There are two species of desperation: The one that continues to hope, and the one that doesn’t. Please stop doing this to me. Please, don’t remind me that there are beautiful things here. I have lost everything. I am worn and irresolute and I can feel the passing of time in my body, I can feel it pull everything out of me, I can hear it, it sounds like someone beating my skull on an anvil. Please let me go. I have nothing left to give you and all I want is for you to untie me and let the world cover me over.

by Charles Warnke

I’ve seen this quote before. Hell, I’ve re-blogged it on tumblr. But I always forget about it at some point. I have no idea why it was such a huge pick-me-up today, but I definitely needed it; today was one of the worst I’ve had in a long time. (ie: this)

I guess it’s ’cause out of all the historical figures I should probably wish I could sit down and talk to, (or be haunted by.. please?), Hunter’s the top of the list. So I guess seeing him in what seems like familiar space just.. helps.

So here’s to you, HST. And the rest of you always ready and somehow willing to read whatever inane drivel I’ve spouted off recently: Lurn, Stevo, Kar(Vinny), Kyle, Rach(x2), Timmy, Amy(421).. this means you.

Thanks.

And there will be more drivel to follow.

Sometimes they wonder if anything ever really heals, or if its just a continuation down a big spiral into nothing.

Sometimes it seems like everything (life?) only really comes as a trickle. Sands falling slowly from a timer counting down to.. What? The next adventure?

And we wait; wait for the last grain to fall. We sit and watch the small, seemingly pathetic sandpile and wonder what any of it even means. Why are we even here? What stupid, inane purpose am I supposed to be fulfilling before the sand runs out?

Will we ever even really know? Expectations are held of us, but what’s even the point? Will any of it even make you happy? That college degree with all it’s recumbent debt.. will that even guarantee you get a good paying job? And if so, will that finally be some kind of ledge achieved?

You can sit there from your lofty perch and scream into the wind “I’m here! I’ve made it!”, feeling some kind of elation before realizing that you’re not really any happier than before, when you were jobless and broke. Or struggling through college.

Are you happier now, with your house (mortgage), your 2.5 kids, and the dog, Rex? Or is everything /still/ really all pointless?

Everyone I know seems so concerned with getting a “good” job. Because, apparently, making mid-six figures will solve all my problems.

Except that I know something they apparently don’t; it wont solve all my problems. Sorry, guys, but the rabbit hole goes far, far deeper. If you were wondering why I’m still in Hawaii, this is why. I /don’t/ know what the fuck I want to do, exactly.

And I don’t know, because I have no clue what the point of any of it would even be.

Maybe if I had any idea of who I even am anymore. Maybe if this year had gone differently. Or the year before. Or the year before that. Maybe if it didn’t feel like the glue had such a tenuous hold on the cracks after being shattered.

Sometimes I’m not even sure what’s original and what’s the patches, struggling valiantly to cover the hole left after a break and the pieces are just /gone/. Lost. Some.. piece.. of who you were, broken off and disappearing like spare change in the wash.

Maybe it’ll turn up someday. Like it was just fucking hiding under the couch.

So when she calls, don’t send her my way
When it hurts, you’ll know it’s the right thing

[…]Keep your hands where I can see em
You took the words right out of my mouth
When you knew that I would need em
What am I supposed to do now?
Without you
Without you

It’s unannounced, like you’d expect it
Among broke down brake lines and Motown records
And all that’s left is a blind reflection
But you know what’s coming and you regret it

So when she calls, don’t send her my way
When it hurts most, it’s the right thing

This conversation happens fairly often:
Phone: *vibrating incessantly underneath something somewhere*
Erica: You’re phone’s ringing.
Ben: I don’t care.
E: Answer your phone. It could be your mother.
B: It’s not. She has a custom ringtone, and anyway, hardly ever calls.
E: It’s on vibrate. Fucking check it at least.
B: *disgruntledly checks* See? Not my mother. Not anything I care about.
E: Well.. now that you’re holding your phone.. call your mom.
B: …

So I’ll ignore my phone when it rings. Occasionally this means I miss a message or call that I’d actually care about. Not usually, though. After thinking about it, I set the default ringtone to “silent”, with my old default set for people I actually care about hearing from.

I’ve been reading a lot from mnmlist.com, especially this post. What does that really mean for me? Well, mostly the realization that I don’t need some people in my life. If something’s toxic, maybe just stay away from it? Bear in mind this is from me; smoker, alcoholic, masochist, and (according to my rehab counselor) addict. So I’m trying to cut things out of my life. As DaVinci said, ‘Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.’

On an unrelated note, I jokingly told Erica a month or so ago that it was her fault that I haven’t been writing; I only seem to really write when I’m not happy. Recently it seems like she’s been trying to fill the “muse” role, which is really only fair, I suppose; some of my closest friends have told me that one reason they like me is that I try to always be brutally honest. If you ask me how I’m doing, I’ll tell you; If you don’t want to actually know, don’t fucking ask. “Brutally honest” is occasionally the same thing as “Being an asshole”, so.. you should really give her props for putting up with my bullshit, as much as she does.

Not that that’s untrue for a great majority of people, but for me.. I guess it’s mostly that in my mind, I’m a fairly simple person; and I like simple things. Shepherds pie, cheese sandwiches, earl grey. None of these things qualify as anything other than simple. Fuck, even writing this, I’m using OmmWriter. It’s as simple as you could possibly get. Seriously.

So.. this is my life, and I want you to know that I’m both happy and sad.. and I’m still trying to figure out how that could be. It’s been a hell of a few weeks, though I suppose you could extrapolate that to “months” or “so far this year” fairly easily. If you’re reading this and it comes as a shock to you that I’m in rehab, maybe we need to talk more often. Though it’s kinda been ongoing for a few years, so.. maybe that’s not why you didn’t know. Maybe I just never wanted to admit to anyone or myself that I had a bit of a problem with narcotics. Okay, and sorta amphetamines and alcohol. “Sorta” in the same way that hitting the asphalt after a car changes lanes into your bike at eighty mph “sorta” hurts… and after the second time, I’ve become intimately acquainted with how that feels. If you’ve never had the good fortune to experience detoxing from opiates, do yourself a favor and try your damnedest to never find out how it feels. Unless you’re a huge fan of laying in bed awake in your own, personal hell. In that case, knock yourself out.

Starting to fall down the rabbit hole here, and I guess we’ll see tomorrow how much of this survives the first light-of-day edit. Not much, I’m thinking. Not that that’s stopping me from typing or anything. Anyway.

I guess part of the incoherent, rambling thing I was trying to get at is that for the last.. 33 days now.. I’m sober. Completely sober. No vicodin, no uppers, no alcohol. Which is sorta crazy, in the I’ve-been-awake-for-thirty-minutes-it’s-time-for-the-first-drink sense. And six months without a cigarette. Done. Fucking clean.

Yeah, it really sucked getting here; extremely painful at the beginning.. Still is, more often than not. But sometimes, increasingly more often, it strays over onto the “awesome” side of the scale. It seems like for the first time in.. well, years, really.. I’m seeing the world around me without feeling numb. A couple months ago I told someone that the only time I didn’t feel like I was dead was when I was on the bike, throttle pinned, violating the hell out of.. really, any traffic law you could possibly think of. And I guess for a while that was true.

Now, though.. just give me a soft breeze and the sunset. It doesn’t really take a whole lot. I guess.. maybe this is because I’m.. happy? I’m not 100% on that, because I’m just not sure how that really feels. Not the entire day in blissful oblivion or any hippy bullshit like that. Just.. content.

Often happy, sometimes sad..

“Normal”, I guess, whatever the fuck that actually means.

–
I’m not always proud of what I do, but if I had it to do again, I’m not sure I could do it any other way. Things fall apart, they break; That’s life. Sometimes life just has to be sad, broken, haunted. And after all the shit going on, I guess I thought we deserved some time to just coast. Cruise through life for a while and see where it took us.

But in the end, life gets a little dull when you’re not actually striving for anything real. One hungover morning becomes like any of the others; time’s passing marked by the missed calls on your phone. I’m not ignoring your calls, Mom, but you’ve got the wrong number – the person you’re trying to call is gone; that child you raised is dead, though a burnt, broken shell remains.

We’d all like to think we just flew too close to the sun, and that’s why our wings burned; wax melting away under the heat until none of our feathers remained. Nothing for it but to plunge straight down, preserving whatever we can of our dignity and imagining the shape of the crater we’ll leave.

The problem is, the closest we ever came to the sun was staring at it through the clouds, wishing we could rise that high from the sand.

Just another hour…

Another day…

Another year…

Another castle built…

Another wave comes.

–

“The expansion of our digital universe… has shifted not only how we spend our time but also how we construct identity. For her coming book, ‘Alone Together,’ Sherry Turkle, a professor at M.I.T. interviewed more than 400 children and parents about their use of social media and cell phones. Among young people especially she found that the self was increasingly becoming externally manufactured rather than internally developed: a series of profiles to be sculpted and refined in response to public opinion. ‘On Twitter and Facebook you’re trying to express something real about who you are,’ she explained. ‘But because you’re also creating something for others’ consumption, you find yourself imagining and playing to your audience more and more. So those moments in which you’re supposed to be showing your true self become a performance.’”

.  With social media so prevalent, you may find yourself framing how you’ll share the experience, while you’re still having the experience.  As Brett & Kate McKay wrote: 

If you’re already thinking, “Wait until my friends see this!” you’ve left the realm of being present in the moment.

.  This became fairly obvious to me last month when Cat and I went with a few friends to a Train concert.  A good portion of the audience spent their time watching the band through the tiny screen on their phones or cameras as they tried to get the entire concert on video.  It actually caused me to enjoy my time at the concert less; as an audio/videophile, it was almost physically distressing to envision how terrible those recordings were going to be.  No one will ever watch their terrible concert video.  The audio quality alone would make me want to punch a baby, let alone the video; that small of a lens, in those lighting conditions, from a distance with no stabilization?  Please.  So many of the concert-goers around us were so focused on their soon-to-be epic youtube video that a lot of them didn’t seem to be really enjoying the concert itself.

.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with a momentary pause for a picture, say, on a hiking trip.  As long as the focus is more on the experience than the photos you’re going to post or the tweets you’re sending out to let everyone know how awesome your life is.  As Marcus Aurelius said, “We can live only in the present moment, in this brief now; all the rest of our life is dead and buried or shrouded in uncertainty. Short is the life we lead and small our patch of earth.”  This might have something to do with my lack of posts to flikr, twitter, facebook, et al.  I’d rather just enjoy my time at the beach, and, seriously, who cares what you people think, anyway?  I’ve already somehow deluded Cat into thinking that I’m awesome; time to rest on my laurels.

.  tl;dr In no way is my lack of posts and photos out of crippling procrastination or laziness; It’s due to a philosophical high-ground.  And you all look so silly from up here in my ivory tower.

You should seriously read the rest of the interview, but my favorite part by far was the last question:

How would you describe your fashion?

“I think fashion is repulsive. The whole idea that someone else can make clothing that is supposed to be in style and make other people look good is ridiculous. It sickens me to think that there is an industry that plays to the low self-esteem of the general public. I would like the fashion industry to collapse. I think it plays to the most superficial, most insecure parts of human nature. I hope GQ as a magazine fails. I hope that all of these people who make a living by looking pretty are eventually made destitute or forced to do something of substance. At least pornography has a function.”

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He always told himself that he had gotten that from his mother, as if living like a pack-rat was somehow a genetic trait. Deep down he knew that it was really just laziness and reluctance to change. The notebooks would never be useful; he knew this, but still they took up space in a box. They’d moved with him six times over the last three years, keeping with him even when most of his friends didn’t. The notebooks were to him what junk food was to a lot of people: At first they were comforting, but he grew to hate them more every time he saw them.