Sometime earlier this week I had the epiphany that I had something very wrong with me. I had been feeling very moody and the movement of my emotions had become increadingly erratic. The realization I had a few days ago was that I had, in fact, gone mad.
Let me try to describe that.
Most of the time, you spend your time going about your business without a great deal of thought about the motivations and mechanics of it. You're getting coffee because it tastes good, or you want a little jolt. You snap at a stranger because they cut you off, or behaved rudely. Any of your actions can be scrutinized at a given point and more or less be found to have reasonable motivations, particularly in retrospect.
On occasion we all have had the experience of sudden awareness, a snapping awake, wherein we'd realize that we had no idea what we were doing. You go into a room to get something, only to realize you do not know why you are there. You try to use the wrong key for something, over and over, despite that it's not even close to the correct key. You put your radio next to the bathtub, plugged into the wall and are up to your neck in water before the hazard presents itself.
In each of these moments, you realize you are not aware of what you are doing and after the initial shake of the head, you backtrack to try and place the action in some sort of context that will comfort you through it's reasonable progression. Sometimes you can't, and you chalk it up to doing something dumb. More often you can, and you move on with the understanding that it likely won't happen again.
Now what if you can explain this coasting of action, such that you're not being dumb or thoughtless, but you find yourself 'snapping awake' a few times a day? No one notices but you, since your actions are by in large in line with what is expected, but you certainly notice. What if it happens dozens of times a day? Or a hundred times or more? At what point does one lose the ability to distinguish between conscious and unconscious action?
I hit that point. The point where I saw that my ability to mimic human behavior and response had reached an equilibrium with my ability to actually be human. I wouldn't even have noticed were it not for the increasingly uncontrollable mood swings of the past few months which have forced an awareness of to great what degree I rely on autopilot to avoid detection.
It was the moment I found myself asking why was I upset and I heard someone else answer, I knew I had lost it. This was only confirmed when I found myself not reeling from this realization but rather smoothly drifting away from it as it was automatically compensated for - by whom? Why? I breathed, relaxed, and went on with the day as if nothing had happened. For all I knew, nothing had.
Another drunken night, if potentially one of the last of this most recent sweep. After gnawing on a cold burrito and watching the latest insipid, TiVo'd, episode of The Real World, I passed out. It was probably 4AM.
My phone rings this morning. I wake up, my tongue Press-n-Sealed to the roof of my mouth, my head feeling like an inadequete container for pulsating tumors, and my insides from the chin down reporting in as fully pickled. I grab the phone, hoping it's her like always. A moment before I hit "Talk" and my hope is realized, I notice the time. It's 9AM.
She wants to wish me well, in response to a cell phone text message I had sent her last night. Disoriented, pleased, and harboring a creeping dread, I moaned. I asked where she was, somehow knowing it was unlike her to be up and about this early on a Saturday. She tells me she's in the city. I instantly reference all known possibilities of whom she would be staying with "in the city" and the pressure in room changes slightly.
I stumble about between mumbles, moans, and silence before I feel compelled to plow on. Who are you staying with? I asked. It's just some guy she works with. They're just talking. Y'know. Nothing more. Y'know. Because she needs time - I know. I know the exact shape those falling dominoes will form. In an instant that mimics forever, I feel my heart break.
The momentum is too much, though, and so the conversation continues. I ask about him. There's been some kissing. No big deal. Y'know. She finally gets to my fucking her friend and how that hurt her feelings. I think of 'dick in a bottle' and let it pass. I apologize and apologize. Unanticipated, she blurts out the conviction: I just want to be friends. There is no waver or qualm. I can hear the sound of the guy in the room with her.
Friends. We're going to be just friends. Just friends. We're friends. And I think of our friendship before I fell in love with her and before she stood by and watched, smiling. How close we were. How intimate. We would talk about anything, share our feelings and fears. We were comfortable with each other physically. We argued with heat but not malice. We were friends. Now, we are just friends.
She tells me that she can talk to this guy. She can talk to him like we used to talk. Like friends? I think to myself. She's going to something tonight with him, presumably like friends do. I force a laugh and make some impotent comments about how I understand what has happened and what is happening. I apologize for the pressures she had been under. I re-certify my pledge to be her friend *justfriend*, always.
There is one of those unmeasurable silences and suddenly hypersensitive I hear birds outside and the groan of the wood under my bed as I breathe. The peeling paint of the ceiling has the texture of mummified skin. The air is moist and tastes like dried wood. My room sharpens and what little color it contained bleached as I lay there.
She has to go. Take a shit. I hear the guy again. Should she call me (or do I need 'time')? I don't know. She's got to go. I don't want to say goodbye. But she's got *I don't want to* say goodbye. She's gotta go. She'll... talk to me later. Later? Bye. Bye.
What a tumultuous couple of months these past months have been. Filled with firey declarations of love and hissed vows of hatred, what an emotional world war. Friends made and friends destroyed. Plans carefully detailed, only upon construction to be found as plans for something unintended. Literally gut-wrenching experiences - with little hope for change in the future.
I've been forced twice to cauterize intensely intimate relationships. Two girls, both of whom managed to blind themselves to every warning, dodge all caution, and infiltrate to the last my almost inexhaustible barracade of patient compassion, now find themselves utterly exiled from my life. I wish them well - just not personally.
I've fallen in love twice. It's possible I merely revisited old sites where affection had been planted and found love a'bloom, but who's playing timetaker where love is involved? One in particular has proved to be substantially more formidable than I imagined, providing my fine readers with the joyful, almost ecstatic posts of this month.
I've found myself in the surprisingly rewarding position of helping others academically and hope to do more in the future. Teaching has always been one of the things I am worst at, mostly due to an uncharacteristic lack of patience, but apparently tutoring is its less retarded cousin as I've been complimented twice, unsolicited, in this regard. Score one for me. An aside: Do girls get "hot for tutor"? It just doesn't have the same ring to it.
This weekend I plan on going out and purchasing a new wardrobe for myself. I've settled in on my new hairstyle, a poorly managed 'spikey' type do, and my fashion template is sorely overdue for a revamping; Some would say it has never been vamped to begin with. This may be combined with some spontaneous driving lessons, which would make two activities this weekend fully out of character.
Oh yeah, that reminds me. For those who didn't know, I got my learner's permit a few weeks ago. It's possible I'll be able to drive in the near future. Whether or not you should be more or less afraid of my being on the road than I am, I'll leave for you to worry about as clearly my plate is full.
What else is there but aspiration? You see something beyond yourself - and instinctively reach for it. Who lives who lacks some ember of desire? Can one be alive without it? What is left when only you remain?
When the night closes over me, when I can feel time slow and the air is still, I embrace myself unwillingly. Enduring me. That which is forever until it is not. How insufferable. How could anyone endure the expanse of life with only themselves to offer comfort?
Instead I reach for you. You represent life. You represent choice. You represent a breath without which I cannot keep pace of my own. You aren't the yin to my yang. You aren't my other. You aren't that which gives life meaning.
You are me.
It's quiet. It's a very quiet night. I am a very quiet man tonight. When the night ends will this man's quiet be broken by noise, or by music?
It's Brooklyn, sometime in the early 90's. I'm living in a brownstone somewhere nondescript, aside from being a touch seedy. A group of my best friends are there, and we're all tripping. Acid, as usual. I brought my rock-solid boombox up to the roof, powered by a dangling extension cord. We went up there and plugged in what had to be the soundtrack to my life at the time, Beastie Boys "Check Your Head".
I don't know who started it, but we ended up dancing up there - banging on the roof with our feet and mouthing lyrics. It was raining. We went around in a circle and danced and shouted and lost ourselves in the falling water. Eventually, I must have passed out, because I woke up lying on the roof, utterly soaked.
My eyes opened and the first thing I noticed was that I was freezing. When you're tripping, sensations are amplified by quite a bit so I wasn't worried about catching cold or getting sick but I was confused about where I was and where my friends were. Lying there on the roof, I looked to my right and just under the Manhattan skyline I saw my boombox, still playing the CD - on loop.
For a moment I was happy to hear it. I released my worries about myself and my friends and just listened for a bit, allowing the rain to fall on my face and feeling my body shiver from the cold. After some time, a thought crept into my head. It went something like: water. Water. Rain. Radio. Electronics. Water. Electronics. Electricity. Water and electricity is ... dangerous.
I sat up and looked at my boombox. It was soaked. For a moment I was impressed with JVC technology and design, but then I looked at the deep puddle of water it was sitting in and noticed what else was in that puddle. I was lying in a puddle of water with an extension cord from the bathroom downstairs running into it.
Reaching over, I turned it off. I sat there for a while thinking about what an incredibly stupid, dangerous, and potentially lethal situation I was sitting in. Then, I got up and kicked the cord out. I picked up the box and went down the fire escape to seek out my friends and give them hell for being so careless.
As glad as I am of my fortune in surviving this event, and many others like it, I'm also unavoidably aware of how much I miss being in situations like that. Maybe it's the comfort of naivete I miss. Maybe it's the rush of death washing by me. Maybe it's how cleanly I embraced life. I don't know. I wasn't afraid then. Of anything.
Because it came up the other day, and I find it funny, I'm posting the definition of love from Ambrose Bierce's "The Devil's Dictionary". I urge you to peruse the other entries - humor doesn't get drier or more bleak.
LOVE, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder. This disease, like caries and many other ailments, is prevalent only among civilized races living under artificial conditions; barbarous nations breathing pure air and eating simple food enjoy immunity from its ravages. It is sometimes fatal, but more frequently to the physician than to the patient.
Distantly related, I discovered that "Perogative" is not officially a word in English. The correct word is "Prerogative" and the "pre" part is pronounced as in "printer". Who knew?
Apparently Ambrose did:
PREROGATIVE, n. A sovereign's right to do wrong.
Sometimes it's difficult to figure out where I end and my imagination begins. It's increasingly hard to avoid how my aspirations tend to taint my perceptions. I think I expect too much of people. There's no way for me to think of that without reflecting it on myself. My expectations for myself are ... perhaps inhuman.
Where I see dishonesty, I want truth. Where I feel injustice, I want righteous action. When I hear discord, I want harmony. To some extent this would be corny platitude, but it applies to myself first. I'm dishonest. I'm unfair. I'm chaotic. My efforts to accomodate or straight rectify these aspects of myself are matched only by my expectation of others to do the same.
The other day someone remarked on my drinking habits. Alcohol, of course. I responded, "I need something to help me sleep ... alone." as a joke. I'd be hard pressed to decide if I was joking or not. Realistically, I don't think there is a drinking problem, at least insofar as my physiology is concerned. Like most, I drink as an escape from relentless awareness.
Back when I was utterly involved in psychotropic drugs, I laughed at people who used alcohol. It made them numb. Stupid. Tired. Violent. I reveled in how aware and awake I was, and not even in comparison. Even in retrospect I'm not sure if I would have appreciated the irony of using alcohol to neutralize that very hyper-awareness.
If there were a synopsis of my adult life it would have to include a heartfelt description of my forced acceptance of things I was utterly against in my younger days. There are things that are better left unsaid. There are things better left unthought. Freedom is anything but free. One can too much - everything. I'm sure I would have laughed at who I am now, back then.
Nonetheless, the manifest reality of my existance bears the weight of my existential doubt. I'm here. I feel and touch and love and hurt. Hell, I write drunken poetry. I think about what my children will think of my blog. I imagine, what with the changes of the past decade, what I'll think of who I am now in ten years. I'm sure it will be just as astounded and condescending.
It's impossible to avoid the awareness of how lonely I am. Yet, it's equally impossible to avoid the pride I feel in existing despite it. Masochistic? Maybe. I've yet to be convinced it's possible to keep ones eyes open to as much truth as possible without bearing the weight of the horror it neccessarily carries. I wouldn't have it any other way.
Endlessly pondering my position, I reach
I reach out and with screaming effort try
Try to touch something else, otherwise me
Before the chime sounds and the time is up
There is no me, there is no us, there isn't
And silence rings my bell for a visit
Unannounced we tea with grim intent
Overwhelming me with me and me and me
Only an ear for the door, listening for you
To interrupt and relieve the monotony of
A chamber of intimate design fitted solely
For me