[823] Crunchy Boi

Maybe I want to die.

I was in a car wreck tonight. According to the woman who I was involved in it with, I was coming around a corner fast. According to me, she was in the middle of the road. It was dark and it just rained. Who wins?

I'm not even tempted to admit fault. My instinct is marred by experience, and I work for the State. If what you say is 10% or 5% true, it's used to infer 100%. I lost a wheel to my car. She didn't have insurance. Does it mean anything? I don't think so. It's another bill. It's not even a “lesson.” We both probably already knew dark corners in the rain at the speed limit or otherwise can prove perilous. A deer in the day time that recently nicked my side mirror can attest to that.

I can't help but to think the worst. I feel like I'm perpetually daring life to get harder than it needs to be - to show its nasty face and stop pretending. I can't help but to believe that just as I “escape debt,” I find myself with a totaled car. It's like a cliché television episode. I can't help but to think that for every time I make a joke about dying on the highway, your god is up there saying, “I'll show you, you son of a bitch.” I feel like my task, having come into focus, to pay down or trade down for a car without debt has been “solved” in the most ridiculous and not-appropriate way depending on how the insurance plays out.

The major takeaway, mind you, is how I feel like I'm watching. I don't mean in some kind of traumatized or processing shock kind of way. I feel like I'm sort of carrying on and extremely calm when “real” happens. I'll find myself in a panic politely contemplating the direction of my life on a lunch break or pop a blood pressure machine when I feel on the verge of things being “too easy” in the money-making from drug studies. While I'm sliding after colliding down a country road? I feel, “of course.”

I'm always waiting for the other shoe to drop. I want to get the tragedy over with. I want to crack the joke, bust out the broom, and have the money stock-piled waiting to pay for the series of miscalculations and misdeeds. I fundamentally don't believe there's a reason or plan you don't create for yourself. The lady in the accident had Christian music blasting and commented, “It all happens for a reason, I can't see what it is right now, but you gotta believe that.” I told her that I tag that sentiment with, “It doesn't mean it's a good reason.”

I feel stuck. I feel like there's almost too many things to say, and absolutely nothing. Big and little disasters happen all the time, and they're indifferent. That's the point. I suppose I've been living amidst a series of small disasters that are totally fixable with a little forethought, responsibility, and accountability, and they don't get fixed. Why should I believe those “virtues” would save me for the “big” things? Why should I think, whether it's a car wreck or a conversation, anyone is going to learn or get the clue that life really is short and you should aspire to more than the piddling excuse we hold up for each other on the daily?

I don't matter but for the smallest of individuated circumstances. Car crashes put us in our place. A brief error or oversight erases your chance to do any more good or bad, and it doesn't even have to be your own. So drink and be merry? Use every tool you have to reach every end? Live in spite of the indifference by caring so gosh golly hard others feel inspired by you?

Another perverse angle I entertain is that I've self-sabotaged yet again. Get out of debt? No no, you can't handle the freedom, let's tack on $1000 deductible and keep you safe another two weeks. Part of me thinks the only way I feel I can “deserve” my station in life is if I get there through every possible kind of fuck up and strife so that I'm not tempted to revel in it too sweetly. How unbelievably fucked would that be if this were true? What if there was nothing that could be done to stop it?

Let's talk about the irony of maybe wanting to die. If I wanted it sincerely enough, I couldn't just get a gun and blow my head off. I couldn't even rely on our broadly safe cars and folly of drivers. I'd have to find a way to cut myself ten thousand times in physical and psychological ways. I'd have to feel like I earned my death as much as I've had to crawl and beg through the pain and frustration to get where I have so far. Maybe there's a war going on inside for how vicious each side of my life and death impulse will behave.

I don't want anyone to be scared, because I'm not. I am, and forever will, remain confused though.