Teenage World

you bought me a rabbit to keep me company
and i'm here in my car and the rabbit's here with me
heading out highway one, respecting posted speed limits
and i tried to figure this one out but i can't find any meaning

and i'm sick and tired of trying to figure out your gestures
and i'm sick and tired of wondering what your presents mean
i'm gonna take this rabbit into malibu 
and he'll chew on sour grass while i wolf down dexadrine
dexadrine.

-- The Mountain Goats, "Teenage World"

The guy in the car studied finance and accounting in community college, and now he's got a job for the Methodist Hospital in Gettysburg, PA. The job doesn't yet actually involve finance or accounting even though it's in the hospital's finance and accounting office, but if he stays in the job long enough, if he gets a couple of promotions, it might. For now the job involves filing. It involves typing patients' first and last names and middle initials and their DOB and SSN onto little white sheets of paper and then sliding those little white sheets of paper inside the translucent yellow and orange and red plastic tabs at the top of pale blue file folders and then printing out pre-certification documentation and patient information forms and HSA reimbursement claims and then slipping them all inside the pale blue folders. 

He can think when he files, so he thinks about how he wants to learn to play the ukulele. He wants to learn "No Children" and "The Best Death Metal Band In Denton" and "Pink and Blue." He wants to be as cleverly unhinged, as boyishly sinister, as John Darnielle; he wants to be wry and erudite and unpredictable. He wants to learn about things like boxing and obscure metal bands and Roman emperors and vegans. 

He confessed all of this to his girlfriend Lindsey two weeks ago after he'd taken her to dinner at El Mariachi, and she just laughed at him. It wasn't the good kind of laughter. It wasn't friendly or understanding or sweet. It wasn't the kind of laughter that suggested she understood what he was trying to say, understood the real gravity of it, how frustrating and hopeless everything might feel to him and so she was laughing to try to lighten the mood. And she didn't follow the laughing with a confession of her own, admitting that for the first two years of high school she'd wanted to be Christina Aguilera or that her stepfather had once locked her in the bathroom for three hours because he'd caught her smoking his pot out by the air conditioner compressor fan behind the house. No, she'd just laughed, and he'd dropped her off at home and when she asked him what was wrong, he didn't even try to explain it. 

But she must have understood something because when he stopped over after work two days later she told him she had a present for him and she handed him the rabbit. It's for you, she said. He took it home with him and put it in an old dog crate someone had left in the garage behind the house where he was renting an apartment, but it didn't take him long to figure out he didn't want a rabbit. He didn't understand why Lindsey had thought he would want a rabbit and he didn't know what it had to do with what he'd told her about John Darnielle and then her laughing at him, but he just knew that all of it was somehow tied together, and he felt like he needed to understand it but couldn't, and so he'd taken the rabbit out of the dog crate and brought it with him in the car and now here he was just driving nowhere in particular and trying to concentrate, trying to get his head cleared and figure it all out, but the only words that kept appearing in his head weren't connected to one another in sentences but instead were just individual words jumbled together as if they were a thousand different colored bottles thrown into a recycling dumpster. 

But as he kept driving, as he passed the last of the buildings and parking lots and strip malls that looked even vaguely familiar, the words started to sound like something to him, not something that made sense but something pleasing, something that tasted good on his tongue. Oxygen jewel weed dexadrine. Tabulate easter ghetto. Indent wonder eliminate create.

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