Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Potch's LiveJournal:

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Wednesday, December 8th, 2004
3:24 pm	Experiences are ultimately meaningless. They accumulate, but they accumulate like diaphanous clouds of smoke; memory disperses into discrete molecules of perception when one attempts to grasp it. The sadness of things is that they never remain how you want them to be, and with that awareness, you can never properly appreciate them when they've been assembled into a pleasing configuration. There isn't really anything I want anymore. The only remotely satisfying experiences I've had this year have occurred while I was under the influence of alcohol or some other drug, and I think I've probably done more this year than I've done in my entire life. I don't really long for anything now; I just feel used up and bored. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, September 17th, 2004
11:37 am	Something I found The nothing that you seek cannot be found in bound books nor can it be found in rare items of exotic stock, limned by the rays of summertime isles, or in the sharpness of immediacy that rises from physical contact in a dirty bed some thirty miles away from the clean bed in which you usually sleep. nor can it be circumscribed and enclosed in a book handed down by generations of dirty, oppressed people or in a volume simplistic in message and beauty that has been used to justify slaughters of dark-skinned women and poor farmers with green eyes that suggest the maple leaves that you chewed in your youth. unfurl that tongue of yours, which you've been using in the service of masters greater than yourself, and fill the sky with your saliva, meeting your cerebral fluids and intermingling with the amniotic seas that once bounded you on all sides, keeping you warm and comfortable and safe from the things that can be things that can be things that can be things; the polished firmament will glisten with your ownership and you, content once again beneath the rising and falling of the body that contains you, may rest peacefully beneath that maple with a bottle, a bottle that reminds you of what you've been, who you are, and the nothing that you'll be. the sun percolates through the spaces between the branches of the maple under which you sit as the sun and the trees and now-glowing branches and the cries of the ravens as they pick apart a fresh carcass percolate through you; for once, your prison is occupied, but you are not in it. He is not here; he is risen. (Comment on this)
Sunday, August 22nd, 2004
6:42 pm	Sometimes I wonder ....why I even update this. I don't do it frequently, but it's still quite compulsive. I think maybe one or two people read this, but still I'm forced to add an entry every now and again. I'm sitting in my undergarments, my hair unkempt and hanging over my shoulders in wild, greasy strands. I'm moving back and forth between writing this and reading Chaucer aloud to myself in the reconstructed Middle English pronunciation. The room is nearly empty; most of my possessions are up at my apartment in Kalamazoo. My thoughts are very confused. I've had more sexual activity in the last two weeks than I've had in my entire life, which isn't to say very much, but it's still been enough to thrust me into a strange, nervous, wreckless, and unpredictable mood. On the Wednesday of the week before last, I had a one night stand with a thirty-something woman; it was unpleasant in most respects. I'm not suited to engaging in meaningless sexual activity; consequently, the encounter only strengthened my feelings of loneliness and isolation. I enjoyed giving the woman oral sex, but only because of the absurdity of the experience; it's much like ministering to an overgrown, impossibly elongated infant. One gauges its pleasure by the gurgles and moans it produces and the increasingly incontinent writhing of its form. I said all of the correct things, put the woman at ease, and pleasured her according to her signals. I'm not certain if I was any good, but I don't particularly care; The only reason I was attentive to her desires at the time was a leaden hopelessness that sat upon my intellect like a indolent succubus. Alcohol, depression and frustrated dreams create a volatile mixture. Wodan must want to get me laid, because my latest experience with a girl occurred on the Wednesday of last week. I was at a party hosted by a high schooler whom I had come to know over the course of the summer. It was relatively bland, and so I sought to spice it up by acting like a complete fool (something which I'm particularly good at). Unbeknownst to me at the time, there was a girl in attendance who was attracted to that sort of thing. I ended up resting my head on her lap and continuing to make gibes and sallies, which amused her for some reason. Then I began to put random objects in my mouth and read from the few books that had been strewn across the floor in a flurry of convivial activity. She and I decided to stay the night at the home of my teenage host, and although efforts were made to keep us apart (a separate bed was prepared for me), I had migrated to her couch by the time the lights went down. We kissed and cuddled for a very long time. (If I could arrange for a girlfriend--for someone with whom I could do that sort of thing daily and with feeling--I think I'd be able to banish my melancholy.) The girl, however, turned out to be a mere sixteen years of age. I shouldn't have been surprised, given the milieu in which I was introduced to her, but it still bothers me a bit, even though it shouldn't. I've arranged to meet her again, but I don't think we'll be sucking face again; it was a development that seemed to leave both of us surprised--I don't think she's the type of person that tends to exchange bodily fluids with random people either. (Comment on this)
Friday, August 13th, 2004
3:30 pm	I make myself sick Too much shit has gone on in the last two days. I've done innumerable things that would be considered abysmally stupid by most. I regret them already. There's nothing I can do about it now. Last night was just inexplicable. Can't even write about it. I keep thinking: "I should kill myself," then I think "hey, you might've already, you stupid fuck." (Comment on this)
Monday, August 9th, 2004
7:30 pm	Michel de Montaigne Nothing I do is going to outlast me. My life is being written in water. I must accept this, but I cannot help but struggle to insert some sort of meaning into my insignificant existence. Honesty is the least practiced virtue in life and writing. I do not believe in absolute virtues, but my sensibilities are drawn to those things that most closely approximate truth; therefore, I will try to be as honest and as true to myself and my own life as possible in this journal. What I've written so far has been true in a sense, but its omissions are myriad, and its accounts of my life are limited to complaints, the contemplations of a philosophaster, and the sentiments of a depressed teenager. I've transcended the role of depressed teenager; I am now a depressed adult. My dysphoria does not stem from any outward sources. As I've stated before, I am the artificer of my own unhappiness. The bile that I've accumulated over years of watching myself fuck up each and every chance for my own redemption has developed into a deity of sorts; it speaks to my from the storm that ravages my mind. It answers my questions with derision and with assertions of its own permanence. Then Lord spoke to Job from the storm, "Brace yourself like a man. I will question you, and you shall answer me." Job 40, verses 6-7 I shan't even bother to cite my quotations correctly. This isn't formal academic prose; this isn't a way for me to write beautiful, aesthetically pleasing conclusions. I'm here to sing a song of myself, nothwithstanding that that self is mostly pneumatic. Yahweh has questioned me, and I have answered him by curling up into the fetal position. I'm no man. I'm nothing. My ears had heard, but now my eyes have seen; therefore I depise myself and repent in dust and ashes. The last few weeks have been difficult. I've been trying to master my body by abstaining from masturbation, meditating daily, and monitoring my food intake. I managed to refrain from masturbation for a little over two weeks. Today, I allowed myself to give into my sexual frustration. I think it was necessary, but it proves that I'm still weak. I won't allow myself to masturbate again for at least a month. There's absolutely nothing of religious sentiment in my sudden attempt at asceticism. Masturbation is a cheap fix for my frustration, a way to allay my desire quickly and without thought; consequently, it is an impediment to my progress. I do not know towards what I progress, but it is, at the very least, a self-directed progression. It may lead to nothing, but I'm already there. My illness is still with me, no matter how much I may try to deny it. On Saturday, I alienated a friend by completely losing it in the car. We were an hour or so from home, and my brain stopped functioning completely; I couldn't find my way back. The streets became unfamiliar, and I had difficulty controlling the vehicle. My judgment, too, became impaired, and it wasn't long before we were far off course. Eventually, I used the sun to find my way back to Michigan, but not before almost getting into an accident twice, becoming eerily silent, and causing my friend to lose all trust in my abilities and intelligence. I doubt she'll ever speak to me again. If I were her, I wouldn't speak to me again. Her 15-year-old brother was in the car. I almost killed them with my idiocy. All of this has become cemented in Zarathustra's terrible WAS. The past perfect is the most infuriating of all tenses. I find this depressing. I don't have enough friends to lose. What's worse is that she's connected to all of the friends that live relatively close to me, so there's a chance that she'll spread the tale around, villifying me and leaving me without companionship yet again. I feel like Carlyle's Teufeldrokh: "I seemed to have nothing given me but eyes, whereby to discern my own wretchedness," though my angst is much less existential and far more concrete than his. It won't be long before I start university. My apartment is ready, and my things are slowly gravitating towards it with an expedience and a terrible inexorability that I find a bit upsetting. I'm being displaced, but I doubt that displacement will change anything. My Axis Mundi remains rooted in my brain. To quote Prometheus's great Christian brother in rebellion, "What matter where if I still be the same?" Need is what drives me, and not a need for nourishment or achievement or greater pleasures, but a need for human connection, understanding, and sympathy. I feel as though I do not exist when there isn't another human being around to watch me. I feel as unfixed in position as an electron in quantum mechanics, as indefinable as mu, and as adrift as a single particle in abyssal space. That may not be very good writing, but it's honest writing; it's what's true for me. I read Carlyle's character sketches of Wordsworth and Coleridge today, and from these, my mind cannot help but sketch a character of Carlyle that is anything but flattering. He trots out these great men of letters, advanced in years and far from their intellectual zeniths, and describes them in the basest of terms. Carlyle's caricatures, for that is what I assume they are, are amusing, but embedded in their easy, conversational tone is a certain vulgarity of character, and by that, I mean an exploitative delight in the lowering of that which has been venerated, and not in the noble way Voltaire or Hume relished divesting montebanks and charlatans and Tartuffes of their grandeur, but in the petty and wholly unnecessary way that a journalist exposes the peccadilloes of great men for the mockery of the masses. There is a bile to Carlyle's words that intimates that he became an inconoclast for the pleasure of destruction, rather than for the liberation of men. I've not been smoking lately. I still haven't decided whether cigarettes will be another casualty of my nascent asceticism. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, July 23rd, 2004
3:44 am	My hands smell of cigarette smoke and perfume; My eyes burn and my lips are chapped. In the corner, there's a vinyl recording waiting to be played. You're monsters, all of you. The self can never truly be despised in concreto by the individual. No man has fully apprehended his self. It remains elusive, impermanent, and plastic. To apply a transitive verb to the individual's relationship to himself is to divide that individual; it is to make the self a thing discrete from the thing perceiving it. Further fragmentation results from the penitent self-despiser's loathing of his self-hatred. It is not himself that he hates, but it is he, the self, that hates the representation that he has erected, which is usually founded on bits of pieces of information that he has gathered from others. In this way, the mechanism of perception continues to divide itself indefinitely, forming thesis and antithesis, protagonist and antagonist, Yin and Yang. The apparatus cannot distinguish between itself and illusions, yet it is discernment, discretion, distinguishment itself that engender them. Man asks himself "Who am I?" and looks inward, only to discover those shards of the natural world that he has internalized. Going still deeper, he discovers himself perceiving. The self that perceives is then distinguished from the self that is perceived by the mechanism. Man may know himself perceiving, but he may never experience the thing-in-itself, even the himself-in-himself. Schopenhauer's concept of the Idea extends even to the furthest recesses of the mind. Be comfortable, then, with that crystalline core, hard and sharp and receptive, that composes your center. That is the true unknowable, the great ILLE QUI SCIRI NON POTEST. We are bounded on both sides by cyphers; we can only dream in the margins. (Comment on this)
Thursday, July 22nd, 2004
3:01 am	Empty His trust was with the Eternal to be deemed Equal in strength, and rather than be less, Cared not to be at all; with that care lost Went all his fear: of God or Hell or worse Paradise Lost I see echoes of that in Faust's beginning soliloquy. And in myself. I had to find the passage and memorize it. It's amazing how disgusting I find myself and my judgments. (Comment on this)
Sunday, July 18th, 2004
9:17 pm	My head aches. Did you find your Husband, Saint Catherine? Was he overwhelmed by your desire to meet him? Did he lecture you over technicalities. Did your self-consumption constitute suicide? You met him at an age when other women had had their children. What fruits did you produce ? You disdained yourself for Him, and you would not participate in the world that He gave you. Ungrateful, sullen child! You spurned His gift in His name, and you suffered for Him what he suffered for you. What poor, starved, wretchedly venomous love you must have given your neighbors, Cat. What self you had, you willed out of existence; what you gained will eventually be gained by all men. What drove you to despise yourself? Why do we seek nothing? My blood will eventually stain the tree of the grove of Aricia. Yggdrasil will have my bones, and Diana Nemorensis will drink my ichor. Until then, I arm myself with sustenance. We court the same man, Cat, but haven't you ever heard of playing hard to get? Anorexia mirabilis, indeed. (Comment on this)
1:18 am	HATEHAHTEHATEHAHTEHAHTEHATEHATEHATEHAHTEHAHTEHATEHATEHATE Yeah. Actual conversation: Pretty Girl: I get laid less than (name omitted) I'm so sexually frustrated. Me: Yeah. Me, too. *excessive flirtation* Later: Pretty girl: So yeah, I can't date guys over 18. Me: *seethes* Platonic friend: Oh well. That girl with the glowsticks said you were cute, even if she did think you were retarded. I'm going to go smoke an entire pack of cigarettes and then fucking sleep. I hope I'm not having a cerebral fucking hemorrhage (Comment on this)
Saturday, July 10th, 2004
11:44 pm	I shall never get laid. It's as simple as that. I'm so narcissistic that I'm always attracted to girls who are, in many ways, like me. I'm fucked up; consequently, girls who are like me are fucked up. Everyone likes me, but nobody likes me romantically. Great. I love the platonic affection. It's marvelous; I just need the fuck. (Comment on this)
Friday, June 25th, 2004
11:12 pm	Shit If the act of writing is tantamount to smearing one's mental feces over the minds of one's readers, then calling critics a group of coprophagus bottom-feeders is not only fun, it's also completely accurate. Today, I learned that I'm completely incapable of wrapping cheese to the satisfaction of the management. My motor skills have always been undeveloped; consequently my cheese-wrapping abilities, and my doing-pretty-much-anything-beyond-mere-cogitation abilities have always been piss-poor at best, appallingly abysmal at worst. That's why it was smart of me to choose a deli, a place replete with implements both sharp and hot, as a place of employment. I think my fellow employees think of me as a decerebrate mascot. I wander around in a haze of fatigue and depression, frequently bumping into objects and fellow humans as I go about performing whatever tasks have been (unwisely) assigned to me. The mental fatigue that used to plague me so often has returned with a vengeance. I'm not sure if this job is good for me. (Comment on this)
Sunday, June 20th, 2004
5:17 pm	"Come on dude, who are you?" "The answer is mu." "Come on man, I really wanna know you." "Rien". "WHO ARE YOU?" "I am God, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon, and I am world, which is just a tedious way of saying that I do not exist." "That's not who you ARE, that's who Borges is, or at least who he thought himself to be. Don't take your abstraction too seriously. Reification is dangerous. Who did you come with?" I love what I do. I hate what I am. Who knows why I love what I love? What I do is what I am. What I see is what I am. My conception of the human race is what I am. My conception of you is who I am. Bits and pieces form the whole. Aggregation, concentration, refractory refraction. Esse quam videri. Koan. Gohan. What? Integration. Reintegration. Concentration. O , ces voix d'enfant chantant dans la coupole. J'ai vaincu les Filles. J'ai vaincu les Filles. eo ibis quo omnia eunt That's what happens when I try to go all stream of consciousness on your asses. It's not a terribly beautiful sight, nor is it a particularly interesting read, although it might be fun to pick out all the misquoted literary references. My mind is pretty scattered right now, and I'm not even sure why. As someone recently observed, it's not very helpful to unfurl one's mind onto a page, electronic or otherwise. The results of such an exercise are usually as disparate, disconnected, desultory, and confusing to read as they were in their natural habitat. I tried to keep a real journal, something that would survive me after my death, but I found that the topic on which it is most difficult to write is one's own life. It's so familiar that it eludes description. Some people can describe the mundane effortlessly, but that is a group of which I am not a member. (Comment on this)
Sunday, June 6th, 2004
2:01 am	Lament for a Relationship that Never Existed I'm not a writer, but she makes me want to write. Pain may provide the impetus for much that is good in literature, but it rarely serves as a suitable topic for a magnum opus. It's much too abstract, too relative, and too intangible to stretch into a novel or to wrestle into the confines of an elegant poem. If the writer wants the reader to feel his pain, he must construct a series of events or a string of words that, though they do not directly express agony, brush the synapses of the reader in such a way that the desired emotion or sentiment is released. This is Eliot's objective correlative. If it is pain that you want to express, be sure to examine your motivations. Are you writing out of pure sadomasochism? Do you use your words as a weapon, a cutlass with which you can strike at those whom you consider better of than yourself? I say this so you can better achieve your goal, not as criticism. Writing with a purpose that is unknown even to the self seldom produces something worth reading. None of this in any way pertains to what will follow. I can't seem to write anything without emptying my brain of contents that I didn't even know it held. She was nineteen, beautiful, and intelligent. Her laugh carried with it a hint of some past bitterness, her gait and bearing were aloof, and her brilliant blue eyes, even during conversation, would dart back and forth between objects with a restlessness that I was never quite able to understand. I met her in a basic Italian class, which I was taking more out of personal interest than any necessity. She struck me as beautiful, but ultimately too good for me. A consumptive cough that she had acquired as a result of three-week flu-- in addition to her thin frame, pale complexion and waist-length hair-- inspired me to call her Romantic Poet Girl. Much to my surprise, she started talking to me towards the end of the course. Although she was reserved at first, she soon began to tell me a great deal about herself and her personal life. Her father was a military man and her mother was a housewife. As much as she tried to distance herself from her mother's Christian morality, she carried it with her into every situation, not as a guide, but rather as a standard to be transgressed at every opportunity. She seemed to enjoy sexuality, but did not find it beautiful. The desecration of the moral code that she had long since discarded seemed to heighten her enjoyment of anything that she believed was forbidden by its strictures. She accepted few statements that were contrary to traditional Christian views, yet did everything she could to act outside of their influence. It's unsurprising that she had a penchant for Anne Rice novels. Much of her conversation seemed to consist of complaints about her job and her friends. She was not strident in her disapproval of either, but rather spoke about the things which she disliked with an easy wit and engaging humor. When she informed me that she had tried L'absinthe after an excursion to Windsor, Canada, I changed her sobriquet to Symbolist Poet Girl. After we had exchanged phone numbers, we began to engage in three hour conversations that often lasted till midnight. The only things we had in common were a interest in Neil Gaiman novels and an admiration for the Italian language; consequently, she began to tell me the story of her life, or at least one version of it. She worried that she wasn't allowing me to add anything to our discussions, but I always assured her that I was content to listen, which was true. Her life involved innumerable friends, all of whom she had met in high school or junior high, and a procession of characters that I found difficult to keep straight in my memory. I remember so many things about her that it feels as though she's only a character in a book that I happened to page through some lonely night in my past. She had had a serious relationship when she was a mere fourteen years of age. Although she would never admit it directly, the experience was relatively traumatic. She fears waves because of their power, and she dreads the possibility of drowning. She's neurotic and hypochondriacal. She loves crabs and sea creatures. She keeps most of her previous boyfriends as friends. There are countless other things about her that I remember, but I won't list them for fear of revealing too much. The anonymity of the internet does not always provide adequate protection for information that was meant to be kept confidential. We began to see each other on Thursdays. She seemed to enjoy my company, and I enjoyed hers. We walked down by the beach and chatted, watched movies, and did our share of driving around town in futile quests for something exciting to do. The phone calls continued. I began to feel closer and closer to her, though I don't believe she ever felt anything for me other than a distant fondness. There were things about her she shared with me that led me to question her mental health, but nothing that implied that she was any more mentally ill than I. The neuroses that she exhibited, including her irrational fears, attracted me just as much as her beauty. I found myself unable to resist the urge to take things further; I had always had romantic designs on her, but I'd not really forced myself to make anything but subtle hints. I started putting my arm around her as we watched films and as we walked along the pier, and surprisingly, she didn't pull away. Other than this small hint of things to come, things remained much as they were between us. The final Thursday confused me. Now that I am "The Man Who Was Thursday", I cannot stop thinking about the particulars of that day. She was uncharacteristically peevish the entire time I spent with her, though I attributed this to her job. We drove to a bookstore, hung out there for a while, and then returned to my house during a torrential storm. In spite of my ineptitude, I managed to get us to my house safely. She had brought her photo album with her for the purpose of showing me all of the people to whom I had been introduced through her stories, so we sat on my couch and she began to show me her life in pictures. I put my arm around her as she spoke, and she seemed comfortable with the contact. After listening to her many tales of high school and college hijinks, I sat there for a while, just looking into her eyes. It was at this point that I asked her if I could kiss her. She pursed her lips and thought for a moment before resting her head on my shoulder and cuddling into me. She said something to the effect of "I wasn't planning on dating anyone." After a few more seconds had passed, she looked up at me with those giant blue eyes of hers and inquired, "What do you like about me?" I was honest, possibly excessively so. I told her that I liked her because she was kind, beautiful, intelligent, witty, perpetually concerned about her friends, socially conscious, idealistic where she could be, and endearingly neurotic, but if I recall correctly, I employed more superlatives. She seemed to like this response, but she responded with an insecure remark that was meant to repudiate some of my compliments. After I had reassured her that what I said was, in fact, accurate, she said something like, "I'm insane," which puzzled me at the time. She then sat up, turned towards me, and placed her arms decisively around my neck. As she leaned forward to kiss me, I hesitated and said, rather pathetically, "I don't know how to do this." She smiled and moved towards me with alacrity, pressing her lips against mine. I did the best I could with the amount I experience that I had, which likely wasn't enough. The kiss continued for a while. Afterwards, she looked into my eyes and asked me with some concern, "What are you thinking?" I, overcome with emotion, said that her eyes were beautiful. We held each other, and she commented that I was shaking, which was undoubtedly true. For the remainder of our last forty-five minutes together, she lay against my chest as I stroked her hair and arms. As the rhythm of her breathing slowed, I lay back against the couch and closed my eyes, smelling her, listening to her breath, and feeling her body pulse against my own. For that instant, she was perfect. Inevitably, she awoke and had to leave. She seemed tired and ,at the same time, peculiarly happy. At the door, however, I noticed a change come over her. She seemed sharper, somehow and withdrawn. She was extremely tired, and the storm was still visibly and audibly wreaking havoc outside, so I offered her my couch as an alternative to travelling all the way to her house, which was located on the other side of town. I told her that my mother would be comfortable with her staying over. I had already established that this wasn't a request for sex, so I thought her response was a bit odd. She replied rather caustically, "Why, does this happen often?" I remember opening my eyes rather widely at that, as I had already discussed my lack of sexual experience with her. I don't remember what I said afterwards, but she seemed mollified by whatever it was, and her demeanor returned to the pleasant one to which I was accustomed. Then we discussed a few more things amiably, we shared a prolonged hug, and I asked for another kiss, with which she provided me without hesitation. The previous times she had left my house on a Thursday, she had instructed me to call her. She failed to say anything of the sort as she skipped off towards her car, and from the door, I could barely detect a strange, almost dismissive smile forming on her lips. I never heard from her again. I tried calling her a few times, but she never replied. She gave me my first kiss and she provided me with some companionship when I was in desperate need of human contact; for those things I shall be forever grateful to her. However, her failure to call me, to provide me with some sort of closure, has driven me nearly insane. I can still smell her hair and her sweat and her skin. In conclusion: Mike says, "Potch, you're so gay." That about sums it up. (Comment on this)
Saturday, June 5th, 2004
6:09 pm	My sister rocks I never use this journal for anything other than creating half-assed attempts at inspirational writing and voicing my often lugubrious complaints. That changes today. My sister deserves praise. As a child, April admired me. She emulated me in many ways and always sought out my company. Fortunately, she soon learned that her hero worship was misplaced and that I wasn't really remarkable or admirable in any way. We drifted apart as we grew older, she into her social cliques and I into my video games, solitude and books. Occasionally, she would attempt to help me fit in, usually with advice about my clothing, behavior, or tendency to stutter in public. That she cared enough to caution me about my social ineptitude was actually relatively amazing for a girl three years my junior and only nine years old. She, rather wisely, gave up on me eventually, and allowed me to sink into social disgrace and infamy. I think my growing corpulence signalled to her that I was beyond all hope of redemption. There was nothing more she could do. My school years were truly hell. My peers hated me because of my weight, my fatuous intellectualism, and my assumption that they were actually much more sophisticated than they really were ( I developed a sense of irony before anyone else, and oftentimes read too much into the innocent cues of others as a result). Despite her inability to provide me with advice, my sister helped me through many painful experiences with her wit, pragmatism, and support. She even tried to set me up with a few of her girlfriends. Although my proclivity for bungling every opportunity to better my situation vexed her, she didn't nag me about my awkwardness or my shyness, or the apathy that I developed after years of rejection. Eventually, my life started to improve. Girls seemed interested in me, my social group began to expand precipitously, and people seemed to like me. My sister was extremely happy for me, and she supplied me with ample counsel about the cultivation and retention of my newfound popularity. Then I got ill. My friends deserted me, my life receded into the background, and I could barely think well enough to assemble grammatically correct sentences or solve simple math equations. I spent my time watching television, playing videogames, and sleeping--or so I'm told; I don't remember those years very well, and the parts that I can recollect are foggy. My sister did everything in her power to accommodate any needs that I had. She didn't quite understand what I was going through, but she TRIED, and even that is remarkable for an ordinary twelve-year-old girl. The internet was my refuge during those five years. I still had difficulties thinking, but the intermediary of the computer screen allowed me to collect what little thoughts I had, and to form a number of friendships in spite of my cognitive problems. My sister was there for me again when I tried to attend high school. I only made it through two months of the ninth grade before my body imploded, but she was instrumental in making those two months interesting. She told me what to say, how to act, and what to wear in order to come off as a relatively well-adjusted, interesting person. I followed her advice, and I acquired a number of friends before the end of my high school experience. They all left me when I was incapacitated by my illness again, but with my sister's help, I had a two month respite from the loneliness to which I had been accustomed. Now that I'm well, or at least going through a period of remission, I'm still dealing with that loneliness. My years of isolation, in conjunction with tendency to be socially maladroit, have made it difficult for me to contrive a social life for myself. April is still trying to take care of me, her pathetic, sickly, and often confused older brother. She invites me to attend parties with her, to go to the movies with her and her friends, and to do all sorts of things that she imagines will distract me from my depression. I think that she and Justin are the only reasons why I'm still alive, whatever that's worth. So here's to you, April. Even though this reads more like selection from my biography, it's intended as something of a panegyric. (Comment on this)
Thursday, June 3rd, 2004
8:37 pm	I'm a complete mental and emotional wreck. I've nothing to do, nowhere to go, and nothing to say. It's been over two weeks and I still can't stop thinking about that girl. What the fuck is wrong with me? She gave me reddish blonde hair, enormous blue eyes, endearing mannerisms, interesting conversation, and then silence. I get attached to people too easily. I still miss everyone from my junior high and elementary school classes, and they all HATED me. I just want to obliterate myself. (Comment on this)
Sunday, May 30th, 2004
4:11 pm	I turned twenty today. How terribly depressing. Sixteen and eighteen were bad enough. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 26th, 2004
6:08 pm	Kaloo Kalay, oh fabjulous day! I suspect that the first two words in the title of this post are actually transliterated forms of the Greek adjective for beauty: kallos. A mouse, two mouse, a moose? Lewis Carrol could have my children any day. Alice is so marvelously addled. She's gone. I didn't think it'd last. I cried. It was like having a mental bowel movement. I saw a magazine with a girl who looked like her. I nearly cried again. The model had a similarly expressive face and those gigantic, limpid, fabulously blue eyes that she, the girl, had deprived me of. The power was out for five days. I read a number of books, all of them very decent. I crashed a party at which the median age of those in attendance was around twenty-six. I got rather impressively drunk and hit on every girl in sight. I had to lie like a motherfucker in order to avoid being thrown out (I was a 24-year-old engineer here, a 22-year-old human resources drone there [the party-goers were uniformly employees of Whirlpool]), but my forays into mendacity were well rewarded with a decent time. As I commented to one of those girls who had to endure my Quagmire-esque attempts at flirtation, the party was about ten steps below Bacchanalian. Still, it was a decent time. I nearly broke my tailbone in a spastic attempt to dance on a floor that had been suffused with various fluids by the night's activities, and I'm still unsure of the origins of a number of the bruises that I somehow managed to acquire. I actually had an interesting, relatively long conversation with one of the few people at the party who had managed to remain sober; she was an extremely intelligent, pretty Yale graduate who had somehow managed to find her way into Whirlpool's engineering program. It's too bad my drunkeness allowed me to continue lying; she's actually e-mailed me, and, given a situation sans my dishonesty, I'd e-mail her back in an instant. Given the circumstances, I'm not sure of what to say. I may end up confessing my dissimulation and asking her if she'd mind hanging out with a college junior with a proclivity for audacity fueled by abject depression. I only lied about my age, the completion of my studies, and my place of employment. Fucking hell. This Certain sections from Mozart's operas can bring me a mental state approaching orgasm, especially bits from Don Giovanni. It's unfortunate that that opera is, on the surface, an offensive morality play. I miss that girl so much. (Comment on this)
Friday, May 7th, 2004
6:58 pm	Crap Those of you who've read this from time to time should be accustomed to my propensity for making an embarrassing spectacle of myself. There's this girl. Too many stories begin that way, especially on the internet. The internet is brimming with broken-hearted men and boys who've fallen in love with the unattainable. I may have found, what is for me, the attainable. The only thing that's keeping me from allowing my joy to overwhelm my reason is this knowledge: the configuration of brain chemicals that is currently allowing me to feel sane for the first time in months is transient and wholly dependent on the caprices of another person. If, by some chance, she should decide that I'm no longer worthy of her attention, I shall immediately plunge into a depression blacker than the one from which I was recently extricated. And there's nothing I can do about it. I am completely smitten. I tried to resist, but my neurology is far stronger than I. I shall be tired of her within a month, a year, a few weeks, and then I shall be back to where I started. I find myself falling into reveries in which I cannot stop thinking about her skin, her eyes, her hair, her voice, the way she eats, the way she fidgets with her anklet, or the innumerable things about her that I find alluring. I even find her flaws attractive, even dangerously so. Her imperfections are like smudges in a pointillist painting that have, by chance, converged to form an image equally as beautiful as the one intended by the painter. If I were a woman, I would be trapped in an abusive relationship from which I would be unable to escape. My longing too easily finds an object. Finally, I am constantly made acutely aware of my own intrinsic Puritanism, or, perhaps more accurately, my natural Gnosticism. My self-hatred emerges all too often at the times when it's least convenient. When I'm with her, I find myself wishing that I could remove myself from the situation as all but an intangible consciousness, or perhaps a thin strand of silk or an innocuous zephyr. I want to experience her without me. If she should rebuff my advances, if she should reject me outright, this would not change my feelings for her. It would be impossible to tarnish the images which she has allowed me to store in my memory. J'ai gardé sa forme et sa essence divine. Beauty is the only reason to live; beauty is the only reason to desire death. (Comment on this)
Monday, January 26th, 2004
12:08 am	When I was a child, I worried that I did not have a soul. My family, at the time, was involved in a frightening sort of Protestant Christian fundamentalism mixed with a mysticism cobbled together from old books, religious television programs, and the addled blatherings of our local preacher. Although my mother was and is an intelligent woman, her brain never factored much into her religious beliefs or decisions. I suspect that she was always afraid that her naturally analytical mind, given enough liberty to examine her newfound faith, would immediately dismiss it as foolish. The mystical aspect of our religion instilled in us a strong faith in so-called 'gifts of the spirit, e.g. glossolalia, healing, preternatural interpretation of languages and dreams, and prophecy. My mother and sister were able to slip quite naturally into the religious ecstasy necessary to mistake a meaningless production of monosyllabic gibberish for the words of God. I, however, was never able to delude myself in that way. My mind would start to seethe and roil when I would request that god grant me the gift that he had so benevolently bestowed upon my family. Yet when I would attempt to pass control over my tongue to that venerable deity, not a consecrate phoneme would sputter forth from my then-Christian lips. I could have blurted out a string of meaningless sounds, but I wanted a true spiritual connection. It took me years to understand that neither my sister nor my mother had ever experienced true communion with the god whom they professed to worship; They had merely mistaken an eagerness to experience spirituality coupled with an ability to produce random gibberish with a genuine mystical experience. When I was eight, nine, and ten, my inability speaks in tongues continued to trouble me. I believed that God was either neglecting to respond to my sincere entreaties because of some peculiar wickedness native to me, or because my faith was someone lacking. Nothing could convince me that I was not a preterite, a soul destined to remain apart from its creator. My teachers and the parishioners at our church thought that I would become a minister or a holy man of some sort because of my voluminous store of Biblical knowledge and my easy command of various Christian doctrines. I understood the history and the intellectual portions of the religion, but I had never experienced god in any meaningful way. Age and experience have shown me that none of the so-called 'believers' whom I used to admire so much had ever experienced god either. They either convinced themselves that they had felt his presence, or they continued to cling to their religious beliefs out of habit or fear. It's possible that the 'soul' is synonymous with self-deception. I've always been inept at self-delusion, and that may account for my early fears that I was somehow fundamentally inferior to other human beings. Or maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps other humans do possess a spiritual essence, a tie to the ethereal and the numinous that I seem to lack. Maybe I'm a marionette or a homunculus only capable of the lowest forms of thought and ratiocination, an animated husk. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, January 19th, 2004
1:16 am	I wish there were a course I could take that could show me how to live my life. My decisions are always poor, my knowledge is sketchy, and my interpersonal skills are non-existent. I'm completely inept at life. I've no clue how to proceed. When I was a little kid, my failures never proved bothersome to me. I always had an implicit belief in a higher power that would eventually provide me with the life events and epiphanies that, at the time, seemed endemic to the human experience--things such as the first kiss, the establishment of a proper goal, the parties, and the girlfriends. Upon reaching the age of twelve or so, I began to realize that my life was crap, and that I needed to effect change on my own, regardless of whatever higher power was guiding my actions. Unfortunately, my attempts to craft a life for myself were always unsuccessful. When I became ill with CFS at the age of thirteen, I assumed I would recover within a year. As the years passed without a change in my condition, I assumed a position of stasis. It took me five years to succumb to despair. Now that I'm finally convalescing, I'm finding myself exactly where I was almost eight years ago; I'm a man without a life, without a purpose, and without ties. I don't pity myself, and I don't expect pity; Most of this is my fault. I had no control over the duration of my illness, but I have had control over my attempts to contrive a meaningful existence for myself and to discover a raison d'etre. I have failed to do either. I'm incompetent at pretty much everything at which I've tried my hand. Sometimes I think acquiring a girlfriend might better my situation, but then I realize that trying to do so would only aggravate my problems. I have two paths open to me: a) an ascetic life dominated by the desire to rid myself of suffering or b) a sort of Epicurian hedonism. The problem with b is that I'm not terribly good at hedonism; There aren't enough things that give me pleasure, and I'm inept at procuring the few things that do. The problems with a are many and varied, not least of which is my suspicion of all religious beliefs that lead to a sort of entropic state. (2 Comments |Comment on this)