Not That You Asked: Fear and Loathing with midterms and too much bad news

I felt like the doomed Dr. Gonzo in the epic ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,’ when he’s submerged in a hotel bathtub and begging Raoul Duke to throw the radio into the water at the peak of ‘White Rabbit.’ The past few weeks have risen to an intolerable pitch, the schoolwork and studying piling up as finals season rapidly approaches.

Everything is driving me nuts. Night and day, the specter of failing grades and a sinking college career lurks out there on the horizon, cursing and stomping and demanding my ruin.

It isn’t exactly tangible, but I know it’s there. I can sense it lurking in the darkness with the poltergeist identity of an unknown monster, waiting for a wrong move or a vulnerable point, like the Vikings of the netherworld with their terrible and crushing raids. Pillage and doom and fires crept up in my dreams, when I could sleep, and the darkness of civil rights violations, impending exams and broken oil barges off the coast of Spain clouded my head.

I was lost. I began sleepwalking to the bathroom, to the convenience store, to class. Always filled with fear. Fear of questions I could not answer, fear of historical modes of thought that I felt confident I could never understand, let alone explain in essay form with a sparse 500 words to play with.

‘The bad news,’ said one of my professors, ‘is that 10 of you are failing.’ And the good news never came. I kept figuring he’d just misplaced it. Maybe I’d find it in the mail soon. Or on a voice message. Or tucked away securely amongst all the war and death I see on television.

Slowly I realized that news is never good. And only a straight bastard could ever believe differently.

It’s been a rough week on my head, even beyond studying. I’ve become another lunatic CNN slave, drooling for updates on Iraq and talking to myself. Ted Turner’s evil cackle somewhere in the Patagonian distance keeps me from sleeping most nights. ‘No,’ says Ted. ‘You can’t sleep … there’s still more coverage. You must get total coverage.’

So I wake up and on my way to make coffee I flip the cable box to 17 and see the same things I’ve seen a thousand times aerial shots of crime scenes, distraught officials at podiums, fear seducing a media frenzy like blood a shark.

Too much, I say, I’m not gonna care anymore … but I can’t stop it, I don’t have that power. I sit on the couch and moan, thinking about a thousand plausible explanations for Saddam’s apparent acceptance of United Nations procedures and a thousand theories for his next course of action. I predict troop movements and White House sentiments, and I’m usually right.

Then I get cocky and I laugh at the ‘experts’ on television at Connie Chung and anybody who walks in the room. If nobody comes in, I laugh by myself. But not for long.

Because things aren’t looking any good any more, and nothing’s getting any better. Try to watch television for a little stress relief and it’ll panic you more than the any test could … that tanker off the coast of Spain had how many times more oil onboard than the Exxon Valdez? All that oil pouring into the ocean, toxic birds creeping up on the shore to die, grown fish coated in a thick slather, their gills pumping furiously for air…

Get control. What the hell are you doing up in the middle of the night making Turner richer and salivating at the sight of death? This is no way to live.

There’s something psychotic in the air this season. After 21 years here, I’m still not used to the New England November that purgatorial gloom that’s not quite winter, definitely not summer, and by no means anywhere close to what a civilized area would call autumn. My brain rallies and clicks and waits for some better information, unable to comprehend the alternating heat and cold.

At least I got off the Deer Hunter kick. For a couple weeks, there I was consumed by that scene where Christopher Walken and Robert de Niro play Russian roulette in a backwoods Vietnam POW camp. They have no choice. The Vietnamese keep slapping them and threatening them with automatic weapons. ‘Mao!’ The pistol they’re playing with has three bullets, instead of one, thanks to de Niro’s frightening escape plan. ‘Put an empty chamber in that gun, Nicky,’ says de Niro. Then he gets slapped again. ‘Mao!’

There’s no choice any more: turn off the television and jam the radio between stations so you get that nice constant white noise which drowns out everything and puts the mice back in their holes from fear. ‘I’m going to sleep,’ I declare, but I never do.

‘Mao!’ The drums just keep beating, the definitions of obscure civil war heroes flash through my head, and the meaning of al Qaeda and our new war on terrorism perches between my ears and pecks at my once-linear thought process.

You get so into studying that you’re mind is racing at 1,000 knots an hour and when you want to sleep you can’t stop it it just keeps careening down the curves of history, economics and warfare. You close your eyes but your pupils don’t adjust, and you’re twitching there in bed, waiting to sleep, sweating from the radiator and freezing from the open window.

You know the feeling. Hearing all that paper shuffling in the night. Finals. Papers. That test plopped down in front of you, warm still from the photocopier down the hall, teasing you and tempting you seducing the wrong answers from your study-crazy mind.

There’s no cure for this type of dereliction, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it. You’ve either been made a monster from all this madness, or some kind of weird and untroubled saint. I know I’m on the verge of complete monsterness … me, Saddam and every other test-taking CNN junkie on this campus. Misery loves company, and from the looks in everybody’s eyes, I’ve got quite a bit of it. Mao!