EDITOR’S NOTE:

Dr. Gorman has been unreachable since graduating from Barbara Ingram School for the Arts where, in his final months as a guitar major in the Instrumental Music discipline, he had described himself in a program biography as a “reluctant guitarist” and a “failed composer.”

What we gather from witness testimony is that after the graduation ceremony, he accepted his award for Best Guitarist and Best Student in AP Literature, received his diploma, and left Hagerstown without picking his graduate cap off the street. During our only successful attempt at contact, he claimed to have “caught a cold from Mama.” The true meaning of this has not yet been determined, but the possibility of esoteric euphemism has not been ruled out. 

Since then, he has only communicated with us by sending poorly-lit pictures of notebook pages and the phrase “publish all please&thankyou.” The following article is what was discernible and deemed publishable by the Acid Attack Everything Committee of Quality, which has thus far been very lenient with Dr. Gorman. We apologize for this lapse in normalcy and promise readers that the regular means of production will be returned to within the month. By any means necessary. 

If you have any information concerning the health or whereabouts of Dr. Gorman, please contact us at methamphetamineoverdose@protonmail.com.

This morning I rode the bus alone. Sure, I was surrounded by peers, but Dallin was inexplicably missing, and Bennett was now able to legally drive his girlfriend to school. So yes, I was alone.

Hunter S. Thompson was sitting in my lap, but I was only half reading him. To my left, I could hear two sophomores playing a game of pingpong with their conversations. There was no throughline. It seemed to me that I was listening to a series of recalled feverdreams joined together by non sequiturs. Between that scatterbrained, half-awake mumbling and my own struggles to concentrate on a particularly trite section of Kingdom of Fear, I could find no area of focus anywhere. I felt like I was swimming in a murk of noise, having climbed into a randomly materialized above-ground pool in the middle of a foggy forest. 

My confusion felt almost manufactured, as if it was an attempt by the sophomores to buck any potential eavesdroppers. I was clearly matched against some powerful wizards of the psychic realm. I slowly closed the book and tried my best to hear only the conversation to my left. It took some serious effort to tune in, and when I felt I had an adequate grasp on what they were talking about, I became convinced that the one with a husky voice had gotten involved with espionage. I shuddered thinking about the damage an international agent could do at an art school, imagining the kinds of subversive and dangerous ideologies they could plant in the minds of the already mentally ill student body… then I realized they were describing a book they had read.
Just as I gained my bearings on this farce, the one with the speech impediment started talking about her very sick grandma. Suddenly, I felt guilty about listening-in on their conversation, so I tried opening Kingdom of Fear again. But it was useless. I had sifted through the aural static of the bus with too fine-toothed a comb, and was now doomed to hear nothing except for these girls until I could get out of earshot. I sheepishly scooted towards the window, trying to put more distance between us.

Mercifully, it wasn’t too long before my guilt was soothed by yet another jump in topic. Speech Impediment was now talking about her misfortune at being stuck with having to clean out her grandma’s fridge. It was a rotten little thing by the sound of it: blackened eggs and brown heads of lettuce; solidified milk oozing a curdled trail down to green, fuzzy cheese… she described it as “End Times.”

Cazart! Here I am in them and they do look like eggs and cabbage corrupted by rot. But who’s gonna clear this fridge out? Not me, I can tell you that much. I’ve been feasting exclusively on the expired for too long–four years, in fact–and now, yes: it’s time for a change in palate.

The stuff in my fridge kept longer than most expected. I was warned many times that I would get sick, which is the only natural conclusion to gorging on this never-ending sea of perishable foodstuffs. But it wasn’t until my junior year that I started to taste the tang of the brown spots. And now I’m very sensitive to bad vegetables. I hate to even look at a salad without having seen it prepared with my own eyes. 

As the bus pulled into the back of the school, Speech Impediment started talking about their grandma again, and they reused that phrase “End Times.” It seemed cruel to me that they were comparing some of their last memories of a dying relative to a filthy refrigerator. 

The bus parked, we stood up, and I stared straight ahead. As we stepped into the aisle, I made sure to take long strides in order to get off before they did. It took a great effort not to cast a sidelong glance as I overtook them. I’m sure they noticed my strange posture and unnatural haste, but I needed to get out of listening range before I was compelled to give my input.

My nerves were further wracked by a run-in with an ex-friend in the stairwell. There was a moment of awkward eye-contact there on the landing as I made rough mental calculations of our trajectories. By my judgement, if we had both continued at our respective paces, we would’ve ran directly into each other at the first step. So I reassumed a strange posture, and quickened my speed. 

I looked like a dweeb, literally running away from discomfort… but fuck if I was gonna be stuck behind her. To be looking at my shoes while climbing steps, trying not to accidentally ram my head into the ass of someone I’ve shared a bed with is the kind of situation that could easily ruin my day. So I clutched the handrail and swung my body onto the staircase, jogging to the third floor.

Once there, I raised my arm and performed my pulsing shaka hand gesture to a clarinet player I’ve tried hard to be friends with. Some days he ignores me, but today he smiled wide and waved. I was pleased with myself to earn this reception, but my goodwill was soon overpowered. 

“Wait, Tyler!” he called. “Have you seen A Bug’s Life?”

I turned back and stood there stupidly, blinking and half stammering. I started passing my spindly fingers over my boney arms, feeling naked.

Before I could form a complete thought, his friend said, “Sure he has, I’ve seen him in it!” She laughed and covered her mouth, apologizing through the tightness of her giggle. I turned back to the classroom and walked in. 

How long, O Lord, how long? Something like that would’ve really rattled me freshman year, but I’ve tasted the lettuce for so long that the egg seems almost sweeter. Fuck that bearcub with blue highlights, I thought. I have a day of basically jacking off ahead of me, while she still has to labor through all her required courses. Nobody can take away the fact that I’ve earned the right to piss my day away. At least, that’s what I have to tell myself to stay sane through all the confusticating habits of skullsuckers. At this stage of my high school career, it’s only the psychic attacks that can meaningfully affect me.

Where’s Dallin when I need him? I could use somebody to confide my cruel jests to right now. I’ve needed Dallin on a lot of these mornings recently, but that’s always exactly when he’s missing. He doesn’t owe me any explanations, but about a quarter of the time, I ask where he’s been anyway. But this morning, I felt a need to overstep. In some vain and selfish act of fear, I sent him a text–which never does much good with that Child of the Forest. His heart belongs too much to the natural world to be concerned with the noises and lights his phone emits. 

But I figured that at this hour, he was probably stuck under fluorescent lights in a waiting room somewhere, with nothing else to be distracted by; and I needed to know whether or not to prepare myself for an hour-and-a-half of lonely psychic attacks. There were five minutes until the official start of class. I pulled my phone out and wrote Guildenstern!! Again!! Where are you?!

But even if he answers me, what good would it be? I respect Mrs. Stokes too much to check my phone in her class, which is unfortunately more than I can say for some of the other teachers on my schedule. 

I’m over the hump. They used to call it senioritis, but I think that term’s fallen out of fashion now. And I write for tomorrow, never to be confused by a blanket of nostalgia for yesterday, damnit! So as I sit here and wait for a response that I know isn’t coming, I’ll think of something new to name my condition.

“Brain Death” is the best thing I could think of. But maybe “Brain Blocking” is more apt? The guitar is still sitting in my lap, I’m just choosing to pretend it’s not. I’ve learned the music I needed to learn, and I’ve retained my knowledge of phrasing a piece musically; but in truth, it’s closer to death than a simple refusal of acknowledgement. I’m done, not just exhausted. I’m collapsing in the home stretch, and I look up through the dust, I don’t see home anywhere in sight.

Because the track has been extended. We were promised gigs for Commercial Band by the end of November, and now our first one is scheduled for the Saturday after school lets out. I’ll be fucked if I’m showing up for that… so I guess I’ll be fucked. I owe it to our director, I guess. Even though he can’t stop me from graduating at this point, I’ll show up for him. After all, he’s one of the two people responsible for helping me to realize the futility of a future in classical performance. The other is firmly settled a few states away now, so it would be hard to persecute her, even in writing. These are the people that have saved me from starvation. Mahalo.

But let’s think about that. Does being an artist mean you have to starve? Is starving even that bad? When both of these people told me how ridiculous of an idea it was to make a living solely off the performance of a dead genre of music, I could’ve stood tall and told them that I would be doing it anyway. But I didn’t. Because I wasn’t up to the hardship of climbing the ladder, as it were. I very well could’ve been fulfilled as a classical guitarist, but deep down, I knew it was just an extended fling with romantic fantasy.

I had looked down my nose at a classmate who said he wanted to be a rockstar last year. I thought of him as an embarrassingly childish fool. I thought he was a fantasist to a detriment. But how was I any better? It was a weird kind of elitism that made me believe my own dream was more respectable because I was playing music by dead guys who wore powdered wigs.

Shit on it all. The rock stars and the classically trained both need to be strapped down and reprogrammed. All art is quite useless, so why make it? We could have a colony on Mars by now if all the modern musical prodigies devoted their time to space exploration. We could have real robot cops patrolling the streets and vaporizing any dissidents before they even think of committing a crime (which would be recognized by an AI training model with access to everyone's Neuralink chips… along with consideration of socioethnic factors), and everything could be dressed in a chrome sheen of sleekness and purity. But I think we’re past this being achievable. There was a very small window of time where even the most bleeding-hearted of artists could have been duped into hocking their instruments or their paintbrushes in return for a more productive trade, and it’s nailed shut now. A line has been drawn firmly in the sand, and all the artists have positioned themselves on one side of it–whatever it means. Oh, well. Leave the New World Order for a new world, I suppose. 

Mrs. Stokes had to ask the class a series of questions for a teacher feedback course she opted into. One of them was “By a show of hands, how many of you plan to major in something relating to your discipline?” One hand went up.

Then I felt a ripple on my thigh. I couldn’t tell if my phone had buzzed or if it was a shockwave from the shiver that had just come over me. Whatever it was, I knew Dallin hadn’t responded yet. I still had a mind clear enough to divine that fairly obvious fact. Guildenstern is dead, I guess. But how does that fare for me, a Rosencrantz here all alone?

I had taken to eating lunch in the stairwell of the old building. The cafeteria was much too bright, and the flittering of eyes made me nervous. That is to say, the people my eyes could flitter to made me nervous with their evil energies, and the possibility that I was being perceived by them made me break out into a hot sweat. It was overwhelming to the Holy Psychic Radio. 

When I walked to my usual spot, there were two young musicians, lounging with guitars and singing. I stood for a moment and listened to them sing a Smiths song. I started bellowing along with them in an exaggerated mockery of vaudeville, drifting out of time semi-tastefully. It was just an attempt to mask my failure at recalling the words. In between bouts of half-rememberance, I had taken hold of the hand rail and began to dance up and down the bottom step.
“Careful!” a voice behind me shouted. I didn’t turn around. I was in no mood to see who had spoken, though I had a good idea who it was. It was a known confidant of a fair and terrible Ice Queen, and knowing that they were there to witness me listening to a Smiths song was an embarrassment beyond words. The last time I had willingly listened to The Smiths had been in a moment of grossly personal defeat. I was half-asleep, half-dead, and face-down on a couch. Presently, I had taken a step towards the singers, out of the way of the oncoming witness. I was crouching, covering my neck, and shutting my eyes hard. 

I listened to the witness climb the stairs step by step, and when I heard the door to the second floor shut, I rose slowly out of my safety curl. I awkwardly smiled down at the singers, who had never stopped playing through my foolish antics. They looked up at me with a kind of bothered concern. I let my smile drop, careful to give it a natural-looking wither. Then I went and hid behind the corner.

I sprawled myself out across the crafted wood and covered my eyes with my arm, feeling sick. They played on, repeating the last chorus ad nauseum. 

So for once in my life

Let me get what I want

Lord knows it would be the first time

Lord knows it would be the first time

This utter gibberish became a point of stabilization for me in my rotten mood. It was consistent, and it sounded warm, and it was down. It was the perfect sound to hear as an echo rising up the stairwell and falling back to meet my ears as I writhed slowly. I thought about the beauty of this moment for them, getting to shake off some nervous loon with their jamming. I knew they were supposed to be in Musicianship class. I thought about all the times my buddy and I skipped that class to jam our sophomore year. I was overwhelmed with a lot of horribly maudlin thoughts. Those times were far behind me, and playing music would never be that fun again. I was hungry to learn, and the experience of playing a song with another living human being is a kind of euphoria I will rarely experience in my life to come. My buddy’s going off to Texas to play circles around all the honkeys at UNT come Fall, and I’ll be stuck here at home picking up my guitar every so often as to not completely forget how to play it. I’m fenced in by a wall of effects pedals and records that won’t serve me any more usefully than they already have in my doted adolescence. Once upon a time, I was gonna be a musician, using my teenage rig in a recording studio and making a name for myself through my idiosyncratic compositions. And now my buddy is seizing that dream. He has been for as long as I’ve known him, even as I was fumbling around thinking about how great a thing it would be to do. He was playing gigs while I was stomping around my basement, imagining I was on stage with a rockin’ teenage combo. He, in his infinite generosity, will reach out and ask me to write a press release for the public announcement of his record label, and I’ll get the message while noodling on an electric guitar at the end of a long night spent grading essays. He’ll be something tangible. I’ll be able to touch him and say This is Ryan Barrett: Jazz Genius and Popular Music Extraordinaire. And then he’ll smack my hand away and say Quit it! Whereupon I’ll pull him into a hug, feeling the soft skin of his cheek in the crook of my neck and stroking his curly hair. He won’t know what to make of this, so he’ll say Oh. I love you, buddy. And I’ll say, I love you too. And the whole thing will be true. I know it will be.

Then they sang the chorus one last time and ended the song.

“You chickenshit bastards!” I yelled, tensing my whole body. “Play the whole fucking thing again!” I heard some confused mumbling from around the corner as I sat up, gripping the back of the bench for support. “Bards! Music! Now!” Then they started playing “Buddy Holly.” 

I slunk back down, digging my palms into my eyesockets, waiting for the bell to ring.