Monday, March 5, 2012

Livin's Mostly Just Wastin' Time: Bits and Pieces of My Thread-bare Soul

Random musings, insignificant excerpts, and rambling notions of happiness or the illusion thereof.  But first...

"Your weirdness is beautiful."
"I don't know how you are the way you are, but the world is better for it."
"Not to sound piggish, but your writing is as sexy as you are."
"You love hard because love is fleeting. So you burn bright because you know you're going to burn fast."

There's an electricity about us/it/this.  An intangible, but very encompassing current that runs between, rapidly and naturally, like it was just taking its rightful place in the universe.

Man, I can handle this shit, but I did think I would get a bit more of everything before this shit came up.  We are going to have to battle the demons at some point.  Miserable people can't stand to sit idly by while happiness abounds.  It's their only motivation, really.  To my credit, in my darkest, most nefarious hours, I never wanted to piss on someone elses happiness.  I never saw the point.  I just wanted a little slice for myself.

Just as he was about to take the last drag of his Marlboro, a familiar visage strode toward him with feigned authority.  His stomach pulsated and churned.  The faintest taste of blood peppered his mouth.  Was it excitement or was it dread?

She almost wanted her to come. It was the little bit of excitement her evil half had been craving throughout this candy-coated dream.  Her stomach was in anxious sailor's knots.  That wicked half-smile was forming across her all-too-knowing face.

But the love side, the purity side, the happiness side just wanted it all to go away as quietly as possible and as abruptly as it came about.  She flashed back to a few days prior...This night was different.  There was an eerie, howling wind, rapidly changing directions through the weathered houses.  A neighbor was hunched over, banging hard and cacophonius with a sledgehammer at something on the cement.  And the putrid and unmistakeable smell of decay filled the night.

"They say if you get far enough away, you'll be on your way back home."  But what if you don't know where you are?

My perfectionism in itself an imperfection.  A fatal and dangerous flaw.  It is far more trouble than it is worth.  I hold myself to this superhuman standard that I can barely live up to, leaving me spent and doubled-over in pain, but it makes me look like some God-damned saint or superhero.  At first it's dazzling and intoxicating, but very quickly becomes a source of contention as no one likes to gaze into the face of perfection for very long.  It's nauseating and makes for far too much introspection.  Most people don't like the reflection staring back at them.

Oh, my Rule of Ten.  Be sweet and loving to me, I will be ten times as sweet and loving in return.  But be a dick to me, and I will be ten times the dick in return.  There is something really satisfying about running things into the ground. About blowing people out of the water, in either direction.  When will they learn?  I tell them of my dual nature, to polite, but dismissive head nods.  Only a rare few have understood what I meant by this.  Evil is a choice.  I don't have a depressed amygdala.  My emotional center is overly-active.  I can be held accountable for my sins.  I should be held accountable for them.  I should suffer for them.

Maybe he is just testing to see if I'm human.

I'm afraid of shattering the illusion.  I'm afraid of waking up.

He wanted me to need him.  To reach out for him in the night.  To level the playing field.  But pride wouldn't let me take the bait.  Maybe I'm the asshole.  Or maybe I'm not the scared little girl I once was, needing men to validate my existence at every turn to somehow make up for my severe abandonment issues.  I don't want to be that weak again, but I never want to be that callous either.

His love was so unconditional.  It's not fair to hold him up to that impossible standard, almost as impossible as the one I hold myself up to.  It's a cruel joke to know love that great, only to have the magic carpet ripped from under you.

We've been so conditioned not to believe in romance.  Life beats the romance out of any of those foolish enough to feel it.  That's why romance is always tinged with tragedy.  It makes the pill easier to swallow.

I told of my romance fraught with complication and stained raw love.  Fuck doleur exquise.

Is happiness my life's greatest challenge?  Am I so used to not being challenged in any real way that my brain doesn't know how to react and is blaming my heart?  Is that why I am acting like an indignant child?

There is no more exposed a person than the honest writer, and there is no more dejected a than the thoughtful comedian.  Why does everything I touch turn to dust and ash?  I fear I am cursed to forever wander in this moribund world.  Men love the idea of me more than they love me.  I live in a prison of my own making.  Barred from any kind of lasting happiness.  I am a fuck-up. It was said best with, "No one gets to be all three.  You're a witch that must be burned at the stake."  It's true, I am not of this world.  I am from some other planet.  Some other dimension.

It's funny, I want so many things, yet nothing at all.  I don't know if happiness exists for me.  Some force just likes to taunt me.  Or I just like torturing myself.  I am the ultimate sadomasochist.  It's fun being the best at everything.

I felt that crashing sensation again tonight.  Where I just wanted to let the car run into something hard, looming and final.  I am too quixotic for this world.  I am too easily hurt, despite my collected, roll-with-the-punches demeanor.  Jokes deflect the inquiries into the real me.  The one that lies beneath the affability and the biting humor.  Pallacci Syndrome.  Humor's just another way to keep people at arm's length.

Negativity exists.  Horror exists.  Death, torture, rape, starvation, heartbreak exist.  You don't get to have your brooding moods at your leisure and expect it to not affect anyone.  I know happiness is work and some days I get tired.

I can't look him in the eye.  God, I'm a shit.  My brain is fried.  I can barely write.  I am on the threshold of sleep.  I feel like I may pass out right here.  Face down in the beans.  I missed him today.  I can't look that those damned things.  It's bullshit.

We did things and knew things about each other that would make an ordinary person's skin crawl.  Do you still like me? he asks.

I was in a throwy-smashy mood.

The less tired I become the more mad I feel.  The more tired, the more forgiving.  Probably because I just want to go to bed.

It was too intense, too deep to be maintained.  I don't want someone that makes me feel weak.  I want someone that makes me feel strong.  But I do feel a bit weak now. Maybe that's a good thing.  It's not an anxiousness, but a dull aching.  That dull ache, that level of hurt, that level of calculated slow-burning anger can only come from love.

There is something empowering about accepting your fate.  It gives you a say in it somehow.  The key to happiness lay in the realization there is no lasting happiness.  It is tempting and elusive, but all happiness is fleeting.  It is, but a hologram.  But once that idea is exposed, so comes clarity, followed by the most elusive mistress of all; freedom.  Existentialism once more reigns.

Post Script: Love is the ultimate and most befitting metaphor for my life. Like no other intangibility, it highlights the notion of black and white, the idea of extremes, polarization.  It can cause the greatest, most fulfilling excitement, satiation, happiness, but yet also the most intense, gut-wrenching, crushing pain, loneliness, and agony.  But you have to roll the dice to play the game.  The deadliest of emotional pendulums, love is still best when at one of the apogees. For resting in the middle is the true torture, where complacency and existential malaise lie. There's the secret.  Flying on either apex for as long as possible and riding that pendulum back the other way with the greatest of speed.  Either side is full of beautiful pain.  Without evil, there could be no good.  La doleur exquise.

Post Post Script-  Yeah, I totally get how fucking pretentious it is to do a piece of my own quotes.  Ugh, the self-indulgence, the ego.  I'm so fucking emo sometimes. Back to Dude.




No comments:

Post a Comment