New beats, repeats, endings and beginnings--

So it's New Year's Eve, and I just went on facebook and friended a guy I met last night who I really wanted to get to know. Today and yesterday I looked at a handful of choices for food and chose vegan ones. Last night and the night before I was up until about two in the morning with friends... but that's less to the point, I guess.

Look, my point is this. It's a new year. I don't believe in living by the arbitrary lines of a calendar, but it's a new year, all the same. By the end of this year, I will be full-on vegan. I will be in college, one way or another. I will have finished at least one novel, and will be writing every single day, outside of college stuff. I will be able to sing and play guitar, and well. That's just... what's going to happen. Will I be happy? That remains to be seen. But I'm not going to sit around and let life just happen around me anymore.

2010 will be a year of grace, mercy, forgiveness; 2010 will be a year of faith, of confidence and spirituality; 2010 will be the year I stop existing and start living.

An Open Letter: it needed to be said (true or not).

look, i'm never going to live up to your expectations. i'm sorry, really and truly i am, because i want to, so much. i want to be fucking perfect, and i'm never going to be and it's not worth your time to keep trying like this. it's just... not. give the fuck up. i'm sorry. i wish you had someone worthy of caring to hang out with, someone who you could teach and help and someone who would actually listen and work hard to fulfill dreams and someone with as much drive as potential. and i know it's a cop-out. everything i've said, everything i've written, every thought i've had for the past two years has been a cop-out, a reason why i can't, or think i can't. and i'm so, so sorry, because i let you down and let you down and let you down, and then i turn around and get upset when you're human, too. i expect my friends to be superhuman somehow, even though i'm the biggest fuckup in the tri-state area. and then... just... i don't know what. I'M FUCKING SORRY. and that's not good enough, it never will be, what i need to do is get off my ass and fix the mistakes, make it better, live up to the very least of my potential and i'm so sorry, because it doesn't look like i ever will. i can't even promise you i'll try, because i know i'll fall apart again when depression kicks in and this little spurt of motivation and inspiration goes away. you deserve better friends than i could be... a better friend, i guess? but plural. anyway. i'm sorry. i guess there's no way to end this thing without a... resolution, of some kind. so i will try. i honestly will try to be better, and i will listen to what you're saying and heed it, and not fuck up so much. that's what i want to do. listen, heed, follow-- all the other stuff is just what i'll work on in the meantime. but i want to be a better friend, someone who's reliable and not... shitty to be around. so yeah. i'll fix it. i can't promise you i'll ever be as good as any one of my friends deserves, but i'll get better. coyote or not, i can be a better human.

It made sense in my head.

Good grief, is it really necessary to psycho-analyze every damn quirk in this twisted little brain? Because it's getting annoying. And a little disturbing. Things don't look right when you look at them closely.

I know I have some weird kind of approval complex. It probably, if I look for the most sensible (if Freudian) reason, is because:
-growing up with the idea of striving for unattainable perfection as the only way to live
-a lack of obvious pride/support of any kind from my father, for the most part
-a deep feeling of self-loathing, traceable to any number of sources
-impossible standards because... ? that one doesn't trace either...

Baaaasically, when there's someone I respect, I go way the hell out of my way to be... whatever the hell my brain has decided I'm supposed to be. And then when I (predictably) fail in the juiced-to-the-maxcore insane standards I've set for myself in that ...role, or whatever you want to call it, I go apeshit on my own brain, and go into full-on self-loathing/abuse/destructive mode. It's kind of a bad thing. I'm getting better at managing it (read: I'm getting better at hiding the evidence and shoving it the hell out of my conscious mind), but it's obviously been very blatant in the past, because it's led certain friends/bosses to be wary of telling me I've screwed up, because they're afraid FOR SOME STRANGE REASON that I'll take it way too hard and OH MY GOODNESS beat up on myself about it. Sigh. Which leads me, or at least my more rational parts, to be all "What is this about? Tell me what I screwed up, so I can... not screw it up next time! It is not a hard concept my friend! I am not a fragile butterfly! I am Coyote and my medicine is stronger than yours! and I can -take- it!" The bit I don't mention, often even to myself, is that I will feel like shit about it, but the honest truth is that if you don't give me a reason to feel like shit? MY BRAIN WILL MAKE ONE UP. I'd rather beat myself up about something that actually happened, which will lead to actual self-improvement in the long term (Don't argue, it will), than to beat myself up about things that aren't even real, and wind up depressed over nothing. t'ain't worth it.

Anyway, it leads to situations like this.
Me: *screws something up*
Other Person: Dude! What the fuck?
Me: Ohshitohshitohshit!
Other Person: ...relax, no big deal.
(some time past)
Me: *screws something up*
Other Person: *makes some odd and vaguely disparaging joke about it*
(rinse and repeat for about three hours)
Exit Other Person
Me: *angrygrumblemutter* Jerkfacealwaysalldownonmeyowhatthefuck*
Subconscious: Except that, hey, cares about you, right? Wants you to be a better person? Only has good intentions and would never jerk you around for no reason?
Me: *grumblemutter* Yeah, but knows I take shit too seriously.
Second-conscious: Except that you keep saying all "I'm not a fragile butterfly, I can take it, stop treating me like a puppy or something," so you have nothing to complain about. Either face up to the fact that you are apparently too thin-skinned to handle even the most gentle, joking of criticisms, or stop fucking whining about it and fix your fucking mistakes so there's no problem.

Of course, if I hadn't been such an idiot this morning, early morning, most of this could've been avoided.

Fuckin' coyotes. We never know when to quit.

Besides, the music made everything worth it, and I mean Everything.

We'll See.

So I didn’t write a 50,000 word novel this month, again. It’s not the first time. I’d like to pull a Linus and close panel on the classic pose, shaking my fist at the sky – Just Wait ‘Til Next Year! But I think I’ll go one step wishy-washy on this one, and say instead, Just Wait ‘Til Some Time In The Future, Unspecified At The Moment But Definitely Inevitable In The Long Run! Because next year, I will be in school again, working my ass off to fulfill my potential as a student of journalism. And, with that in mind, I won’t just be doing homework and kind of working on studies, I will be throwing myself actively towards learning as much as I can, and, given the writing component of journalism, this means my writer’s-head will be getting plenty of exercise without novel-induced craziness.

But someday, and I don’t mean that vague “Someday,” as in, “Some Time In The Future, When I Make Time For It,” I mean someday as in “As Soon As I’m Done With College Even If It Kills Me,” I will write a novel. Fully, and working as hard as I can, and it will be a thing of beauty and I will make people laugh, and cry, the way I do reading about Harry Dresden. This is non-negotiable.

So I didn’t write a novel this year. A more cynical person than I might point out the fact that I’ve never finished a written work of any significant length. But I’m through being that person, and I’d rather dwell on the fact that I got farther into this thing than I ever have before. And if I can finish short stories (which I can, by the way), I can finish a novel. Just wait ‘til next time.

It Doesn't Have To BE This Way

There’s a website which I often fool around on called TV Tropes, which analyzes common themes found in different media; some of you may be familiar with it. One of the tropes discussed at length there is the “Crapsack World,” which is… well, exactly what it sounds like. Here’s one of the descriptions in the summary: “An immutable Crapsack World has corruption and pain Inherent In The System, both physically and metaphysically. Trying to fight this corruption will always result in it winning.”

So basically, this describes a world that is inherently unfair, a world in which good is not only useless, but often counter-productive. This is a world where the evil overlord wins. This is a world where humanity really is reduced to numbers, where the Daleks succeed because the universe doesn’t care; this is a world where a sonic screwdriver and a brilliant smile will get you killed, regardless of how clever or powerful you are, how strongly you want to save the world. This is a universe where the more unfortunate people of the world are taken into slavery to serve the whims of the culture on the other side of the world who doesn’t know or care about their plight. This is a world where an entire population can be decimated on a whim, once more to benefit a class more useful to the people in power, and no one bats an eye. This is a world where those born into poverty and disease and starvation are, more or less, thought of as deserving of such a fate; this is a world where Scrooge was right.

This is our world.

And speaking against any of that makes you a bleeding heart, an emotion-driven basket-case, and it pits you straight up against the power-driven universe, in a world where greed and oppression are rewarded and selflessness is mercilessly stamped out.

I’m not exaggerating. This isn’t hyperbole.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again, and I will keep on saying it until the day I die.

THIS IS NOT RIGHT. I don’t give a used fig as to what your personal beliefs concerning the semantics and wordplay of “ethics” versus “morality,” or which political party you support, or whether you’re an independent or a moderate or on the fringes or outside altogether.

If you are supporting slavery, genocide, if you have nothing to say to this world we’re living in, if you don’t believe that there is something very, very, wrong with what’s going on in this world, get the hell off of my friends list. I don’t care if you're a conservative who believes capitalism is the only thing that will save this world from itself, or you’re an anarchist who believes capitalism is what’s killing this world. You should be fighting for the same ends right now. There are people being driven into slavery, not only in Mali and Cote d’Ivoire, but on this continent, in the cities and the suburbs and all around us. There are people dying on the streets, of malaria. A disease that was cured over a century ago. Not a lot of people know that. Mosquito bites are killing more people in this world than any other animal. Mosquito bites. Death. By. Mosquito. Death by a disease we cured. A disease that’s become a joke in this country. That doesn’t even touch the disease we haven’t cured, AIDS, which people are also dying like flies from.

That’s the one that makes me sick – people believe, somehow people allow themselves to be convinced that it’s not that important. They deserve it, right? Just like the kids born into starvation deserve to die before they reach adulthood, and the people being laid off from their jobs in this very country deserved that, and they deserve to be homeless on the streets with their families, the filthy savages. But not on our streets, no, how about the darker part of town, tucked away somewhere we don’t have to see them? This country makes me sick sometimes. I’m an American, that much is true. I believe in freedom, and I mean that literally. I believe everyone should be free. I believe that freedom is a human right, not an American right. I believe in liberty, and I believe in justice. I believe that no one should die because of a damned bug bite. I believe women who are raped are never ‘asking for it,’ I believe that in a world where there is enough food to go around, no one should starve to death. I believe that it is twisted, sick, and downright evil to refuse homeless men the basement of a church to sleep in on winter nights -- to let them freeze to death in their sleep -- because it brings them too close to the business district.

To be fair, not many people know the reality of all of this. (That's why it's important to do this. Because people don't know.) It’s mentioned in passing, occasionally, but rarely expanded on. We’re very careful, this country is, of tucking things that make our viewers uncomfortable out of sight. We wouldn’t want to lose our viewers. We wouldn’t want to make them too uncomfortable, to make them turn aside to somewhere where the view is a little more pleasant.

Don’t forget this. There is nothing – nothing – that makes you somehow innately more worthy of life than someone else on this planet. I’m a Christian, infinitely more than I am an American. That’s what I believe. I believe in unconditional love, and unconditional forgiveness. You were born (for most of you, anyway) in a wealthy country, if not a wealthy home. Your parents were able to feed you, because they’d worked hard, but also because they’d been born to a land of opportunity. That is why you are here, and not starving to death, or dying of malaria or AIDS, or being beaten to death in the cacao fields on the Gold Coast. Because you were born here, and not there. It doesn’t make you a bad person – but it doesn’t make your life worth more than theirs, either. A life is a life is a life. Please, please remember that.

This world has become a horrible, horrible place -- we don't have to leave it that way. We don't have to submit silently to what this world has become. I mentioned earlier that in this universe, morality is punished and powerlust is rewarded. I don't believe that's Just The Way It Is, I believe it's the way the human race has made it. And we can change that. It's not idealistic to believe that conscience should overrule politics.

Politics are supposed to be a way to follow your conscience; they are not supposed to subvert it for the party values.

I'll say it once again.

We don't have to take this. If you have a conscience, if you want to see this world become something other than a prison, do it. Don't wait for a signal. You ARE the signal.

And I don't want to promise, because I don't want to lie.

So I’m sitting here listening to If God Will Send His Angels, by U2 in Dunkin Donuts, after taking the written portion of my driver’s test. I can’t work on the novel I’m supposed to have done by December. I can’t think. I’m running over things in my mind, restless, upset, not understanding things. That’s how I roll. I worry, and I fret, and I think, and I pick things apart in my mind and analyze the pieces, and then I sit down and write about them. That’s why I want to be a journalist. That’s what makes sense to me. But that’s not what I wanted to say. That was this morning.

I deleted that little bit, this morning, because I wound up wandering off on life careening out of my control, of not understanding my own destiny.

My dad and I had this huge political argument. This time, it started with me telling him what my older sister, who had been in the Army, said about Fort Hood – that it reflected the state of the United States Military. My dad said it had to do with political correctness. I disagreed. We proceeded to argue from there about everything currently on the political plate; I scored a few points, he scored most of them, because he is good at verbal arguments, and I am not. I can write. I’m not good at talking. Anyway. The whole thing culminated with me saying something about universal health care, and him laying a pretty hefty guilt trip on me and then giving me a lecture about using analytical thought instead of following your heart, your emotions.

I cannot accept that. I cannot. I cannot sit here, at my desk at my laptop in this house in America, the United States of, and make imperious analytical judgments without conscience.

I have derided my conscience as neurotic. Maybe it is. But it’s still there. There is still a voice telling me that what I am doing with my life, most of the time, is wrong. I am doing almost nothing to improve the lot of the poor, the sick, the needy in this world. What am I doing to feed the fatherless, the widows? I cannot vote without my conscience. I cannot vote without my emotions. The two are tied, the two are more me than I am, and there’s a logic bomb for you. That is who I am supposed to be. Not who I am, no – I’m not happy with that person. I get angry when people talk about me being a kind or a conscientious person. If I was the person – half the person – who I should be, I would be vegan. I would be working my ass off, and then sending most of my paychecks off to Save Darfur or to pay for cures for malaria, or to combat the AIDS crisis. I don’t hold up to the standards. That’s fucked up. I am not a kind or conscientious person.

My dad gets angry when I talk about this stuff. I don’t phrase it like that – that would be trawling for pity. (I phrase it like that here because I don’t have anywhere else to talk about it. I have to get this off my chest somewhere, and this is the only blog nobody connects with me.) But when I talk about ONE, (Red), Save Darfur, Fair Trade, hell, if I mention the word ‘hybrid,’ I get a death stare. Those, you see, are causes Liberals use to make themselves feel good about themselves. (Sometimes I wonder if he knows that is almost exactly the same thing anarchists say about them.) Those Damn Liberals, they’re so smug about what they’re doing to help the world. That Bono, he’s so smug about trying to fix the world. Don’t they realize that they’re being led around by the nose because they listen to their emotions instead of their minds?

Fuck. That.

After he left, I sat here thinking, wondering, trying to make sense of it all. I have a conscience, you see. It’s neurotic, probably from not being listened to, but it’s there. And, thanks to Slacktivist, I’m starting to see more about the world, viewed through a Christian’s eyes. An evangelical, no less! And someone who’s disgusted by the evangelical scene today, someone who hasn’t forgotten that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord thy God, and the second commandment is to love thy neighbor as thyself. And someone who is consistently calling evangelicals out on it. But I bring any of these points up to my dad, and I get called out as a Liberal, smug in my own false sense of conscience.

I listened to If God Will Send His Angels, and I cried, and I shook my fist at the sky and begged for a sign, and I knelt and pleaded for a sign, and I despaired of there being any hope in this world, any true way to live for a Christian, anything to cling to. And I walked out and sat in the woods, and cried and stared at the sky and was accused by my conscience of praying to Bono, and defended my Not-A-Prayer by saying “at least he’s here, in this world, tangible and real,” and then had to admit that God is more real than anything tangible BUT ANYWAY. I don’t need a sign. I want a sign. I saw a cross, white and lit up, that I’d never seen before, on a hill, just visible behind some houses in the trees. Struck me as odd – I thought I knew that neighborhood backwards – but I desperately went to where it looked to be, and it turned out to be a flagpole.

Really, I should’ve seen that coming. I don’t need a sign. That, I guess, would make things too easy. But God, oh God do I want one. Something – anything – to make it just a little bit easier to believe that there IS a right way, always a right thing to do. I walked home. I sat down. I watched Jon Stewart, I listened to If God Will Send His Angels again, I cried a little more, and then I glanced at Twitter, saw Bono had just tweeted a few seconds ago (if it’s him; not a verified account, but I can be pretty naïve in my desperate hopes sometimes, and I’m willing to believe), and told him in a message he’ll probably never see that he’s a hero. My hero, anyway. Someone who actually gives a damn about this world, someone who’s working to do something about it, and someone who wrote a song pleading for a sign. A modern-day psalm. God, I want that sign. And it’s never given, you know?

There are all these stories, they tell them in Baptist churches, about the diver who’s been an atheist all his life, and one night he’s late at the pool, and he spreads his arms, about to dive into this pool, and perceives that the shape is like a cross, and he gets this spiritual moment of just… I don’t know what, and he walks down into the pool and discovers that there’s no water in it and he would’ve died, and he repents his sins and gives his life to God. It’s one of those posters you see in foyers, like the footprints poster… oh, the footprints poster. A friend of mine wrote on that:

“I guess what irks me about this, and other sentiments, which try to make life's hurts "better" is the implicit message hidden in them. They say, no matter what, there's comfort in knowing God is with you. No matter what, face life with the eternal hope and optimism of Christian life. God will protect you. God will make things better. Your life before Jesus: :-(. Your life after Jesus: :-).
…
So not only did I have issues, I suddenly had a religion that was smacking me across the face with, if you believe in God, it won't be as bad.

So it was bad, so what did that mean? It obviously meant I didn't believe in God enough.

A Good ChristianTM lives in the Grace of God. The reflect the Peace of Christ in everything they do. They walk with the joy of the Lord. They're happy and live happy lives. This was the positive side of religion presented me as a convert. I felt like, simply by being depressed, I was failing at being Christian. My unhappiness and troubles and self-hatred were because I just wasn't good enough.
…
Most importantly what happened was, by slow degrees, by example and prodding and (most important) just figuring it out for myself, I left the world of platitudes and inspirational posters and beaches at sunset and turned to the Cross.

Which, in most churches I frequent, features an emaciated man dying in agony. At some point in the process he, God and most beloved of God, looks up and says, "O God, O God! Why have you forsaken me?"

A man in abject helplessness, incapable of optimism (because optimism is thinking things will turn out okay) but still, in the depths of his despair, with the hope that this suffering will accomplish something. A man who carried his cross though in agony, but who--still--didn't soldier on, ignoring the pain; he fell, grew weak, needed help.

This, I recognized. This was me.

I think, sometimes, we are a little too afraid of pain. We are a little too anxious for everything to be over. We are a little too addicted to neat, clean, pat answers. I'm not advocating drawing things out unnecessarily, but honestly. Can we stop saying, "It's okay," when it isn't?”

So I guess that’s my point, after much rambling and whining and whatnot. It’s not okay. I’m not going to get a magical vision that shows me a clear path, gives me the willpower to follow it, and makes it impossible for me to fall from that path, whether into self-flagellation or apathy or wallowing or whatever the case may be. All I can do is follow what I perceive to be the right path, do what I think His plan for me is to do, and pray that if and when I delve into self-flagellation, apathy, or wallowing, He sends either a friend or a musician or a hero to slap me upside the head and put me back on track.

And that I always remember to write when things stop making sense, and maybe the words will bring me back to where I need to be.
…Amen.

It’s pretty cold in my room; cold enough to make it significantly harder to type. I should, by all rights, be at the DMV right now, standing in line. I screwed up a la priorities again, and decided to wait on going out of town to get my license test because there was a chance I’d be needed for work. Part of this is because, yes, I need more hours. But part of it is because I have this idea that if I make myself really available, then when full time hours are available, it’ll make sense to put me in that spot. Selfish? Yeah, probably. But I think at some point it kind of becomes necessary to think of yourself.

Which is actually funny to see typed by myself, who has been barely even bothering to battle (like the alliteration? yeaaaah) with the voices lately on the point that I am a worthless waste of space. I don’t even know how to respond. Part of it is that this is coming from inside of me, it’s a thought that I had, so how do I respond to it? I can rationalize and enforce logic and reason and thought all day and night, but that doesn’t lessen the iron conviction of the thing. How do you reason like that? It’s like trying to rationalize a dream. Doesn’t work. (People run over with a giant tractor on a game board made of fallow land would not be thrown into pieces, like wood chips, they would ooze from underneath. But that is hardly the strangest thing out of that dream. Maybe I should start putting together a dream catcher.)

Anyway. This year I’m participating in NaNoWriMo, trying to write a novel of 50,000 words in thirty days. So far, it sucks. The novel, I mean, not the competition itself. It feels good to be writing again, I’ll admit that. But the book? Ugh. I kind of want to burn it and start over. I’m being just nitpicky enough to slow myself down and stay under the limit, and just careless enough to write complete and utter shit.

But at least it’s writing. And maybe, just maybe, if I get all the shit out of my system, when the month is over and I go to write something actually worth writing, it’ll come out better.

Good stuff and questionable stuff and symbolism in newspaper comics.

Last night I wound up staying awake until one in the morning reading Frazz. I would say I’m not sure why (isn’t that standard procedure when you do something like stay up until one in the morning), but I love that comic, and the website changed so you can read back indefinitely (for now; I’m not sure exactly how far back it goes, but 2003 seemed like a good start), which was really fun until my back started getting sore. So my next move, at one in the morning, was to grab my sneakers and coat and take a walk, which was also fun, except that it’s way too light in the sky for a good night walk right now. I can’t wait for winter to hit, an things go properly dark. (Ye-ah, archaic grammar. I think.)

Anyway, I didn’t realize until I got home from the walk around three o’clock that Caulfield’s name (or maybe I realized on the way down the driveway and then forgot?) is Holden Caulfield’s last name. Oh my good golly gosh, symbolism? In a newspaper comic? …well, I like it. I liked Holden, I loved Catcher in the Rye, I like the characters of Caulfield and Frazz, and it was totally worth it to stay up for hours reading. Also, Caulfield reminds me of me at that age; I was constantly, constantly, getting in trouble for reading while I should have (I very nearly put those two words in quotes—shows how much I’ve grown up, ne?) been doing other things, most notably math. …Actually, scratch “that age,” I was getting in trouble for that through senior year.

The walk was good, by the way. Good in the sense that I mostly accomplished what I really wanted to; I walked into the woods, all the way down to the pond. I had to stop and gather my courage a few times, as I really do prefer the dark to a foggy twilight (it was also raining a little tiny bit) which confuses the eyes and twists perception. What I accomplished was to stand there, looking at the water running across the path, barely visible in the half-darkness, and assure myself that I was in hands larger than my own, that no harm would come to me save by a plan devised entirely by those hands, and also that if I couldn’t walk straight out of the woods which I know like the back of my hand and have been haunting on and off for five years in the dark, I would never be able to walk straight into the state forest, which I’ve never even seen, looking for… well, anything, really.

(Hey, let’s hear it for the very-nearly-run-on-sentence!)

So I got home around three o’clock, and was comfortably in bed before I realized I hadn’t prayed yet, and I am trying to do better. I think that’s happened to me every single night for the past week. This life is a lot more fun when you realize that God probably has a sense of humor, and most likely wants us to have one too. C. S. Lewis said something profound about being able to laugh at our own expense, especially knowing the one making the joke has nothing but our best interests at heart; I don’t remember it, but you get the point. I hope.

That’s life, leaving out the darker stuff about falling back into insanity again. I taped a poster over the mirror where my reflection usually is from the computer, to stave off the desire to stab myself in the eyeball. So far, it’s working pretty well. Life is not hopeless!

So much for that, then.

For a very long time, I have been saying that I will not have a romantic relationship because I am afraid of hurting someone, which I see as inevitable in the course of a relationship in a relationship containing a schizophrenic. Guess what?

I lied. I am afraid of having a romantic relationship because:
I’m afraid of opening up to someone
I have serious self-esteem issues
I don’t trust most people that much at all
and countless other very normal and not-related-to-madness issues! (oh, but the madness issues are still there; they’re just not the whole truth)

I really thought that admitting that to myself was supposed to be a big huge step, a big huge relief, and taking a weight off my mind. The truth! Sets you free!

Yeah, except that that passage is consistently misused and taken out of context. (John, chapter 8) 31: Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed;
32: And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
33: They answered him, We be Abraham's seed, and were never in bondage to any man: how sayest thou, Ye shall be made free?
34: Jesus answered them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin.
35: And the servant abideth not in the house for ever: but the Son abideth ever.
36: If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.

Anyway, my point was that, despite admitting to myself that truth, I am still just as lonely, and just as closed-off and unlikely to have a relationship. Bah! Bah, I say! Eh. Maybe someday I will meet someone who is as crazy as I am, and it will be beautiful and wonderful and love, but for now, I think that despite realizing that I’m not incapable of a relationship, just unwilling, I’d rather be lonely than dating someone who I don’t actually like or love.

Pointless post is pointless.

Introducing...

My room is ice cold, or so it feels to my fingers as they try to type. Yet somehow, I haven't the will to close the window. There will not be many days or nights to come wherein I can leave it open; I savor the few left me. I should go to bed an hour ago, but I need to get this out and off of my mind first. Or at least cement it in my mind, so the shadow can take a form and I can start to figure it out.

I sat down to do a few things; the latter was a letter, a prayer, something like both. I want to throw the material bits of this life away and find a spiritual truth, and my spirit is... well, pathetically weak. I come up with a thousand excuses, vague as steam and not nearly so substantial, why I can't. The fact is, I think I'm afraid of what I'll find. To plunge oneself into the void... to throw oneself into the wave, even though the strength be so great that all your strength came to naught. Yeah. That fear. Unsurprising, really. But anyway.

Today, my friend jolted me out of the rut I'd fallen into, lit a fire under me, made me remember how I felt-- dear God, that was less than a month ago. Wow. Anyway, I remember, now, the purpose of all this striving. I will become a journalist; I will write the truth, and publish it, and expose the people who control this world to the reality of what it is, as compared to what it could, or should, be. Rephrased a bit, that's what I believe. That's what I want to do. No, that's a part of what I want to do. That's what conscience demands of me. I -want- to tell stories, to spin the worlds and characters in me into tales, to spellbind people with the craft I was born to an understanding of. The problem with this is two-fold. Firstly, I have little skill as of yet, and those tales, if I give them voice, deserve better. Secondly, it is exceedingly hard to turn a living on story-telling. I will have to wait.

And, as I said, conscience demands more of me than that. The truth of this world, the horrors that lurk beneath a glamorous surface, have been laid bare to me. What would I be if I ignored them? How can I ignore the murder and slavery and poverty and disease that are directly caused by the Western lifestyle?

I can't.

And, to that end, I will become a journalist, and I will force people to look this monster in the face until someone decides to DO SOMETHING about it.

there's other matters to talk about, mainly the affliction of my conscience still regarding anarchists and former-idealist-chefs and my own part in theft and betrayal. and also the return of nightmares. but that can wait a little longer.

When Love Comes To Town

I was a sailor, I was lost at sea
I was under the waves
Before love rescued me
I was a fighter, I could turn on a thread
Now I stand accused of the things I've said

Love comes to town I'm gonna jump on that train
When love comes to town I'm gonna catch that flame
Maybe I was wrong to ever let you down
But I did what I did before love came to town

I used to make love under a red sunset
I was making promises I would soon forget
She was pale as the lace of her wedding gown
But I left her standing before love came to town

I ran into a juke joint when I heard a guitar scream
The notes were turning blue, I was dazing in a dream
As the music played I saw my life turn around
That was the day before love came to town

When love comes to town I'm gonna jump on that train
When love comes to town I'm gonna catch that flame
Maybe I was wrong to ever let you down
But I did what I did before love came to town

When love comes to town I'm gonna jump on that train
When love comes to town I'm gonna catch that flame
Maybe I was wrong to ever let you down
But I did what I did before love came to town

I was there when they crucified my Lord
I held the scabbard when the soldier drew his sword
I threw the dice when they pierced his side
But I've seen love conquer the great divide

When love comes to town I'm gonna catch that train
When love comes to town I'm gonna catch that flame
Maybe I was wrong to ever let you down
But I did what I did before love came to town

--U2 and BB King

My laptop died as a result of a few things thrown together into one occurrence, that is, the event of a liquid coming into contact with certain parts of the laptop which were not meant to have such exposure, and consequently, the device no longer works in the way it was designed. Fortunately, to counteract this unfortunate chance happening, I have broken down the machine into as few parts as I could manage, to allow the remaining liquid to drain or evaporate, as necessary, which should in the best scenario I can imagine, result in the laptop working as it had prior to the accident.

I drink coffee every morning, which is a bad idea because it’s generally not all that healthy, because it has developed me into dependence, which I strongly dislike, because most coffee is not fair-trade certified and therefore, makes a hypocrite of me, and because it’s an expensive habit, because I really just shouldn’t. But I do. I have an addictive personality; aside from this (I dislike the phrase ‘addictive personality,’ because to my brain it implies that my personality is addicting, which is, I believe, not the case at all) being an excuse for poor willpower (yes, I am guilty of that use; I am sometimes a hypocrite, but will own up to that), it is also an actual thing. After less than a week drinking one mug of coffee per morning, I will get a headache without that cup. After one cigarette, I crave another for a week. Thus, every time I decide to quit coffee, I am shortly back on it after a few bad nights of sleeping, which I can expect more of now that I’ve run out of meds. Sigh. Not an excuse. But still.

So the morning before yesterday (haha, that is a doubled sort of meaning. Could it not mean the morning that began yesterday, since the morning did indeed come before the day?), I put a cup of coffee—a full cup of coffee—down about half an inch away from my keyboard, and reached over the laptop and desk to open the window. My cat, anticipating an open windowsill to sit on, leapt up to the desk, reached over the laptop, and put her paws on the sill, as is her wont. Unfortunately for me, she also lashed her tail once, and knocked the cup of coffee over. Or maybe her leap did that. I don’t know. Anyway, she knocked it straight onto the laptop keyboard. So now I am sitting at my dad’s desktop computer, which he doesn’t mind me using, fortunately.

I don’t understand why so many things in my life want to go wrong lately. First my mp3 player quit, the same evening that I mentioned in a conversation to my grandpa that I’d rather go without a cellphone than an mp3 player, since music is one of the closest things to my heart, and otherwise my walking soundtrack would be traffic. The replacement never worked at all. Then I ran out of medication, at the same time receiving a significant bill from the hospital which writes the prescription. In paying off the bills for contact lenses and driving school, respectively, I overdrew my account and was charged a subsequent fine… which made it crystal clear that I could not afford to renew the prescription for medication… which has no refills. Then I spilled coffee on my laptop, on which reside all of my stories, poetry, music, photos, drawings, ramblings that I have not posted online, et cetera. In between this all was the concert to which I had looked forward for about a year. That provided a week-long euphoria, and also a permanently changed outlook on life. Maybe that’s why, despite what the words of this blog might lead you to believe, they are spoken in a fairly cheery tone of voice—and if not that, at least a matter-of-fact voice. I’m not even mad at the cat (it’s my fault anyway). Strange.

At any rate, that’s life right now. The positive side of this is that 1) it is no longer convenient for me to spend that much time on the computer, 2) without my music, I am forced to use online radio, which brings cool music to my attention that I otherwise neglect, 3) I am hearing it through proper speakers, rather than laptop speakers. The negatives are fairly obvious. But I won’t dwell on them.

October

October
and the trees are stripped bare
of all they wear
What do I care?

October
and kingdoms rise,
and kingdoms fall,
but You go on
and on.
You go on

Today, things went wrong. I spent much of the day trying to write, and failing. I went to see my best friend; he was in a bad mood. I don’t know how to cheer him up. I’m very, very bad at comforting people. I left wishing I could have my life fall apart instead of him being unhappy. Then I called my sister and came to the realization that my life has already fallen apart. She told me I was just another hustler, and might as well be selling weed, when I started telling her about the business I’ve been trying to work on. We had a conversation about college and chosen majors, and then I told her I had to go before I broke down and started crying and screaming in public, because I was really close to that point. I got home, cried, and then decided that I didn’t care what she thought about the business. I got out my list of contacts, for the first time in a long time, and contacted three people. One hasn’t gotten back to me, one seemed interested so far, and one has been forgetting to give me her information but is probably interested. Then, because I want to do this right, I made myself sit down and watch the informational videos about the product so I can prove what I believe to be the truth about it.
Halfway through, I had a vivid hallucination that I was eating a spider. Eating. A spider. I thought I was eating a spider.

I’ve been on medication for about a month. It’s worked for about a year, prior to this month. It keeps me from hallucinating. It doesn’t make my life happy, but it makes me sane enough to function in life, most of the time. Right now, I am seeing things that are not there, in everyday life. I am seeing stacks of things through doorways when the doorways are empty. I am seeing flashes and darkness when I glance in certain directions. I am hearing things on the edge of perception that don’t make sense. I am having strange dreams that almost aren’t even nightmares, they’re so weird. And then they are again, when they suddenly come pounding down on me halfway through the next day. Morbid, self-destructive thoughts are pounding their way into my mind, relentlessly and constantly and painfully. And I am trying, very, very hard to maintain a positive outlook right now. I swear I am. I don’t want to be an unhappy person, I don’t want to make my friends miserable. But. But, but, this isn’t right. This medication isn’t working anymore. I’m hallucinating, visually and audibly, I’m having nightmares, I’m paranoid as hell, I cannot rely on my own perception and judgment. I’m taking medication. It’s not working. I can’t afford to get another prescription when this one runs out anyway, so… yeah. The main question right now is whether the medicine is keeping things at bay, and they’ll get hugely worse when I run out, or if the medicine is completely ineffectual. I’m terrified of the answer.

This blog was supposed to be about growth and personal… something, I don’t even fucking know. I don’t want to be this person. I’m tired of being crazy. Can I be something else now? Can I be normal? Can I be happy? Okay, fine. I don’t want to be happy anyway. Can my friends be happy? Can you make it so I never existed? I don’t want this. I don’t want this life, I don’t fucking want this life anymore and I can’t stop. I don’t want to live anymore. I was so happy for a few days, even though everything went wrong I was happy, it was like a high. I knew something would make it end. I didn’t know it would be this. I don’t want to be crazy anymore. Fuck. Fuck this. Fuck my mind, and what… I don’t even know. I wish writing this all out would make it okay, could get it out of my mind. I say that if I don’t write, I’ll go insane. Now I am insane, and still writing, and… uh, whatever. th

I don’t want to put this up, where people will see it. Especially not you, being the only person who reads this, and also, by some strange coincidence, the person who I least want to be worrying about me. Don’t. I’m still going to put it up, but don’t worry about it, please. I’ll get past this. I generally do. I’ve been off meds before, and I didn’t die or kill anyone or anything horribly crazy. Not that I remember, anyway, though you might think differently. Anyway.

Because I am tired of masks.

Because I grow tired of addressing different parts of my soul when I find myself with a new set of people; because I wish to be who I am, and no other; because, as I have said in other places, the inner wordsmith, the writer in me, is the most honest part of my soul. For all these reasons, and others which I cannot name even to myself, in conscious thought, I will try now to say what I feel to be the truth. Would that I had the conviction of C. S. Lewis, the wit of Terry Pratchett, the lyrical flow of Guy Kay—but that is another point altogether.

I do not, cannot, and will never be able to believe that religion, Christianity, human belief in God, is predictable, or even convenient. Again, I wish very much that I had the skill of Lewis to explain myself, but it is not given to me to speak and debate eloquently on subjects which I hold so close to my heart. My point is simply, this: how can love, belief in perfect love, in forgiveness, in redemption, be an easy thing, a convenient thing—a predictable thing? I remember, ages ago, in a long and very, very drawn-out debate, someone claiming to believe in Christianity, but not being able to accept someone else paying her debts for her. In my self-centered, unsympathetic state, I scorned her, saying loftily that that was “the whole point” of Christianity, that there was no belief if you did not accept that sacrifice. In my defense, I was only saying what I had been taught. It is so easy to put down weakness in others—so much easier when you’re trying to hide the same weakness in yourself.

It was—and is—so, so hard for me to accept the very idea of unconditional love, let alone forgiveness, redemption. For a very, very long time I went through phases of horrible, horrible guilt that would not go away. Guilt for stupid, tiny things, things I didn’t always even have control over. Friends would tell me endlessly that repentance, true repentance, was final, ended it, should end the guilt and the self-blame. What was my answer? Obviously, I had not repented fully enough. (Hah. I was about to write about how this little phase ended when I found out that one of my best friends went through the same thing, but that would be a lie. It made things a bit easier, but end? Hah.) My point is that believing in eternal forgiveness, unconditional love, is most definitely not the first leap of human consciousness.

Even leaving out that which may be an oddity in me and many I have known, that lingering guilt and self-blame, even leaving that—what human would willingly say to their enemy, “Kill me now, and you are damned, but if you repent, thirty days hence, you will be forgiven and absolved”? What woman, what man, would so easily accept the concept of eternal forgiveness, seventy times seven, towards their brother, their killer, their enemy? I cannot speak for all religion—I would never claim that responsibility, or that right. But deny me that. Tell me that unconditional forgiveness, unconditional love—the preaching of this as extended to all fellows, to be more Christlike—is predictable of humanity. Tell me that it is convenient to forgive a brother each and every betrayal he levels against you—or a sister. That is the core of Christianity—love. That is what all the Church is built on, believe it or not.

We are human, we are corruptible and predictable and prone to every conceivable weakness at some point in our lives. But the spirit within us is not. No one in this world could ever make me believe that any part of that is wrong. Perhaps it makes more scientific sense to say that enough evil could damn anyone, in the end. But a repentance of that evil? Would that balance it out—the will, the will inside to balance out any evil done? I could not say; I do not claim to understand metaphysics. But never say to me that unconditional love and forgiveness is a predictable, convenient excuse for human evils. Can it be used for such? Of course. Anything can be used and twisted for evil; someone determined enough to hurt and harm will use any excuse and reason in their power to do so. But it taints them, in the end, not the good that they have ill used. A fire cannot be evil, even if it is used to burn down a house. That’s a poor example, but the point stands, I think.

It’s been a long time since I made such an argument as this. My original intent was to tie it back to my original point about masks, and anarchism, or whatever other facets of my heart which I had at some point taken up and hence found false, but continued to follow. To any belief I have held, any philosophy I have fallen from, I say this. When a belief, a philosophy tells me that all are equal and free, I will agree, whole-heartedly. When it tells me that truth to an inner self should come before law, I will rejoice. When I am told to be angry, to hate, to betray my conscience, I will refuse. When I am told that God is dead, that religion is useful insofar as it aids that philosophy, that morality or ethics are an excuse or a weakness, that conscience is a hindrance, I will take my leave.

Why did I write this? In part, to answer a discussion and debate with a friend. In part because, as I said, I am tired of masks. I am tired of putting on my carefree anarchist face when I go to Food Not Bombs, my detatched philosopher face when someone challenges something I believe in, my selfless Christian face when I'm talking to certain friends, or on certain subjects, and God only knows how many others. I'm sick of it. This is who I am. I'm a Christian. I'm not an Anarchist, or a Republican, or a Democrat, or a Liberal, or a Conservative, or whatever other political label it's possible to wear. It is not given me to be a philosopher, or a singer, or an orator, or a philanthropist, or whatever else. I am a Christian; I believe in charity, not in the common definition of giving money to those you feel deserve and need it, but in the old definition of feeling-- or believing in-- love for all humankind, Just Because; I believe in conscience over law, but I do not believe in lawlessness; I believe in order over chaos, but that order should be just. What more shall I say? I am tired of masks. I no longer believe that I need any worldly label or face or party to hide behind. I need no excuse to be who I am.

Talkin' to my Generation

Right now, I am wondering why Mr. Kanye West – why anyone, actually – has felt the need to go on record calling themselves “the voice of a generation.” Why does this generation need a voice to speak for us? We all have minds, hearts, and voices, do we not? Why, then, are we so silent? How is it that we have opinions on fashion, on pop culture, even on petty national politics at times, yet we remain oblivious to the world outside of our lifestyles? We should not be depending on Kanye West, Barack Obama, or Rush Limbaugh to voice opinions for us. We have minds. We have hearts, we have voices. Why are we allowing ourselves to be led by the nose, like so many idle sheep? Educate yourselves! Listen to your conscience and speak out! There is slavery in Africa, upheld by the mainstream chocolate industry. There is genocide in the Sudan, upheld by the Chinese government. Peaceful protesters are being brutally put down in Iran. Aung San Suu Kyi has spent the greater part of the last twenty years under house arrest in Burma for speaking out. Here in America, there are entire families homeless and without food or shelter. In countries all over the globe, there are young children working endless hours in deplorable conditions without even enough money to live on. What are we doing about it? We depend on politicians to get things done; we elect them for their elegant promises, and then consider our duties to the world done. I am not targeting any one politician; they have all betrayed us the same. We cannot simply cast a vote on election day, and then walk home to go back to our lives as though the world had been changed. We cannot ignore the condition of this world.

You have a mind. You have a voice. You have the right to be free, to live and breathe and eat and drink and laugh; do you not have the responsibility to fight, to give that freedom to every other living person on this planet? We are born into our circumstances; we do not inherently deserve what we are given at birth any more than any other human born to any other parents in any other place. There is no reason why being born in America should give you more of a right to be free, just as being born in a village in Darfur does not mean you deserve to be raped and killed. But we’ve inherited this world, our generation has. We’ve inherited this world full of smooth-tongued, power-hungry politicians, and we’ve inherited some kind of system that tells us that on one side there are good guys, and the other side is not to be trusted. I tell you now that this is a lie. There is good and bad on both sides; both sides are labels. Stop listening to the fanatics on both sides of the system! Read the facts, from as many trustworthy places as you can, and then follow your own conscience. Stop letting others speak for you! You have a mind! You have a voice! Your voice is important, what is behind it is important; your mind, your conscience, your freedom is your birthright, as it is with every other human on this planet. Do not let it be taken from you!

Please. We’ve lain silent long enough—too long. It’s time to stop letting people speak for us, decide for us; we’re adults, or we soon will be. It’s time to start thinking about the world we’ve been born into, it’s time to step up. We’ve been born to this Earth, for better or worse—how will we leave it?

LAUGHTER, laughter is the best medicine! :D

I guess the long and short of it, or at least somewhere between those two varying points, is that I envy The Comedian. In some of my more lucid moments, when things really do make sense, I can retreat into dark humor, somewhere between Kurt Vonnegut and Edward Blake, getting the joke and somehow it’s beyond horror. When you look at this entire fucking world, what can you do but laugh? It’s all a joke. Somehow, when I try to explain that to most people, most decent, thoughtful, right-minded people, they are horrified. They really should be. It’s a horrible joke. And yet, honestly, what else can you do but laugh? I laugh because it’s easier than crying and harder than jumping off a cliff, which is the only other solution to this world, when you start thinking about it. Just thinking about this country is a joke. I listen to Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, for that matter Larry King or whatever their liberal counterparts are, and I laugh. What else can you do? Everything they say sounds absurd to me. Politics, the study of how fucked up humanity really is. Either you laugh, or you cry. I wrote a poem starting with that once, but I didn’t even understand, back then. I only started to understand this my junior, and senior year, when I’d walk out of third period, with our control-freak math teacher having just tried to attack me again, unable to do anything but laugh. That was when my emotions started to shut down, and I started laughing instead of crying.

My saving grace, I guess, is that as much as I laugh, as hard, as wide as my smile is, it still hurts, underneath. It’s gotten to the point where laughter itself hurts, most of the time, there’s this squeezing pain around my chest when I laugh, often. The Comedian, I think, became so hard to the world that laughing was all he knew how to do, that suffering and pain never even touched his mind anymore, except as part of the joke. I still want to change things. I still hurt when I see others hurt, and I still hurt when I laugh. I just don’t think I’ll ever be able to stop laughing, and I’m not sure I want to. Like I said, laugh or cry in this world, and say what you will about the healing of tears, etc, but laughter, laughter doesn’t produce mucus in your body either.

Get it?

Maybe I should join the Army and go to Iraq so I can be the next Kurt Vonnegut if I don’t get killed.

Unabashed Human Crying

I need a hug, so bad. And that sounds wicked corny and also kind of melodramatic, but right now I need someone Older And Wiser^TM to give me a hug and tell me that I’m not a horrible person, even if I don’t believe them. I need something, someone, solid and reassuring and trustworthy, and no such person exists in my life. My best friends are 1) as crazy, emotional, and unbalanced as I am, for the most part, and have their own hug and emotion needs, 2) miles and miles and miles away, almost to a one, or 3) not psychic and therefore unable to determine when I am torn up and hurt and lonely inside and really in need of a hug.

Gah. For all my wild and rampaging monster insides, I’m still part human girl, and I still need to curl up in a little ball and hide from the world sometimes. Maybe that’s part of the wild rampaging thing.

Oh Noes!

what if my mother was right and i am, in fact, a demon? or a doppleganger inhabited by a demon? somehow led to believe that i am or was a real person, just waiting for the right moment to snap and become a bloodthirsty monster? oh, wait, i already am a bloodthirsty monster. right.

what if it IS all a conspiracy?

:O

Poking fun at my own delusional self, or actually quite worried? YOU decide. : D [with black buttons for eyes.]

Nothing to Say

I don't know if it's wise to post this here. But I figure like I should post it somewhere, somewhere public, somewhere where I will see it whenever I look through the archives, and remember, this is why you fucking listen to your conscience, this is why anarchy is bullshit, for all it's a pretty picture on paper. Everything looks nice if you have the right people talking about it. I'm not falling for this philosophy bullshit again.

I feel used, betrayed, lied to. Rational or no, that’s how I feel. Now, that would be bad enough, really. But I also feel guilty, horrible, like scum of the earth. So it’s… hmmm.

A friend stole from her workplace. In her mind, I believe, because the owner was a jerk, because the store was a part of the hierarchy she rebels against and hates (as do I, as do most people in one way or another), because she wasn’t treated well there, it was justified. This, I would not judge her for, though it goes against my personal code. Part of my code of life is not judging others by my own morals, ethics, what have you. It’s hard, but I believe it’s right. But, but, but, things are never that simple. She took food that would’ve been thrown away and distributed it, through us, to needy and homeless people in the city, along with the donations the group collected from supermarkets. I suppose if I had paid attention to any sort of detail at all, I would’ve known that she had no authority to do so. But she eventually left, and was subsequently banned from the store, for whatever reason, I didn’t pry. She told us we could continue to take expired food; we did. Start to present, this was about a year.

Yesterday, a new woman stopped us, called the manager, who told us that the man in charge of deli food had said no “in the past” to expired food being taken. Knowing the man, knowing that he’s been taken advantage of in the past, and knowing that he and our friend had never gotten along, I rather understood. Also, I’d always been fairly certain that the owner of the store didn’t know about the whole situation. I figured the chef had a newborn baby to take care of, his job was on the line, I wouldn’t press the issue. The woman told me to take it up with him on Monday. We left without food, except what I’d brought from my garden, some green beans and some basil, as well as a melon from my friend's brother. It was fine, there was plenty of supermarket produce, and we helped cook up a meal and handed everything out at the park (except the green beans, which didn’t find a place). I type up an e-mail explaining the situation to the entire group, and then spend the entire night worrying about the chef, whether or not he will hate me, if he will understand, if he will think I’ve lied to him or used him or tried to deceive him. This is irrational, but I like the guy, a lot, and don’t want to hurt him, or for him to be angry at me, only partially because he is sometimes moody and the very idea of him angry scares the shit out of me, partly emotion-wise, partly just because.

Monday morning, I wake up significantly pre-dawn, continue worrying for a few more hours in bed, and eventually get up and get coffee and see my dad off. With my little brother in tow (the library was in the works for after I got everything sorted out), I headed off to the plaza in which he and I work and the friend formerly worked, worrying the entire way, of course. I head into the store, and run into (not literally) the grocery manager, a man who I don’t know very well, but has a reputation from plenty of friends for being a mellow, very nice, very generous guy. He tells me that the owner and manager are angry, the weekend was bad, they never condoned the food donations at all, and are contacting the group over it, and so on. I wince, tell him I am sorry but understand; he is not happy either. My little brother pipes up “But it’s expired food—” I tell him to shut up. The grocery manager tells me that the deli food was not, in fact, all expired, which shuts me the hell up, too. I am stunned, shell-shocked, apologize, and leave the store a very, very confused person indeed.

After talking to my very good friend who I work with, my brother takes off to the library, I am stricken with conscience and guilt (far too late, I fear), and return to the grocery store to apologize to the chef. He is behind the deli lunch counter, asks me what’s wrong, had no idea I was involved in any way with the goings-on. Tells me he does not blame me, that it is really the friend’s fault, she has an attitude problem, she should’ve told us, I swallow. I am still her friend. I will not judge her. He says not to worry, they will take care of the judging for me. She was banned, you know. …She was what? Oh. Oh, um. I’m really really really really sorry. He tells me not to worry. I tell him I promise I never would’ve taken food that wasn’t expired; he knows that, don’t worry. He doesn’t think the manager or owner know about my involvement, he definitely didn’t, I am still welcome, don’t worry, just don't mention it to either of them. I feel like shit.

Fuck anarchy, fuck anarchism, fuck the higher good and high ethics and the greater cause and all the bullshit that’s kept me all high and mighty all last year. Fuck it all. I let ideology blind me to my own conscience, and that’s a mistake I won’t make again. I can’t believe I was so stupid to ignore everyone in my life who warned me about idealism, and living outside of reality. The worst part is, I knew they were right. But I figured, maybe someday I’ll look back on this stage of my life and laugh at the foolish kid I was, or maybe I’ll figure out a way to live by my conscience and make it work. I didn’t think I’d wind up stealing from someone I care about, or, for that matter, stealing full stop.

I walked to the library, feeling hurt, angry, stupid, guilty. I found my little brother, laughing under his breath at Stephen Colbert’s book, and dug up a Terry Pratchett book for myself, and proceeded to get lost in the life of Samuel Vimes, Night Watch. Good book. It was five-thirty before I put it down, having seen my brother off some time ago. I called my best friend and told her as much of the story as I could, in as much detail as I could muster, having called my sister on the way to the library, seen my other best friend at the store where I work during the whole ordeal, and having decided (after all this) to e-mail my other best friend the story later on. Then I walked back to the plaza, buying a bottle of glue and applying for a job on the way there, and also stopping for a bite and writing this: Fuck anarchism, fuck the greater good, fuck higher ideals and all the bullshit that comes along. Whenever I get suicidal, I take two options. One, look around, decide the world, life, is too beautiful, amazing; two, it’s the easy way out and I’d let people down. But right now I’m finding it hard to care about either. I concluded that if life was about conscience, appreciating beauty, working hard and loving with all you’ve got and so on, I could take it. I could take heartbreak, pain, physical and emotional, but I can’t take all the moral-gray-area bullshit that comes along. I can’t take fucking philosophy.

Anyway, I got to the store where I currently work as my friend was closing up, accidentally scaring the shit out of him in the process, and went with him to both stores he needed to go to, me radiating apathy and depression, and him trying to cheer me up in various ways, in varying degrees of success. As we left the second grocery store, I got a call from my sister telling me that my brother, a drug dealer who my dad had kicked out at the start of the summer, had broken into the house, and she’d found lights on all over, and the black plastic hat that had held about four months’ worth of my pocket change (at least ten bucks, probably closer to twenty) empty on my dad’s bed. I thanked her for the news, hung up. Walked home laughing, about as painfully close to tears as I ever want to be, laughing and unable to stop. I stopped in the park for a while, saw a bat flying around, apologized to my God and for what I did to both the owner and the chef and God only knows who else, lied in a tree and wished for death, jumped out and walked home, where I found that my brother had also taken with him about two meals’ worth of food, and kicked in the basement door. My dad surmises that it is me he truly hates, and I do know this to be the case.

But all I could do was laugh, figuring how can I hate him? What I’ve done is so much worse.

And that is why I feel like shit right now.

Related Thoughts in the Stream of an Unfortunate Consciousness

(On humanity: I’m not a fan. )

We just watched Watchmen, I’m a little tired of this all. How do you justify a liking to the Comedian when in all appearance experiences you are a femine-something? I don’t, don’t, don’t. Don’t understand; not myself, not this, not that, not you for sure. I always seem to like the psychos. Yeah, I liked Rorsach too, the book and movie version. I liked both. Maybe like’s not the right word. I liked the Joker, if that’s the word. I remember reading this thing about how “(I can’t put enough fucking quotes around this word)Gifted” children, after seeing a movie, say, Fiddler on the Roof, would not be ready to go out for ice cream; they would still be wrapped up in the characters, torn apart by their emotional immersion in the drama of it, in a way of sorts somehow; “Semi-“Gifted”” children would be ready to go out for ice cream but only if they could talk about the lighting and the stagecraft and the filming techniques and the so on and so forth and so on, so, so, so I kind of claimed the second category (even though I think there was a third before you get to the gosh-damned lucky normal kids), because in my experience that was a bad thing, when you cried when the character died because even though he was a villain you understood him? Or when you cheered or clapped or whatever the fuck.

I don’t understand why I’m here.
That’s not really true.
Yes it is, though. On the greater level of the question, heady philosophical question, etc.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,oh oh oh oh oh oh fuck this fuckfuckfuck.

Medication vs. LSD

You know, I managed to be without meds for four weeks, with no serious problems.

...Yeah, because the sudden recurring manic laughter is completely normal. Someone is going to notice, even if 2/3 of the people who usually pick up on that are leaving.

Actually, taking meds doesn’t make the manic laughter go away. In some cases, it gets worse.

Oh, I know. I remember things like that, too. But you have to admit that having withdrawal-like symptoms for almost half a week isn’t normal.

I don’t have to admit shit.

Your chest is contracting.

You’re unable to externalize negative emotions.

You need your fucking meds. They’re in the cabinet. Take them.

Fuck you. Id rather see the world more clearly. I’m tired of all this distortion.

Oh, for the love of… You’re not seeing things more clearly. The insanity is the distortion, not the meds! You might be more interested in the world when you’re completely fucking batshit, but that’s because it’s not the real world. Take. Your. Meds.

Acid trips make the world more distorted too.

Acid is not Risperdal.

Shut up.

Maybe I should start taking meds again. For a while, nothing seemed different, I didn’t even hit withdrawal, that I remember, at least. And the week in Maine was amazing, unlike normal problems when I don’t take meds. But all the sudden I feel my brain slipping. Dreams are vivid and a little nightmarish again, I’m wondering about things that really shouldn’t… um, things that aren’t really open to discussion, if that makes sense. The rules of physics aren’t… um. Basically, I’m laughing again, instead of whatever emotion I want to express, my chest is acting like it did when I went through withdrawal three or four times before, and the world is strange.

So yeah.

Camping Journal

(This is the uncut version of what I did for most of the week we were in Mt. Desert Island, camping. I'll post the edited version on Facebook. There's only one real difference, to keep my dad's wrath from pouring onto my head, other than that they're the same. Note to self: Not located in blog folder.)

August 12, 2009; morning

Well, this is day one. Full day one, at least. We got here yesterday afternoon/evening, and set about setting up camp. It’s a pretty small campsite, but not as small as it looked when we first got here; we fit both tents in alright, and the van in the driveway, without too much cramping. Right now Ruth is glaring at me across the picnic table for playing music on this thing (Everybody Always Leaves, by Matthew Ryan). I thought she might like it, but she refuses to give it a chance. It’s a pretty gray day, a little tiny bit of humid chill in the air, but that’s okay. I’m honestly so happy to be here I couldn’t care less what the weather does (within reason, of course). But it’s pretty, and it’s nice enough. We went over to Robin and Bob’s house last night, after dinner (spaghetti; Sheila kind of burned the sauce, for which we can blame the dogs). That was cool, I always know in the back of my mind how much I miss them, but it hits home when we actually get to see them. Hope we get to hang around more this week with them. Last night, we walk into the porch, we’re all standing around exchanging greetings, and I look over to see Peter looking at Aunty Robin with a strange sort of look. She’s like “Got a problem? What’s the matter, Pete?” And I looked down to see that she’s standing on one of his shoelaces (untied, as usual), grinning. He’s like “…Um. You’re… you’re standing on my shoelace…” She’s like “What? What, your shoelace? What’s the matter?” It made me smile.

So the dogwalk here is a tiny little fenced in place, but there’s tons of places to take them, so I’m not worried. (Listening to U2, now.) Dad is making pancakes, Ruth just took out her sketchbook, the dogs have finally settled down a little, RJ is setting the table, Peter is watching me type, Sheila is doing something in the tent. Well, their tent. We’re splitting one tent, and Dad and Sheila are splitting another one. (Hurr hurr hurr) Peter is now angry that I will put this up somewhere. Hurr hurr hurr. I probably won’t leave this on or out much longer, since the sky is so gray and threatening.

Little kids are running past our campground, afraid, because before we had tied up the dogs, Lucky chased some kid off when he walked past. Poor guy was like… three feet tall. He ran and ran, and when we finally got Lucky off, (s?)he started crying, just standing there in the middle of the road, crying. It was pretty bad. But I should wrap this thing up and put my laptop away. Peter wants to look up the location of some torture museum, but I refuse to use WiFi unless absolutely, completely necessary. I did not come to Mt. Desert Island to hang around online, or to look at torture museums. Perhaps after a few days, this weekend, I’ll do a quick Facebook update or something. Otherwise? NO. I refuse to be a technology-addicted symbol of teenage dependence. Ruth, Peter, and RJ fill that gap just fine (they deny this). And for crying out loud, Dad was more concerned about me bringing charging-apparatuses for various electronic devices than I was. But anyway.

So that’s pretty much it. Ruth is sketching something that looks like fur around an eye, the pancakes are (hey, it was a furry eye!) about ready, and I don’t want to run my battery down. More later!

August 13, 2009; afternoon

We just got back from a four/five hour hike. We set out around eleven, got back just now, plus maybe twenty, thirty minutes of waiting while someone gave Sheila a ride back to the car so she could come get us, and then driving. So maybe four and a half hours. It’s a little chilly today, and I forgot to pack a sweatshirt (predictably enough), but still pretty nice out. We’re going to Robin and Bob’s for dinner tonight, but we’ve got two hours to cool our heels and shower first, which is a good thing, because we’re all pretty sweaty and gross. Hiking for four hours will do that to you.
The whole time, I kept wanting to take pictures—literally there is unspeakable beauty in every single direction. But I settled for the especially scenic things. And the mushrooms, of course. Most of the hike I was up ahead of everyone. I’m not sure why; I’d just start walking, normally, and when I looked back I’d be alone. Not sure exactly how that works out, but it was pretty fun. We ate lunch at Valley Summit, and then hiked up to the summit of St. Saveur, and down to Echo Lake cliffs from there. A very nice hike; our original plan was to go along St. Saveur to Mt. Acadia, but in the end it turned out we were a little unprepared for that.

Last night I built a fire, it was cool. Everyone kept building it, I eventually just went to bed. But there’s the sky here. It’s so beautiful! The sky is so black, and there are stars, brighter than you would ever see them at home, everywhere. It’s amazing. I saw a shooting star in a clearing a way down the road, a veritable comet, I swear. It had a thick glowing trail, it was bright… amazing. Then I went to bed. My sleeping bag was damp though.

So it was a good day. I dunno how else to describe it. Beautiful mountain, nice hike, good weather so far. The dogs are dead tired. For that matter, so am I.

August 19, 2009; morning

Wow. So this journal was a good idea in theory, but honestly, I’m camping. Who the hell has time to sit around on a laptop typing in such a beautiful place? Not I, for sure. So, in order of things I remember, what’s been going on:

Last night, we had tacos for dinner. They were actually pretty good. I had guacamole, everyone else had ground beef. Before that, Dad and Sheila went out to Sand Beach, up in the Northeast corner of the island (we are in the Southwest corner), and then to Rubber-Rock Beach, which is actually called something else… but no one remembers it here. We played cards around the campground and stuff; before they left, Peter went with me up the street about a mile, to Ship’s Harbor, which is a cool little path to a muddy shore, which then goes to a rocky shore (infinitely cooler). It was ninety-five degrees out, but for some reason Peter was cold.

That morning/afternoon, Robin and Bob took us out (we are about to eat breakfast, scrambled eggs and bacon; Peter’s idea of setting the table is, quite literally, putting spoons out and then leaving someone else to do the rest. He’s very tired all the time, and we suspect dehydration, which makes pretty good sense.) to pull traps (now I am eating eggs with a spoon. They are good.) and we did a little fishing, too. That was mad fun. I can’t remember the last time I was out on a boat, plus it was pretty cool to watch Robin pulling the traps up. She’s definitely the coolest person I know. And it was just awesome being out on the water. Once you get out of the island a bit, things get really cool, but that’s the way I like it. I put sunscreen on my face, because I’m not always an idiot, but then I rolled my sleeves up to the seam and got my shoulders burned, so sometimes I am.

Also, I finished A Clockwork Orange yesterday. It’s a good book, really it is. Then I started on the Vonnegut short stories, and those are cool too. I think my favorite is the one about Bernie and Big Nick, the mafia guy. (Peter is urging me to eat the rest of the bacon. “You’re on vacation!”)

(We’re taking the dogs for a walk at Little Long Pond, since Carly has finally gotten over her exhaustion from playing with Zach. That dog is so freaking energetic, it’s crazy! But he was tired when I went over the other day, which leads into what we did the day before yesterday…)
So the day before yesterday, everyone wanted to go to the lobster hatchery, but I’ve seen it twice now, once as a little kid and once with Aunty Robin, the time I stayed up here with them for two weeks. I was trying to remember what the deal was last time I was there, and I remembered that foggy morning when I got in a fight with Grandpa (because he is a racist sometimes. I know he'd never act on it, and if he knows a person personally he doesn't judge them at all like that, but it does NOT excuse the kind of things he was saying that day.) and needed to get the hell out of the house before I punched him or something. So I mentioned that, and Dad got pretty pissed at me over that, which I didn’t realize at the time. But I knew I didn’t want to go to the lobster hatchery/museum, so I looked at the map for a good hike, and found Beech Mountain looking pretty good, figuring I’d go up the cliffs, down the West Ridge Trail, and then all the way around Long Pond to Robin and Bob’s house. So I took the sandwich Sheila had made for me the day before, and a cereal bar and a package of peanuts and two water bottles, a trail map (that’s really, really important), the bus schedule (just in case), and my dad dropped me off at the Echo Lake entrance to Beech Cliffs. We kind of had a fight on the way over. Like I said, I had no idea he was so pissed about the slight to his dad. He was. He told me I was hypersensitive to racial and class-like things, and needed to examine myself because he doesn't think my heart is in the right place. I was furious.

But we kind of got over it by the time we got to the cliffs, which was good. So from there, I went down and took a long drink from the water fountain at Echo Lake, and headed up the cliffs. Those were nice, that’s a beautiful trail, if strenuous, and I was panting pretty heavily when I hit the top of that trail, up towards the summit. (I have to hurry this up, I only have an hour of battery left and kind of want this for music on the way home) So I made it from there down to the parking lot, then up a less steep trail to the fire tower at the summit (but forgot to take a picture of the summit sign), and from there I took a bit of a wrong turn and wound up taking the South Ridge Trail. It wasn’t that much longer of a walk, and I still wound up on the shore of Long Pond (different, notably, from Little Long Pond. Robin says “Us Mainers really know how to give names, eh?”), so it wasn’t too bad. The walk around Long Pond was very nice, I wound up drinking a little from the far shore, the one at the base of Beech Mt., mainly because it was so rocky and clear. When I made it around to the pump station at the end of the pond (it really is long, not round; the station is at… the south end, I believe, I was coming from the eastern shore), there were people around, and the water looked muddier. On the western shore, there were people swimming, so I didn’t even think about drinking over there.

At some point, the Long Pond Trail cut up away from the pond, and my original plan was to just skip off the trail and follow the shore of the pond all the way up to the path that goes up to Bob and Robin’s house. So I left the trail, and at first I was worried, and then I noticed things that made me certain that someone, not all that recently, had done this. There was reindeer moss with a boot-print in it, and a few other clues, but nothing really concrete. So I made it down that trail for a while, maybe ten minutes, and I started getting thirstier and thirstier; at this point I’d been walking for a few hours and only had half a bottle of water left, and the pond was all muddy and had lily plants growing there. At some point, it occurred to me that if I cramped up from dehydration on the trail, someone was bound to find me, but if I got stuck out there, there was no guarantee. (this was right about the point at which I stopped taking pictures and concentrated on moving) With that in mind, I beat my way back through the bush to the trail, and on the way became convinced that someone had not quite made a path, per se, along the pond edge, but they’d definitely found a way through. I don’t know if I can say why I was so certain, because like I said, there was no real concrete evidence. But anyway, I made it back to the trail, and took the Long Pond Trail all the way uphill to where it forked with the Great Notch (called the ‘Western Trail’ on the trail map, which threw me for a second).

At that point, I was incredibly thirsty, praying under my breath that I’d make it up to the fire road, had one mouthful of water left, and really starting to worry. I made up my mind that the next people I met, I’d swallow my pride and ask if they had any water to spare. So I did, and a lovely Quebecois couple poured half a bottle of (heavily chlorinated, NOT that I am in any way complaining) water into my empty bottle, and I made it up the Great Notch to the Fire Road on that. I drank the last mouthful of clear water on the Long Pond Fire Road, and had a few swallows of the other stuff left. So I walked up the fire road, and eventually hit Hodgdon (pronounced HOJ-dun) Road, and drank the last of it. From there, it was straight up the road, except for one triangular fork. But I checked the map there, and made it all the way to Bob and Robin’s house, where Robin was outside making dinner. So I stayed there, they gave me water and some potato salad (honestly I think her potato salad is some of the best I’ve had, because usually I’m not a huge potato salad fan; every other one I’ve ever had is overpowering on the mayonnaise) and we talked for a while, and Zach was so tired he pretty much laid around, which was adorable. He kept putting his head in my lap, and it is so soft! Such a cute puppy; he’s only one. Other than that time, I have never seen him not energetic. Visla, they are an awesome breed.

ETA: (what i would've said had i the battery power then, in summary: I told Robin about the fight with my dad, and she said "Bullshit! He is too a racist!" (on my grandpa.) it made me pretty glad that at least i knew i wasn't crazy. when i was showing her my route on the trail map, she pointed out that I could've cut across the shore of Long Pond, and said that she'd actually done that before and I went "Ha! I knew someone'd done that." It made me pretty happy.)

(Just realized I only have twenty minutes of battery left, switched to Power Saver mode, which means ten extra minutes but also that I cannot but hardly see the screen at all. Apologies for spelling errors.)

So they dropped me off at the campsite, and I laid around for a little while, and then everyone else got home, we ate supper, and I went to bed. That concludes… Monday’s adventure. Now, what did we do Sunday?

Ah, right. On Sunday, Bobby took Ruth, Peter, and RJ out fishing. They caught quite a bit of fish, and were proud of themselves. Peter, predictably enough, had some serious trouble taking proper care of his line, but he was very good at filleting the fish later, and when he’d done that, we had them for supper the following night; they smelled, looked, and according to everyone else, tasted like something you’d have in a restaurant, owing partly to my dad’s excellent cooking skills, partly to Peter’s excellent fish-filleting skills, partly to everyone’s fishing skills, and very muchly to Bobby’s fishing-teaching skills and taking them out on the boat. So that was cool, while they were doing that, Dad, Sheila, Robin and I took all three dogs out to a walk around Little Long Pond, which is a nice spot on Rockefeller land, which means dogs can be unleashed and bikers are not allowed. (Lucky hates bikers, and on this island they are often rude, so that’s a good thing.) That was a lot of fun.

So after that, we took the fish to Robin and Bob’s house (which was where Peter filleted them), and only left to take the dogs home to feed (which we forgot to do while at home, but got laundry done and fed them with the food in the dashboard), then went back for hamburgers and hotdogs. (and veggie burgers. and turkey burger, for Robin)

I have to call Robin and let her know we’re set to go walk the dogs, and also I am almost out of batteries. I’ll do the rest of this later.

August 19, 2009; afternoon

It took so long to check e-mail while I was here charging my laptop that I forgot to finish the bloggish entry thing here. Oh well, now we’re going to Rubber-Rock Beach (also called Hunter Beach, which Robin remembered when we asked her on the walk today.)

August 20, 2009; late morning/early afternoon

Well, we just finished packing up, just about ten-thirty. We’re dropping by the dock to pick up lobsters and say goodbye to Robin and Bob. I am terribly sad, and really don’t want to leave. But life goes on, and I know we’ll be back. Soon, I hope.

Very little battery left, so I guess this is the end. Carly’s got her head on my leg; I think she’s as sad to leave as we are. Alas, alack, but life goes on.

See Pay angst. Angst, pay, Angst!

There are three people in this world who I trust completely. I don’t trust people, normally, because that’s the fast-track to a whole mess of things, emotional, physical, and so on. But I trust them, more than anyone or anything or myself. Somehow, this doesn’t even enter my mind when they tell me things like to stop beating myself up about stuff. I don’t even consider being logical. In my mind, I am being logical, and they’re just blind to something, some important all-encompassing thing that makes me not really worth caring about. Bullshit? Yeah, probably. But that doesn’t make it easier to let go.

The thing is, for the most part, all the bullshit about schizophrenia and hearing voices in your head… I figure, I don’t hear more voices than normal people, unless you’re counting Mohan, and the kittens, and the kittens are not in my head. Well, they are, but I still hear them like normal sounds. The point is, there are times when I would make the most stereotypical schizoid seem normal, except that I try to avoid muttering to myself. The voices in my head aren’t part of me, or they are, but they’re

fuck it.

The point is, I will never be able to convince myself that I am not a shitty friend, or a shitty excuse for a human being. No matter how much good I do, and how much my friends tell me that it’s alright, and how much I escape, I will always feel like a horrible person who’s just managing to disguise the awful parts of her for now, and eventually they’ll come out and destroy everyone around her. And the worst part is? I’ve at least partially confirmed this. Without a certain part of me keeping myself in check, I could easily become a psychopath. I’ve nearly stabbed my best friend in the eye before, without it even really registering in my conscious mind until the fork was halfway there. The only conscious thought I had, in a feeling rather than words, was how satisfying stabbing an eyeball would be.

This is why I do not understand why anyone, at all, would ever want to be even in my direct vicinity, let alone actually friends. Yeah, I can pass for normal sometimes, or failing that, I can look and act like a nice person, or at least a friendly one, but the fact is, I know that there is something inside of me that is either not human, or a terrible human. I am, on the inside, a monstrosity. A wild thing, but not in the romanticized, glorified, dreaming-hippie wild way. A real wild thing, all claws and irrational ferocity and fear and rage and unthinking violence.

That’s the part that scares me the most, I think. Then there’s all the other parts, the part about not caring enough, and being a shitty friend because, secretly, truly, I care more for myself than anyone, and how would I ever know if that’s true or not? I claim I’d do anything for my friends, but doesn’t everyone?

Then there’s the part where all of those combine with the final fucking crown jewel of analytically criticizing every word and gesture and look that have crossed me in all of life in memory—and I have a long, long, detailed memory. And hating myself for every damned one. I know, and constantly review, almost every mistake I’ve ever made. It’s a habit. Sometimes I can keep myself from doing it, sometimes I can’t.

I think I hate my life, but in reality I hate myself so much more. And my friends don’t understand why, and the worst part is that I could explain everything in this blog post with a fucking powerpoint, and they’d still tell me to stop beating myself up. Why? What the fuck makes you think I deserve happiness?

(The logical part of my brain claims that it’s Baptist Guilt telling me all this. But I rarely know which part of my head to believe. They all lie. I don’t really trust myself anymore, either.)

Self-induced Nightmares

Right now, it’s a quarter past one. I should be asleep, I have to be at work in less than eight hours, have to leave in less than seven and a half. And I was on my way to sleep, but self-induced nightmares took my mind, and now I can’t go back. Self-induced nightmares… God, what a scary concept. Your brain starts down a train of thought, horrifying, but you can’t look away. And it’s worse—it’s a story, it’s a drama, you know the characters, you are one of them, but that doesn’t make the cruelty easier. But because it’s a story—catch 22. You can’t leave, not until it’s finished somehow, but it’s so horrifying that the longer you stay, the worse it gets.

Welcome to my brain. Glad you dropped by? Yeah, didn’t think so.

Nightmares

The first nightmare I ever had, that I remember, is something that happened when I was very, very young, probably just old enough to walk, talk, and read a little. (Reading came on the heels of talking for me, in a house with a lot of books and no television or computer.) I remember, very, very vaguely, more as feelings and general tones than actual memories, being warned about electricity, and about lights, and bulbs, and sockets. My dad knew enough—knows enough, even—to know exactly how dangerous that kind of thing is. Most people do, but he also knows how to do things with electricity without ever being in danger, or how to deal with danger. But to me, at that age, electricity was just one of those things, like cars, or lightning, or fire, that just… Were. Were forces of danger, things my parents gave dire warnings against, enforced by spankings and more dire warnings of a general, and, in order for this nightmare to have occurred, specific nature, I suppose.


Our house was very old, for an American building—over a hundred years old, inherited from my great-grandparents, two stories plus a basement and an attic. My sister and I shared an upstairs bedroom, the one in the front of the house, with two windows looking onto the street, through the branches of two evergreen trees—I could never tell you what kind. Through the hallway was the staircase; above the staircase, in that hallway somewhere, was a narrow staircase that led to the attic. But past the main staircase was my parents’ room, the master bedroom, past that was… a closet, I believe, on one hand, and on the other, a bathroom which led into what would’ve been my brothers’ room, farther on. My brother may have been sleeping in it even then; I don’t remember. He was very young. Down the stairs, there was the living room under our bedroom, and in the back of the house, the kitchen, very dark, I remember, for some reason. I have a vague impression of tan floor tiles, but that may be wrong. There was a pantry, and somewhere there were stairs to the basement. Where, exactly, I don’t remember.


In this dream, I remember, my little brother, David—then, he was my only brother—and I were sitting on the floor, in the attic, which was bare and dusty and lit well. There were piles of Christmas-tree lights on either side of us, bundled and coiled, and we each had a strand. We were unscrewing the light bulbs, checking them for something, to see if they lit up or something like that, and then screwing them back in. (It occurs to me that one important thing about the trigger of this nightmare may have been my mother’s hatred of Christmas decorations.) Someone, either my older sister, Serenity, or one of my parents, called from downstairs about hot chocolate. I put the strand of lights down, eagerly, and told David to come on, and stood up. And he said, “Just this last one,” and unscrewed a light bulb, and it shocked him somehow, and he collapsed, dead.


And that was the most horrifying thing that I have ever dreamed, to this day. I have dreams of demons, and horrible nightmares, and vivid, lucid brawls, and chases where I can’t get away, and dreams of betrayal, and dreams of cannibalism and pain. But that was the worst dream I ever had.


There was one, a few years later, where I was tied to the little tree out behind the fence, at the corner of our fence and our next-door-neighbors (to the right, the Andersons), and a man drove up in a green Model-T Ford, a man with white hair and a white beard and a top hat (I think, I may be misremembering the top hat), and he took me by the wrist and tried to get me to get into his car. I remember being in the backyard with David and a bunch of shouting, screaming twenty-ish people drove through the yard in screaming red sports-cars, and we were scared. He dreamed the same dream, the same night, I think. Or maybe I imagined that.



But the scariest, worst, most nightmarish dream I have ever had, or probably ever will have, is remembering sitting there on the attic floor, screaming, and him dead on the floor next to me.

Things in my life, literal and otherwise

On my desk, which has finally been organized, I keep a handful of rocks. There is a dark gray rock that fits almost perfectly in my fist, which I kicked along the park once, and decided to keep; the feel of it, solid, cold, heavy in my palm reminded me that I was real. The second rock is a polished tiger-eye, very reddish in color, compared to most stones of that nature. It’s very pretty, and it reminds me of Mohan, my friend. Then there’s a little piece of clinker, very dark gray, like a shadow on the bottom of a river, it glistens in the right light; I found it in my favorite park, by the riverside, upstream. Two more rocks my best friend gave me, smooth and flat and elliptical, one more tawny and one more gray, a pencil-gray, both the right size to hold in my hand at night. The sixth rock is a small lump of pink granite, black-flecked, that I found at the beach; the seventh is a tan, white, dark rock that I picked up from the sidewalk on my way home, last night, after a friend told me everything that was in my own heart, poisoning me from the inside out. I’d known; before leaving, I’d written something along the same lines, bemoaning my inaction and resolving to get off my ass and do something. But hearing it from someone else was kind of painful, which I should have seen coming. Perceptive friends are a double-edged sword.

I loved the person I was on the road to becoming; I wanted to be that person, I want to be someone who lives life to the fullest, someone who cares and creates and loves. I hate the person I am, I hate the person I am becoming now, instead. I have no creative energy, I waste most of my days daydreaming without doing anything about it, I sit around and do nothing. I am, quite simply, a waste of space right now.

There is a lot of shit being thrown at me in life right now. I’d love to use that as a shield; in my own mind, I have been, have been excusing all my lackluster as an effect of the world around me. This is basically complete bullshit. There are so many things that could be worse in my life, I have been so lucky, and there really is no excuse for my situation right now. I’m not going to college because I fucked up my grades and then didn’t apply to enough schools. I’m not going to Sacramento because I didn’t get a second job soon enough, didn’t save carefully enough. I’m still living with my family—well, because I’m not going to college and don’t have enough money to move to Sacramento. This is no excuse to laze around and whine.

There’s a mirror on the dresser, to my right. I don’t hate the person looking back at me, most of the time. I used to. I hate the potential there, and I hate the lack of energy. I hate the potential because it forces me onward, because I don’t want to waste the few things I do have. I hate the lack of energy because it’s my own fault, because I could do better. I hate that people see more in me than is really there. I hate that my friends think I’m so damned smart, I hate that I can’t hide my faults from them, I hate making an idiot of myself so often. I hate the irresponsibility, and I love the foolhardiness. I try not to hate myself. That way lies madness; most ways, actually, lead to madness. I try not to think about that too hard, or I wind up curling up into a useless ball in a corner for hours. I wish I was joking. I wish I wasn’t crazy.

One of the things I hate about mental illness, one of the major things, is that it really is a life sentence. That’s one of the first things a friend told me, when I told everyone what the diagnosis was: she said, “It’s not a life sentence.” But it is. It changes the way people look at you, even your best friends, even the people who accept you. For the rest of your life, people will expect certain things from you; for the rest of your life, if you show some quirk in behavior, people will ask, “Have you been taking your meds?” And if you say yes, they will roll their eyes in semi-disbelief, or wry acceptance, and if you say no, they will sigh hopelessly and either give you a lecture, or simply be content with quiet disappointment, far worse than any lecture. And it will never go away. And you will never be normal, and you will never be accepted, and you will never be able to fit in.

But, for all that, there’s really no excuse for sitting around whining about it. The only way to get around something like that is to take the shit you have, and do something with it. So, even if this story is horseshit, I may as well write it, if for nothing better than to satisfy the characters.