as the corner of my room grew darker and darker like they were slowly getting shaded in with pen and ink. It was in these hidden hours I would see a tennis ball on a stick appear in the center of my room. In my heart, I knew if I stopped looking at the ball it would fall off the stick, and I knew if it fell off the stick something bad would happen. I would spend hours or minutes or days or seconds staring at this ball, motionless and sweating until the darkness in the corners of the room would close in and I’d fall asleep, exhausted. It’s different circumstances now but that same feeling has been carried in my heart for years, that all-consuming sense of coming doom. When I feel that sensation, even now, I have the same response, I find myself paralyzed, incapable of doing anything but watching and making sure the tennis ball doesn’t fall off of the stick.

Because it didn’t cross my mind back then I should have just held the tennis ball with my own hands.