Five Guys: Hamburgers So Good, You’ll Call an Ambulance!

I had a little indigestion today.  It happened while I was eating a burger – “all the way” (adds about ten different toppings), with hot sauce.  I also had a large cup of Five Guys Cajun fries.  The cup is bigger than it looks on the menu, and the fries spill out of the cup and into the bag.  Once you finish your meal, there are always ten or so more thick-cut, spicy fries at the bottom of your greasy paper bag, and you reach your hand in and that’s dessert.

By the time my burger was three-quarters finished, I was in the bathroom, on the phone with 911. A woman on the other end told me to go out front and sit where the ambulance crew could see me.  ”Do you think you can make it to your car?” she asked.  ”I-I’d rather just sit h-h-here,” I stammered.  The cold got into my bones like no cold ever has.  The shivering didn’t let up in the ambulance, or until I had been in the hospital 20 minutes, and the nurse practitioner covered me with three heated blankets.  Then my breathing slowed to normal and my teeth stopped chattering.  I called work to get my shift covered for the night.

It was a sharp, stabbing, repeated pain in my left chest.  ”I don’t know if this helps,” explained the really nice doctor in his early 50s, who attended to me and chatted about Detroit, as I do now with strangers with the zeal of the converted, “but a real heart attack doesn’t feel like that.”  It did help to hear.  Knowing the stabbing wasn’t a problem lowered my stress level, and that and two Tums and a Starbucks Calm tea later, the stabbing stopped.

I had a nice night, a little mixed up and I didn’t get sleep like I needed to.  I spent some time on the computer, I talked to Rima and I walked down to a new Mexican restaurant, and spent an hour or so listening to the waitresses talk about their majors, about where they were going, about how they all thought they’d end up back in Burlington.  I sipped my margarita and I calmed down some more.

I’m on 56 hours or so of sleeping only in spurts, for 30 minutes, 60 minutes tops.  I went to a brainstorming session / job interview in Albany yesterday; I had a lot of fun.  They were imaginative, ambitious people.  We chowed down on Chinese food and invented a new organizing model.  It was thrilling.  Today, through a static-y phone call, a very powerful person in the labor movement told me, “they all loved you.  How do we make this work?”

Salary isn’t guaranteed yet.  It’s a new project, and I may need to demonstrate my chops to get the funding, and so they can get a clear picture of the new model.  I only have a thousand dollars saved on a good day, though, and my girlfriend won’t wait weeks while I dive into a campaign.  I told them I have to see her every week.

Uncertainty, my old friend.  Caffeine, insomnia and you team up on my brain and put me $500 further in debt, with the ambulance ride, hospital visit, doctor’s consultation.  I don’t even care that you make a scene in front of the Five Guys, or that you make me will myself to sleep under pain of this happening again when I pull a double shift tomorrow.  I’m used to all that.

But I’m trying to work here.  I’m trying to make myself better.

Leave me alone.  I have no time for you anymore.

Borrowed Time

I woke up late and my stomach was growling.  The alarm had rung about six or seven times last night to keep me up and alert.  I was finally hitting some REM sleep, that time when I could tell my panic to go to hell and I could see the insides of my eyelids.  So I took a few more hours and just slept.  It was a little cold in the apartment, but not too bad.  I woke up at 1PM with nothing on my schedule but work at 4PM.

I was hungry.  My bank account has been dwindling for weeks, largely because of a few missed shifts – plus the fact that SOMEBODY had misplaced the hundred twenty dollars I made last Sunday before the really nasty panic attack where my boss drove me to the hospital and I busted into the ER, wailing like a banshee.  I had barely kept a lid on myself while they asked me what was wrong.  ”Either I’m having a heart attack, or a panic attack so bad I can’t tell.”  ”Okay, hopefully the latter,” said a skinny kid in a black sweater behind the desk.  That didn’t sound right to me.  ”If it is, it’s the WORST PANIC ATTACK I’VE EVER HAD.”  ”Okay,” he said again, “sit down over there.  Do you want a wheelchair?”

I really didn’t like the fact that I’d be waiting.  ”Sure,” I said.  I don’t remember why I took the wheelchair.  Maybe so someone could grab me and roll me quick if I started destatting. I sat down and I started making noises like a crazed homeless person, a sort of high-pitched gutteral whine repeated every few seconds, a desperate “please, I’m dying, pay some goddamn attention please!” until the nurse on duty actually shut the door to her office to block me out.  I asked for some water from the two kids at the desk, the black-sweatshirted guy and a girl.  When I didn’t get any after two minutes, I asked again.  ”I think he’s coming back with it,” said the girl about the black-sweatshirted guy, whom I had been following nervously with my eyes to see if he’d forgotten me.  He already had a few strikes against him for not putting me on a stretcher and getting me in to see the Main Head Doctor for Seriously Fucked-Up Emergencies when I had come in so obviously on death’s door.  Sure enough, he walked up to me ten seconds later with a mini-Dixie cup filled with ice water.  ”Best I could do on short notice.”  ”Thanks,” I said.  I sipped and sort of, not really, calmed down.  After I ran out of water, a nice old lady with her daughter said, “Would you like some of our water?”

“No, I got some.  Thank you so much.”  I was huddling myself and shivering like I was in a meat freezer.  I looked and sounded absolutely ridiculous.  But I couldn’t stop.  Not until I knew I was okay.

Turns out I was okay.  I got seen, and the nurse said, “Your vitals are very normal.  But the tingling and numbness aren’t going to stop unless you calm down.  Deep, slow breaths.” I looked at the simple machines taking my information.  I didn’t know that I trusted them to find out everything they needed to know, so this nurse could know for 100% sure I was okay.  But that was what there was.

When I got back into the lobby, the stress of the whole evening made me more tired than I’d been in weeks.  I almost fell asleep in my chair waiting to be called to be seen by a doctor.  Eventually, I was called, I saw a doctor who himself used to have panic attacks, and he gave me two pills.  ”Keep one for the road,” he said.  ”This stuff is really good.  I like it.  And call this doctor.”  He gave me the name and I texted it to myself.

Somewhere in there, my boss, who had cashed me out from the restaurant, didn’t give me my money, and it got left in the restaurant or in his brother’s car, which he was borrowing that day to drive me to the hospital.  Or, he gave it to me, and I lost it.  But I had nothing on me other than my bag, and it wasn’t in the bag, which I found out the next morning.  When I called back later, the hospital didn’t have it.  It pissed me off that I lost so much money, but what can I do?  It’s gone.

So I woke up a hundred twenty dollars poorer, plus I missed some shifts due to going home early and not wanting to be in the restaurant as much with all the attacks I’d been having.  (Frankly, I was stunned they were giving me shifts.)  I hadn’t gone shopping yet, though, so I got on my bike and rode off in search of food.

The City of Burlington slopes downhill in slants and plateaus from the campus to the lake.  Lake Champlain is a big, wide expanse of blue, almost an ocean, except that on the other side you can see Upstate New York, much like Burlington, lined with trees and small towns and boats.  When you bike downhill, like I was, you can see that there’s water – and it looks, even from across the street, even from the same side of the street, like you just sort of walk along this nice little park and the water is right there, and you can touch it except for this railing in the way.  Then you come to the railing and look over, and you see this:

It’s like the edge of the world, and below the edge is a boardwalk.  And there, you can touch the water, which at this time of day is clear and blue and as close to the shores of heaven as matters.

I took some pictures and video and I biked down the slope of the street, until I was on the level of the ocean.  Turns out – duh – there’s a whole waterfront complex, with trendy restaurants and visitor parking and rocks you can climb on, along with wooden swings-built-for-two that you can cuddle up on with your sweetie and watch the lake tide roll in and out and the recreational boats go back and forth.  There are also educational panel displays on the boardwalk, and I walked up to one and I learned that this used to be one of the busiest ports in the world, where Vermont lumber was floated on ice in winter and upriver to Montreal or down to New York in the summer, to be shipped to Europe to make European cities, two hundred years ago.  And that the air would have been filled with the sounds and smells of buzzsaws and factories, in that spot, right where I stood.

I had an idea for a site called WikiTime.  Everyone everywhere could load in documents and pictures and maps and plans and artifacts from any time in history, and these objects would be assembled into temporal snapshots of our civilization, going back as far as the farthest-back object you could place, maybe to the bones of Lucy the proto-human from Africa.  And you could fill it out with some texture from a simple computer program, and you could literally walk around any point in history.  I walked up and down the boardwalk and climbed on the rocks and I thought out the details of my little invention.

I got hungry again, and so I biked away, and I resolved to love my new hometown just a little more now that it had a place I could touch the water.  I had a sandwich and arrived at work out of breath, and I made back my hundred twenty dollars, plus a little bit for lunch.

Hi, I’m Josh!

So I was in my apartment a few days ago, in my small room, with an overhead light, a comfortable room in a really dirty way.  I sleep on a mattress on the floor.  Working political campaigns made me into a pig.

I was looking at my hands.  My pulse was racing and my forehead was sweating.  I was tracking two minutes in my head, and I was down to a minute-twenty.  If you’re still alive in two minutes, I had said to myself, forty seconds ago, then you’re okay.  Of course, I’d probably just reset the clock at another two minutes, when this two minutes was up.  I wasn’t really bargaining with myself – I was holding an indefinite vigil.  Like I do at night, if I’m not convinced I’ll live to see morning.  I set my alarm for five minutes, so I don’t die in my sleep.  Then, I wake up to the standard iPhone ring… sometimes I just roll over; sometimes, if I’ve gone a little bit to sleep, I wipe the drool from my mouth.  DING-DING-DING-DING-DING-DING-DING-DING-DING-DING-DING-DING.  I meticulously set the clock for another five minutes.  As I start to fall asleep more and more, in between am-I-alive? checks, I extend the time… I allow that I may live for twenty minutes instead of five.  Maybe then, an hour.  Maybe, by the end of the night, I’ll have gotten two solid hours’ sleep.  Then I wake up cold and shivering and groggy and thankful to be alive, feeling a little silly but more like I just got off easy.  The poison wasn’t strong enough, the bruise didn’t bleed out.  Whatever my feelings, I bury them and join the day, going about like normal with all the people who aren’t facing their doom.

So I was at forty seconds of a two-minute countdown, and I remembered earlier in the day, when I’d been dancing at work.  I work at Buffalo Wild Wings.  It’s a sports-themed wing shop with a lot of beer, if you haven’t been to one.  I like dancing in the hallway to pass the time before anyone sits in my section.  There’s always really loud music playing, and it’s dance music – not the sort of stuff you’d think about, you’d just move.  And what usually happens is that people get used to my dancing, jerking back and forth, no rhythm – really awful stuff.  (My girlfriend, who dances semi-professionally, actually laughed out loud when I first danced for her.  She’s a really good and sweet person, which made this all the funnier.)

My co-workers get used to it.  At first, they just stare and smile.  Or, as my boss said yesterday after I got acclaim for serving his boss, the owner (I’m pretty good at waiting tables), and then he found me dancing to a Ke$ha song I hated in the kitchen… “You’re one weird cat.”  ”Yes,” I said.  ”Most definitely.”  I skipped to the back and ran an order to Table One Five Three, shimmying all the way.  People adapt to it.  It’s just dancing.  But other people don’t dance as much as I do.

Other people don’t sing as much, either.  I’m very audio.  Everything I hear, I remember.  I remember songs forever, especially the awful songs with the stupid hooks that make me want to claw my eyes out.  I remember them, and I sing them at the top of my lungs, and then for a second I want to spit because the words are so awful.  But it doesn’t matter, because it’s all trivia.  I sing and I dance.

People usually comment on how upbeat I am.  If I get to the interview stage of a job, for example – it’s rare for me to not get the job.  I like making people smile.  I wasn’t that good with people as a child, so it still seems like a new and rare skill to me when someone laughs at my jokes.  I feel like the coolest nerd on the block.  I love listening to people.  You learn so many things about people, about their hopes and dreams and fears… and about humanity, about how people sort out the world around them and what they care about and what bothers them and what excites them.

So I remembered all that – my mind settled on a thousand mouths forming the words, “You’re so happy, Josh.”  ”I love your attitude.”  ”You’re so funny.”  And I remembered how lucky I feel to have so many good people in my life.  And then my mind settled for a second on the clock, and on how little time I had left to live, and that the clock restarts itself two to three times a day (now that I’m in a bad spot), and how I was jumping up and down happy one minute and about to be in my grave the next, and then back to happy.

“Heh,” I thought.  ”That’s kind of funny.”  Dark, sure… but funny!  Life’s biggest fan, stalked through his otherwise humdrum day by death.

There are a gazillion little anecdotes I have in my head that I want to write down.  I’ve wanted to write, full-time, for a while now.  And I think the format I want is something that keeps my writing short, terse, meaningful.  Something that captures a scene and, in the words of the intro to Strunck and White, omits needless words!

Web comics.  Let’s give that a shot.

In between, I’ll write blog posts – I want to be a good long-form writer, too.  I also want to work out some of the anxiety that these panic episodes come from, and god damnit, I want to move my life forward.  I’m 28 years old, and I have five years of college under my belt, but I have no college degree.  I’ve worked in politics and the service sector for ten years, and I’m super fucking done with it.  I want to sort all this out and get back to school and have a career.  I want so badly to be looking at all this as my former life, that I don’t have to deal with anymore, thank God.  I’m sure that’s part of where the panic comes from.

I want to thank a few people starting out.  First of all, you, the reader – if you have panic disorder, like I do, I hope you find some companionship in this, and know that you can feel free to share your stories with me, if it helps.  I hope, somewhere along the line, it makes someone feel better to know that they’re not the only one for whom the imaginary walls seem to close in, and I hope someday we all get better.  This is no way to live, and I have high hopes for our over-exerted pituitary glands, our hostage lives and our stolen time.  We will get ourselves back, with time, with struggle and, cliche as it is, with therapy.

Second, to my parents, who have always been loving and supportive.  They raised me to be okay with myself, to get help when I needed it, and to look for things in the world that didn’t make sense and to straighten those things out.  I can’t imagine a fuller or more relevant education.  Thanks, and love you always.

To my girlfriend, Rima, without whom I wouldn’t have the courage to be myself or to understand, let alone tell, my life story.  You help me and support me with literally everything.  I will never stop loving or admiring you.  Taking on life with you as my partner is a revelation I couldn’t have seen coming and will never take for granted.

My two younger siblings, who always make me proud and who are a constant inspiration.  My sister, Melissa Hyman, is, as it happens, a pretty fantastic musician, and she’s gotten an early start on owning her talent and making it work for her.  You can hear her stuff here.  Expect great things from her.

My broseph, Paul Hyman, is a volunteer firefighter and all-around great guy.  He’s going into college, or something, next year.  Whatever he does, I couldn’t be prouder.

Major inspiration for this blog comes from Jeff David Stauch, who runs an artistically brilliant, searingly honest account of his life and of overcoming his own day to day struggles, called American Catharsis.  If you want a quick hit of deep, eminently readable, moving and universally meaningful nonfiction, go there and check out any post.  I used to work with Jeff at one of my hippie jobs in Boston, and I had no idea at the time he was this talented.  His work made my work possible, no mean feat for someone (myself) who brainstorms always and produces never.

I have to give a shout-out as well to my heterosexual lifemate Bart Kumor.  After I ended a long relationship, some of my oldest and best friends abandoned me.  Bart became my business partner and best friend.  Me and ‘Tosz came up with some of the world’s best ideas this last couple of years over beers and coffee.  Someday, buddy, we’ll strike it rich, and we’ll use all our free time to scheme some more.

Finally, to my friends – I have the best friends in the world, really truly.  Brilliant, hilarious, inventive, and hearts of fucking gold.  My peeps in Port Washington, in Detroit, in Burlington and Montreal, and all the people who have been so good to me when I was homeless and working for campaign “money.”  You’re giant windows that let so much light into my world, and I hope one day I can throw you all a really big party, and then do the same the next week and the next.

I hope you like the comics!

- Josh