note: June 16th, 2011 — I left this unedited because I like to see how accurate/inaccurate I was typing laying in bed with my eyes closed
i:m writing this lying down in my bed with my eyes closed. Ipray that my alignment on the keyboard isn’t off, or else I’ll practically lose everything I’ve typed.
There are perfectly good reasons why I am laying down, typing to myself. I have to wake up in about 3 hours and drive another hour to schoolMy sleep disorder aside, I think I could sleep but I am restless. Actually, maybe restless is the wrong word, let’s say stirred. I am stirred. I’m laying down right now, wth my eyes closed and I know that my life, currently, is a crockpot of bs. I think the fact that I have known this for, well, who really knows how long is more of the point. I’m shut off, man.
It probably isn’t all my fault or intention, but I’ve completely withdrawn; from everything. I go on record as referring to this current point in my life as a minor tragedy. It is only minor because on the tragedy richter scale, my troubles register as a 1 or 2. With that said, I can’t deceive myself, or anyone else for that matter, anymore. This is about as significant as it gets, when considering the entire timeline of my life. I don’t know how manythings you could count as being’ right’ in the present. There are some huge ones, yes. My family, my faith (though it, admittedly, is a bit of a dry period, and I’m not too sure where I find myself fully there again), some close people. I have kivubgm carubg abd fully supporting parents. There is a girl who is absolutely devoted and crazy about me, I don’t understand why sometimes, though if I ever mention any such confusion or failure to understand, I find myself quickly receding and falling silent for fear of messing something up– as if I have some sort of elaborate smoke and mirrors illusion on the cosmic scale, yet I have no such control or cognizance as to how it works, so I just hide behind it as much as I can. I probably betray these people everyday. And the other few close ones left. I betray people because I am disconnected. That itself is the betrayal. There are small pcokets in time where I seem to phase back in, as if my body were on auto-pilot and the rest of me is on vacation, but here I am, popping into the helm and teasing. Here are my thoughts. Here are my hopes, my dreams, my concerns. Here is me glad-handing everyone a little bit,see, I’m fine, it is the same old me.
The hell it is.
Nostalgia is a trippy thing. It is probably one of the biggest cons we pull on ourselves. The contiinual lie we get high off of, just to make sure we are always lying about something. Though, I do believe there are a lot of true feelings to nostalgia, I think they just become amplified to the point that we can’t hear anything else but the notes that we so fondly remembers, Even the misery sounds good when played through the strings of nostalgia. But man, I don’t think I’ve been overwhelmed by nostalgia lately. There is a difference between nostalgia and between a lot of what I’ve been feeling and thinking lately. Nostalgia doesn’t make me feel like my current place in life is so wrong. I don’t want to sell this as something that is a new thing, though this is the most ‘wrong’ I think things have been, but I think it is also the point where I can’t help but step aside and see how far things habe been moving in this broken down vehicle.
I’m thinking just about everything is wrong right now. The convenient thing about being a student, is that we so easily get to break down our life into semesters. WE cut our years in half and we cut thoseh alves in half, and often times, those halves or halves of halves (yeah, quarters) carry a long with them much change. Given that our perception of time continually compresses and multiplies until moments and events feel as insignificant as sand and that we can so easily chart meaningful change in our lives, it is no surprise that sometimes life can feel like it is just rapidly changing and spiraling out og control from what you want it to be, or what you tought it was. See, what I thought my life was, yesterday, is already a distant memory of what life what was. That’s just not right.
I’ve pretty much been relegated to a hermetic state. Quantitatively, there is a lot on each side of the arguments, whether it has been voluntary or involuntary.
For instance, I am, as I already said, detached, far removed, isolated from much of society. I feel like the past few years has just been a slow process of elimination. A big game of musical chairs with my friends. Sometimes it was me, pulling the chair out from under them as the music stopped. The other half were cases where I feel like the one abandoned, but either ay, I looked through my contacts list in my phone today and just felt really sad. Where did everyone go? Where did I go? Why do we all forget about each other so easily? That’s not right,, man. Here is the true meat of my social life; mom, dad, Kara. That’s really about it, then you have your players in significant roels, but not starring scrren time, people like my sister, or Slinky, or anyone of the Josh’s that I know) for some reason you can always rely on a Josh, and you always make it a point to make sure they can count on you). I am not a major socialite, and I can get by just fine if left on my own, but at the same time, you can have everything else feeling like it has decayed, but if you ave good people to surround yourself with, life will still feel, well, lively. There is no liveliness here. I don’t have any big congregations of old friends to look forward to. I couldn’t pull anything that you could even dare associate the word ‘antics’ withl I’m mummified. I don’t have anything new on the influx. Half of the excitement of social interaction is on newe frontiers. Our lives change, so do our people. Instead, my life has changed, but my people haven’t, so the ones who were there just dopped off like flies. Then it is stagnant.
You know, if we lived in some sort of post-apocalyptic dystopian scenario, that’d be more than alright. I’d feel like a winner, I’d have everything I need. The problem is, society is still intact. A few hitches aside, in the United States, we all pretty much live the same lives we were born into. So when I enter society’s various realms, I’m surrounded by people who still have living lives. Ifwe were plants, I’d be feigning my bloom, my fruits would be nothing more than a plastic display, the soil beneath me is totally exhausted and as useless as stone. That is really hard to deal with when all the other plants around you still bloom in the spring, and produce ripe fruit each in accordance with the seasons. I’m stuck in a perpetual autumn and winter.
From this point, I can say a lot of things that will get me into some degree of trouble with just about anyone who may happen to read this, so, of course, I will. Sometimes I look back on how the past few years have played out and wonder about how things could be diffferent if ___. I won’t lie, sometimes I think that not only would I be better off, but my girlfriend, Kara woud be too if we had never dated. Let me quikcly say that I don’t actually think this, as a dominant thought, but let’s just allow ourselves to understand that thought is more like a democracy anyway, the idea that we aren’t allowed to think some sort of thought that is contrary to what we truly believe is all messed up. What is doubt? It is just a minority thought anyway. Of course, sometimes democracy’s vote sways, but that is not the case here, I am just saying, I’ve had the thought a couple of times. Really though, there is some plausabilitiy to this. For instance, sometimes I think to myself about Kara. I feel really bad about hiw her life has played out the past few years.. since I’ve been a major part of her life. When we first were getting to knw eachother, she had friends, a decent support group. Friends both male and woman-male. That was good for her, as it would be for ayone else. Now, that’s just simply and truly not the case. I am not sying she has no friends at all, but all of her ‘close’ friends aren’t there, nor have they been for a very long time. Sorry, I don’t just mean close friends, I mean close and immediate friends. IF you’re unable to play a mjor role in someone’s life on a weekly or daily basis, then you’re not really able to be an immediate friend, thiough you can be close. To be honest about this, it really really pisses me off. Why? I’l tell you straight up, I, with full conviction, believe all these so called friends just straight up abandoned the girl. What on earth kind of close friend does that? Ok, I admitted earlier that I’m guilty of such things, and have been since I can remember, I bet, but we are talking about all of them. This isn’t a new thing for her, either, yet this is someone who just isn’t deserrving of such a thing. On that same token, I wonder to myself, would this have ever happened if we had dated? I mean, as much as we all try, when you seriously date someone, or anything along those lines, it just becomes hard to allocat our time and energy to everyone. There isn’t enough time in a day. So on some end, I feel like I have ot have at least some significant blame for the initial distance forming between her and some of her close ones, until that turned into a chasm, Ury, iy id sll dyill dprvulsyibr, brvsudr yo br honrdy, I eill never know how things would be. This means blaming myself, partly, for a person ending up more alone than they likely have ever been is perfectly valid. Thus I can still say this to all of you who did partake in such abndonement, screw you. I’m bitter because people just move on so quickly and easily. And you wonder why I struggle so much with self-loathing? I make myself sick!
Repeating myself; things aren’t right. Here is how tomorrow is supposed to go. I’ll wake up at about 7:30 in the morning, I’ll drive probably an hour ecause of traffic up to school. I’ll park at the apartment complex I lived in last year and walk across the street, just as I used to do every morning for a year. I’ll fumble my feet, one in fron of the other until I drift into a classsroom. I’ll sit and pay attention. I’ll be mildly entertained from time to time by the professor, of whom I like, and take away small bits of inromation that my brain can nibble on. As soon as I leave the classroom, the amnesia process begins. Within 2 hours, at best, all of te crumbs are just matter lost in the infinite vastness of ever expanding space, until all that matter ever knows is blackness and nothingness. I’ll go to some sort of lecture so I can get a number credited to my student record, so that I can get enough of these numbers to further contribute to my graduation. Between that time I may go to Kara’s apartment and nap, or go play basketball at noon for about 40 minutes until I repeat that whole class routine. In and out of reality, injecting myself for intol small cracks of society, then just like that extacting and innoculating myself. That’s my day. A few blips on a radar scan and non-existant for the rest. Because beyond that, I don’t do much else that registers anywhere. I keep to myself. I spend time with my girlfriend, or maybe a small small amount with my parents, or to myself, with my internet. There ar e a few other timesI get to be a blip, they vary slightly, and small exceptions or minor players, such as a cat and dog that I spend much time interacting with, but outside of that, I pretty much told you everything you need to know about an entire life, all in half of a day.
The whole school part of it makes it all even more depressing. I treasure knowledge as much as any other man or woman who has at least a nominal value for wisdom would, but let’s look at education on a curved scale. The effects of my education, on the instituional level that e call school, has prety much maxed out. Not that it has, by any mean, just that if you did something like throw in a doctorate or something, I may end up much further with wahtever I’m studying than I am now, but the time, money,energy, thought and so on einvested into it doesn’t really justify the gain, because relatively speaking, it is very little. Most of my education comes from my own pursuits these days. I mean, I learn in school, and it is valuable stuff I learn, Lord knows I have a lot of completely useless knowledge I’ve chased down in my own time over the years, but we live in this world where we can soak up more knowledge than we can handle, and in more ways than ever. I don’t spend akk if my alone time learning, but I spend a lot of if learning, in some capacity. I study things that interest ,e to the point that they drive me. Just like we grow and experience phases that shadow the growthin our life, so do our interests change in this shadowing manner. Right now I am obsessed with the art of storytelling through film and audio visual mediums. Obsessed. I feel absolutely compelled to absorb as much as I can, as I find myself coninually shaping how I want to tell stories through such means. I can write and pour endless thought into all things related, but to ask me to give you a ouple of pages on some poem I read in Spanish, or to analyze the environment of an industry and how it would affect a certain company are just so tedious to me right now. I can do these things in my sleep, and I pretty much have been for a while. So the scary realization hits me. At some point, the ability to force myself to do such things is going to run out. It is a finite thing to be able to force yourself to perform adruous work in things that you have trouble stimulating your mind with.
I really try to not paint such a negative picture about school, because I don’t want it to seem useless. I have just had my fill of recycled thoughts and discussions on business this and industry that, and so on. There was a time I was obsessed with related things, for instance, the economic meltdown a few years back. I spent hours upon hours siphoning every piece of infromation out of what was exactly going on. The thing is, within the instituion, it is hard to get a real discussion going about the institution. I’ve pretty much met my limits in terms of trying to immerse myself in a languafe in order to learn it, while being in a country where the primary language is English. So I take all these Spanish classes, yet get worse and worse at Spanish because I can’t force myself into furrther immersion so that I can continue to get a hold on the langue. I’m tired of having tons of thoughts on things that I understand in Spanish, but everyone having half-ballsed discussions because we can’t really express our thoughts like we’d like. I can continue, but my point is just this; arduous.
Scary, you know? I’ve done this school thing for so long, 18 years without a break, and academia isn’t what I want to do with my life. To all the people with their PhD’s and Master’s degrees and so on, that is what was what they wanted on some level, so thyey were able to do it. More power to them. Intellecutally, there is no problem, in terms of desire, I’m scared that I’ve ran out, yet I am a few steps away from the finish line. Where is my motivation? It is lost. All of this stuff in my life is just suddenly missing; or so it seems. So what happens I have to turn myself into a liquid and inject myself into cracks and small holes here and there, then pull myself back out again. I have to pour myself into all sort of things except the glass that I want to be in or need to be in. I exhaust myself, I difffuse myself, I dissipate. From here, anxiety grows.
I’m filled with more anxiety than I ever have been. It is like looking at the national deficit 50 years ago to today, the quantities are that striking. I think when you look back on the past, I maybe outputted the same levels of anxiety, the anxiety farm always had similar crop yield, but I could spread it out all over. How many avenues do I have to sow my seed of anxiety now, when I myself and evaporated? Atomically, I am all over the place. I’ve drifted into the clouds, I’ve parted north, west, south and east. I’m in some other planet’s orbit, i’m in 60 different galxies at once and I’m only getting further away from the center. Do I want to go to school this morning? No. Do I want to continue pretending like I care the whole week? No. Do I want to continue hanging on by a thread, getting this graduation nonsense sorted out? No. Do I want to succumb toall that pressure and just tell myself i’m going to sit down and take a breather when I’m so close to the end? No. Do I want to risk never crossing that finish line? No. Do I want to step out of this buffer and truly put myself in a place where I have to assume the full responsibilities of a grown adult? No. Do I feel young at all anymore? No.
Do I think back on to memories of simple things, like going to football games at my high school each friday and feel like that never existed? Yes. Do I think back on to how the stupidest stuff in my life was so exciting, like going to school each morning or to class later on in hopes of seeing some girl I hardly know but thrilled because I can add more to my memory than just that time she was wearing whatever and what it felt like when I made her laugh and feel like there is nothing to look forward to… or at least that life is not a simple as it should be? Yes. Do I feel like a lot of people who have meant a lot to me have abandoned me? Yes. Do I feel like I have abandoned a lot of people who have meant a lot to me? Yes. Am I fed up with how, if you round up, everyone so willingly and ignorantly falls into the exact mold society dumps them into? Yes. Do I feel bad for the people who are still unfortunate to be stuck with me and my current state? Yes. Do I think I am a ghost, a poorly executed program of the person I once was? Yes. Do I sometimes feel like I am locked in to what my life currently is and where that means it must be going? Yes. Do I feel bad for feeling that? Yes. Do I think it is wrong? Yes. Do I think that I’m a long ways off from where I know I need to be? Yes. Do I think that in the future that all these tragic elements and more will be back to being ‘good’? Yes.
Do I think I can make it there with the current state of everything? I don’t know….
Do I think I’ll be able to wake up in 2 1/2 hours.. I don’t know that either. I’ll feel even worse than I do now if I don’t, though. School isn’t even just school at this point, it is my entire life, nearly all-ined over the course of 4-5 years, more of myself invested into it on all facets. We have so much pressure on ourselves in the things where there should be no pressure.
When I started writing this, my eyes were closed. For better or for worse, they’re open right now.
