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| It is an awful feeling to hate your life. I spent too much time doing it. I used to wake up early and work at meaningless jobs all day in order to fund someone else's ambitions while mine came to resemble a carrot hanged from the end of a stick. It was a sticky feeling. A murky, sticky feeling. Beer me. Weddings. I went to the weddings of my friends. It was a paradoxical feeling--being happy for my friends, and miserable for myself, in a sense for the same reason. Different circumstances though. As the ceremonies went on, they inevitably came to the part where the ministers would have the guests promise to support the soon-to-be-married couples' vows to each other. I promised, and I may have failed, but not intentionally. It was a reminder--a happy, smiling reminder--of being in my friends' position. Different circumstances though. Idiot circumstances, fueled by idiot decisions and indecisions that led to a hundred visions and revisions. Promises had been made, and I was afraid to be that jerk who went ahead and broke promises in such arrogant and selfish ways. It was a murky, sticky, helpless feeling. Beer me. Distractions... I used to distract myself from everything. Or try to. Or pretend to. Lie in bed after work and stare out the window at the clouded sky. Don't say anything real. Don't say anything wrong. I had snakes to distract me. Getting lots of snakes wasn't the best or cheapest way to distract myself, but it's too late to change that now. Invite dissatisfaction and disruption into everyone else's lives. Compare, or just forget and watch. Hard to forget because life is a reminder of its own existence. Sit in the other end of the house, alone in my room with my computer and my snakes, and a dead staghorn fern. I tried, but not hard enough. Maybe those cacti will live. I don't know, not enough sunlight out there because of the trees and the angle. Stare out the window at the trees and whatever might be happening in the back of the building. Kids liked to play in the neighborhood. I liked to play when I was a kid. We used to run around barefoot, or bike barefoot, or do anything barefoot. Who needs fucking shoes? We played on the boulders at the end of the apartment complex and we found little fossorial snakes living under rocks. I don't know what kind of rocks they were, but I might be able to come to some decent conclusions if I looked at a geologic map of the area. Maybe they washed up with Africa. Maybe they had always been there, like I'll always be here, goddamn it, with a kitchen full of rotting pieces of food in that goddamn broken fucking garbage disposal and all of that other useless fucking decorative shit I can't stand but it had to be there. We had to have it, and it collects dust in a fucking corner and gets in the way when I open the back door and then I have to clean it up because it gets knocked the fuck over. Fuck. I hate this. I hate this. I hate being this way. I hate being here. I wonder how it would feel to beat myself in the belly with a hammer. Probably not good. This isn't good anyway. But I can't get out. Or I could, but my job...but then where would I live? I can't afford to live here. I can live in my car during the week, and sign up at a gym so I can take showers. And eat cheap fast food or something. But winter is so fucking cold here...but I have those blankets. No, I'm not going to do that. I'm a pussy. And I made a promise, or a bunch of damn promises, and I'm not an asshole, or whatever. And I can't fucking afford it anyway. So I'm stuck here. SSRI me. Please. Then suddenly, much more suddenly than everything had gotten dark, I woke up one morning and felt amazing. Weird and amazing. Relieved and weird. No need to argue. No urge to resent anyone or anything. No reason to lie about myself or how I'm doing or what I think about something...no fear of having to defend myself on the ride home. No desire to kick myself in the head. Just time. Plenty of time to sort it all out and see how wrong it all was. How wrong I was. Why I made the mistakes I had made. Time to be overwhelmed by the choices I could make, and the opportunities I could take. Time to pick myself up. Time to write a song. Time to do whatever.... ....and time for me. It is a wonderful feeling to love my life. I hate my job. I hate getting up at 5:00 every morning to go to my job, which I hate. I really really hate my job. But it doesn't keep me from loving my life. It's no longer a symptom or a reminder of almost every bad decision I made for three or four years, or a reminder that I should spend some time hating myself for making those decisions. It's just a vehicle to the things I want. It's just temporary, like that horribly dead part of my life was. I am alive. | | |
| It may be possible to use logic to convince a philosophy major to give you a blowjob. Just make sure your reasoning is fellatious. | | |
| Dear Monica,
I have enjoyed spending time in your lair. I found one of your books during the summer, stole it, and read it. The world seems to make more sense now.
And I have enjoyed rearranging your toys from time to time, while you are not looking. I revel in my own degenerate sense of self-amusement, and I want to spread my depravity around in the hopes that it multiplies. Thank you for giving me ample opportunities to do this. "Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar..." Well, I say, "Sometimes, a cigar is really a fat, throbbing cock, aching to penetrate a rodent's asshole." You know exactly what I mean, and I'm glad you do.
You tease me regularly and almost methodically. I think you are interested in my reactions. I occasionally hear beeping noises when I'm around you. I think you have me in your Skinner box.
-me | | |
| As I walked quickly from my car towards the entrance of the plant this morning, riding fast on the stress of waking up almost an hour late, I felt the autumn hit me. The air was a little bit cold. I liked it. | | |
| It has been five years now since a lot of things happened. I don't know where I would be or what I would be doing right now if New Orleans had not flooded. I don't care.
Lots of memories of the past five years sit a little strange in my belly. I'd recently graduated from high school and drove to New Orleans anticipating and dreading and swollen with the promise of every great thing to come. I drove back partly in my mind and partly in the mind of Dayquil. (There isn't much dextromethorphan in that stuff, but when it's the only thing in you, it seems to matter.)
When I was 19, late in the fall, I started working for my friend's dad, helping him clean up and fix some things at his machine shop and power house. I also did a lot of sitting out on the dam, watching my breath run out of me, listening to the Pacolet River running underneath me as it eroded a cut bank that already rose over a hundred feet above the water. I don't know how long the river has been there, but it is an amount of time that makes each of us insignificant. I can come up with a decent enough guess as to when the rocks were formed, and it makes us seem more insignificant.
When I was 18, late in the fall, Dr. Ferguson took all six of Wofford's geology students on a trip to the Valley and Ridge region of Tennessee. We spent eleven hours driving across the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains, stopping at road cuts and river crossings. I stood at the top of a hill and picked up rocks that had been eroded smooth and deposited by the river that was now at the bottom of the hill. I put my hands on fault lines. I had my first experience with a slickenside, and it is an amazing word. The next morning, we drove out in the valley and took a look at the ridges. The rock of the valley was 500 million years old. The rock of the ridges was 900 million years old. Nine-hundred million years. I once held a rock that was well over a billion years old. When you hold something like that in your hand and start trying to comprehend that amount of time, about the only thing you can say is, "Well, shit...."
I think that hurricane influenced a whole lot of things for me that otherwise would not have happened. My life felt very surreal for the next couple of years. And there are people who are still rebuilding the city, gutting their homes, ripping things apart, and moving on with their surreal lives. Five years is a significant chunk of the moment we each occupy the earth.
And as I remember the smushed, rounded edge, the fault line where one of those 900-million-year-old ridges had been thrust over the 400-million-year-old valley floor, the only thing I can really say is, "Well, shit..." | | |
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