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Last night, June 16, 2010, was the first time in five years I was going through a noticeable, visible panic attack. I was in San Diego, now I'm in Santa Barbara. I was at Jx's house, and I was feeling weak and vulnerable, for I just started working through the instruction manual for Logic Pro music software (I'm trying to transfer from Sonar Home Studio) and realized that my venturing through the mechanics of music audio production would finally lead me to my salvation of bare minimum professional multi-media production, but then had to be interrupted by the realities that I had to head back up to Santa Barbara, because the following day entailed the initiation of a root-canal process and two meetings with two different professors. Then again, my being in San Diego embodied the first time of my escaping from Santa Barbara for an entire month of brutal labor of "reviewing the previous literature and paying homage to all those who did work before me... spending a significant fraction of my life worrying about what other people think rather than further developing what I think." Fxck! I hate literature reviews.... But nevertheless, I do learn new things and somehow I do build character in the process... then again... I feel more institutionalized... more so a part of the establishment... lovely.... To take things back even further, I had come to realize that this entire academic year I had been mentally bulldozed and riddled with a bunch of unfinished projects, but I emerged from my being in the midst of the intellectual academic hurricane with new directions, digging extremely deep inside myself and feel that I have the answer to the question of "what's next in Victoria's life" whereas in the previous summer I did NOT feel that way. So I've spent the ENTIRE LAST 9 MONTHS HOLDING MY MENTAL BREATH and it's the first time I've had the opportunity to ask "WHO AM I?" and "WHERE IN THE HXLL AM I AT?" being in San Diego, far far away from Santa Barbara, the utopia vacation land, yet riddled with my own academic problems... It's a paradoxical landscape at this moment... and last night was the LAST thing I wanted to do, drive in the middle of the night back to Santa Barbara to wrap up loose ends, talk to professors, and have the worst and most graphic and physical dental operation I had ever experienced in my 10 years of sitting on the dental seat. So here I am, uncovering the hidden prison of my mind--Logic Pro Music software--uprooted from my internal vulnerabilities, forced to return to the land of academidrama I didn't even want to think about and then right before I leave Jx vents to me about his concerns with the "conditions" of the ocean and how the last three months have not been money-makers, it's the first time it's ever happened to him in his entire fishing career... miserable April, like usual, then these blasting red tides with no ocean circulation, and now small vessel advisories due to excess wind.... There's no break in bad weather.... Jx vented pretty badly and then reminded me to be a bit more considerate with my use of coffee cups and the tiniest of things, combined with his fishing concerns (see the manifesto above) just placed me in this super ultimate vulnerable emotional state, where I feel everything is swirling and unstable and that everything in the whole world is "my fault" and then I find myself in this mode of uncontrollable heavy breathing and crying and wailing alone in the car at night, my sleeves covered with snot and these gang-banger cars passing by me with heavy loud rap music right outside the Lemon Grove Starbucks, in which I ventured in, trying to stay bare minimum composed though my face was blotched with brown-redness and the two insensitive women (or do I say bxtches) behind the counter inspected my one-time re-use coffee cup from the Albertsons down the street as if they were holding an envelop possibly containing anthrax, and with the immense uncertain snootiness the older woman rejected the possibility of a 50-cent refill because "it's not the same store" but then she mumbled "but we have coffee brewing right now, it will be about three minutes... but don't worry about it, I'll just bring one out to you," and though this seems to be a kind gesture in words, the older woman's tone of voice was of alien disgust, as if I were contaminated by the Gulf Oil spill or something, and I just burst into tears right then and there in front of those two snooty girls and barely handled my cup, sat down at a table right be the doorway trying to compose myself, but it was a miserable failure... just this ultimate moment of vulnerability where my exposure of uncontrollable emotion is greeted by insensitivity of the humans around me, I just knew, yes yes, this is a Post-Modern Moment (or Post Modern Second or PMS), or so I now know... Victoria Anonymous, Terra Anonymous... one and the same... human indifference to anyone and anything they don't know and are not attached to.... I'm staring at a few hundred humans across the street at the farmer's market, and now I feel like I'm staring at round stones rolling down a hill, I'm staring at tumbleweed blown across the Mojave Desert, I'm in a city and I feel more desolate and alone than when I'm out on the Pacific Ocean or at the Bahia de Los Angeles, so I was sooo uncontained that I just walked out the Starbucks and stormed away, back into the car, without picking up any coffee, it was the perfectly wrong moment to encounter ultimate bxtchiness of lady Starbucks baristas.
Before I left in the dark, I called Jx one more time and he calmed me down some, reminding me that we all need to vent, it's a part of the process... which is very true, but my vulnerability was unbearable at the moment.... He cheered me up with some text messages and cartoon ideas, and after about a half-hour of driving I was calming down... though just that half-hour before I was crying and wailing and short of breath that I could barely hold the steering wheel, let alone see through my watery eyes. As I continued driving up north, parsing the drive into "counties," from San Diego to Orange County (south and north) to Los Angeles, then Ventura and SB, Jx's manifesto sat heavier and heavier in me. It was so sorrowful to me, to give up.... To give up a passion, a self-carved profession that was half labor, half hobby and play, that had worked successfully for over ten years, and for a multitude of reasons all feeding off of each other... this profession no longer works, no longer viable... for more than a few days... an entire season? One thing I can say for sure, it is one thing for a scientist to write about how "all fishermen have to do is change their profession" in the literature in cold, nonchalant text, and then it's another thing to experience the venting worries of a fisherman or fishermen who have become close friends. These include worries... to a point of depression (worse than a bad funk). This distant, cold fine print problem in the literature suddenly becomes magnifyingly personal. A visua-emotional landscape mapped onto the impersonal... it's the least I can do in my life: experience the fine technical print, not just read it.
All the reasons as to why Jx is a commercial fisherman in the first place welled up in my mind: (1) to escape humans, escape civilization (2) to escape the absurdity of having a job in a box, a cubicle (3) to integrate mental and physical labor (4) to be your own boss, impose your own labors on yourself rather than do the labors of another human's will: all the ideals of such work just tapering away... to succumb to the drudgery work of a machinist society, where everyone is working for everyone else and not for their own brains.... Oh but there must be other fruitful and meaningful and connected forms of labors out there... It just takes a while to poke around and figure out where they're at. I spoke with Peter about this manifesto, and he informed me that many natural resource users feel this way: they are under the gun, at the whims of the agents of the environment, and then society comes down on them with additional layers of constraints, it can be unbearably overwhelming... like me... having a panic attack. I just think that "living your passions is no longer financially viable" is a sin of a mass-scale economic system. People are behaving to satisfy the vicious metabolism of a giant machine, rather than fulfilling their inner needs, exploring their inner souls. We're all being swallowed by the giant machine... if only we could somehow survive being at the fringes of the grid. I was thinking about the sportfishing option for temporary work... "You might as well catch people to catch fish. After all, there seems to be a lot more humans than fishes, so you might as well catch naive, vacation-going humans instead..." but then some of the charms of the labors of commercial fishing vanish.... What was the means of livelihood metamorphoses to Disney entertainment of the ocean (in part)....
It's toward the end of June 17, 2010, and somehow I have survived the day. I had the roughest dental work done on me... a root canal at the UCSB on-campus dental offices... lost so much of a molar.... I'm still sore... the dental assistant was a bit of a ditz, but the dentist was hard core. Today I was a phenomenal patient and Dr. Montgomery said he liked to "divorce the patient from the tooth," (quite existential!) so I'm a great patient with a troublesome tooth. It turned out that one of my four tooth tunnels inherently calcified, "nature's root canal" which was against the grain of textbook procedures. After that I had a super discussion about ecocriticism, Literature and the Environment with Dr. Shewry, and then wrote most of this blog at Kinkos in Goleta, and then talked with Dr. Alagona about marine environmental history and a whole bunch of other cool stuff (in which he cheered me up, as usual) and here I am, a little less bummed than before....
