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I noticed that "inadequate" popped up as the default mood. It fits, so I'll leave it. It's 11:47pm on a Friday in August. Next week, I turn 31. I could try to write something pretty or something depressing but I'm not really alert enough for that. The state of my life. Well, that's hardly worth going into. I'm considering changing my mood to see if I can come up with something more worthwhile. I guess I should just start typing and see what comes out: I am neither hero nor villian, neither pedagogue nor protege. The restless ennui that consumes my daily existence has taken more of a toll than I wish to confess. I am lost within myself, within the isolated confines of a body that seems sometimes souless. The adamantine shackles I have bound myself with loosen at the touch but, of late, I lack either the courage or the will to break free of them. I am the captive of my own fears. The burdens of the past weigh heavily on me, a past not rife with misdeed but rather abyssal in emptiness. The role of the recluse was forced upon me. Once a self-proclaimed nihilistic hedonist whose only maxim was "Live life to its fullest and reckon not the cost", I have been reduced to a trite object of pity. Pathos. The appearance of suffering. So long without perspective. The ego that counsels me does not have the strength to ply its advice in my behavior. I grow too dense, too convoluted. The bubble popped and my lucidity has left me. What is hope but an unconscious amalgamation of memories of action and result? Shit, a segue would be nice. Or a point. "This I whispered and the darkness murmured back the word 'Lenore'. Only this, and nothing more." Better yet: "Take me away, for by my fay I cannot reason." |
| I'm feeling a bit groggy today. No, no alcohol or other chemicals last night, just a haze of crap in my head that coffee can't cut. I regret surrendering myself to this stationary inertia. I want to write a sentence using the word "banal" to describe my life but won't because it does a better job of capturing the spirit of my blog entries thusfar. I long for clarity of purpose, a discrete and discernable function in life. Instead, I'm adrift upon a sea of retarded lamentations and bad prose. The phantasmagoric succubus that dogs my footsteps as I trek across the stark landscape of my mind will not let me be. I sound mad. No, there's a frightfully mundane message beneath my obfuscations. It's just more fun to write like this. Or maybe I am mad. Something for me to think over in my free-time. Great. Christ, I ramble out these barely sensical complaints and expect what? That someone hepped up on voyeurism will puruse my rambling and be entertained? Which of us does that demean? That's a rhetorical question. Obviously, it demeans me. I was hoping someone would think it belied an esoteric truth that I was privy to. No, I don't have any answers, though, in my experience, answers come easily once the right questions are found. Now, I just need to go back and find an appropriate place to insert the sentence, "I fear to discard the voided claim-ticket for my expectations." Well, at least I made myself laugh. Enough for now. |
| I am bounded in a world deaf to my entreaties. I’ve wondered too long what choices led me to this crossroads outside the gates of Babylon, and have wandered too long about this crossroads to know whether I am leaving Babylon or am pondering how to gain entry. I understand so little. This means of whittling away hours that produces nothing but rubbish. It’s as though I want to ascribe mysticism to my ignorance, punctuating each sentence with what I do not understand. I understand so little. I understand so little. Perhaps, but I’m not so fucking dumb that I don’t see that the frustration I’m attempting to channel falls on deaf ears, if it falls on ears at all. Ears belonging to people who think me an ass. This life that I regale in mocking holds potential still and there is little sense in bemoaning the hand I currently hold. These cards were dealt me. I did not draw them. Christ, the angst that sprouts from isolation. And this petty public catharsis accomplishes nothing. That might not entirely be the case. I could well regret it in a few hours. For the moment though, it only serves as a means to channel out my anger and anxiety to dispel fears that life will not change. Yes, I recognize that I am more the master of my own fate than anyone else. Still, I feel trapped by the tangled webs woven for me. I am alone and mock no one but myself. Bullshit like this cannot undergo some sort of transubstantiation in the mind's eye of the reader and appear to be more than it is, can it? These emotions brook no glimpse of their impetus behind the verbal tapestry I weave. Like an autofecundating plant that with mutant offspring it owes to its self-fertilization, my mind has steeped too long in its own neurosis. And this bile that I spew forth to relieve the pressure in my head, to start anew . . . I didn't mean to write that. "To start anew." But it would be to start anew with a hobbled spirit. I would rather the thought shame me, to believe myself incapable of it, to quip, "It doth repent me; words are quick and vain and so was I." It frightens me, the thought of starting anew, yet what choice do I have? It's not a matter of finding the nearest cliff to jump from to see if I can fly. Why is it that what comes so easily to others is so difficult for me? My hobbled spirit? Stubbornness, laziness, fear? All? It doesn't seem to matter. The clamoring thoughts in my head have subsided some. Pardon the vomit. |
| I'm exhausted and feeling stupid, drinking coffee at 11:30pm. I was writing an email earlier tonight in which I recounted parts of the movie "Affliction", a movie in which Nick Nolte deteriorates into alcoholism while his brother is counseling him to "Take care of the little things and the big things will take care of themselves." I'm beginning to think I should apply the same advice to my own life. The Germans have a word, "smertz" I believe, that means "pain and weariness." I've let mine fester for too long. The barren pleasures afforded by my lifestyle delight me no longer. My anhedonia is almost complete. Even bitching and moaning in view of the whole world doesn't provide me with the release it once would have. Christ, well, the coffee doesn't seem to be curbing my exhaustion. I feel starved for attention and don't know how to deal with it. What I need are two bottles of good wine, a sixteenth of blow, and an Asian prostitute. I think that'd be about what it would take to provide me with the degree of escapism necessary to pretend my life isn't what it is. What was it that Hamlet said, something like, "The earth seems a vast, sterile promintory and the heavens but a pestulant congregation of vapours"? Then either Rosencrantz or Guildenstern said, "It is your imagination that makes it so," and Hamlet replied, "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space". That's badly paraphrased, but my point, if I have one, is that I seem to be suffering from the same sort of dysphoric ennui and it feels to come from within. A wider spectrum of stimulation might ease my unhappiness but I'm not hopeful. Well, I thought I'd had more to say. To plagiarize David Bowie, I must have died alone a long, long time ago. |
| My misanthropic instincts are in high gear right now. I'm in a house full of strangers and don't feel like talking to any of them. I don't have a niche in their spectrum. That's an excuse, and not a bad one. But it's also what's keeping me in this room, in front of this computer. I can't expect to suddenly feel that I want to crawl out of my hole and interact with ten strangers. I mean, I need to take baby steps. I don't seem to be focused enough to really dissect this, which isn't to say there'd be any sense in that. I'm just a nasty, autistic-like compulsion, to dissect and categorize the elements of my discomfit. I mean, it comes down to a sense of not belonging and, really, who could blame me for that. I barely feel human. I've conjectured what would restore my lost sense of humanity and can come up with one or two answers, but those avenues aren't open to me. It's a misstatement to say that my sense of humanity is "lost". It's merely quashed currently, quashed by my circumstance and the preceding years. The preceding years weight heavily on me, and perhaps not entirely for being lost, for having borne no fruit. No, some injury has been done to my soul that I can't in general carry with me as a bit of unfortunate luggage. It too often cripples me. Jim Morrison sang, "Women seem wicked when you're unwanted." I'd expand upon that to state that, for me, not only do women seem wicked, all men seem like potential bastards. I'm listening to "The Ballad of John and Yoko" and just heard John Lennon quote blackest of all widows Yoko Ohno saying, "You don't take nothing with you but your soul." I'd best do something about the festering sore on mine. "If you want to get your soul to heaven, trust in me now. Don't you doubt or question." Those are Tool lyrics. I know I appear merely melancholic. My problems run a bit deeper than that. But they're mine to bear and my resistence to writing frankly about them, even under a blanket of anonymity, hasn't been broken down yet. I'm not suggesting anyone out there is biting their nails, waiting to hear a more concrete enumeration of my troubles. I am, as are many of us here, doing this for my own sake. All I will say for the moment is that I feel lost, lost with no one to turn to. It is revealing that I won't discuss my problems even anonymously. Does my self-stigmatization carry so far that I presume myself a pariah or a leper? Even to myself? "I don't know any lepers either but I'm not about to run out and join one of their fucking clubs." I suppose that's as good a note as any to end on, if there really is nothing left to write. Wait, one more. Groucho Marx: "I wouldn't belong to any club that would have me as a member." Don't let that one get too ingrained in your psyche. |