I just wanna babble a bit. I was thinking about, I guess it’s a compulsion, to break stuff. I don’t mean good things or for the sake of it, but I like to shake what might otherwise be considered a foundation. You call me a good person, I want to speak a little more obscenely or dissuade you in some weird or creative fashion. You don’t like the word “retarded,” even if I haven’t used it in years, I’ll pick it back up like it’s literally been anchored off the tip of my tongue. It’s really rather annoying to try and put the propensity in its place.
“Extra” is a word that’s evolved for modern use. You’re so extra right now. Added discomfort or useless words used to bolster a point to nowhere and to no one’s benefit. That something so new could seemingly embody a good portion of where I feel I mentally exist is rather intriguing. There’s always room to find or change words to capture how to go about alienating yourself.
I was also thinking about how many families seem to immediately warm to me or present me significantly fewer problems than I hear for people generally. I get pissy assholes, but people seem hungry for normal or polite conversation that apparently DCS is in no way associated with. The moment you tell me explicitly it’s going to be a dramatic or crazy situation, I’m almost positive it’s going to be a throwaway day where everything gets signed and we’re shaking it out politely. I feel like a principle ballerina who’d rather be swimming than dancing. But you’re so good. But, just, nah.
I got mildly tipsy the other night. It led to a mild hangover today. Mildly drunk me is a place I said that I’d like to operate under for long periods of time. My aching body says provoking nonsense suicide ideation during a hangover is a terrible strategy. I also get ratcheted up and enthusiastic and whatever happens to be pressing on my mind I vomit out immediately. I manage to find deliberate and usually awesome phrasing, but the timing is always ridiculously wrong, middle of the night, or I’ve provoked myself to text someone I’ve got no business talking to and who’s wanted nothing to do with me.
I think the scary part in all of it is the “I don’t care” part. I’m at war with that feeling. The list of things I don’t care about seems to grow by the second. And it’s important to note, broad not caring isn’t the absence of care, it’s just an extremely narrow sense of what’s worthwhile. I don’t get to “just” not care though. I act. I impulse. I need to make sure that if and when I’m not caring, I can direct the energy away from too much consequence. That usually involves pointed focused instances of caring, to tie up loose ends or work perhaps, and then off to the coping mechanism abyss. I care about the image, at least.
I provoke harsher and sketchier fear consequences. I start to poke at things that matter. Thankfully, I don’t so much do it to people I like, but the second I do, I seem to recreate the world around that decision. Not so much for me, but for them. It’s as if they were at once so not invested in reading about how I operate, yet so dramatically invested in it that a betrayal of what they expect becomes the rally point for all future interactions. You could be close to someone your entire life, but the moment they kill your pet rabbit, that’s pretty much going to be the center of whatever remains of your dynamic. Pressing that metaphor further, even if you killed that rabbit barreling down the road with your ridiculous and hard-to-manage personality, they’ll act as though it was an intimate neck snapping as you stared it in the eye.
It’s interesting how much I allow myself to give the people I interact with the benefit of the doubt. One, I think I say this every day, I’m not the police. I didn’t sign up to punish, I’m a manager. As well, it’s not generally hard to see how and when people are lying to you when they do it several times a day about ridiculous things, but there’s nothing any of us can do about that. I, maybe not swallow, but take in “personal truths” about people’s relative responsibility to the circumstances of their lives, and caked or speckled with bullshit, I get why the story sounds the way it does. I need civility and compliance, and otherwise, I don’t really care how you talk about it until something you disclose triggers a child safety issue.
Changing up a bit. I don’t know if I super-fucked my sleep or my diet or what, but this week has been about as long as I’ve ever had of a week. I’m not waking up right. I’m not settling into drives. I’m not enjoying my morning coffee, shitting all at once, able to figure out the happy middle between raging hellfire sunlight and obnoxiously noisy and ill-pointing air conditioning. I was feeling a touch crazy at lunch and started conducting an imaginary meeting in an empty conference room. My mind needed significantly more to do than the minutes leading up that decision were providing. I went to the library and then Starbucks and sat down for some intro physics reading.
There’s this aching emotional child in me that pines for a kind of romance about my life and the people in it. It’s like a part of me who had one really good acid trip and then proceeds to advocate way too hard for the utility, nay, necessity that everyone does it too, even when the absurdity is laid bare immediately. What faculty is that? What purpose does that serve? How do you shut it off? Do I like when the people I relate to seem to be there and we enjoy each other’s company? Sure. Have I not, as close to literally as a basically functioning person can maintain, cordoned myself off in a cave because I can’t seem to manage the psychological load of “hope” or genuine belief in things continuing well-enough indefinitely? How many knives have I put in the words “friend” and “love” while remaining perfectly unmoved to dig up old language to replace the equal-sized holes they left in my heart?
I had a friend once tell me she missed the hangover. She expected whatever degree of shit she was going to feel, and like routine beating from an abusive husband, the kiss with a fist ends up better than none. If that doesn’t testify to the knots our brains can form, as if first-hand experience with battered wives couldn’t do it for you, I don’t know what is. It’s at extreme depths and on the thinnest of edges that we find meaning and inspiration, whether you provoke that place from jumping out of planes, or live the kind of interpersonally dramatic life you’ll never see on TV. I can write a pretty cool song or poem when I’m actually sad, not sitting around bored and angry wishing I were sad enough to provoke the creative impulse. Just like actual anger pushes me to behave in spite and actual tipsy emotional dams breaking mean you’re going to wake up to either a heart-warming or annoying chunk of text.
More and more I feel as though I’m watching myself. I’m deconstructing the expectations for myself I’ve ridden to this point. I’m a step removed from feeling the fallout of playing new friendship games or pressing on old wounds. I’m trying to step into a kind of time flow that allows me to pop back in when I’m only a few hundred in debt, some annoying bumps at work have smoothed over, and I’m finding myself much further along in a book or project than I was anticipating. I think it’s a new form of coping I’ve been practicing; transitioning away from clenched and re-awakening OCD-adjacent behavior. My mind might finally be attacking that fire that makes me so willing to be annoying until whatever’s done is done. I might adopt that solemn timber of the rebellious punk-rock rebel turned soccer dad. That could also just be my inner whore figuring new ways to play to the ladies in their 30s crowd. It’s unclear.
Much as with this blog, I’m toning down the volume on the question, “What do you want to do?” and just doing. I thought I’d be lucky to get a page when I stared, and I still don’t quite know what I’m trying to say. I’m just saying it. I’ll keep reacting to the responsibilities of my life as they present themselves, and I’ll flow right into choices to mock them with as the impulse beckons. I’ll keep writing like no one’s reading, or the ones that pretty much know what they’re in for. The ones I can’t “trigger.” The ones who, were I to ever get my shit together and have a place to plug them into, might be here by the afternoon.
I think I’m done now.
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