looking up the winners

The winners are the people that completed their degrees. I'm one of the losers. I looked up one of the winners today. She works in Denver. She does statistical modeling for some company called Corona. I'm sure she lives comfortably in the city with the purported best dating scene for 20-35 year-old singles. I wouldn't know much about dating scenes, although my last date was when I lived in that area. Muncie, Indiana was certainly not a place to find a lady or even to settle down. As I've noted before, a brown aura hung over that town. I'm still stained.

My aura is dead. It fizzled out. As I've said, I'm one of the losers, and I live eternally in the penumbra of my past failures. I cannot come to terms with my quitting, nor could I come to terms with my finishing either. I was in between. Now I barely get by, and it has its romantic or exciting moments. Mostly though I find myself cooking up deranged fantasies and living by them. I find reasons to remain alone. I find reasons to alienate my few friends. My cat moans endlessly, and I continue to ignore her. That's my life. I scribble into this little diario on occasion but have nothing truly life-changing to say. Here was my recent insight.

People laugh at my jokes for reasons unknown to me. I make the jokes for reasons that are known to me, but their appeal for others is unknown to me. I accept that they are a mystery to me and the in-between I bridge with a joke is a mystery. I'm giving up my jokes. I'm in a sour mood and I sorely want a life make-over. I want to get serious, get a job, and move the fuck out of this place. I don't care where I go. I just want to head somewhere else. I need to mix up my life, and acquiring a job would help me do so. I've used this excuse before. I told myself in November that I had some writing plans. I've written 0 sentences in completion of those plans. Six months in and I've nothing to show for this year--another wash in the sand, another fragmented kelp frond cast into the surf, pocked with cigarette filters, drowned in the echoes of last night's party. Why do I write? Why do I propose? I'm not going anywhere anytime soon. Even my half-sister's hopes for my employment have gone unanswered. Nothing. I haven't talked to her since she came into town and treated me to a brunch at Casa Gallardo. That was a pleasant moment. Now I stand here, no prospects, and a cryptic message that went unanswered. "My boss wants you to do something." Then I called her back on the wrong day and she never returned the call. I know what her boss wants me to do, get my shit out of her inbox.

I look up the winners because I'm not one of them. They're the context for my own sorry text, a tear drop serves as my period. A frown functions as a quotation. A moan fills in for the vowels and a sob for the consonants. I stand around wondering why every time that I get this way nobody wants to entertain it. They just tell me to suck it up and shut the fuck up. I want to stab a fucker in the heart for trying to tell me how to live my life. I live it how I please, and I've resigned to living alone because I refused to have any affinity with the dupes and the sleepwalking wounded that surround me. I'm not sleeping. I'm well awake and scared shitless like a mouse in a sticky trap.

I write myself in circles and seek out those who write what I wish I could do for myself. I sit down with any project and lose all interest in the doing. There's a measure of anxiety that accompanies the act of writing for an audience, be it a teacher or a panel of experts on a topic. I'm a phony. I'm a fake. I'm speaking into the air. Is there anyone there that understands my snowflake unique bullshit tripe of a message? I wished that girl in the audience did. Man, she was so beautiful to perceive. Her friend, a panel member, was a bit rough at the edges, and asked me the time. I guess that was her attempt at having me behold her. I beheld her mind. She was all rough otherwise, but like a busted up looking tin can, the contents remained glistening and nutritive. She had ideas, not botulism. She's gone now too. I'm certain that she has her PhD and either lives stateside or moved back to that country that her accent revealed as something Eastern European.

All things are 'no' things. They are overdetermined by their 'not this'-ness. I'm a 'no' thing to any other thing. Things are things. That's the only symmetry a thing shares with another, the logic of naming. The thing will always buffet any attempt for the word, the logos to shape it. All the logos and the thing can do in concert is to motivate my own attitudes concerning the thing, its moral character, its consequential nature.