the Chris Driver complex

They call it the Chris Driver complex. It returns to you in post-apocalyptic psychology, after your religion and ideals have been ground to dust good and proper, to pave the way for the propriety of a blank buzzing confusion. The confusion was blooming in William James’ day, when the dentist was enlightening, but now the blooms are wilted, expired hallucinations when you did acid and tetris and things made a good deal more sense, like you were practically the protagonist in a Faust adaptation, player one, charmed, the magnetism of the brash and stupid child, wearing trite splendor like an old hat, cocked like clockwork. That punk never needed the Chris Driver complex, but you do, when your charm wears off with the weight of ecstasy’s chemical windowsill above you, and you lose your job, and theoretically (and it’s as solid as evolution) there’s still enough wealth to go around in 2007 to justify scrambling for the luxury item called dignity with its bling accessory pride, because didn’t your guardian angel, that wizened hustler, give you her coupons for the liquidation sale of a closing Canadian superstore?

So you visit the store one shady day in submission to the angelbitch holding the whip, she thrashes you with a smile, tone of voice, self-assured flip of hair, cryptic sensuous and blond. You’re in a massive steel hangar of shelves for super-sized consumer goods, eerie and quiet and you hide your coupons and look around, ostensibly for nothing but maybe socks and underwear, but for some reason you can’t bare to buy any of them, every action is embarrassing, and you would buy something but none of the checkouts seem occupied, and you don’t want to take too close a look and look like an idiot, some weirdo, is this place even open, what are these people doing, should you be here? Buying is out of the question, let alone applying. No applied physics here, it’s creepy, forget it, go to Wal-Mart, it’s the devil you know, just lay low and buy some socks and forget looking for work.

Times like these, you know your hang-ups are going to leave you twitching under the noose before long, leaving only neurotic kneejerks of denial and escape, the most satisfying being your cartoon version of the world, which grows from kernels of truth to hard drive crashes and corrupted operating systems. Post apocalypse offers a lot of space to go bonkers in, if you were a plug-in preset, you’d be “ruined city reverb”. That’s why you turn to the Chris Driver complex, like your cat turns its head to the can opener. It goes with those well-fitting shades, plaid-tinted, blocking the more punishing frequencies of sunlight, the clarity that hurts too much. Bespectacled, the stubborn facts that divert agnostic froth no longer appear. “The way the world really works” is laughable, unknowable. The way it seems to work is a tragic but noble defeat, a framed oil-painting of slow suicide in muted blue and red.

The charm of the Chris Driver complex is its ability to build gorgeous and riotous delusions that would make great movies with the right cinematographer. Paranoid, yes, yourself as the center of every societal ill, systemic fuck-up, twisted vendetta, animal instinct run amok with modern amphetamines. But with the evils must come angels, not the unattainable whip-wielding ones whose skin make you cry, but platonic fags with soothing voices who regale you with tales of narcotized tranquility, personal paisley visions, narcissistic and masturbatory, what you’re best at, loving the one you’re with, alone with only yourself to respect yourself in a desperate swoon for cock-eyed cock-rocking tranquility, dreams under duress, the best kind of reveries, because the harsher the reality, the more brilliant the fantasy.

So Chris Driver regains control, on the ironic occasion of a trip to the Grocery store. He’s the character who was you, who imagined himself employed in a worse-case scenario Sisyphean hamster-wheel stock job, where they were out to get him with their nasty looks and comments, saying everything he worried they thought because why hold back now that his supports are gone and he doesn’t have a fucking friend in Jesus, time for him to know who he really is, the dirtball loser pussyboy, because that is the truth and the truth is good and beautiful, so beautiful how ugly he is and he can either accept that or drown in delusion. So now you’re applying for that hypothetical job, except for real this time, because you fell through a hole in the market economy, even though the economy is supposed to be good.

Well, it’s good for somebody but not you. You lost cachet, along with your wallet, on the floor of some bar, maybe one of those blackout nights at the Royal, and then you lost your job. And what didn’t kill you left you weaker, with more reasons to be afraid, all drama queen bollocks, skin irritation of experience, the new crop of fears, more nuanced, sophisticated, and plausible than the superstitious bullshit you left behind, but still mockingly contradictory. You never thought the dregs had undone so many, and now you’re networked with the creeps and the ruined. You were reaching for the angels but they pulled away like the promise of the last term politician and the offer from MasterCard and the flirting eyes of the Jessica Alba-resembling hippie girl back when you might have had a shot. Now you’re parasitical on the economy, unemployed, needy, and using drugs to fill the void. Better than TV, I guess. Now you’ll reach for yourself instead, why not? Player one is game over, let Luigi take over the pixilated level-one palace, extra code conjuring game genii, meta-programming the human bio-computer to grant it the respectability of a sense-deprived scientist.

You’ll need to forget the angelbitch sadist you’re supposed to buy with your Zastrozzi credits and learn to love the good fags in your head, intoxicated and good and sick, but your chosen perversity, maybe healthy, maybe Lao could justify it, it’s gotta balance out something, right? And second person might as well be first, in solipsism.