0301111851 Generic Pub (again)

I was almost afraid to set foot in this fucking place, well-dressed on a Tuesday. That said, history may repeat itself, you just have to buffer yourself with differing circumstances.

I just had a twisted, despicable thought that I should message and tell her that ******* regretted telling her she could/would be involved in our wedding. Assuming ******* didn’t lie (which she would), it would destroy their friendship. I’m glad I’m not a terrible person—every good person has lots of terrible thoughts, but the difference between good people and their counterparts is the ability to see beyond the self, to filter when it’s wise so to do. I can already tell I’m up to no good this evening, if these are the first words I commit to paper.

It seems like it must be a recurring theme in adulthood—learning your lesson, but not completely. Every time I put myself in a similar situation, I manipulate circumstances and see what I can do about provoking a different outcome.

Communism: the only system in which an “ordinary” man could be canonized. I look at the statue of Lenin atop the never-built Palace of the Soviets and I marvel that such works of art have only been devoted to the divine.

Frat boys are endlessly gracious, if you know how to talk to them and you catch them before they’ve outdrunk themselves. Talk about women, frat stuff and money. If the conversation gets too involved, talk about guns. If they don’t like guns (rare), talk about cars. If they don’t like cars, they’ll like women. That’s why it’s first on the list, see?

I wish I could invent people…or at least characterize people without insulting or exalting them on some level. I want to treat my life not with Truth, because that’s impossible, but with the specific truth that resides within my consciousness, the truth that perpetuates itself as a function of all the stimuli I’ve encountered since that strange day some quarter century ago, that day I was born.

No one has the same home movies.

The commemorated events are, of course, similar, but the ways in which they’re experienced are as variegated as identity itself. Sure, Czeslaw Milosz looks like Unknown Hinson, but they’re not comparable on any kind of rational level. My computer’s going to die soon. There is a very loud amusement park in front of my house…I should waste my last few minutes of free self-expression on the internet, shouldn’t I? I remember Word used to insist that I capitalize the word “internet.” Nouns lost capitalization when things started to blend into each other…you know, Baudrillard, all that. Internet is not a proper noun. It’s a fact of life. It’s not like Paris, which you can only experience by venturing there. It’s omnipresent. I reckon I have about five minutes. At most. What does it mean to die? What does it mean to realize that everything’s over, and short of spiritual verification (faith), you have no reason to believe that existence is anything but a one-time deal? I have no idea. My computer probably does. It’s flashing and making aggressive gestures at me. That’s not what dying people do. They fade away, b e

03020021 That’s the last thing the computer could understand, the last piece of data it processed. The computer’s last memory. Sad, isn’t it?

03060047

I’m reminded presently of Derrida’s pharmakon…the poison/medicine. I want and do not want to cut something out of myself. I want to feel whole again, but feeling whole again involves removing something critical but decayed so something new and self-sustaining can grow in its place…eventually. I’m going to compile every memory ******* and I ever made together and put it in a sarcophagus like so much radioactive waste. I’m going to put it somewhere far from me, where it can’t hurt my health any more than it already has. The things around my house are the easy part. I’ll assemble, contain and remove them for (possibly) temporary burial and safekeeping. The rest is essentially amateur brain surgery. I suppose alcohol is its own haphazard form of brain surgery, but its imprecision began to annoy me and cause me problems about a month ago.

I’ve had two disastrous dates that have only served to remind me how vulnerable I am, how unready I am to be attractive to another person. In both cases my interlocutors were much more interested (seemingly) in where I’m from and what I’ve done than in who I am. I felt felt sorry for. But I don’t need (or want) pity, I need patience. Someone who actually has the compassion and emotional breadth to understand that where I am…is temporary. Who I am now is not who I am or want to be. Who I am now is a function of all my scars and the things that have been forcibly ripped from me and allowed to abscess in recent years. My entire body feels covered in buboes and pockets of emotional venom.

I looked at an innocuous Guinness promotional sign that provided a “Countdown to St. Patty’s Day” in the bar tonight. I watched the seconds dwindle and recondense, eating into the minutes, and it occurred to me that these are the only minutes of my life. It’s not a countdown to Saint Patrick’s Day, it’s a countdown to the end of existence—not just for me, but for all of us.

I’ve been on the verge of tears for days, occasionally crossing the verge and crying, in moments public and private. I’m stuck in customs on the border between Malaise and Self-disgust. My life is disintegrating, but I suppose life is itself a process of perpetual disintegration. The things I built in childhood fell apart or ceased to be relevant. By the same token, then, the rest of my life is a perpetual process of me falling apart and ceasing to be relevant. Most people just call it “getting old,” but “old,” too, implies decay and obsolescence. I’m too young to disintegrate, though; the things I do to my flesh on a daily basis prove that my body is still strong enough to withstand my habits. But it won’t be forever, and I have a feeling that the wisdom that accompanies experience will soften me somehow, make me regret my decadences. I don’t have regrets yet. I don’t have enough of the perspective that accompanies age to know what to regret.