I was never really awake until I felt the first clean crunch of 12 ounce leather landing into the left front orbital. Usually someone’s glove and my face. I mean a lot of times I got the first punches in but being clocked was certainly alarming. That’s just the way it works. It’s strange, compounded velocity that moves everything. Physics alarm clocks.
I was really attracted to Euclidean Vectors and feedback loops back then. I wrote a paper in AP U.S. History about how American foreign policy relations from the 1980s-present could be described using mechanical and electrical engineering conceptual applications. But it all really stemmed from me snapping into life every morning amid the cavernous drone of Schott’s Boxing Club. Suddenly, I was there. I was real. I existed in the absolute present for a moment, divorced from natural sequence and therefore completely impossible to measure in time. This is how I woke up every day for six years.
I never remembered much about the actual daily trek to the gym. I must have taken third avenue, I don’t know how else I would have gotten there. Then it happened. One day I was walking really early in the morning and as I was about to cross president street I saw a car barreling down the hill in reverse. It must have been going 50 miles per hour. 1989 Volvo 240. One driver, no passengers. It slammed into the Lyceum with a violence straight out of world war whatever. I read later in the paper the man behind the wheel had an epileptic seizure and lost control of the vehicle. It was the first time I ever witnessed anyone die. I pretended to ignore the scene and kept walking straight towards the gym. I remember being delivered unwilling into wired consciousness. I remember being completely paralyzed by all stimuli. I remember just sitting on the bench in the empty locker room. I remember spinning, shaking. I remember taking my still unzipped bag and quietly walking out of the building. I remember taking a cab even though I couldn’t afford it. I remember that was the last time I was really awake.
(John Maus’ We Must Become The Pitiless Censors Of Ourselves out on Upset The Rhythm)
