Boredom Exercise #1

He made his way down the narrow aisle of the city bus with the painful sort of clumsiness common to the very old. His hips were wide and covered by an ancient looking blue sweater vest, ill-fitting, stretched out, and reaching to his knees. He settled into his seat, without ackowledging either of the two people who, upon his approach, quickly removed themselves from the bench at the front of the bus. This section, clearly marked with red and black stickers, silhoutting photos of an old, stooped over lady with a walker, a baseball capped person on crutches and an exaggeratedly pregnant woman, is taboo for the young, healthy and barren. In the summer this apparent VIP section reeks of body odor, alcohol and the thick perfumes of elderly women in floppy hats who clutch cloth shopping bags and often make conversations with reluctant drivers, attractive teenage girls, or sometimes, in the spirit of the one-sideness of most bus discussions, simply chat and laugh to themselves. Highschool kids at the back giggle, sitting in their little groups of three or four, sometimes slightly too loud for politeness, while professionals, black-jacket-starched-collar-sensible-shoes, look to their peers, engage in a momentary silent and collective eyebrow raise and proceed to shift around uncomfortably in their seats, as though disconnecting themselves from the potential contagion, saturating the upholstery of the seats, that is old age and senility.

D.I.D

I had yet another thrilling telephone conversation with my mother the other day--She calls me out of obligation, I imagine, to make sure I'm still alive. Keeping tabs on her offspring I guess..She prefers to keep the phone calls short and general unless my tone is more morose than usual , as it is. I am so stressed out and I can't focus and I have so many assignments coming up. I have a sense of true despair and I swear if I were even able to anymore, I would have just spent the whole day choking back tears. But apparently, according to mother, I'm an emotional cripple.

Not only did she deride my time management skills, but, knowing how overwhelmed I am, she continued to press me for what sort of idea I've come up with for what I'm going to do next year. She keeps suggesting I go to school and study something else before doing my English MA. I wonder how I'm supposed to afford all this education and still survive as well as keeping hold on the ever weakening cord tying together my body and mind. I feel rather unhinged these days, but I really don't want to go back on any pills They make me sick and depressed (more so--because I don't like the idea of having to take something to appear normal)...Incidentally, I've not managed to get any work done at all, despite a 4 hr stint in the library today. I feel incredibly stupid, incompetent and very empty.

My mother likes to use herself as an example of how collected someone can be, how things always work out. She told me I was young and pretty and should get myself out there. I was cruel and told her I wasn't like her--she's gone through quite a few boyfriends since finally kicking out the psychopath I'm embarrassed to call father (apparently, according to a source, he's started drinking heavily, which is probably the only reason I haven't got more psycho death threats). When I told her I've never been into dating and that I have a real problem with trust and physicality (when I was little, I was one of those flinching, "I don't like to be touched" children who got permission to stay in and read at recess rather than engage in messy sports), she reacted more strongly to this, than when I told her I might just be suffering a total mental breakdown and I thought I'd die any time now--the woman cares, apparently. She got all huffy and said something along the lines of --in a really incredulous, snide way, "So you want to be alone forever?!"...'Mother' can't understand, that unlike her, I don't need someone else to complete me...I feel far to rent apart already from my personal stuff and I really don't feel up to sharing this information with someone who expects things from me. It makes me ill. But then everything does. Mother suggested I was in love with my sadness and was quite pathetic. I told her not to quote Pumpkins lyrics and I wouldn't reprimand her for her poor choice in men and her idiocy in the case of her ill-fated marriage.

She somehow thinks my unwillingness to date comes from a really shallow place and that I must have high expectations--which is ridiculous considering the only people I've ever dated turned out to be incredibly well-intentioned, understanding, sweet people, but with serious substance/alcohol abuse/mental/criminal problems. I don't think I carry high expectations. maybe that's my problem. Hurrah for low self-esteems and reluctant co-dependence. At least I'm not in search of a prop to help me along. That would be cruel. If someone "nice" expresses interest, it's terrifying because they couldn't possibly get a lot of my issues--there are many--I am bad luck--every one I know, everything I touch seems to rot. All my friends have been in and out of hospitals this year. One of them overdosed repeatedly on sleeping pills. Going home is nothing but depression and subsequently, a lot of hours alone, watching television until 5am, as none of the people from home are healthy enough to do things with me. It's either idleness alone or drinking with acquaintances over a bar with really loud music to limit conversation. I can handle it. Spackle on some makeup. Make myself smile for once. pretend I enjoy people. etcetera. Makes me can't wait for christmas.

I have a headache. It's terrible. I hope I don't die but I really don't feel alive

Even Now

I think we live in a culture of shame and guilt. These two are the only tangible sentiments people really instill on their children. Everything everywhere is constantly criticized. If it's not being criticized outwardly by someone else, you're doing it to yourself, making awfully sure to self-edit and censor your actual feelings because you know nothing in this life can be kept secret for more than a few moments. Treasure those moments while they're happening, because in an hour or so, at least in my experience, the self-criticism comes to torment me and I experience an enormous, unbearable urge to leave where I am and run home to proceed to dwell on every sentence uttered, every possibly obnoxious look, strange posture or uncomfortable silence. I hate that I am this way and I know I 'm not alone in mental mind fucking, but I think I may be a more extreme case.

Speaking of minds, mine feels a little clogged these days. Each hour seems more uninspired than the next and I don't feel as though I can actually function in society anymore (and I was making such an effort for awhile). There's nothing to say that hasn't been said. There's little to do that hasn't been done (for a poor student that is). I know what there is to look forward to and I want none of it. I'm not exactly saying i'd like to die (it's a thought that has thankfully, terrified me of late), it's just that I'm not so sure I'd like to live, which leads me to question whether I really know what that means, since I do appear to have grasped the concept of breathing. Inoutinout and all that. Yay for me.

I wake up constantly in the night. All week I've had nightmares. I've barely slept. This is not unusual, but I think I prefer my blank dreams where all I see is black. I feel a sense of foreboding and I don't feel very healthy. I shut my eyes and my sleep feels too heavy and 2 minutes into shut-eye, I sit up so fast, terrifed that my heart has shut down and that a quick jolt is all it needs, walk around the room, check for intruders (a mirror hanging on the door is not a wise move for the paranoiac)...Settle into bed again. Take a tylenol. Close my eyes. Sleep for 10 minutes and repeat until daylight. I usually sleep uninterruptedly from 6-830 AM at which point my alarm goes off and I get terrified that I was supposed to have set it earlier because there's so much I put off doing the night before and there's never anytime for anything or anyone and I hate that. I hate that.

I hate that I refuse to allow myself meaningful connections with people. I can only socialize when I have a drink (and I, even then, end up hating the things I do, how I look, how I feel, so I get another one and just try to be the fun, interesting person at the bloody party--that's how it always is and I don't see a way out). It's not that I drink often, but when I do, I drink a lot, and that's what people remember, because I'm actually existing outside of my personal space. It's the only time I ever really talk and have things I feel like saying.

2 people in my life want me to take the year off next year and check myself in to a place I don't quite feel like mentioning here, and I realize they care (although I have my doubts--it may just be the only thing that hasn't been tried, a convenient solution to my messy mind) but I can't actually foresee improvement in my current state. Everything culminates. Everything in my whole goddamned life has culminated to this moment, now, where i feel horrible and am using this blog as a means to avoid doing other, unhealthier things. I forget nothing. I repress nothing. It's all on the surface and I've become so ashamed of it, so guilty for seeing it in myself when I wake up, that I can't leave the house until it's been conveniently tucked away in a backpocket or other.

And so here we are with all our wisdom and our headaches and weight and loneliness and lies and denial and repression and disgust and moments of wanting to act on impulse so so badly. Here we are, alone with our current standard of living and looking at life in the third person. It makes me very sad that even now, I can never say the things I want to say.

Halloween

I really love Halloween and dressing up...Or maybe I just love dressing up because well I'm sick of what I and everybody else looks like on a day to day basis. That's right, you people all make me a little sick. hah. We all wear masks anyways, you know, covering up some aspect of ourselves to appear better than you actually are. I do it and so do you, so whatever. It sucks that we don't live in a world where honesty is appreciated--even if society suggests that policy-wise, it's number one. So come Halloween, we're still wearing masks, or layers of make up and outlandish clothes, etcetera, but hey, despite being covered in fake blood and gangrenous sores, you're not bullshitting. So drink up, eat candy, and don't blog when you're drunk-ish and worried about work in a few hrs.

Try not to break shit, hurt people or burn things down in your halloween glee. Take a tylenol before bed with a glass of water and swallow back the urge to puke. It should be fine.

Tainted

I've been reading Blake's Innocence and Experience and now I am very depressed--but in a good way because all I do is read and read and very rarely do I actually feel the need to pay heed to what lies beneath the words...

Not all children are naiive and not all adults are wise and all knowing as far as goes the world. I wonder where I fit. I know I am not naive because I feel sick to death with nearly everything that goes on around me these days--yet I live in a very privelleged portion of the world and do not expect to see certain horrors that others, decades younger than myself have since grown immune to, if not flourished into rational, thinking beings, within. But maybe it is naiive of me to think that the things I've witnessed are unspeakable. Does it work on a scale? Certainly, I am not wise. I've met very few who are and those who call themselves so are the most naiive of all.

I barely know whether to call myself child or adult. Psychologically I've felt the same way since about 12 or so, and chronologically (including all the idle years and those I continue to waste) I am an adult. Yet, I distance myself, as always from adult things. Here it is important to note that not all children in their innocence are happy (no skipping and catching butterflies in green untainted meadows for me, I'm afraid). Some are innocent of the trappings and corruptions of the world, but live in the horrible hell of their own mind. Are they innocent, when all they see is grey and sadness, death and rot, tears and blood?

It would be so easy to say, "Oh he was corrupted by a book."--Wasn't a Dorian Gray tainted in this manner?--how simple would that be,to be able to pinpoint the undesirable object in order to destroy it? But an innocent whose corrupter was his or herself, maybe through being left too often to dwell quietly in shame in tiny bedrooms with flourescent humming lamps, drowning in the waters of fears and possibilities conjured by the terrified mind, has nothing material to destroy but his or herself. How can innocence possibly be maintained in the face of such a startling revelation? it passes quickly away, as fast as the handfull of pills reaches to the mouth and drops again, as fast as catching one's reflection in the gleam of a shiny new razorblade, faster still than the time it takes for said gleam to became tarnished with the sacrificial slice of the first cut. Innocence and blood. How fucking biblical of me.. Perhaps I ought to be Catholic...(lalala...I didn't just say that...)

Anyway, yeah, I think the loss of innocence is like the breaking point into the maddening adult world we call society. Like, at some unnameable point, we all have a mental breakdown and go insane. Except we're not insane as we know it--we're normal. Those of us who cannot tolerate life and the world and people and their society and maybe walk around with 5 winter coats on in the middle of summer and a daisy in their hats because they feel like it, are clearly mad. Because they're adults. Because they're insane. Because they don't give a goddamn. Because. I cannot personally escape this world that makes me sick. I don't have it in me to be insane enough to escape from consumerism, life, society, etc, but I can't possibly flourish here as others do. I'll grow sicker and sicker and work and work, and make money and become invisible until I'm as pale as the off white standard wallpaper in my workstation--and then, one day, finally, when my spirit has finally broken and I no longer care enough to notice or write depressive blogs about my state, I will die and my money will serve to buy me a nice pine box and a slab of granite (to make sure I stay weighted the fuck down). "They'll" be forcing me to return to an earth I know nothing about through virtue of pretending to be well-adjusted to modern urban society-- no time to play in that sandbox, I'm afraid, though it does look kind of fun, whatever will they say?--and like the nice adult I am, I'll politely stay down and let the lid close over my head.

Sleep

Another shitty night of insomnia-driven self-reflection. Now I'm tired and depressed....I think I should make an effort to like pills a little more, but that just raises more issues of what I should be relying on, if anything. I passed the wee hours reading accounts of highly depressive people's suicide attempts on the internet--I was bored and really, it was either that or read all about celebrity eating disorders/drug abuse. I swear, it was a tough decision (I'm sure), but if I get to the point where I'm tired enough to start plastering celebrity-type images on my fridge, I think I'd rather just take the fucking sleep pill and pass out for a solid 8 hours. At least, if my mind starts giving me (what now appear to be expected) awful thoughts, said thoughts will be restrained within the confines of sleep and muscle relaxant (you know, to prevent any incidences of murder by somnabulism). It's a nice thought, actually. Sleep could provide me with (the apparently more) constructive habits, like regular dreaming, which would maybe (?--or am I just romanticizing the concept of dream--I should re-read Casteneda) help me not feel so fucking cynical and repulsed. I feel too young to be so bitter and it just isn't cool anymore.

Knowing me though, I'd probably have another nightmare.

I think I want to drink a bit tonight.

Dumb Mute

Everytime I try to write it just doesn't work out--Why--Only I can say why. And now here I sit and my vocabulary won't allow me to say what I want to say.

Today in class we talked about how literature and language is so closely connected as far as aboriginal stories are concerned. Because their tradition is oral, translation in English is, as my prof says, like kissing someone through a veil. Close, but too much is lost in the translation to actually like it, or get the meaning the story teller and those who understand his language, understands. I thought that was a pretty nice analogy, kissing someone through a veil. Being who I am, I immediately got off track and silently sat there thinking not of native literature, interesting as it is (it is!), but rather of the secrecy we all feel so compelled to keep from those closest to us.

Someone can know you, or think he/she does, and you can feel like they do too, but really, it's simply yet another case, like all previous such cases, of testing the limits. How close is just too damn close? How many hours can one actually spend in the company of just one other person before slinking out the door on potentially false pretenses? For someone with no connection to the mob, a secret lover on the side, or a job as a private investigator, this avoidance of actual time and intimacy in the closest of relationships, simply will not do. Stick to the surface. Please, don't be superficial, but can you make it quick?

I read this back and feel awful. But that's how I feel (awful?) and I guess i simply cannot have it any other way.

Really bad headache..Took a Nytol in the tub. Need to sleep. Listening to "A is for Accident" by the Dresden Dolls...