How to Survive Liminal Spaces
It is so bland in here. Blander than bread, blander than mayo. You could not conceive a place more bland than this. If IKEA were commissioned to decorate a new office space for the Sacramento DMV, it still would not be so suffocatingly plain, sterilized, and yes, bland. Though it might come close. How I ended up here, I don’t know, and don’t quite recall. To be perfectly clear, I did not dream this place up, for I know very well that no dream would last as long as this one has. Has it been days, weeks, centuries? There is no way to keep track of time in this place, for though there are clocks on each wall, they are apparently non-functional, forever stuck at 4:58, the numerological, semiotic significance of which I lack the intellectual fortitude or analytical bandwidth to ascertain. And though the hands on the clock were forever frozen, the gears inside still seemed to produce a ticking noise that never, ever stopped. Some would probably find this extremely annoying, but I find it’s a nice way to fill what would otherwise be a deadly quiet soundscape. Compounding the broken sense of time in this place is the disturbing lack of windows here. Like Target or Wal-Mart or any such consumer space, there is no sense of time in here. Day or night are inconsequential properties, for here it stays perpetually bathed in a bright fluorescence from from the dull gray ceiling above.
Deprived of sun and moonlight, the only semblance of natural life I can find here are in these plastic plants, nestled neatly against the four corners of the room. Tactile little things, these plants in white ceramic pots, with their tall stalks and giant leaves. What I most liked about these plants is that they were most certainly not the cheap kind you’d find in an under-funded public access station, or a defunct Big Lots shop. Someone must’ve gone to West Elm or to Crate & Barrel to source these. Even up close, they were truly convincing facsimiles of the real thing– variegated leaves with sturdy red-veins to support them from their nonexistent roots, buried beneath a foundation of fake dirt, dirt which I oftentimes liked to run my hands through. So fine and brittle is the artificial dirt, so miniscule and rubbery, that if I were under three, they would prove quite the choking hazard for me. The grains of brown-painted polyurethane have such a pleasant feeling to them when I run my hands through them for hours on end, the palm of my hands squeezing while my fingertips sink into them deeply. Playing with these plants and their dirt is the closest I’ll get to ‘touching grass.’
It certainly feels like an eternity here, though I am fortunate to still have all my faculties intact. Feebler minds would have gone mad here long before. I am fortunate in that I have only gone semi-insane. That is to say, I on occasion wil have conversations, complete with disagreements, rebuttals, and logical fallacies, with the voices that have started infiltrating my psyche. They make for good imaginary company, but sometimes they can be quite mean, too. Sometimes they’ll say really disrespectful things to me, attacking my insecurities, and oftentimes won’t even shut up when I tell them to. Sartre once said that hell is other people, though I wonder if he included imaginary people in that assertion.
Yet, it is important to note that though I hear these voices, I am still cogent enough to know that they are just in my head and that this is not the behavior of a psychologically sound individual. That is of little matter to me, for though being crazy is not ideal, the good thing is that there is no one here to witness my compounding insanity, not a single soul, to perceive me as being crazy and make me feel self conscious about the inefficacy of my mental fortitude.
You’re probably thinking, “alright asshole, enough with the pedantics, how am I supposed to survive should I ever find myself in such an appallingly unappealing situation such as this?” Well, my rude, imaginary interrogator, this is where I tell you– cultivate your imagination skills now, for they will be your greatest aid. Imagination will keep your mind mostly intact. I’ve found it’s sometimes nice to shut my eyes real tight, seated on the movie theater style rug on the floor, my back against the wall, imagining these colorful sensory memories of what I recall from my life. The sad truth is, this plain prison I find myself in is not dissimilar from the many office buildings, shopping centers, and domestic spaces I spent in when I was still out and roaming freely amongst everyone else. Sometimes I like to make use of this lingering remembrance. Sometimes I’ll fixate on some small little detail in the furniture that’s around me. Take for example, the blue chair, with its metal Bauhaus frame and its peculiarly-patterned upholstery. It’s a repeated tiling of light blue and dark blue cubes, seen from an isometric perspective that reminds me of the level design in Q Bert. Have you ever played Q Bert? Ah Q Bert! What memories that brings! Mostly memories of going out to Round Table with my divorced dad, eating slices of pineapple pizza before going to the arcade, playing Q Bert, while in the corner of my eye, I watched my dad unsuccessfully flirt with the staff after having a few too many Bud Lights.
Yes, memory is an effective coping mechanism for the sensory-deprived. Sadly, many of my memories mostly consist of things I saw other people do on TV screens, having lived their made-up experiences vicariously as an avid media consumer. Oh how I longed for the dulling effects of spectacle in a darkened room. Once to make the time pass by, I sat in complete silence, and played the entirety of the Indiana Jones movie series in my head, watching it unfold, beat by beat, shot by shot, scene by scene, every line of dialogue, every John Williams musical cue. I vividly remember Doc Ock with a fake Mexican accent getting stabbed by a booby trap. A Chinese man in a suit getting impaled by a flaming shishkebab. The Fuhrer signing Sean Connery’s diary for a flummoxed Ford. I remember these details with such stunning clarity, and it has been a lifeline for me. everything committed to my memory from so many rewatches that it practically singed itself permanently into my memory bank. Admittedly, things got a little fuzzy and jumbled up once I arrived at ‘Crystal Skull’ and ‘Dial of Destiny,’ as I had not committed those later installments to memory. For a bit, I would just sit there imagining Antonio Banderas in a scuba suit swinging on vines with a bunch of poorly-rendered CG monkeys. It was an amusing enough mental visual to entertain me for some time.
I have heard that there’s folks with no no capacity for generating mental images, with no internal monologue at all– and these types would certainly be reduced to drooling Kasper Hauser-like enigmas if they had to deal with the crap that I have to deal with.
Truthfully, that is the extent of my advice should you end up in my situation. Overall, if one can use their imagination effectively, the mind eventually acclimates to its liminal reality. In my early days, it was a lot worse. I found it to be quite a tense, one might even say, uncanny place. I used to dread that there would be some awful Slender Man, or some other escaped SCP, type waiting to pounce on me as soon as I turned around to face the other way. I imagined such a creature having huge reptilian-eyes and long serrated fangs, which it would promptly sink into my neck and belly to feast on my entrails. That fear has long since dissipated. In fact, such a fatal threat would be a welcome reprieve from this mundane bullshit I have to deal with day to day. As you can see, I have not fully come to terms with it all. My life is a frustrating kind of Groundhog’s Day, except I am not stuck in some charming Pennsylvania town full of whimsical comic relief characters. There are no people here on a loop I can have my fun with, and there are no opportunities yet presented for me to have some sort of redemption arc to finally break away from this jail. The only things here to stimulate my sense are some generic pieces of furniture with soft edged and rich saturations.
Living here has become very much annoying, but moaning about it won’t do me any good it seems. Overall, I’ve come to terms with this place.
Oh and one more thing– If I can impart one last bit of advice, let it be this. Be careful what aesthetics you choose to hyper-fixate on. They just might become your prison. I would not be surprised to know that there is some disenchanted trad wife out there, living in a cabin in a cold, desolate forest. A woman who at one point decided that this sort of quiet domestic life she saw so many TikToks about might be a welcome reprieve from the brash loudness, the stark violence, and the moral coldness of the modern world, only to find she is forced to live out an eternity in a cottagecore prison cell of her own choosing, doing chores, hemming shirts, sweeping floors, the tail end of her bright beige head scarf draped over the kitchen counter as she perfunctorily bakes another pecan pie for the umpteenth time.
She waits forever for her burly, flannel-sporting hunk of a husband to reward her dutiful domestic efforts with a forehead kiss and a knee-weakening baritone utterance of ‘good girl,’ to make the her work feel appreciated, to make her soul feel validated. Everyday she waits for him to come, but he never does.
I am also certain that there is a chronically online, rail-thin, hair dyed, deep-fried cheesy spud-indulging enby out there, sitting in their gamer chair in their gamer den, day in, day out, bisexually lit in oppressive blues and sickly purple hues, a cluttered hoarder’s room full of empty Red Bulls, with a glass case full of Sonny Angels, Labubus, and other trendy plastics suspended up on the wall next a bunch of Naruto and JJK character posters. I picture their
eyes being glued to the, bloodshot and bulbous, screen playing a game that never ends, occasionally they’ll looking out towards a window of nocturnal perpetuity, gazing at a desolate unpopulated metropolis filled with grimy brick walls and and a barrage of chain link fencing, the constant sound of police sirens, and droning traffic horns, the cyberpunk aesthetics they once worshipped at the altar of now their permanent reality, underlined with a distorted playlist ringing in their head, full of overplayed radio hits from the 80s and 90s [SLOWED DOWN + with REVERB, naturally], to barely drown out the hollow feeling in their overstimulated brain.
I imagine all of us being our own Robinson Crusoes, in our own islands of isolation, waiting patiently for a Friday to arrive that we can finally and gratefully thank God for. I wonder what any of us did to end up in places like these, we may never know. Perhaps we didn’t do anything at all, and that very well could be the reason for our eternal damnation of niche, personalized aesthetics. Maybe the Protestants were right after all. Idle hands and all that.
Or it could very well be that I’m the only fool out there suffering through this strange lonely sensation. That wouldn’t be beyond the realm of possibility. I’ve certainly been very uniquely unlucky in my life in other ways. Had I known life would lead me here, I might have chosen a much less strange and creepy pastiche to base my lifestyle around.