I need to append Chronicle 2 (below) with some thoughts that have occured to me in the short time since it was posted (really only a few minutes ago). I need to ride this train of thought for a while longer.

Most of my friends have, in the last few years, relegated themselves to domestic confines with significant others. Of these, many have even moved out of state, been married, bought houses. Any day now I expect to recieve news of imminent children and further marriages. I would never begrudge any of these people for doing what it is that they are doing. Indeed, the fact that they all seem to have reached similar conclusions (or beginnings as it were) at similar times, isn’t so much a singularity as it is an example of what I was talking about below in Chronicle 2.

There have been points in my life when I was jealous of others, or covetous of certain possessions and/or people. Wanting what one can’t have is the sort of sine qua non of the human condition. I don’t know if this is one of those times per se. I’m certainly envious that some, perhaps most, people have within their natures the ability to form and maintain these sorts of intimate relationships. At the risk of sounding as if I believe in some version of a higher power, I should say that perhaps I wasn’t dealt those cards. Nurture or nature? Here I am getting all misty-eyed again.

Whence these feelings? Is it because I am coming to terms with reality? Imagine for a second that it were demonstrated to you that you were going to be alone for the rest of your life; alone and poor, with perhaps cursory visits from past friends; the occasional wedding or anneversary invitation. Is that being demonstrated to me now? Has this been in the back of my mind for some time and only now am I choosing to approach it?

I’ve done a lot of stupid shit in my life but the question, I think, is whether the stupid shit I’ve done is symptomatic of a problem or the problem itself. If that answer were forthcoming, there may be a way to deal with the issue.

The hammer to the face though has really been that, while all these others have been off building lives, I’m still stuck here in the same town, the same apartment, sitting in front of the same computer, smoking the same cigarettes, drinking the same booze at the same bar, et fucking cetera. There are, again, no prospects for change. I’m savvy enough to know that change of one sort (in this case my life) is often the precurser to change of another sort (relationships et al.) but, again, I have this lack of ability to make myself care about anything enough to do anything about it. What kind of viscious cycle is this? This is how I live.

I live in an ocean of guilt now, and I verily I don’t want to let the tides of that ocean breach the shores of any of my friends’ lives. How selfish and drastic would that be? Not to mention horribly detrimental to someone’s life. No, please no one think that I am trying to guilt people into admitting that they had something to do with my current condition. I, and only I, am to blame for this snafu. I take responsibility, the weight of which is perhaps the cause of my inaction to relieve myself of some of this pain.

I think I’m done for tonight.

-vec

I was inexplicably sought out by my parentage today, though perhaps it wasn’t wholly unexpected. It had been more than six months since I had seen or talked to anyone in my family. I am somewhat of a recluse for reasons, I think, that are enumerated in the previous blog entry. There are other reasons, I’m sure.

I’m fully willing to admit that I am a fucked up individual. The problem is that I’m not fucked up enough to warrant state intervention or, indeed, warrant anything save the admonition “stop yer whinin’”. Get off the couch and just do it. Right?

I don’t think there is a medical condition that has ever been diagnosed that adequately explains my complete lack of desire to do anything with my life. There certainly isn’t any explanation as to why I cannot succeed at anything that I care about. Further, there is no parsing the complexities of why I can only care about a given thing in excess, and that the excess only lasts for some abnormally brief period of time. Witness my 4.0 grade point average that I pissed away into oblivion; witness my inability to form and maintain lasting relationships with the oposite sex; witness the fact that I very nearly let myself starve to death this past year because I couldn’t even be bothered to care about my continuing existence. I would never be so crass as to commit suicide; wasting away is more poetical.

Atheism may have saved my life at various points. Additionally I could probably wax Freudian about diverse aspects of my personality, such as it is. I’m not sure that I buy into the whole idea of psychotherapy, or even just therapy in general. It seems to me that therapy is the modern excuse to not have healthy relationships. The therapist takes the place of good friends and family in the absence thereof. Our connections severed by space, time and a certain necessary self-centerdness, requires a transplantation of individuals into given extant slots. Need A somehow can be met by persons B, C, D etc. The particular form of capitalism that we are engaged in dictates that you do, however, have to pay large sums of money to be allowed unrestricted access to the upper eschelons of Mazlow’s Hierarchy. Either that or you have to have good reason to make the state pay for some semblance of same.

Of course, all of this is just a long-winded way of saying that I have no one to talk to. Ever. My therapist, then, is this page. I talk to her, if you excuse my wanton anthropomorphism, because there is no one else. Sometimes I wonder if this is a new development (the lack of others in my life) or whether I have really been alone all my life.

I think there is a lesson learned here, but maybe learned too late in life to make much of a difference. I have never really been open about the true me, never talked about my desires or fears with anyone. Perhaps this is why I can’t maintain relationships: there is no intimacy from my side of the fence. In fact, having said that, I clearly deserve a kick in the teeth. How many women in my past were trying to be open with me, trying to forge some sort of deeper bond, while I simply pushed them away. No reciprocation forthcoming from me meant all of those relationships were doomed to fail. Epiphanies are a bitch. I’d like to apologize to all of those women right now, if any ever read this.

Just deserts are served though, since I am now beyond salvation. The age of 30 looms on the horizon and there hasn’t been a woman looking my way in years. I have no prospects for a future. Know that you were all right when you admonished me; I was too stupid to realize it until now. I’m probably still too stupid to do anything about it.

In a better world some publisher somewhere would read this blog and ween a seed of talent, heretofore unexploited, and offer me a job. Whence that seed would be cultivated and in time germinate into a career, if I may continue the metaphor. This isn’t a better world though. It’s still the same world that I woke up in. It’s the world in which all of the above, and all previous and future posts are, in fact, true. It’s the world where that seed doesn’t ever land on fertile soil… fuck this cliché. I’ve done it all to myself, and I’m sure I deserve every ounce.

More later, work now.

-vec