…you replace the batteries in your blood pressure machine and almost first thing in the morning, as everything is pretty much chill, you get the highest reading you have seen since that New Year’s Eve gig seven years ago when, against all common sense, you took a reading while you were fuming about how your time was thoughtlessly and inconsiderately wasted during a sound check. You’re hoping that the reading is an anomaly. You will try again later, after you’ve spent the better part of the day trying not to stress about that first high reading. You try to think of explanations. Maybe those batteries are just too juicy. Maybe you had that thing on too tight. You hate the feeling of having your blood pressure taken. It gives you the heebie jeebies. You feel like your arm is being squeezed off. Sometimes the pressure causes you to breathe kind of heavy, get a little dizzy. It was like that this morning. But you know, too, that your trepidation about having your blood pressure taken can’t be totally to blame, as you have had dozens of good readings over the last few years, even in doctor’s offices, where blood pressure readings are notoriously high. In fact, you kind of thought you had arrived in a kind of goldilocks zone with the absence of some of the normal stressors of teaching full time and just the right combination of meds. If things do not mellow out tonight and tomorrow morning, you’ll be calling your doctor first thing.
None of this prevented you, however, from recording a silly video for Instagram of a pretend phone call to your musical partner in Vermont, which he edited for maximum strangeness and humor, which you posted to promote the new PROJECT MA single, due out tomorrow, or today, as they sometimes say, at midnight. Midnight is not technically today, but it feels more like today than six o’clock in the morning tomorrow. The single is called “Paper Bag,” and it’s a song, somewhat ironically (or appropriately), about how individuals deal with anxiety. It’s strange. You have always felt yourself to be pretty even-keeled when it comes to stress and anxiety. That’s probably an error. You can easily think of times in your career and in your life generally when you have felt stressed out. Maybe it is that your disposition has always lent itself to a swift and full recovery. But it’s also possible that all of that was just a coping mechanism that served you in good stead for a long time, until you got older, and until you were diagnosed with hypertension.
You remember a number of years ago when you asked the doctor, in his office, if he thought you were in immediate danger. He said no. That memory is a comfort now. You’ll see him again soon. He’ll fix you up with some new cocktail of pills and maybe some ideas about good things to eat for the heart. It will be just fine, you say out loud to yourself. Everything’s just fine. You decide to spend the rest of this late afternoon reading from James by Percival Everett. If you were a doctor, you would tell your patients, beyond all the things we know about minimizing stress, exercising, resting, meditating, and eating well, that literature was good for the heart. You don’t know that to be a fact. But you feel it, deeply.
michael jarmer 