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Adrenalin and rigid dedication to doing your best.  A million different aerial bacteria floating in confined spaces.  Eager children trying to trump their friends.  Want to be the best in class no matter the cost.  Proud parents.  Money changing hands like quick low fives all over the place.  When you're hungry its hard to ignore the smell from downstairs, even if it's the same old crap as before.  What the hell are they cooking down there?  Shoestring budget lunch dates with a friend.  Just a friend, man.  No matter how hard you press up against the glass it doesn't want to shatter.  Fixed ceiling canopy.  Thank you to sun baked family in palm tree paradise.  Thanks for the top up.  Not enough fuel and tiny overflow hoses dispersing the residue.  Warm inside the garage.  Foggy dampness clouding the insides of my mechanical chariot.  Chills at 6 in the morning.  Wake up call biting my feet as I twist into a warmer position.  Cloudy headaches without the sense of numbness from the night before.  What more can I do?  Try to pull back just in time.  Starting over again again.

Cold showers and disappointment on the internet.  Who's that girl?  Dirty talk and superior confidence.  Absolute domination in the 21st Century.  The bread is buttered on this side.  Maybe some of that was a bit too much, but my eyes can't turn the other cheek.  Boring and exciting at the same time.  Easy shot of ecstasy before the come down.

Jump in the snow and carve an angel with your wings.  Cool off in the shadows.  Rattle, rattle, rattle.  Snow tires.  Worn out steering wheel and rusty bottoms shifting like old metal bones.  Absorbing the shock of yet another failed clean slate.  There's always tomorrow.

my day

roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster roller coaster

'It's your day!' she said.

bulletproof

talk is cheap

As someone who obviously suffers from depression, anxiety and other self-defeating ailments, I find myself surprised that I am having a problem with this recent 'mental health awareness' trend that seems to be sweeping the nation.  To blanket all 'ill' feelings under the banner of mental illness, I think, is simply too broad and too restrictive a term.  I recently spent time with a friend who I suspect feels that I'm a lot more 'worse for wear' than I actually am.  His delicate attempts to broach the subject the other day while we watched a Basketball game left me feeling judged and slightly perturbed.  His analogy that people who don't feel like going out and avoid people are suffering from mental illness didn't sit well with me.  Maybe I'm just not a people person.  Maybe I enjoy my own company.  Sure, I do have bad days where the world seems like a black ball of horror...but have you looked outside recently?  Watch the news for a week and tell me that the world is a wonderful place and that I should 'get out more' and 'explore' all the wonders and smiling faces that await me.  This, coming from someone who ended each and every message over the course of 2-3 days with 'I hope we can hang soon' or 'look forward to hanging soon'...to the point where I felt obligated to see him.  I didn't drive 45 minutes in traffic to make myself feel better...I did it because he was the one literally crying out for someone to spend some time with him.  At first, I thought it was because we just hadn't hung out for a while...he missed talking sports, or going out on the balcony for a smoke...but when I got there, I was instantly regaled with the real reason why he was desperate for me to come over.  The girl he had been talking to and seeing the past couple of months hadn't called or texted him in a day and a half and he needed something, someone to distract him.  It wasn't about me...it was about him.  For him to then turn it around and attempt to probe me for some juicy bit of self loathing or 'feeling' felt forced and totally disingenuous.  It pissed me off.  Instantly he sensed my awkwardness and attempted to change the subject with a 'sorry to get all serious on you bro', but the damage had already been done.  

I feel like this is what's happening with the whole 'Let's talk' movement that has been front and center in the media the last little while.  It's as if the people wanting to start the dialogue have their own motives and reasons for wanting to 'break the silence', not for a second realizing that these things run deeper than simply having someone 'open up' about their damage and that that will somehow fix the problem.  And when I say the problem, I'm not talking about mental health...I'm talking about whatever big fucking cloud they themselves see off on the horizon over my head.  They don't know me.  The world bothers me.  People bother me.  Can that be fixed by talking about it.  Bullshit!

I found my corner to shout in.  I come here to vent, to attempt to articulate what I'm going through for my own benefit.  If it clicks with someone reading it, great.  But I don't do it to get a response from anyone other than myself.  I'm an intensely private person, and this is my way.  That may fly in the face of 'common wisdom' with regards to why people write blogs, or post things on facebook...but i truly, in my heart, do this to understand myself better.  To spit it all out on the virtual page and read it back to myself so that I may glean some insight as to why things bother me the way they do.  I don't post here so that others may attempt to 'help' me or offer their own insight, though sometimes their insight is insightful and is cause for me to look even more inward.  

No, I think this whole fad of talking about and attempting to define the troubles and problems people have is simply another half-hearted band-aid solution for those who desperately want to feel as if they are doing something to help others.  When I hear people talk about how helping others or giving their time to the less fortunate makes them 'feel good about themselves' it makes me feel like they're just doing it for their own selfish gratification.  Their lives are empty, or not complete, so they seek out sad people to cheer up to feel useful.  I am oversimplifying here, obviously, and there are people who genuinely want to help others...its just their thing...but they don't push their agenda.  They don't force it on the unwilling and uncomfortable.  To me, its the difference between an open door, and having someone outside that door trying to get people to come inside.  Why do you want me to come inside so bad?  What's in it for you?  So they'll continue to pay you to stand outside that door and shepherd more people to walk through that 'open' door so that you feel useful?  So YOU can go about your day without feeling sad and useless.  

Clearly I'm not a candidate for open dialogue.  Maybe I'm in denial.  Maybe talking to 'someone' would help...but if there's one thing I've had repeatedly made clear to me in my life, its that most people can't handle 'the truth'.  The real, ugly, in-your-face truth of the matter.  It instantly changes the relationship.  It instantly paints you with a brush you weren't intending.  No, I'd rather continue to rant into my corner and attempt to make sense of the echo over talk to some 'friend' who really is more interested in coming to grips with their own shit than mine.  The next time I hang out with this friend of mine, I know the inevitable conversation about the elephant in the room will occur...and that just colours the whole experience of hanging out with my friend.  I came over to watch a Basketball game and offer you a little company, and instead, I have a spotlight shone on me and my imagined faults, if ever so briefly.  Maybe this friend of mine who I've known for almost a decade and seen regularly was more a drinking buddy than a true friend?  He's the one who changed the dynamic weeks ago...and now I'm the one stuck attempting to find a way for things to 'stay the same' between us.  I'm the prick if I tell him he pushed too hard.  I'll be the one who's in denial...the one who doesn't want to face my problems...to talk to him about them.  Fuck that!  

You open a serious can of worms prying into other peoples lives...friend or no friend.  Does he seriously think I'm so far down that I'd kill myself?  That I'm a walking time bomb of misery waiting for the spark that sets me off.  Maybe I should just appreciate the gesture...the attempt...but all it did was make me feel like I was pitiful.  I can do that all by myself thankyouverymuch...I don't need my 'friends' to remind me when all I want to do is give the guy a few hours of my time to get him off my back about hanging out.

See what happens when I try and do the 'right' thing?  This is my life.  I'm fucking cursed.

thumbs

This whole sitting around stuff is getting mighty old.  I’m trying to stay stimulated now that I’m no longer slipping into self-induced numbness in the cold hours of the night.  I eat.  I double click the same dozen or so websites 20 times a day.  TV is a bore.  It’s too cold to go outside for any length of time…and I can’t seem to get my apartment just the right temperature to sit still.  And how the hell am I supposed to keep my back straight sitting in this stiff chair that hurts my knees as much as it hurts my ass?

I did manage to tap into my love of music, if ever so briefly.  Dancing around my apartment like I was 18 again was fun…until I jammed my ankle something fierce and spent the next day and a half hobbling around and unable to sustain pressure on my cars accelerator pedal.  My now years long passion for comic books is fading faster than my hairline, and I’m living off $5 a day.  Fun times.

My camera works again…only it’s now woefully obsolete.  In order to take any sort of clear picture I’ve got to maintain a rigid stiffness that I imagine a ballerina would have trouble holding.  If only I could just bring myself to jump back into Skyrim and lose myself in the life of my Wood Elf self.  Or re-start my NBA basketball career playing for the Utah Jazz.  I was the leading scorer averaging nearly 20 a game for Christ’s sake?  What’s wrong with me?  I know a good movie would make me feel better…yet I can’t bring myself to load a single disk.  And don’t get me started on the ‘young couple’ that just moved into our building and instantly turned it into a Kramer’s smokers lounge.

‘I’d like to be Superman, but you’re standing on my cape!’

I’m waiting for a call that seems less likely with each passing day.  Other options?  I’ve got them, but Jesus if I wasn’t psyching myself up for a real step forward.  Brain won’t turn off.  Sleep is an impossibility at this point.  Twisting, turning, staring-at-the-clock torture.  Even with clean sheets.  How did the Babe sleep at night?  Drunk off his ass with the lingering shadow of home runs dancing in his head.  Maybe I really do need to get a dog…even if it’d probably end up spending more to feed it than me.  Something, anything to get me thinking about something other than my pathetic self.  Fuck you green lines, I know what I’m saying!

Kids, kids everywhere…what the fuck?

Is this growing old?  I can’t imagine our parents were this sappy about their offspring.  I have more memories of spankings than hugs…yet my generation seems hell-bent on turning that around by turning our kids into mini–celebrities.  My kids cuter than yours.  Just wait.

Oh I’m so bitter.  Its disgusting, I know.  Its why I don’t have any friends.  I must just reek of unapologetic disdain.  No, that’s not true…I’m totally apologetic about it…I just can’t help but be honest.  And its that honesty that continues to pave the road ahead with tar and ice.  Watch your step Neil…the good intentions only lead to slip and falls.

And then there’s the girls.

Hell if I know what’s going on there.  Nuclear strikes one minute, blackouts the next.  Is she or isn’t she?  Was I really that abrupt and unpleasant?  Did I push so hard and pull away so fast it left her spinning like an off-balance top?  I suppose my subconscious isn’t surprised…but then, I’ve been trying to avoid his negativity during this rebuild.  Think positive.  Push out the bummers and embrace the what-if-it-all-goes-right.  Hilarious.  Is everything a joke?  Are we all just bitter comedians trying to come up with the stingiest one-liner?  The one that cuts so deep it opens up dialogue so pure it comes pouring out like lava?  Fuck the police!  Rambo on the California coast.  Shoot first, look closely later.  Talk out the side of your mouth as long as you can, cause nothing good comes from scraping away the hyperbole and lies.  Only fuels the critics and cynics and rotten hearts.  God, there are so many miserable people who only want to make everyone else miserable.  I don’t think I’m one of them…but then I look at what I’m doing here and I’ve got to believe my attempts at steam-of-consciousness honesty only serves to add more negativity to the cosmic debate.  A good night sleep sounds good right about now.  Fresh air and all that.  Warm bodies pressed against each other…hot breath…another heartbeat to distract the silent stare into the abyss.  Have another shovel’s worth.

I should have kept driving.

30 shuffle

Pyramid Song - Radiohead
Ahead by a Century - Tragically Hip
All Mine - Portishead
Missing Something - Beck
Stride - Hayden
I Don't Know - Beastie Boys
St. James Infirmary Blues - The White Stripes
Glimpse - Calexico
Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground - The White Stripes
It's All Right - Travelling Wilburys
A Conspiracy - The Black Crowes
Farewell Ride - Beck
Comfy In Nautica - Panda Bear
Starting Over - Hayden
A Doubt - John Frusciante
Old Fashioned Way - Hayden
Death Letter - The White Stripes
Wonderwall - Cat Power
Country Leaver - Dandy Warhols
Take Pills - Panda Bear
Very Ape - Nirvana
The Beatles - Daniel Johnston
Time Runs Out - John Frusciante
Whiskyclone, Hotel City 1997 - Beck
Dancing With Someone - Castanets
Pneumonia - Fog
Doin' Time - Sublime
Skinned - Blind Melon
I Got A Girl - Tripping Daisy
Lights Out - Sonic Youth

curiouser and curiouser

I wish I wasn't as angry as I am.  I wish I could sit still more often.  I wish I would let the movies take me away more often...like they used to.  I wish I could afford to keep it warmer in my apartment.  I wish I didn't peak through the blinds as often as I do.  I wish I had more faith.  I wish I didn't take things to heart like I do.  I wish I wasn't so Goddamn emotional.  I wish I cared about myself as much as I care about the people around me.  I wish I wasn't so desperate sometimes.  I wish I could stop hiding from the world.  I wish I was  stronger.  I wish I wasn't so envious of people I don't even know.  I wish I could fall asleep when I wanted to.  I wish I could believe that my parents are proud of the person I've become.  I wish I could accept their help without feeling so guilty.  I wish I learned how to play the guitar.  I wish I was a better friend to my friends.  I wish I had tried harder when I was younger.

I'm not such a bad person.  I just don't fit in.  Conversation makes me uncomfortable.  I don't like it when people are wrong.  I don't like it when people hate things.  And then I look in the mirror and wonder how I've made it this far beating myself up the way I have for as long as I have.  Nobody is perfect.  I know this.  But it doesn't take.  People are good at their core.  The world makes them nasty.  It makes them angry.  It makes them loud.  They just want to be heard.  Want to be a part.  To feel like they belong.  They don't mean to upset the silence.  The calm of the evening.

I need to remember this more.  I'm good.

smoke

My fire, drive and passion is missing.  It rises up everyone once in a while, filling me with an overflowing feeling of energy, but it doesn't last.  What to do?  Where do I focus what's left?  As much as I resist, I really do want to hop back on the treadmill and get moving in the right direction...whatever that is.  I'm bored of myself and my misery.  Its old and stale.  But I don't have a believable peak to reach for.  A summit to aspire to.  I draw a blank when I close my eyes tight and dream.

I'm lazy, but not in the traditional definition of the word.  Rusty gears and low on oil I am.  Stuck in the mud. Exhausted.  It all applies, but there's more.  There's something at my core that stops me.  Makes me think about it instead of just doing it.  And I always find a way to convince myself its not worth it.  Not worth the trouble.  Not worth the conflict.  Not worth the uncomfortable feeling of potential failure.  If I'm ever going to be successful...whatever that is...I need to overcome those feelings.  Push through them.  Climb over them.  Break them down and sweep them into the garbage.  I've been trying to, in my own way, for the past 15 years.  I can't remember what it feels like to be truly happy.  Full.  Content.

I blame myself.  And that's the worst part.

like?

I've got to stop turning up here when things aren't going so well.  I am completely and utterly at war with myself.  I am my own worst enemy.  I fear the worst, and then somehow subliminally will it to happen.  I won't get the job.  She's bored.  This spark of inspiration won't last.  My habits are so ingrown now, even if I do end up breaking them, I'll still reach for them like an amputee reaching for a lost limb.  I'm an misery addict.

Mania.

Rampaging thoughts and desires.  Pure and wide.  Then flat and dead.  Like a cold rock hitting the floor with a thud.  No bounce back.  Perched in my chair, I can't even bring myself to enjoy what I have.  Watch a movie, play a game, listen to some music.  What for?  Distraction?  Temporary.  Some days I just want to crawl into bed, hide under the covers, and fall asleep for a month.  But I can't.  My legs get twitchy and I've got to get up.  For money.

I'm paying my bills somehow.  I'm on the cusp of a new job, a new career.  But it feels both within reach, and out of reach.  I can't even be honest and up front.  I'm shrinking when I should be growing.  How is this happening again?  Haven't I learned anything?  This was always going to be the tough part.  The transition to something new.  Something else.  I'm over the past, but for some reason, I'm frozen.  Doubt.  Shame.  Pain.

The world is ugly and uninviting.  People shuffle around with their heads down and their minds on themselves.   Chivalry is a dead idea.  Honesty is a fault.  How anyone looks at the world that awaits us and thinks they should have kids is irresponsible and selfish.  Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.  If you're going to have kids, you better be willing to chip in and try and right the ship...not just for you and them, but for everyone.  Posting cutesy pictures on facebook is not chipping in.  Honestly, when did my generation fold and become our parents?  Did we really buy all that 'Greatest Generation' bullshit?  Job, house, wife, fence, pool, yard, 60" plasma?  Why?  What the fuck for?

Slaves.

I almost convinced myself its what I wanted too.  To be respectable.  To be responsible.  Lies.  Makes me want to puke.