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.

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.

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.

Dancing, or something a bit like it.

One of my favorite things about life is the crazily silly dances I manage to get away with most of the time, alone. Anyone who knows me would be able to tell you that I Do Not Dance, mostly because I Cannot Dance. But the crazy bobbing-head and waving-arms gestures that pop up around my keyboard must surely count for something! Every so often I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the screen and have to suppress the embarrassed part of my brain, because a wince would interfere with the beat. And there is a beat, and I do carry it, in my own rather wild way. The other fun thing is the crazy leaping, twisting, capering-and-cavorting sort of dance that I only do when it is a truly joyful song on my mp3 player and I am on the part of the path by the pond that is completely hidden from the rest of the park. Or the crazy dance that came with Pride, by U2, which was performed in a series of leaps and twirls, and presented the major problem with this entire category of behavior.

As with so many of the things I do, there is no good explanation. There is no respectable way to explain a minor injury incurred while dancing wildly away from observers. Fortunately, the worst that ever happened was when I landed partly on a piece of furniture, on my ankle, in the living room in mid-leap and was limping for a day or two. With any luck at all, I’ll never have to explain a sprain in my shoulder or something this way. I might just have to make something up.

A strange and shitty night.

Blood on my mouthpiece, still straining to hit those low notes, usually it’s the high notes that get me but that hasn’t been the case lately, and the lower register is really tough to reach. I’m sick of mellophone, which Microsoft Word corrects as “cellophane,” amusingly enough, and it’s only been two or three weeks now. Three days would be too long. I haven’t played horn in long enough, that’s the problem. I need to get back to caring, back to pouring my soul into the brass. Or at least forcing out a few tunes a night. I’m angry, though, angry and hurt and apathetic and I don’t know where to turn now.

This is a shitty blog post, I am fully aware. I’m in a shitty mood. I’m feeling like a shitty artist, with no vision, and I want to seek meaning but I forgot how to seek. And my hair is shitty, because I haven’t had a chance to wash it in about three days, possibly more. And my eyes are shitty, as usual, except that lately contacts keep falling out of them, and my nails are broken and jagged, and my lips are chapped and split and broken (thus the blood on my mouthpiece) despite the balm I put on them, which is gross and made with honey, and I just want life to be over.

Today, or this evening, I guess, it was well after sunset when I left the library, I took the roundabout way home, and when I passed by the highway there was a man doing something, sending up a huge fountain of yellow-orange sparks, wicked bright all over, and they cast his face into relief, even twenty feet away at the bottom of the bank, maybe further, I could see. And there was a huge white spotlight shining at the scene, it nearly blinded me. I watched the sparks for a while and then a car came, and I shook myself loose and kept walking.

Before that, turning onto that roundabout road, I saw a possum going to cross the road, but I came too close for comfort, and it bolted in the other direction, past the bank sign, into the woods. I say bolted, but it was really more of a rolling lumber.

And now I will go to sleep and hope that nightmares don’t haunt me too long.