[732] I Hurt Myself Today

There's a character named Nick in the series “I'm Dying Up Here.” Nick is a junkie. Nick's been molested. Nick fucked the girlfriend of one of his friends. That last one though, the girlfriend fucked him back so don't yell at me #feminism. Nick was one of the first ones to make it to Carson, though he didn't get the couch. Nick's got some of the edgiest or brutal off-the-cuff commentary about the crowd or the various ways in which his life is going to shit at that moment. Nick couldn't stop himself in front of the police, nor a judge. Nick is under the spell of his demons.

Earlier today I watched “Bill Nye Saves the World” as well. One episode was about addiction. Addiction isn't just being genetically disposed to finding yourself robbed of the decision to engage in a specific substance. There's behavioral addiction. That's compulsive gamblers or binge eaters. Addiction is when you keep doing something not because it feels good, but to keep from feeling bad.

I've been consistent in saying I'm not addicted to things. The largest “compulsion” I've had towards any activity brings me back to youth and video games or the collecting and listing of things. I've speculated those habits arose from being treated like a juvenile delinquent in spite of my knowledge or effort and the resulting stress. That abusive frame of reference gave me my edge. I've justified or explained a torrent of my behavior in the context of being fucked with for too long too early. If I adopted #mommyissues to launch every blog for the last 14 years, it'd be safe to say we could all see the nature of my addiction.

What if the language of addiction can still be instructive? What if the form it can take is more subtle? I've never gone more than maybe a week without sugar, likely since I was a baby. What schedule of horribly grumpy moods and headaches might that withdrawal look like? I can, somehow, always talk myself out of the patience and calm of taking everything in stride and giving myself a little time to eat something or wake up before I damn my lamentable fate. What irrational animal got addicted to that kind of shitty behavior? I've made it to the gym 2 days in a row. What line of “reasoning” persuades a person who sleeps maybe 4 hours a night he doesn't have the time to go and figure out his shower routine? It must be close to the language that sends me to White Castle straight from the gym, you know, because change doesn't happen overnight or I need to control the terms of my pursuit of marginally better health.

I know I'm under a surfeit of spells. I was recently told a story about someone marveling over the wonders of my town. Did you know? You can walk the streets here without getting stabbed! This relayed by a plastered civil engineer who blames himself for the calamity of traffic during road construction. Little does he know my friends and I all carried knives walking around our home town too. It took me a year or so before I didn't feel like leaving mine at home was akin to leaving my wallet. 

What stops me from doing the right thing? What stops me from doing the right thing all of the time? Besides the immediate confusion about what may constitute “the right thing,” why do I ever, for even one second, give myself the room to not go to the gym, not prepare the meal (or look up the handful of easy and affordable recipes for variety), or not just do simple shit like buy binders and transparencies and build a literal highlighted back up of what I read and plan on doing in the future? Why do I waste moments on distractions? Or, why don't I have the right kind of disgust or aversion to that behavior built into my mind more rigidly?

These next few bits are either the excuses or the context. That degree of focus takes a huge amount of energy and has proven to alienate me. Ph.D focus in a C and D world puts you at odds with everyone all the time if you bother talking. Just like nobody is going to listen to you intensely rattle on about proper chemical names and neurophysiology, nobody gives a shit that your cause or concerns on the ground motivate you to do whatever the things it is that you're doing. Outside of academia, it doesn't hurt to behave “normally” and try to have friends.

Pursuing, ceaselessly, a measure of “perfection” regarding your behavior or being seems to lead to self-destruction. It's not “you” anymore doing things, it's the number you have to hit, the attention you can garner, or the soap box from which to preach. How much of my writing is me bitching about how people aren't as concerned about the same things I said I was? How unsympathetic I was if you couldn't find the time to read 5 articles totaling 50 pages a day. I understood colloquially, but I didn't get it. “Real-world” regular jobs are soul-sucking. The call of death is real. Investing in friends and family in real ways are as entirely capable of becoming addicted to too.

The last bit of context is the one place I think nobody who's under that pursuit of “good” “all the time” and “no excuses” ever wants to realize. Once you get what you want, it might feel good for a second, you don't want to pursue it or do it all the time any more, and the achieved goal has transformed into a perfect excuse. That seems about the best way to describe my mental position.

Why pursue connection or affection; I've already been the biggest whore AND dated a version of my ideal. Why practice, even poorly, one or dozen instruments every day; I've already made my fingers do what I wasn't able to even imagine AND gotten bored as shit listening to variations on those advanced themes. Why join a sports league or make new friends at work; I've already routinely managed to scare, piss off, or offend away around 2 friends a year AND can get a dozen phone numbers and several dozen more laughs any night of the week. Why get in shape; the car crash is coming just around the corner, I just know it. I stopped playing video games because I beat and perfected the ever-loving shit out of so many growing up. I think I might have generally stopped looking forward to things.

I framed my expectations in ways that were either easily thrown in my face or designed to meet a substandard absolution of those around me. What else is there to gain in that kind of environment? People are at the mercy of our objectively terrible times, don't keep in touch, don't come through on even their most piddling words, look at you exasperated, angry, and/or dejected about every “negative” thing you say which wholly override all you're attempting to do. So blame them in blogs they don't read and live to gripe another day. Forgive them their priorities and pathologies. What example is left to set that isn't an ego-driven mad lunge for faux-immortality? What example is left to be set?

There's plenty of hard bodies already out there to cream over. My concept of “being nice” isn't the gleaming lying assess of the masses people seem to prefer. To be sure, I still have 15 things I want to do on the land practically overnight, but now I have a better handle on the time and cash behind them. I can't run like I did with the coffee shop. I don't mean to suggest I didn't trip or didn't wish for places to pause and show caution. I mean blissfully ignorantly into the future predicated on a foundational belief in my capacity. I got tempered. Temperance feels like death.

Leave it to me to recklessly abandon my physically self-destructive job for a mentally degrading one where the people wear their addictions and excuses on their sleeves! Trapped and spiraling away from further obligations in order to stave off feeling truly bad. I can only imagine the withdrawal of missing out on my children. I can just peek back into one or ten blogs spiraling out about the loss of “friends” though, and bet you turn that shit up to 11 before nailing through your hand to affix the dial.

What I had in the past wasn't about me. I was feeling my dad's support, Wendy's, Hatsam's, the friends who helped unpack and decorate, the people who volunteered to hand out booze or Schroeder not expecting to get paid to DJ. My grandma used to insist I could be whatever I wanted to be and doing well in school wasn't just money, but accolades and protection. Hell, there's my addiction to over-achieving, I still think if I'm not bringing home at least As and Bs I'm unloved or going to get the shit beat out of me. Then, so wisely, I tied my habits and capacity to a “responsibility for the whole world” and remain stubbornly indignant I can't find anyone to help me save it. I'll tip my hat to Bill Nye and the scientists he features at the end of each episode. I'll return to my hole cheerleading the 1 in 5 “families” with a chance to go back to using and abusing without supervision.

And could I blame them? Doesn't addiction truly have a claim to fame in transcending boundaries? Well, I guess not racial boundaries, but for those not right up against being bred for hopelessness? Is the world still not in shock over Anthony Bourdain? Aren't there a million articles speculating about his motivations, his exhaustion, or his behavior? Aren't we all so ready to ball up our “favorite” celebrities as something we can understand in lieu of accepting our own moments of wanting to die? When the connection doesn't feel there. When the attempts go ignored or are unwelcome. When we're so caught up in one isolated epiphany that feels so true and clear it may as well be as compelling an awakening as any revelatory drug.

You die alone.

In your grief, in your fear, in your confusion, with your wild eyes staring back in every reflection, with every memory and regret and in spite of your last doubt, you die alone.

Maybe that's as real and alive as he's felt in years.