utter disappointment

Today is one of those days when I'm utterly disappointed in my life. I recall that I once had a future. Now it seems that I only have a present. Dreaming of a possible and brighter future was my source of hope, my source of happiness, a container for my dreams.

I still dream of a brighter future. I am utterly disappointed with my current condition. I'm becoming increasingly selfish. I am becoming increasingly jealous. I want what I don't have and I'm willing anymore to destroy friendships in the pursuit of what I don't have. In the end, all I really want is some kind of affirming presence. Right now, it's a lot of me hamming for attention, and my god an I am an obnoxious prick in the pursuit of this.

I'm done making calls after a night of drunken debauchery and requesting forgiveness from others. I don't know if I need to apologize. I probably should see it that way. I grade crappy papers. I post crappy responses. My current occupation is so utterly unfulfilling that I dread returning after a few days away. Those days away I spend spinning in my heels, drinking, and trying to charm every girl with a pulse. I repeat myself. I think I anger people as well. Sometimes my regret at angering others shouldn't be entertained. Some people just aren't worth my concern. I need to extricate myself from social situations that I feel that I'm poisoning. I cannot stand that.

I tell myself that if I had a job that kept me employed full time, I'd be happy. No, I'd just be preoccupied. If I'm lucky I'd be too preoccupied to worry about my life. In the absence of continuous obligations and duties I worry. I worry that I may never find a mate. I worry that I may never find fulfilling work. I worry that anything I write will mean nothing. I worry that I'm in a situation where I don't have as much control as I want. I worry that I'm ruining others' impressions of me. I have tested these at least. I spin things over in my head, over and over and over and over. I'm living some kind of loop of remembrance, guilt, shame, sorrow, anger, jealousy, resentment, resignation. Right now, I'm depressed at the start of a new day and my obligations to work to some measurable standard of adequacy. I'm not feeling up to it. I dislike the work that I do right now. Sometimes I accept it and the freedom that I have. Not now, no, now I hate this work.

I am fearful that my feelings will get the best of me. I am fearful that I may eventually snap. I am fearful that I am killing myself in order to find some kind of happiness. I am uncertain that I will find any happiness that is long-lasting. I think I like some people, but when I pursue those people I am fearful of their otherness. I grow disgusted at silly things. Why should I judge? What gives me that right?

I'll keep plugging away. Mentality is an affliction. Reflection is the precursor to my own disgust. To know oneself outside of time, to regard oneself according to some standard, to some measure only leads me to measure myself short nearly every time. That's the source of my affliction. I'm so damn stuck in my head. I've made strides to extricate myself from that, but I'm beginning to feel that my attempts are all false. I'm beginning to snap under the weight of so much silly returning to the same issues.

I'm about ready to give up on this life, but this isn't a cry for help. This isn't a suicide. This is me killing my social life one friendship at a time. This is me realizing that my actions can and will have lasting consequences. This is me wishing that this network of thinking neurons around which my identity sparks would disappear. John Lennon mentioned LSD leading to ego destruction. I am unsure if I could achieve such a thing, but to me it sounds like a wonderful proposition. I try, I try, I try, but I have yet to achieve freedom from my own surly self-identity.

tempted by fate

Do you press on the threads of fate?

I am unsure what these are, but I recognize my quiet entrapment in incidental matters. It's an unavoidable consequence of our thinking as means of 'fixing' time, fastening it to a context, while the rest of the world continually challenges this assumption. Certainty is our mode of reasoning. That which is certain can be done again and again, neuroconsolidation. Repetitive behaviors. We become unstuck in time culture provides us with a will have had-ness, which adds a hermeneutic sheen to our relations. We see it and lose track of the reality fragment. We are driven by our genre commitments to our own hermeneutic sheen. I already know you is what culture provides. Do people actually act according to a presumed entity that they'd wish to represent them.

Communication challenges authenticity. It is our cultural condition; we can only pray for madness as a means of escaping it. Communication is the symptom of our universe. Culture has depth, wisdom. It is bigger than us. We concede to its given-ness; we embrace the oceanic sense of being there as being there, and marvel at how a word we use hides the meaning of the object that it describes. Strange really that we fool ourselves right at that crease where word and thing collide.

Because of its depth and complexity. Because of our situatedness within it that standpoint which provides us with a loading program for reality; we cannot escape it. What are its intentions? I can only suspect that it is an alien entity. The language is a false consciousness. It is more genre commitment than program for living freely. We concede to its rules. How real is it? I cannot fathom this question. I only believe that which repeats itself. Does our nervous matter require this form of stimulation?

Our sense of existence is epiphenomenal, merely incidental. It is the accomplishment of a reflexive circuit of motor neurons. The logic of three dimensional space. The logic of off and on circuits. The logic of amplitude modulation. These are the things which comprise thinking--the bare matter of existence. What's missing is a world, a world that these parts call home. A world that causes these parts to spin and whirl and spin off configurations that fix meaning in that world. Strange when you lay it out to its bare essence. Is that it?

That's it. And here's the rub. Our thinking mechanism requires it. It's nature dictates the background to our reality, and its formalities. Why do the old remember their youth? What makes early formed memories more resilient? I shouldn't ask these questions willy-nilly. This has been studied. I'm lost in the ether, regarding myself as a thing and as a such.

Strange that we don't trust the media through which we know the world. Is the medium really there? Communication is a symptom of cultural activity, its politics, its social organization, its way of being. We manifest these symptoms as we negotiate our self with the dictates of a group through which we realize much of our living. We work. We marry. We join clubs. We play sports. We visit family. We are of a group. Yet we are separate of the group. We identify with ourselves, and we identify with a group. That's the wrinkle, which causes the logic to come out broken, perchance to fool us into believing fate or believing in free will. It's broken and that's how realize the logic of existence.

Reflexivity

According to the AP story, "American economists in the buzz for Nobel:"

STOCKHOLM – Research into market behavior and the psychology of decision-making could be awarded the Nobel prize for economics on Monday and improve the weak U.S. representation among this year's Nobel laureates.

Betting agency Ladbrokes says American behavioral economists Richard Thaler at the University of Chicago and Robert Shiller of Yale University are the top bets for this year's award.

I like that their first source is a betting agency who reported which economists were their biggest bets. Nobel economists being chosen by a betting agency, and an economy run through boom and bust on bets. The economists probably also relied on fMRI studies of risk behavior to base their theories. A popular tool to study risk behavior is a 4-deck choice game where the participant needs to discover and chose from the winning deck--classic betting behavior. Reflexivity at its finest.

I am not a vampire.

I am not a vampire. I am a fool.

I talk your ear off.

I can't dance.

I am not that pretty.

I am afraid to express myself. I can only act.

My act has two parts. First I meet you. Then I expend your last shred of patience.

I violate my own stage. Watch out. I'll violate yours.

Vampires are undead.

You wish I was dead.

I am a vampire

I am a vampire.

I say this because I prey on people. I prey upon emotions. I look for that soft spot and I plunge in my fangs. I stare intensely at people. I try very hard to charm women on the dance floor. I touch them oh so lightly. And they all fight back. Their friends fight back. They call me names to try to discourage me. They point out and paint features of my body as grotesque. I roll with it. After all, I'm a vampire. Vampires don't have feelings for the hurting. I prowl all night long in search of fresh blood.

Blood in this case isn't that human connective tissue specialized for transporting oxygen and nutrients to various parts of the body. No. Blood in this case is experience. I slurp up experiences. Last night I met and danced briefly with a girl who lost her boyfriend/husband in a car accident. I touched her arm where she had been sewn up. The puncture points of the staples or thread and the long slit indicate that she was splayed open to have her bone fixed probably. Her friends were like pack wolves, simultaneously nipping at my heels and corralling her away from me. They were protecting her. I was the threat. That's why I'm the vampire. I swoop in with an intense stare and a pocket full of charm and try like hell to impress. It's a lot of fun being a vampire. There is so much pain in the world. It's like a drug when I milk it and feed on it.

The hungry feast on crumbs

Crumbs.

Portions of feelings.

Slivers of sentences.

A glance.

A foot touches mine.

A long hug.

A look and a smile.

A drunken kiss.

Crumbs of hope are how these are viewed. Crumbs of opportunity. I greedily gather them up, remember them, and cook them into something large enough to sustain me. My crumb castle, meticulously constructed from so many scraps of throw-away moments in the life of another. I feast on these.

A hungry person. A person who is alone. A person who is under-worked. A person with lots of self-flagellating free time. That's me. I greedily hold onto these crumbs and wish them into a reality that alienates me from the people who drop them, perhaps unwittingly, perhaps unconsciously. They're all I have in this crushingly lonely and empty place.

All I have are crumbs. I meticulously collect what positive remarks I receive, and arrange them like a series of comic books or baseball cards. How silly and veritably nonexistent these moments in my life are. An outsider may find this whole hobby unhealthy, blown out of proportion, pointless, potentially harmful.

These crumbs are all I have. I hunger for a touch, a look, a feeling, a word. I take what crumbling memories I have of these very things and form them into a convincing picture, a set of motives, a belief in something brighter. But like a religion, it's a matter of followership that legitimizes it. I follow my crumb formed beliefs alone. The person I worship doesn't exist as I've created her from the crumbs. Showing her my crumb cake alienates her. Clutching her hungry pushes her away. My hunger is a threat. My fantasies disturb. My desires go unanswered. My hunger continues. I place my crumb cake in the trash, but I cannot take myself to toss it out for good. That place is familiar. Those events are all too real. I want to believe the way I strung the crumbs together, but its my own coherent agenda. People rarely speak across time, asynchronously. I've created my Frankenstein out of these fleeting moments that confirm my own desires, my own affections, my own infatuations.

It's time to move on. It's time to move out. It's time to get out. It's time to redefine. It's time to quit curating the crumbs. They've damaged too much. They've brought me no tangible results. I have no victories. I have left overs, the tossed-aside products of what, I'm not sure. Perhaps I mistakenly read them as positive signs. It's all I could do. Forgetting them would be sacrificing too much.

They're just crumbs.

What to do, what to do

Sometimes your life presents opportunities to spread out, to switch gears, to move on, to leave town. I find myself at one of these points.

I killed my friendships. I actually succeeded this time. Make a pass at your friend's girlfriend. It worked for me. She still won't look at me. It's funny really. I don't know what to make of it all. I suggest that the feelings are more complex than merely 'creeped out' or 'suspicious.' I won't speculate. I'll just let it die like I wanted it to earlier this year.

Now that I've killed my friendship. I'll now seek out a new life, a life outside of this circle of friends. Can this be done? Why can't it be done? It's so bloody simple in this digital world to just change one's phone, move without the assistance of your friends, and simply 'disconnect.' So bloody simple.

I guess that's the problem. Friendship is needed from a psychosocial perspective. But the one thing that required companionship--raising kids, collecting food, building shelter--the labor-intensive conjunctive tasks that punctuated human settlement in the past, are all but taken care of by technologies and services.

I can rent a truck. I can hire a mover. I can sell off my items. I can do all of this myself. It's so damn easy. I can even move when they're not around. I can get everything moved to the frontroom, and move it into a rented truck at 9 am. I'd have the truck packed by the afternoon. Then I'd just ship out, drop the key in their slot, and be gone forever.

Forever is so subjective. Forever in this case would only last as long as our lives, that could be 30 years maybe 50. That's not really forever, and I really see no need in calling it forever.

This is what I've learned. Placing all your eggs in one basket creates a weakness. If all you care about are a couple of people, when those people don't invite you, don't call back, don't answer the phone, don't answer the door, ignore your voice, ignore your presence, then your world falls apart. This dissolution of reality may only be temporary, but it is a devastating consequence. It hurts. And given the nature of how you place all your stake in these close friends it artificially creates a crisis anytime this kind of activity occurs. The simpler you're ignored, the more it hurts. You don't exist. Alternately, a verbal assault, threats of violence, and arguing in general would substantiate the connections between you and these friends. I guess I wanted to see how real this friendship was. It was real. It is real. And I have a choice about whether or not I want to repair this friendship, if it's even broken.

I've apologized. I've spoken my mind. Hell, I shared my infatuations with my friend first. He may have been building a case to support his suspicions, and I helped to confirm those suspicions. That's all I have done. And now I have a choice to just walk away, every moment I stay away I confirm an absent answer to the current status of our friendship. Hell, for the first three weeks I pretended like I didn't know what I did, and I did not know what I did. Now that I do, my own suspicions about what I did were confirmed. That's all.

Strange how when you force a new meaning on a friendship it requires violence. Forcing meaning requires a violent force, be it symbolic or physical. In this case, touching a body was the physical violence. Saying that I 'want to make a connection' is the symbolic component. Looking at these from afar, they're pretty weak.

How weak can it be? It's in the absence of unambiguous meaning that we fill in with suspicions and anxieties. It's a fun exercise really. I find destroying or at least testing boundaries demonstrates how this process works. Funny that I find some activities a violation of my space, and my friends don't see this. Now that I repaid the favor in some way, they're the ones who are upset. It's a futile exercise if what is more important is the relationship.

There's no need to say goodbye. There's no need to even apologize any more. There's no need to address what occurred. There's no need to talk about it. I'd rather leave that moment in our collective past some kind of redacted document. Its contours can and should be remembered like a drunken party or a sedated surgery. An absent presence is felt but it cannot be remembered. I'll leave it at that.

Herein lies the rub. Yes, there is a wrinkle in my plan. I may run into these people. I could still be cordial. Why would I then keep them from knowing where I live? It's a strange situation. Yes, there's no need to leave them out of my life. I just need to move away. That's all I need to do, move away. So simple. I don't have to disconnect my phone or hide my address. I'll just leave, move out, reestablish myself in some other part of the city. That's a simple procedure. That's a simple exercise in getting some aspect of my life back. I'd rather not know my neighbors. I'd rather not know with whom I share my walls. At least I'd rather not care what goes on behind their walls and they the same for me.

"Your music was so loud." That's what my friend said when I went out with his girlfriend and she wanted to hang out in my apartment for a bit. I played some music and we shared a few beers. Normally, he says that my music doesn't bother him. Then it did. I suspect that he cannot trust me. I suspect that he cannot trust his girlfriend. Her ability to compartmentalize to cordon her behavior to select people should raise suspicion. She won't give him all of her. In one year they will have been common-law married. Eight years is all it takes. She knows this, and she's trying hard to break out of his orbit and do something with her life. I don't blame her. Surely, I did something to disrupt her own sense of where I stand in her orbit of relations. She won't look at me. Well she will, but she doesn't initiate an interaction with eye contact. She also won't tell me "no." Why can't she say "no?" It's a monosyllabic word that is probably one of the first words that I learned. Hell, we all learned this word probably first. "No" is such an important word. I touch her, and she can say "no." I make her feel uncomfortable, and she can say "no." If she wants me to not do something all she has to do is say "no." That's so bloody simple. I know "no." I respond to "no." I won't resent her "no." Yet she won't say "no." Hell, he won't say "no" either. "No" must cause discomfort. It's odd, yes. I made her feel uncomfortable.

Discomfort can be an odd sensation. I suggest that her discomfort stems from a reevaluation of our relationship. I may have shattered some of her trust. I wasn't the only one flirting. Damn it, I know this to be true. I crossed some line that never was mentioned. She trusted me. Perhaps she doesn't trust me anymore. That's fine. I'd rather be too complex to predict and control. That's my new joke. "Baby, I'm so complex that I'm confused."

I like booze damn it. I love booze. I can almost drink a full bottle of vodka. What kind of achievement is that? I guess part of it is a Chinasky aesthetic. Chinasky is Charles Bukowski's own persona in his novels. He boozes, writes, submits his work, occasionally makes money from his work, and shares his earnings via booze with his drinking friends. These friends are a motley crew of drunks. He of course has a rough-around-the-edges lady. Hell, I have no drinking friends. I drink and stare at a computer screen, cheer on movies, and play video games. I hardly write. I need to do that more. I need to diary less and create more. I suppose this is a fitting proxy for my writing. I'll grant it that. I do try to tailor this shit as best I can.

To summarize, all that I have done in wishing away my friends and their encroaching lives is to push back. I finally pushed too hard. I hardly think that I destroyed anything permanently, but now is a good time for me to make a strong decision. I win if I move out. They get more space. I get my sanity back at least temporarily. I'll probably go crazy once again. Paranoia and delusions are my nest material. I'll prick my finger on something sharp in my nest soon enough. Until then all I can do is make the first move.