I have to get this out as I am haunted and bothered and I've tried 3 times with increasingly dumber words and given up before I managed to feel better.
Let's start nowhere. I was driving and thought again about how relieved I'd be upon death. My face relaxed. I got a little more chipper. “This,” whatever the fog of wasted time and effort that I exhibit while working, fighting back the head or back ache...”this” dreadful thought that as I get closer and closer to achieving one of my goals it will leave me as empty as anything has managed to in life...”this” absolutely engulfing deadness behind who I'm basically forcing myself to be when all I'd rather be doing is sleeping. “This” gets to be over one day!
I put it out there that I might recently start traveling and bullshitting with friends. Just throw it on the cards, come back and work it off. A pattern I could keep up for a spell, but it's not like I'd be taking them back with me to work on anything together. It was suggested to me recently that I needed a vacation. I think that idea is backwards. I need to feel like I matter again. That's been the missing piece in all of my efforts. I don't matter, but for the oft fondness someone might find for me in a scan of my facebook world.
That is, it has nothing to do with friends and getting a chance to get drunk with them. It has everything to do with my incredibly dark and empty feeling I never know how to direct into something that isn't some level of obscenity. When I want nothing else, all I want to do is argue and make jokes. That's my bottom. Unyielding darkness and emptiness, hardly even “depression” or “anxiety” at that point, and the first thing I want to do is lament that I'm not a student so I can't even count on a bullet coming my way soon enough.
The problem is that I've stopped believing in myself. Are my goals inching forward? I mean, I don't have rent anymore. That's a big deal. My job, while bullshit, I still manage to abuse for more money than the people out saving your kids and yet still for considerably less than I feel I'm worth. It's a problem that I'm barely even motivated by spite anymore. I'm pissing in the wind, and it leads me to decide last minute to keep ordering drinks until I'm asked to leave the bar for something I'm not even aware that I did. I both absolutely could give a shit who I managed to embarrass myself in front of as much as I think it's worthwhile to consider why I'd ever think that's even occasionally the thing I “want” to be doing. Drinking is still fun, sure, but alone? Ping ponging between tables because you're starved for someone new to talk to? Desperation driving decision making isn't decision making at all.
So am I going to double down and spend hundreds of dollars to try something similar with friends? Is it not more important to get the rest of the house completed? I don't even know. I don't know that I care. I just know that when I have to suffer through a hangover day or 2 and the idea of death brings a smile to my face, I need to rip out the sliver of insight that's not making its way to my conscious mind fast enough.
Let's start nowhere. I was driving and thought again about how relieved I'd be upon death. My face relaxed. I got a little more chipper. “This,” whatever the fog of wasted time and effort that I exhibit while working, fighting back the head or back ache...”this” dreadful thought that as I get closer and closer to achieving one of my goals it will leave me as empty as anything has managed to in life...”this” absolutely engulfing deadness behind who I'm basically forcing myself to be when all I'd rather be doing is sleeping. “This” gets to be over one day!
I put it out there that I might recently start traveling and bullshitting with friends. Just throw it on the cards, come back and work it off. A pattern I could keep up for a spell, but it's not like I'd be taking them back with me to work on anything together. It was suggested to me recently that I needed a vacation. I think that idea is backwards. I need to feel like I matter again. That's been the missing piece in all of my efforts. I don't matter, but for the oft fondness someone might find for me in a scan of my facebook world.
That is, it has nothing to do with friends and getting a chance to get drunk with them. It has everything to do with my incredibly dark and empty feeling I never know how to direct into something that isn't some level of obscenity. When I want nothing else, all I want to do is argue and make jokes. That's my bottom. Unyielding darkness and emptiness, hardly even “depression” or “anxiety” at that point, and the first thing I want to do is lament that I'm not a student so I can't even count on a bullet coming my way soon enough.
The problem is that I've stopped believing in myself. Are my goals inching forward? I mean, I don't have rent anymore. That's a big deal. My job, while bullshit, I still manage to abuse for more money than the people out saving your kids and yet still for considerably less than I feel I'm worth. It's a problem that I'm barely even motivated by spite anymore. I'm pissing in the wind, and it leads me to decide last minute to keep ordering drinks until I'm asked to leave the bar for something I'm not even aware that I did. I both absolutely could give a shit who I managed to embarrass myself in front of as much as I think it's worthwhile to consider why I'd ever think that's even occasionally the thing I “want” to be doing. Drinking is still fun, sure, but alone? Ping ponging between tables because you're starved for someone new to talk to? Desperation driving decision making isn't decision making at all.
So am I going to double down and spend hundreds of dollars to try something similar with friends? Is it not more important to get the rest of the house completed? I don't even know. I don't know that I care. I just know that when I have to suffer through a hangover day or 2 and the idea of death brings a smile to my face, I need to rip out the sliver of insight that's not making its way to my conscious mind fast enough.
I've been asked on several occasions at this point, by older people, why I don't have a girlfriend. I talk about the hours I work and they opine on some of the diatribes I've written regarding respect for time and effort. I'm a poster child, in their mind, for that young go-getter guy who's supposed to be setting some example for kids or doting over his girl. Leaving aside that my longest relationship was doomed to fail from the beginning and only lasted as long as it did because of a combination of her choice and financial considerations, I've never seen myself with anybody in my imagined future. I envisioned a more flamboyant “man of the world” type scenario. If I had the ability to create my own fun or distractions as I went along, I figured I'd get along well-enough.
At the same time, on the small scale, I can see that's a fucked up plan. “Broke,” I can manage to be a drunken asshole, hell, not even asshole, but certainly too much "[redacted" that at least pisses off one door man. I can spend waaaay too much that didn't even amount to a day's worth of effort. Imagine if I got thousands or more coming in with as pithy an attitude about how it might be spent. It's not my default mode of being to waste, to be sure, but I find drunk mind sober heart examples telling. Throwing money at drinks and food to escape my mind and essentially beg strangers to bother with me is not a good look, no matter how often I'm making you laugh or numbers my phone collects.
I had the thought too that I wonder if I'm scared of success. It's an old idea that I've never entertained seriously, but then, I've never really succeeded without so much failure it's always just felt like some form of inevitability. Like, I don't have rent, it's worth restating. That was always in the cards. You show up to work, you cook your own food, you live modestly, you can afford that in “no time.” I've been living the reality of no rent for a few days, but mostly I've had the feeling since I decided I could live in a tiny house after all. The things I can bother to bitch about morph in real time. Okay, so no rent, what's next on what will go wrong with my car? How many more surprises do I need before I get power? How many embattled conversations is it going to take before I feel the thousands spent on a website were really worth it?
I can come up with goals. I can keep applying myself to other business things. But, I don't want to be blindly chugging away at ideas simply because I've held them the longest. I want security, not an endless list of obligations. If I get security making candles, then I'll be a candle maker. If I prove to have a knack for growing my own food, we'll see where that takes me. My problems are now in terms of days. 4 more days of work, I've paid off my credit card, got a little nest egg, and could kinda do nothing for a month. 2 more days of work my “couch rent” is taken care of and I've paid for a day's labor from my guy. 6 days buys me a new truck engine. 2 takes care of my taxes, (talk about an oversight there, if I wanted to get fucked I could have just stuck with Turbo Tax.)
But what about day 50? Day 100? When I'm still alone, still begging Craigslist to find me a friend, after I've exhausted my weekends away, bought everything on my Amazon wish list, insured my existence in a way that almost begs for the unexpected fire so I can upgrade. New problems and things to achieve will always present themselves, but as these things have been presented to myself and I find no rush or vigor in achieving them, why should I believe the next things will? When I make some blanket statement about what I'll do or where I'll go, who cares? Oh, you've got the money to travel? Here's a stupid picture me in front of some fountain the proves I can take a plane.
The big hard goal is what I want done with the website. In order to reasonably spend the amount of money that will take, I'm still, say 14 days at least from a comfortable living situation. Even still, I'll figure something out, I'll pour months of my life into it, I'll present it to the idiot masses, and it won't really mean anything but to me and my ability to now argue more effectively. Still sounds fun, but who am I kidding? I don't know that I care to “change the world” anymore. Maybe I want an average looking bitch and retarded kid who cling to me out of mutual fear and desperation and we can all pretend together that “everyone old enough figures out this is what it's about eventually.” Let me be the fat happy-go-lucky movie-goer commenting on how every preview is in fact something I do or don't want to see. Let me get the kind of fat that has me making the jokes about greasing my high school gym doors at the 20 year reunion with all the confidence of someone who's given up years ago.
It's these damned hangover days, I'm telling you. They remind me that there is an inescapable blackness at the center of my being too, and so much of me has been sucked into it. I'm only reasonably afraid of death insofar as I'm not keen on pain. I’m only just so anxious about saying the wrong thing to a coworker at the bar or remembering what got me kicked out. I'm skipping enthusiastically along that border between chaos and order, and in working so much and losing all regard for nearly every social interaction, the chaos has been dying for an opportunity. At best, I feel like Buzz Lightyear. I'm falling with style into my future. It's probably not a style anyone else wants to wear. I'm certainly not flying.
