It’s funny, because with all my “friends” 350 miles away, and with Sarah usually about 20 feet away or more at all times, I am completely alone, and I don’t necessarily feel bad about it. I feel more alone right now than I have in the last three months. It’s not all bad, though, it just takes some acclimation to being all alone inside my own head. That, specifically, sucks right now. I don’t have anyone to talk to. Sarah is the person I talk to about my feelings, but my feelings are about Sarah, and now my feelings are about the fact that I can’t seem to talk about my feelings, or anything at all. There is no comfort here, no physical contact, no conversation.

I didn’t expect this. I know that in the last month “things have changed” but I didn’t expect to be a stranger in her house. Her bed isn’t big enough for the two of us, it’s a twin, and she’s in pain from her condition so it makes lying in certain positions difficult. (These happen to be all the positions that involve us touching each other. At all. Ever. Even the hugs make me feel like I am stealing something from her that she is not willing to give up.)

I slept on the couch in the living room last night, and I can’t say that I didn’t entirely feel like I ventured into her house as an unwelcome guest who’s been relegated to the opposite side of the house. I can’t say that I didn’t sob, briefly, tearlessly, after hours of reaffirming, repeatedly, the fact that we are not close to each other. It doesn’t make me much of a man, I guess, to admit to that, but I came here to be close to her, and I am anything but. As of right now I’m not even sure why I am here. It feels like I walked into the wrong house.

I don’t know what’s in her head. She says she’s just acting strange, which was a different answer than I expected (I expected: “i’m in pain,” which I can’t deny and comes laden with explanation) and leaves me wondering what she’s not telling me. I can think of a few reasons that she is acting the way she is and they are all ugly and painful and make me furrow my brow and fight the urge to cry, again, briefly, tearlessly. Instead I just smoke a cigarette and listen to Local H through my phone and try to be strong.

But, I am not strong. What am I supposed to do but feel defeated? I came here with a warning I didn’t heed. It’s my fault, really, and I don’t seem to have the strength or ability to fight it. What am I supposed to do? Force her to want to be close to me? How can I even do that? My skin is clear, my hair is awesome, I’m attractive and intelligent, I’m here… What else can I do?

I’m supposed to take her to meet some girl in one of her statistics class for the first time. I’m supposed to take her there and drop her off, then come back here and shower and, uh, twiddle my thumbs for a few hours? I don’t… whatever.

Looks like I am going to spend this week getting used to being completely alone (a benefit, if there ever was one, to driving 400 miles to spend time with a girl you love), reading through The Secret History (which is turning painful, laborious), maybe finishing that damn new design, and maybe at some point I will finally drive across the Golden Gate Bridge and see Golden Gate Park and all those things I’ll probably never have another chance to see.

This is life.
Fuck you all.

I’m a good man. It dawned on me last night. While it is difficult… Well, in short, I don’t know. I came to a realization about things. Vague vague vague.

I’m a good man, and I’m lucky. I’ve made mistakes, I’ve done bad things, but I am still forgiven. I’m lucky. I’m happy. Good days from now on.

and by we, i mean me, of course.

no capitalization in this journal post! punctuation is key but capitalization is Abaddon.

i get real foggy headed sometimes, but i don’t realize it until i come to hours later and wonder what exactly it was that i was thinking that made thinking ok.

because it didn’t get enough action in my twitter and i feel like it would make a small great part of some sort of youtube sketch:

BRAD: How is Arizona?

JASON (on the phone, from Arizona): I stole condoms and Hoodia.

BRAD: Wha-Why?

JASON: Well my mom only gave me $15, so I’m going to take the Hoodia so that I can surpress my appetite.

BRAD: That’s the road to addiction, my friend.

JASON: No, no, I’m just taking the hoodia so that I can buy more beer, you know.

BRAD: Awww, Jay, it’s almost cute.

i’m at home. i did some work for the boss man a day late. i don’t have anything else to do now, but listen to local h and think about all the things i don’t want to think about.

i’m a kierkegaard, i decided it well over a year ago, that i was cursed to a relationship free fate. too intolerable to love but it’s impossible to not long. here i am, a year later, probably about a year since i gave up my moratorium on relationships, only more certain than ever that i am in no way ready or capable to have a relationship with someone.

maybe i’m beating myself up. sarah and i got a long fine in person, after a few initial hiccups in our early meetings, perhaps beautifully even. all the mistakes and bad things happened while we were far away from each other. who’s to say that had we lived next door to each other, things might have been different? or maybe they wouldn’t have happened at all. i don’t know. who’s to say that i would have been able to maintain my decency for much past a week with her? i’m not a bad guy, so i don’t know what i would do, but familiarity breeds contempt, and proximity only increases the desire for solitude. who’s to say anything, anything at all.

last night i realized that i was a fool for trying to figure out whether the life that i live here is as bad as sarah makes it out to be, or whether sarah is as bad as she makes me feel about my life. i came away from the end of the night — with burnt hair and wounded feelings and no MEDICINE FOR MY DYSFUNCTION — reasonably certain that i was a fool for finally coming around to the conclusion that sarah is a twat for judging my life. no, no, she just judges it the same way i used to, but i’ve become so apathetic (as if stoned into submission) about my status that it doesn’t really matter.

people who don’t even think i’m a decent person compliment me, right. brad, you’re making a good go at making money without actually having a job (way better than anyone else we know who is jobless and subsists off their parents), and you bring people together, and you’re reasonable when it comes to situations that are not your own. so, then, hmm.

last night i had the distinct feeling that i understood what hell is. i mean, what it has to be, and it has to be last night sitting in front of the fire wordlessly with friend who set my hair on fire and friend who is occasionally contemptible (this swamp donkey he is banging out of desperation left him her only $10 for marijuana so that she wouldn’t spend it while she looked for another $10 so she could buy a sack, and he, without thinking or caring, decides that he can spend it on food if necessary and ’she ain’t going to say shit’ and i felt bad for helping get rid of her earlier when she was hanging around with no place else to go but home. poor fat ugly girl, but you’ll learn some day or you never will) and i felt a little like, yes, this is what will happen when i die: i will be sent to whittier, stuck at 23, stuck doing nothing but depersonalizing all day so i don’t have to wake up and realize i am floundering. sometimes you can’t get far enough away and all you can do is flounder. sometimes all you do is flounder.

by you, i mean me, of course.

This is why you don’t read people’s diaries. This is why you are never the first one to break the trust in a relationship. This is why, I guess, I thought I’d never try to get into a serious relationship again.

I keep reading about Sarah’s original opinions on me. I’ve been gradually working myself backward, apparently, through her personal opinion of me. It started with her Livejournal, which she conveniently left up on the screen at her father’s house, where I read that she lied to me about this guy from the internet that she was briefly dating. (She told me he liked her, but she didn’t like him, and she told him they would have to be just friends. Turned out the truth was the opposite, she liked him but he didn’t like her, and he told her they’d have to be ‘just friends’.) That same day I also read something about me being physically unattractive, but small beans to knowing that you were being lied to all along, and that you probably would have been completely ditched if it hasn’t been for some guy deciding your girl isn’t hot enough for him.

Then, I guess it was a more recent occurrence, within her emails to yet another guy from the internet that she was dating (although this batch of truth actually contained some truth about her feelings for this douchy-bastard, who she continues to defend to me as if I give a shit) with admittance that she still doesn’t really have feelings for me and that her plans for me are anything but long-term and after I come up fro the weekend and spend a ton of money on her, she probably won’t see me but once after. Comforting, it was!

And last night, I finally got so bored I rifled through a file I hadn’t even glimpsed at before and found a description of our first meeting, full of graphic detail, but the most graphic of all was her frank description of how hideous I am, which has always been a recurring theme in her personal writing (if you read her diary, you’d assume I am this disfigured guy who, on top of being ugly, is also an awful person who slaughters babies and drinks the blood of virgins, all within the first hour of the day) but has never been this extreme.

I guess reading it backwards has kind of harmed the delivery a little: in theory, if you read it forward, I actually get less ugly to her as time goes on. Upside, right? However she doesn’t ever seem to be using me less, as time goes on, which is also troubling.

She’s the victim, in this, obviously. She’s really good at getting upset about invasions into her privacy, although she is the one who routinely logs into my OKCupid (and probably other?) accounts to check up on me after she got burned once (twice!) but my third offense of this kind is too much. Apparently she is not speaking to me, for a spell, or maybe ever, I don’t know.

What baffles me is this: this is my personal journal. The words here are the truth, or at least as much of the truth as I can present. I do, however, write for an ‘audience’, and I do, although I try not to, paint myself in a sympathetic light. For the most part I think I am honest, and usually it’s to the detriment of my character. I am, as I’ve told people before, not a sympathetic character.

I don’t have a private journal. There isn’t truth hidden here that is revealed elsewhere. Everyone knows everything or no one knows anything. That’s just how it is. There is no secret dimension where I am spewing hatred on Sarah, much less for such superficial reasons. (I wish I could call her ugly, but I can’t. There isn’t an ugly part on her, to me. I am recognizing, however slowly, that all her ugliness is internal.)

I was insecure, after having seen so much ugliness written about me and lies about another man, so I intruded into her email. I read the stuff she had archived there. How could I not? How does one, when faced with the option of truth, choose instead to be ignorant? I tried, I really tried. I fought myself. I thought: Brad, you’re better than this, and besides, you don’t want to find anything upsetting, it would just, uh, upset you, so stay out.

I am, sometimes, a confident person. Then, other times, like this, I am anything but.

I’ve never had a girl call me ugly so much. I don’t think I’ve ever actually had a girl call me ugly. I worry about being ugly all the time, how can I not? I look like an alien. But, regardless, I’ve never been called ugly except as a joke from a near-friend, and people have insinuated things, but it’s never been said outright. It’s shocking, then, to see the writing of someone who says she loves you — although I will be fair and say that she didn’t say it back then — describe how hideous (her word! I have to keep using it because it brings me such joy) I am on our first ‘date’, and then later, how hideous I am while I am hovering above her and we’re fucking for the first time. Our first moments of intimacy, in which I was too distracted by how wonderful she was, were blistered and scarred in her writing by, well, me. I was the ugliness in a night of drinking, pot smoking, awkward groping, and eventual penetration at 4 in the morning. That was me. The ugly guy.

It’s so bad now that I even have to call into question my exgirlfriends. Did they think I was ugly all along, too? Did they just never say it? Has everyone always found me ugly? I was reasonably certain there were women out there who find me attractive, immediately, but perhaps not. Maybe I really am hideous and it’s some sort of charm or charisma or (what? I have these things?) I don’t know, that wins women over. I don’t know.

It’s obviously not my insecurity or my lack of trust. My troubles with fidelity. My stupidity and ignorance. My inability to not drum up shit written six months ago in secret. These things are never going to get better.

I remember telling Becca, or someone, some friends maybe, that Sarah was probably going to be the first completely normal and decent person I’ve ever dated. I was certain that somewhere in her kindness and truth I would finally find the woman who would show me that all women aren’t cheating, lying whores. That women aren’t just out to suck you dry and use you up (like a milkshake) and leave you for dead and move onto the next guy. That women are good for something more than just casual sex and passing lonely nights where the lack of emotional connection in your life has gotten you down, finally, after months upon months of solitude. I thought Sarah would restore my faith in women.

And then I find out that the entire early stages (and even up to recently, supposedly, according to her word to others, which she denies to me) of our relationship happened only because her boredom and loneliness surmounted how ugly she thought I was. In spite of my ugliness, she still used me! And here we are, together now, months later.

And I still don’t have any self-respect. I’ll still feel bad, Sarah’s victim posturing over the breach of privacy is something that makes me feel guilty. She’s not me: I post my life on the internet, no thought in my head is entirely secret, ever, and here was a girl who thought she had some private sector of her life and mind that no one could reach. And I touched it. I wish I hadn’t. The shock to her is, I think, easily as bad as the shock to me.

Now we’re just spitting at each other in email. She’s saying she doesn’t want to talk to me anymore, but hopes she’ll feel better in a few days, and then continues to rant at me that I keep lying and she keeps believing me and she doesn’t know why. I point out that I don’t really know why she is calling me a liar, considering I came right out (after minor prodding) and said, “I read your journal and I’m curious if I’m still fucking hideous.” In fact, I haven’t lied about anything since March. (Big man! since March! does it hurt, Brad?)

Privacy violation doesn’t make me a liar. It makes me scummy, whatever, but it doesn’t make me the devil. I’ve run this relationship from the start, I pushed us through all the, apparent, secret writings about how undesirable I am. I paid for all the visits and the meetings (although dinner on the last one was picked up by her). I deserve the fucking truth right? I could have saved so much money had she just told me, back in September, sitting in my car for the first time, that she thought I was ugly. Even before that, if she had told me that she thought the life I live and the things I do are morally reprehensible and she couldn’t imagine herself with someone like me.

These things will never change. I guess she can look past my ugliness, apparently she does, supposedly she finds me attractive now, but that is not something I can understand, only try to believe. If I had ever thought she was ugly or undesirable, none of this would have happened, and that’s my one great sadness.

I feel like none of this should have happened. Had I read her private writing at the onset of our relationship, I would have walked away. I would have known, then and there, that this girl had no interest in me and I was just getting played. This has all been borrowed time and now, Jesus, now I feel trapped.

I lived two and a half months with a dark cloud over me, because she dumped me and I didn’t think I’d see her again. Since then I’ve seen her once and the experience was so honestly fulfilling and wonderful that I can’t imagine not seeing her again. I want to feel what I feel with her all the time. I want to hold onto that. A big part of me, the part with no self-respect, doesn’t give a shit that it was all built on lies and half-truths. Who cares if she was using me and thought I was ugly? It’s not possible now, right? She can’t possibly still be using me, right? I mean, why would she? What is there to gain?

To get melodramatic, finally:

1.) I don’t really know how I am supposed to love after this. Sarah has shown me a side of love I didn’t think existed. One where the sex means something (this is a first) (although I feel a little like I am de-personalizing sex for Sarah, quite the opposite) and being close to someone is actually a joyous moment instead of one filled with uncertainty and doubt. She showed me love all wild and overgrown, a love I would do anything for, a love so good I was pretty certain it wasn’t real. I can’t really imagine finding this again, being that I never found it before, and I didn’t even go out looking for it, so how am I supposed to know how to find it?

2.) I thought Trista fucked me up really bad. I thought catching Trista in bed with that guy not even an hour after she uttered that she loved me and would never hurt me on the phone was going to be the high point of suffering for me. I don’t want to say, outright anyway, that Sarah’s transgressions here have fucked me up far worse than Trista ever did, but, man. I can already feel it. I know that I will treat every woman who comes around after Sarah with a continual eye of uncertainty. I’m always going to wonder, now, if this woman smiling before me is actually thinking: “So, do I fuck him? I mean, he’s so ugly, but, man, I am so bored, and I haven’t slept with someone in a year or so, so, I mean, I guess, sure, why not. Maybe I’ll write in my diary later about how ugly he is, that’ll make me feel better about it, I think.”

How am I supposed to date like that? Where do I go after that? It’s bad enough wondering if your lady is cheating on you all the time, but worrying if she secretly thinks you’re an ugly bastard who she would probably spit on if she passed you on the street? Where do you go from here?

Whatever. I have no self-respect. I love her. It’s all the same story.

This is still not a love song. Still waiting.

Happiness writes white is the theme of the week here.

I finally became really discouraged about Sarah and I, and finally condescended and admitted to her that she’s totally right, we’re totally lost, and there’s nothing to fight for. I gave up, finally, after one final flurry of declarations of undying love and other really unflattering emails. And Twitters. And discussions with my friends. (Not many of those, though, really.)

So, of course, I’m going up to San Jose this weekend. I guess my acceptance of failure was all it took to get Sarah to realize she made a big mistake in dumping me, or something. I don’t know. I’m not in my right mind, so I may be distorting facts or timelines or the entire truth. Anything is possible, right now. Earlier, I was flying. It was cool.

The point is, there aren’t a lot of words when all is well. It’s a sad fact, but things are going alright:

1.) I got through all 15 units this semester. This is pretty impressive considering the three years prior to it I never completed more than 6 units a class. Depending on a grade that needs to come in, my GPA for the 15 units was 3.25-3.5. Not sure which yet. Not perfect, but not bad either. I think it raised my cumulative GPA a lot, too, but I haven’t checked yet. Too bad school is like the thing I give the least of a shit about.

2.) I got accepted to be a ChaCha SMS Guide, way quicker than their application said I would, and I’ve “made” a bit over $20 since then. It’s not real work. I mean, it is, and sometimes it’s tricky, but you’re not making a steady hourly wage by any means, unless you’re a search God, and then who really wants to sit there for more than an hour or two answering questions? I don’t know. It’s alright. I’m going to make at least $100 before I decide I don’t wanna keep at it. There are benefits to being a ChaCha guide, one is that I sat in front of my computer in my boxers with fans blowing on me when it was 104 degrees outside (and I don’t have air conditioning) and I made, like, $12. I didn’t even have to get drug tested. Or interviewed. Or dressed.

3.) There are other things that are awesome, too. I’ve done some more work for Matt, so he’s paying me. I got him to trade my $106 GameStop card for cash, too, so that’s nice.

4.) I GET TO SEE SARAH IN, LIKE, TWO DAYS, HOLY SHIT!!!!!!!!! There are many reasons this is awesome. They mostly all involve warm bodies and hotel beds. And sleep. Lots and lots of sleep.

5.) I have six weeks off from school, giving myself a break, and I’m actually really enjoying myself, and not to self-destructive extents or anything. Relationships with people seem fairly healthy and balanced (moderation in all things!) and I don’t ever feel terribly lonely or empty. I miss Sarah, but I will always miss Sarah and I’m used to that. I’m just glad to, you know — cheese, have her.

So if you wonder why I’m not Twittering, it’s because I’m scrambling trying to get shit ready for San Jose, and I’m just, you know, happy.

My night really began with half an hour of being derided and chastised for a wide variety of things, from my hair, to my general demeanor, to what I idly do with my hands when my head is empty. It was mostly amusing, really, in a sort of smug kind of way. Then it got kind of shocking, when I said something with complete sincerity and it was the wrong thing — and really, who’s to know that saying, “So, is your dad still kickin’?” would be the faux pas to break the Camel. And no, there is no dead father in this tale, just someone who is apparently deeply offended by certain wordings of typical “so, how’s life?” small talk questions. Or, I’m just a idiot. This, I’m beginning to realize, is certainly a possibility.

I’ve always been concerned that I was slightly more inept at social situations than I was aware. Then I started spending a lot of time with people and I’ve caught myself saying things like, “You know, in the last year I’ve really learned a lot of things about how to function socially within intricate groups of friends,” since then. I believed this, but now I’m not so sure. Ever since I’ve become more social within the realm of reality, I’ve…

This is boring.

I think I’m getting worse at cultivating and maintaining decent relationships with people. For a while I just thought, you know what, these are my friends and they are this way and hey, that’s whatever, I’m fucked up, too. For a long while I thought that. Now I wonder if I am the problem, too. I know I’m not the only problem, so I’m not worried about that. I know the people in my life are all crazy in their own ways and we’re all fucked up and quirky and maybe everyone is that way, I don’t know. But maybe I’m fucked up, too.

I think I am.

I’m not sure what it is… maybe it’s a few things. But, back to my night.

Then nothing happened. I called about ten people. The first eight didn’t answer the phone and haven’t returned my calls. I even drove to common hang-out locations trying to locate people randomly, but no one was around. Even Andrew, who almost invariably calls me randomly or answers the phone — and even told me to call him later, didn’t answer the phone. I hung out with Becca’s brother. Then, later on, Becca. Then I went home. Now I’m sitting here. The end!

I spent, I think, a good two years utterly convinced there was a God and a Jesus and all that in an attempt to justify all the horrid shit I felt was happening to me. Something about catching your woman in bed with another dude just has this weird power of putting Jesus inside you? I heard a rumor once. I don’t know. But, I got The Jesus. It’d been hanging around a bit, thanks to Philip K. Dick and Gnosticism and my own curiosity about my Quaker heritage or whatever, but then one day I just got The Jesus.

The Jesus was my justification for bullshit. The Jesus is why I got into a fight with someone today. The Jesus is why some asshole ripped me off for $100. The Jesus is why I did not get laid, etc. The Jesus was a good scapegoat, and in many ways I am thankful that I had The Jesus in my life for a spell.

But I think I am over The Jesus. There is no justification or reason for anything that happens. There are no scales that balance out. No karma, not that The Jesus comes with Karma, The Karma is something separate that acutely affects certain individuals. I’m not saying that people don’t deserve shit, on occasion, but I’ve seen plenty of assholes and cunts who still live charmed lives despite the assholes and cunts they are.

I deserve, for some reason, the things that happen to me. I say “for some reason” mainly to subtly display that I’m still not sure about positively declaring that I deserve everything that happens to me. I’m open to the idea, but I know if I think really deeply about it I’ll begin to feel really fucking gypped and then I’ll get all pissed off but since The Jesus has left me, I have nowhere to deflect all the anger and rage! What’ll I do then?

I’m a shitty person. I have almost no conscience at all.

I think I surround myself with other shitty people who each have no conscience for various reasons specific to their own upbringings.

As a side note: I’ve been thinking a lot about what make us Los Angeles natives possibly different from people not from Los Angeles, as I’ve certainly identified that Bay Area people are distinctively different from Los Angeles people, and San Diego people, who are then distinctively different from Los Angeles people. Perhaps it’s this lack of conscience that is distinctly Los Angeles about me, and everyone else who peppers my life. This is something I’ll have to watch closely. (I’m going to say that Bay Area are motivated by deeply rooted cores of self-loathing, and that San Diego people are motivated by tiny sunshine generators located in their solar plexi.)

But I get what I deserve, and as a shitty person I deserve shitty people, and just by my own nature I surround myself with… you get it? See! It’s all so simple.

So, obviously, I’m totally wrong. Whatever.

The revolution is never coming. The apocalypse came and went — and left us yawny.* We’ll see the end of oil, and maybe that’ll affect us. I don’t know.

Matt said that out of everyone we know, I am the person who is the most motivated by fear. I still have absolutely no idea what he means. He gave an example by saying before Sarah came down the last time I got all panicky and started hocking all my shit to make sure I had enough money for us to have a good time. To this, I said, I don’t think I hocked all my shit until after the last time Sarah was here, and I did that because I felt like I needed to hoard money, and two, how is wanting a bunch of money to entertain a girl an act motivated by fear? I mean, alright, sure, I guess, but that’s not FEAR. Fear as a word is like hate, it’s strong shit.

I mean, I wander through abandoned mental asylums, man. I lead people into them! I map them out in my head and run from cops and shit! How am I, to Matt, who wont even go and check it out once, a person motivated primarily by fear? I don’t know. Now I’ve just confused myself.

Fear is a bunch of shit. I’m way to analytical to get consumed by fear. The only time that fear can’t be explained away is when you’re dealing with the supernatural, and the supernatural ain’t real, so I don’t have anything to worry about. I mean, alright, if someone is going to throw me off a cliff in car, I’ll know what fear is, but until then, fuck it.

In short, my day and night sucked. Hello, Sunday. I’m hope you’re not a fickle bitch as well.

*(Thanks, Bird.)

I’ve been wearing the same shirt all weekend — and it’s Tuesday now, and I’m still wearing it. I somehow managed to not shower yesterday, and I’m pretty sure it’s just because I slept through the whole day, and I’m not sure how that happened either.

Last week’s hip cool fear of meaninglessness is slowly seeping from me. My desire to run in some random direction is fading as well, though as that fades I feel like I am losing grip on some important part of myself that I know is just going to crop its head back up at some point and take a chomp out of me blah blah blah.

I told Sarah that I was willing to try to get the funds to spend the summer in San Jose, in an attempt to see if we’d work as a “real” couple and to see if I could make a go of living up there. She told me no, that she didn’t believe we had long term potential and that (melodramatically) nothing good can possibly survive or come to fruition in San Jose. This was rather unexpected, though I guess stupidly, and to say that it crushed me would be to imply that there was something left of my remains at the end of it all, but no, there were no remains to be found.

But then, of course, she comes to me (through the wire) and tells me she’s reconsidered and she’s totally down to commit to three months of me being there. I tell her that no, it wasn’t about three months, it wasn’t about just being together for three months, and I’m not going to go up there for just three months, unless that’s just naturally how long it can work out — though I guess I don’t really say all that, because I can’t think of it until later when I try to figure out why I felt so terribly hurt when she had the nerve to… misunderstand me? I guess? I don’t think she misunderstood, though.

I guess we just don’t want the same things. Or she does and she’s scared. Or numerous other excuses I can make up on her behalf to spare myself the simple thought that maybe she just doesn’t actually like me that much?

But I’m not depressed. I am unshowered and ill-motivated and there are three days until I can officially declare myself as in the process of drowning under a torrential downpour of school work and I’m chain-smoking and overdrawn in the bank and some days I just can’t seem to get far enough away from myself and I’ve just got to wonder if astral projection is the answer and maybe if I concentrate hard enough I never have to return to my body? Is that what death is like? Astral projection forever? Can I still feel my cock if I am astral projected? Astral-ejaculation? Is it possible? Is it real?

But I’m not depressed, you know? Depression is so passe. Emo is the new Hip and I am so post-hip.

I think I just called myself emo.

I don’t know what is going on! That’s the truth. Before I fall asleep and when I wake up I am overcome with the realization that I have no fucking clue who I am. Throughout the day I ignore it and it’s no big deal and I hang out with other people who seem to know something about me and I guess that stabilizes my head for a bit but once I am lying in bed, all by myself, spinning around in the sheets, I have no clue who’s life this is. I am witnessing the body and actions of someone else through a small hole and this writing right here is how I communicate to the world and dissect the actions of it looking for understanding.

I suspect that if you spend every waking second of the day within a person you can begin to build some sort of portrait of who they are, right? Why is it so hard? If I defined myself as I watch myself interact in the world, my Lord. Maybe I am not ready for prime time.

Brad
all i do now is read, when i am alone
and i am almost never alone. this is nerve wracking

Trista
I don’t really get to read much anymore.
It’s sort of sad.

Brad
i’m on my third Douglas Coupland novel, now Generation X
before this i read three Jim Crace novels
so we’re going for… six novels in two months? maybe more? this has to be some sort of record.
wow, maybe eight novels in two and a half months.. pretty cool. i should get a prize or something.

Trista
Indeed.

Brad
Douglas Coupland seems to write everything I am thinking. Life being meaningless, disillusioned with the rat race and/or a future within the rat race, and how can that possibly mean anything and why doesn’t anyone else seem to be going completely insane thinking about it like I am?
and how can one live a day-to-day life just making it and be ok with the fact that the only reason they do is because they’re just terrified of what would happen if they stopped?
is life really just working yourself into a corner where you have no choice to keep working because you fear the consequences of difference? bah!
maybe not the best thing i can be reading at this point
but i can’t stop
it’s like there are answers in the fact that someone is giving words to questions i’ve been unable to articulate

All this Douglas Coupland I am reading is leaving me in a state slightly worse than the state I was in before I started reading his shit. The two things I have read by him now (consisting of Life After God, and I am 1/3rd through Girlfriend in a Coma) are about people whose heads feel a lot like mine, except they’re in their thirties and feel this way. I’m twenty-three. I am not sure if this means I am just, I don’t know, fucked up ahead of time, like I am running the track a little faster than everyone else, or if this is really all there is and when I am in my thirties I will still feel this way.

The feeling is this, or something like this: there is no meaning. Coupland’s characters struggle with the fact that they’ve made it to their thirties and feel no different than they did when they were in their twenties. They might be better off: they’ve got jobs, money, places to live; but inside they’ve persisted through life unchanged when all they’ve expected is some sort of great awakening, as if they’ve been slumbering in some unaware state and on the other side of daybreak they will find golden, fertile lands, rich with substance and meaning. They’ll — no — we’ll rub our bleary eyes and step out of bed and suddenly feel whole, connected to something deeper than ourselves. It doesn’t even matter what it is, it just has to be something more than ourselves.

But maybe that day never comes. Life After God ends with a revelation that isn’t even so much a revelation as it is a declaration of defeat. We’re not self-sufficient and internal salvation (not a typo) isn’t just going to find us; we have to open ourselves to it and, even then, what we receive is nothing but ourselves, again, just a more vulnerable version of ourselves.

Is that the real answer, though?

I try to pay close attention to the mood and behaviors of my friends and the other people in my lives. I feel like I am always fractured in some way, that if you examine me closely you will see bits of light emerging from within. But, no, the light is darkness; it is the things inside me that I don’t share — those things are still rare even these days where I’ve learned that while sincerity is not pornographic, the truth will almost never set you free — the sadness and contempt that I hold for myself and my surroundings. I watch for other people’s fractures, I try to identify their sadness and when they keep the gaps well caulked with whatever addiction suits their fancy — and there is such variety! — you can basically predict what their inner turmoil is based on the addiction itself.

I came to a realization a few months ago — while I was bellyaching about Sarah being far away and my potential future with her being so far away and all my infinite dissatisfaction with everything in my life forever and ever amen — that I don’t know anyone who is genuinely happy. There are people who hide it well, who seem to live their little lives of routine in a state of bliss, but deep down you know, you just know, they lust for change or something interesting.

It seems to me that the people who laugh the loudest are the ones who feel the most trapped by the routine and dissatisfaction of their lives. Laughter, fun, drugs, sex, and rock’n'roll, are just distractions. Sometimes we get so trapped that all we are is distraction, we become distractions for other people, and maybe that is how some people convince themselves they have meaning. But, I don’t really know.

And that’s not my point, and three erased meandering paragraphs later, I can’t even think of what the point was.

I spent the last month and half, two months, maybe even three months, wrapped up in thoughts of suicide or disappearance (Maura Murray, where are you?), and as of right now, this very moment, I feel totally fine. This isn’t to say that in an hour I wont feel like death again, and even last night after scoping out an abandoned asylum and getting shouted at by the cops and feeling young and care-free and tough, by the end of it I felt tired and worried, thinking, “Is this all there is? Will I spend the next forty or more years of my life rambling through derelict buildings in order to feel somewhat alive and happy? I’m twenty-three, which I know isn’t necessarily old but in a way…”

In a way, suicide and disappearance are the same thing. They’re just lust for some drastic change, for something to happen. Neither are fulfilling, however, as the desire is for a great change that is outside of our, my control. Give me nuclear war, give me zombie invasion, give me something to fight against, give me something to live for, even if the only reason to live is to keep living, to survive. Give me a fight, give me someone to protect, someone to love. Give me a close-knit group of people and make us enough. Give me stacks of abandoned library books to make beds out of (those huge What Is Scientology? volumes will make great bedding) and construct walls to keep away the drafts which can become deadly with the post-apocalyptic chill.

Give me meaning. Give me a reason! When the world ends, we can all be certain that there is no God, so at least we’ll have that squared away. At least with an answer we can move on: how do we live for ourselves? How do we live life without — after God? And, therein, I guess — misquoted, lies the rub.

I think we, generation XYZ, whatever the hell we are — OK, I guess I should speak of myself, not of everyone, because I don’t know who or what everyone is, or what they are feeling — I think I look inside myself, always introverted I have been, and I find a whole lot of nothing. I want to eat, fuck, and sleep. I want to spend money and have things that act as a distraction to the fact that when I look inside myself I see an endlessly revolving list of “eat, fuck, sleep” and I’m having trouble coping with that. Maybe it’s my age, maybe at twenty-three this is what I should be like, that my thought cycle should be an endless loop of “eat, fuck, sleep”.

Don’t get me wrong, I want other things, but in the end they are just things that make those things easier to attain. I want money, and thus a better job, maybe a career, I want to succeed in life, so that I can eat whenever I want, whatever I want. I want to fall in love with someone who really seems to understand me, or at least somewhat, someone that I love and can maybe understand, maybe some girl I’d even want to take care of and spend all my money on, but in the end that is just a romanticized version of fucking. I want to get all my shit in order, mainly by sorting out those two above things, so that I can fall asleep at night without a head full of anxiety and dreams full of torment, lost hopes, and death.

I don’t mean to sound depressive, because, really, I insist, I am not right now. Having identified this about myself, however, has left me feeling rather hollow. Where’s the tortured artist with the soul full of wonder scratching at the veneer of stoicism? Where’s the dreamer who wants to fall in love with some leggy long-haired beauty and spend an evening under the moon on a blanket in a field miles from nowhere? I guess he’s around, but somewhere along the way to here those things have become more realistic and boring, almost like they are inevitable, but only in some lackluster and broken form: Yeah, I’ll write that novel, or short story, or something, some day, it’ll happen, no big deal, whatever. Yeah, I’ll meet that girl with legs for miles again, and maybe it’ll work out, but maybe it won’t, and maybe by the time it happens I just wont even have the capacity for love… I will eventually mindlessly fuck the concept of love out of my head, maybe.

What does it all mean, then? I’ve spent an hour clacking away at this keyboard. I’d think that maybe, by now, I’d have the answer.

But, no.

All I know is that I look for meaning within myself, every single day, and I find myself completely devoid of it. I get up and keep moving each morning simply because I know that if I do not, the things that distract me from the minutiae of my life will slowly vanish one by one and I’ll be left completely alone. These days the idea of an existence all by myself, alone in my room, endlessly doing nothing, is absolutely terrifying. To spend more than twenty minutes absolutely alone inside my own head would probably leave me crippled for life.

What went wrong? We discuss it, on occasion, my friends and I, and we’ve come up with that we’ve been over-saturated with choice and entertainment from birth. Perpetually distracted by toys, video games, television, et al, we never spent any serious time bored in our youth. The few valuable thoughts we should have directed inward at ourselves were spent, instead, killing zombies or gangsters. The conversations we should have had between friends, in person, were instead spent miles apart, sitting on the internet, typing useless drivel about shit on the internet while we stroke our adolescent cocks to pixelated quicktime clips of gyrating hips and “wet, split beavers”. Where would we have ever made time to actually contemplate our own existence? How could we have known that people would eventually be important to us and that maybe, just maybe, we should have focused instead on making ourselves somewhat decent as functioning members of society, whatever the hell that means exactly?

But is that all of it? Half of it? What of our parents? Can we blame them for anything? Can I blame my parents for anything? Should we? If their lives are as devoid as meaning as ours are, then would it even be fair to them? Can you really blame someone who, for all intents and purposes, remained blissfully unaware of what they were doing? How were they to know!

Then, what of ourselves? In our youth we knew nothing better, but now that we are adults we know, or at least we’ve heard from others, or from some distant voice in our heads that speaks in an unfamiliar tone, that there is more to life than what we are currently. Why is this, alone, not meaning enough? When you analyze it, through jaded, cynical, embittered eyes and mind, you end up with the conclusion that all the infinite futures lying ahead of you, me, are completely bullshit.

What interests us? What is our passion? What do we want to be for the rest of our lives?

I don’t know. I don’t know anyone who knows. I’ve heard of people, I used to know people, who have gone on since high school to actually make something of themselves, but then you also hear that that they are just as miserable as you are, deep down. They’ve got the job, and sometimes the girl or guy, husband or wife, and they’re living on their own and maybe, some day, if they move out of California — maybe to Montana — they’ll be able to own a house and have kids, and good for them, but they’re still fucking miserable.

It’s not a question of success, in the end, but one of meaning. But meaning is elusive.

Why isn’t in born into us? Genetics should give us the gift of meaning. One half of Dad’s meaning, one half of Mom’s meaning, and before you know it you’re performing vaginoplasties on Alaskan seals. At least that’d be something. But we don’t even know what our parent’s meaning is, and if you ask them — well, you’d rather not — but you can assume that they don’t know either, and actually knowing that would be far more depressing than anything else.

I am middle class, and so are all my friends. We are, like Coupland’s characters, neutered by our nearly neutral status. We grew up uneventfully. We live lives of quiet tedium, thinking we’re making noise when all we’re really doing is muffling the static in our heads with drugs, alcohol, food, sex, and the relentless ignorance of our own internal plight. This is how we get by, I guess, seeking internal salvation in things that we know, but deny, will never help us get anywhere but stoned.

When it comes down to it, though, being stoned is better than being bored and unhappy. It’s just too bad there isn’t any real permanence to it. Then the joke is that we have to live the lives that make us feel like it’s necessary to shirk sobriety in order to shirk sobriety. It’s just one endlessly repeating joke. The laugh track is broken, looping, skipping like a record, and I think we’re all pretty sure there is no one around to shut it off.