It's Kind of a Funny Story

by Ned Vizzini

mentioned this before.” “Yeah. It’s simple.” “You like simple.” “Doesn’t everybody?” “Some people thrive on complexity, Craig.” “Well, not me. As I was walking over here, I was thinking…I have this fantasy of being a bike messenger.” “Ah.” “It would be so simple, and direct, and I would get paid for it. It would be an Anchor.” “What about school, Craig? You have school for an Anchor.” “School is too all over the place. It spirals out into a million different things.” “Your Tentacles.” I have to hand it to her; Dr. Minerva picked up on my lingo pretty quickly. Tentacles is my term—the Tentacles are the evil tasks that invade my life. Like, for example, my American History class last week, which necessitated me writing a paper on the weapons of the Revolutionary War, which necessitated me traveling to the Metropolitan Museum to check out some of the old guns, which necessitated me getting in the subway, which necessitated me being away from my cell phone and e-mail for 45 minutes, which meant that I didn’t get to respond to a mass mail sent out by my teacher asking who needed extra credit, which meant other kids snapped up the extra credit, which meant I wasn’t going to get a 98 in the class, which meant I wasn’t anywhere close to a 98.6 average (body temperature, that

I’m not doing well in terms of being a functional human, you know?

Hey, soldier, what’s the matter? I can’t sleep and I can’t eat, sir! How about I pump you full of lead, soldier, would that get you motivated? Can’t say, sir! I’d probably still be unable to sleep or eat, just a little bit heavier from the lead. Get up there and fight, soldier! The enemy is there! The enemy is too strong. I can’t fight them. They’re too smart. You’re smart too, soldier. Not smart enough. So you’re just going to give up? That’s the plan.

But most of all I feel my brain, up there taking in blood and looking out on the world and noticing humor and light and smells and dogs and every other thing in the world—everything in my life is all in my brain, really, so it would be natural that when my brain was screwed up, everything in my life would be. I feel my brain on top of my spine and I feel it shift a little bit to the left. That’s it. It happens in my brain once the rest of my body has moved. I don’t know where my brain went. It got knocked off-kilter somewhere. It got caught up in some crap it couldn’t deal with. But now it’s back—connected to my spine and ready to take charge. Jeez, why was I trying to kill myself?