Thanks for the Angst
By Rupert Pupkin
Pupkin talks about the million little pieces of rubbish with his name on it.
I have a great little apartment in a great little neighbourhood, but every time I step out of that great little apartment and that great little neighbourhood I want to take a great big handful of anti-anxiety medication.
My grandmother had agoraphobia; she didn’t leave her house for thirty years. As a kid I thought that was pretty funny and I’d fabricate tales from the outside world that played on her fear: the mob of suburban shoppers that scrambled to take advantage of a sale on vacuum cleaner bags; the runaway city bus leaving hundreds dead and wounded in its wake.
Now I’m getting a taste of my own medicine; I’ve developed a mild form of grandma’s phobia. Every time I prepare to, or even imagine walking out of my apartment with a bag of domestic rubbish my head starts to spin. I can’t take in enough oxygen and my bowels get irritated, as if I had just eaten onion rings made with gutter oil.
There are people on the street that will pounce on the bag of rubbish and parse its contents as soon as I place it in the bin at the foot of my lane. So I walk an extra two blocks out of the way to place the bag in front of another lane where no one knows me and isn’t going to question why anyone would dispose of a perfectly good can of tuna only three days past its expiry date.
They will also see private things, things that no one else should see, things that should be carted off in a trash truck to a landfill or burned beyond recognition in an incinerator. I do not want to leave my apartment with the trash bag, but I must. I cut up anything with my name on it: mail, prescriptions, bank statements etc. into tiny pieces and place the pieces in a few different bags. I can imagine someone trying to piece together my name like a jigsaw puzzle to find out my details and assume my identity.
Not that anyone would want to be me. I don’t know many identity thieves who would be interested in taking on the life of a balding fifty year-old divorced writer with a negative bank balance. But you never know.
Something else happens when I step out of the comfort zone of my great little apartment in my great little neighbourhood: I am confronted with a great deal of noise. It is as if the drivers of mopeds, cars and buses are just waiting for me, their hands poised over the noisemakers intentionally embedded in their vehicles, ready to assault me with a demonic symphony that would turn even the likes of Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra into raving madmen. When I hear a horn blast, my entire body tenses and I feel as if I might vomit on my desert boots, which I go to great pains to keep tidy using a suede brush I picked up in Hong Kong.
This is not a city for the faint of heart or those with a clear genetic link to neurosis. This is a city for hell raisers, go-getters, identity thieves and profiteers. A city for takers, not givers, with little room for the creative class.
It wasn’t always like this. But just as one can become lactose intolerant and develop an allergy to mould later in life, so too can one - after a decade plus in Shanghai - become a victim of the daily barrage. The doctor will see you now, Mr. Pupkin.
