Every day ran the same way: wake up, get dressed, eat breakfast, take the bus to school, attend classes, navigate the increasingly nightmarish panopticon that was my social life with a growing list of people who were antagonistic with me, take the bus back home, do my homework, browse Sonic and Homestar Runner fan forums, and pick up the phone. I always made sure to ask everybody else in the house if they had to use the phone for anything - because there was a set precedent. I was going to call her. The first few times it was exhilarating - to hear my best friend's voice on the telephone, a person you were afraid you were never going to see again, made me feel like there was some sort of future for us. This was before social media became a constant presence in the modern human life, so unless if both of us used MySpace or Neopets or instant messaging apps, the phone was the best avenue for any communication. Letters took too long. I needed instant gratification.
And thus I dialed the number - a number I had dialed a hundred times or more before. One ringy-dingy. Two ringy-dingy. Three-
"Hello," the other voice on the line said, her voice dripping with disappointment and disdain, "do you want to speak to her?"
I recognized that voice from anywhere. She and I had an adversarial relationship back when we were starting out middle school, stemming over...honestly, I can't even remember why. I do remember bullying her, provoking her, saying things in order to drive her into a screaming fit. Some of these things were bigoted in nature, but more out of a naive sense - I had little to no knowledge of her religion nor the trauma her family had gone through outside of a few award-winning books I read in 5th grade, plus I figured that, given an edgy sense of humor I had shared with her sister - the one who I was calling for - she'd take it in stride. It had gotten to the point where her sister - let's call her Watterson - pulled me aside during social skills class and told me that her father had advised her that, if I didn't change my ways, she should not be friends with me. I stopped doing thusly, even after I explained the situation - that I didn't mean any harm in what I had said. We moved on to griefing the sister who attended most of the same classes as me - let's call her Larson. I don't know why she joined in - must've been out of some sibling rivalry; I would drive my brother and sister nuts, either by teaming up with one or the other to pull a prank. Usually, brother and sister would team up together and grief me, but occasionally, I'd be the one who had a turn at it. It wasn't out of the question. Watterson and I, we drove Larson so mad that on the school bus ride back home, overcast day, starting to rain, with Watterson and I trading back our terrible impressions of cartoon characters, Larson pointed at me, stood stuff, and screamed out, "SHUT UP! SHUT UP!"
The bus driver responded, "Larson, calm down."
Larson ignored this, her eyes focused intensely on Watterson and I, and continued yelling, "PLEASE SHUT UP!" Her eyes welled up with tears.
"I wish you were never born!" Larson screamed exclusively to me.
I laughed. Watterson joined in.
"Kill yourself and do the world a favor!" Larson screamed as she collapsed into sobbing. She sat down in her seat, alone. Watterson and I laughed.
"Oh, my God, it sounds like a rap song," Watterson said amidst the laughter. I chimed in with a little beatboxing, mimicking Larson's outburst like a turntable scratch. Eventually our laughter died down as we began talking about other things, like Watterson's sketchbook.
Two years after that incident and I had to talk to Larson.
"You...why should I let you talk to her?" Larson asked me. It was a rhetorical question. This usually ended with Larson immediately hanging up the phone. In the background I could hear footsteps, Watterson yelling, "Larson! Don't hang up! It's for me!"
I heard the sound of a cordless phone being snatched out of somebody's hands. "Hey," Watterson said to me, trying to be as enthusiastic as she usually was. In retrospect, she had a lot of things to say - a lot of anxieties she needed to get out, regarding an illness that just wouldn't go away or the fact that I, over the course of an hour, would talk about the same things (my fascination with merfolk; Homestar Runner; trying to get her to watch Code Lyoko; Primus/The Beatles/any band I liked but she couldn't get into) or the many times I'd do a Homsar impression (usually when making fun of somebody in the news) and utterly blow out her telephone or problems at school.
"Hello, Watterson, how's your day been today?" I asked her.
A moment. Then Watterson choked on the air and began to cry. I had seen her cry a couple of times before - one time when we had lunch in our homeroom.
I asked, "...what's wrong?"
"...I'm being picked on at school. People hate me," Waterson managed to say through the sobs, "I'm getting bulled real bad."
I knew what she was talking about. Several people I had become "friends" with in middle school had suddenly turned heel and began to scream out every single one of my special interests or eccentricities any time I was in the room. "The Rescuers!" "Homestar Runner!" "Mermaids!" "Code Lyoko!" Everything was weaponized. Even a quick glance at walking feet would get a yell of "Foot fetish!" from somebody within that friend group. That last one managed to persist until 12th grade, when it was whittled down to one guy. At that point, it had became a fact of life. In retrospect, it's funny that one guy just kept screaming "foot fetish" to a kind of dweeby person for no reason other than the fact he saw somebody do it.
"I'm going through the same thing," I responded, "People yell random things at me. All because I wanted to talk about a movie I liked."
"They're singing things to annoy me," Watterson cried, "They're doing this to hurt me."
"They're singing rap lyrics to me too, only changing the names to refer to my special interests," I replied.
"How do I stop this?"
"I...I don't know. I tried counseling, but that made things worse. I tried earning their good graces back with an album. That got me in trouble. That's why I hadn't called over the past month."
"Huh," Watterson said, "It's not you that's causing my hearing to go bad."
"Wait - what's making your hearing go bad?" I asked.
A beat. Watterson, confused, asked, "...what? I can't hear you."
I didn't know if this was a joke she was playing or if the call had dropped. I had moved out to the middle of the country - cell phone service was notoriously terrible. However, I was on a cordless landline - there shouldn't be a dropout. Maybe she did have hearing problems.
And so I repeated, much louder, as if trying to give a powerful speech, "I SAID, WHAT'S MAKING YOUR HEARING GO BAD?"
A beat. Watterson sighed and responded, "Never mind. We'll talk about this later. I have some homework to do anyway."
They’re pushing me down
They push the buttons that hurt me so
Hold me down with their mouth sounds
Wait for me to be the geek show
I’m growing frailer and frailer every day
I feel my down drifting away
They mock with Adams and “B'wana She No Home”
In the spider web and the Collector’s throes
It’s a little bit o’ ha and a little bit of oh
It’s a little bit o’ ha and a little bit of oh
It’s a little bit of everything, give me mercy
Or I’ll fall into despair, you see
R:
So I try to hold back my attack so they don’t scream at me
Try so hard not to snap though they want – want to make me bleed
But I know that despite everything, I’m Chara and it’s inevitable ‘cause
After the moment I feel terrible
Wasting away
Ravaged every single day
Am I responsible?
Was there a part of me that was relieved?
Every story I’ve heard from the fights
Was I born to be unbearable?
Awake at night, wracked with guilt
And yet he drifts into a peaceful sleep
I pour over the words, I read the sacred words
How do You rest at all? How do You sleep at all?
Am I Your disappointment, unable to give reprieve?
Was I hell-bent from the start?
[r]
Scatter me as I clear my mind away
Scatter me as I fall down on my knees and scream.
[r]
credits
released December 24, 2022
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Music and lyrics by Shane Smith
Shane provides the guitars, bass, Fairlight CMI, Farfisa, piano, Minimoog, Synclavier, and drum programming.
Shane and Sean provide the vocals.
Opening sample comes from Barshens - "prove your love 1"
Written on March 15, 2022. Recorded between March and December 2022 at Heated New Sound (Moncks Corner, SC Chapter; Sean's parts were recorded in Wilmington, IL in December 2022.
Cardiacs has finally reached Bandcamp. This is genuinely one of my favorite albums, especially with the varied compositional styles, the mixture of psychedelia and prog rock, and Timmy's lyrics. Clicker Records
