A reaffirmation of absurdity...

I really need to update this blog more often, but recording all of my depressions, anxieties, rages and the occasional faint glimmer of hope (a pinprick of light to demonstrate the blackness of my life) is such a futile act of arbitrary meaninglessness I wonder why I even bothered in the first place. Then again, isn't life arbitrary and meaningless to begin with? And if so, then perhaps there is a certain consistency to everything I do...but that's just loser's talk, isn't it? A circular argument of absurdity and absurd post-rationalizations. I remain my own worst enemy, but life, the universe and everything else still comes in at a close second.

Whilst thou drapest this world in black...

Lately, I've found myself in the rather precarious (though not completely unfamiliar) situation where my mind has disintegrated to the point where I no longer consider myself to be fully human. I've been able to hide this fact from other people for a long time simply by avoiding as much contact with them as possible, and making any contact as scripted, shallow and brief as possible. But lately, I've found the aimless psychotic rages and torturous nightmare scenarios repeating themselves over and over to the point where I can't think about anything else, where it blocks out all other thoughts and eventually spills outside my internal psychological realm and into the outside, physical world.

The violent and agitated movements, constant eye rolling, constant muttering and cursing and the meaningless, repeating actions have all attracted the attention of most of my co-workers. I try to stay calm and focused, but I lose all sense of myself during the day, all conception of where I am, who I am and why I shouldn't pick up a mallet and smash the skull of the nearest mouth-breather who looks at me the wrong way.

It's incredibly hard to stay diligent and focused, to live a life within the limits that society allows when all you have to look forward to in the future is killing yourself with a snub-nose .357. Goddammit, I feel so trapped, not even by situation or circumstance but by my own mental state...I just need to break free from all of this but the only way I can realistically do it is through an explosion of gunfire and blood. The worst fate any man can wish upon another is to have just enough humanity left to remember all the humanity that he's lost.

No sun rising...

For longer than I can remember, I've fantasized about living in Chernobyl; the perfect post-nuclear city of complete and total gray. The exact logistics of how I get and stay there are a bit fuzzy, changing to willingly suspend the disbelief of the situation. Sometimes it involves building a trebuchet just outside of Belarus to launch canned food into a landing zone of my choosing, sometimes it involves trading artifacts to unscrupulous scientists and collectors.

Sometimes it involves fighting off hordes of mutants and zombies, scavenging for every last bullet, running around half-starved and bleeding in the dark and thinking all the while "This is sooo much better than being at work!".

Maybe I just can't stand living in this midwestern wasteland, so flat and barren, lifeless and empty yet not lifeless or empty...so much invisible pressure coming down on all sides of me, most of it imagined and from within no doubt but pressure all the same. There's this terrible feeling of being trapped inside my own mind, and wondering if there will ever be any kind of escape no matter where I go.

And here I go again, me versus myself, the epic battle. Only it's not really epic, it's just insanely repetitious and maddening.

The passions of my youth have died, through psychological exhaustion and chemical abrasion, and what is left now is a man half-dead, slowly decaying and wasting away, strangely content at feeling no pain but a little perturbed at what he has lost. All I have to do now is lose the memory of the memory, that feeling of something critical being lost, and then I can finally shuffle off quietly towards my grave.

Never will I take leave from thy haunt...

Ignoring the problem, pretending it doesn't exist, pushing it deeper and deeper into my subconscious and warding it off with a spear in one hand while threatening to pull the rip-cord of total self-destruction in the other...doesn't seem to be working quite as well as I had planned.

And what was the master plan, anyway? A permanent fix, an end to the nightmare? I was just buying time, trying to pretend that I wasn't living it day by day, hour by hour. Some days it goes easier than others, but some days I just don't know if I can make it another five minutes without killing myself. The plan was to not have a plan, which was a raging success, but the objective behind the plan has become a bit blurry. I think part of the plan was to forget the objective, to find a new one and start over again.

Half of my brain feels like it's on fire, while the other half feels like a pile of cold wet noodles. Life is beyond absurd, it circles around absurdity and then breaks off in a new direction altogether in ways more chaotic than is possibly imaginable.

To hope to find meaning in such a universe is a shortcut to insanity. The only meaning of any worth is that which is in one's own mind...but to be refused by oneself, to be held back by some splinter of separate conscious entity apart from oneself...what happens then?

Nothing...not a clean, crisp, perfect nothing but a greasy, dirty, ugly nothing. How I yearn for the former, yet have only known the latter. And thus the problem remains unresolved.

Travelling through an eternal sea of void...

I woke up yesterday from a rather terrifying nightmare...the exact details of it are not important for the sake of this post but suffice it to say, it wasn't some fantastic surreal fantasy with demonic apparitions and hellish situations...it was a very close approximation of what my life is right now; how I've been living it and what I've been missing.

It seems that even if I've somehow blinded myself into ignoring everything that's wrong and inured myself into not feeling anything, somewhere deep in my subconscious mind a part of me knows the reality of the situation, that there is something pulling me down and that I need to rise above it.

But the problem is of course, it's an impossible fight. My mind is fractured, it feels like broken glass. When I try to concentrate, pain and confusion are the only rewards I get for trying to avoid being crushed, and so I put my efforts into finding ways to make the weight more bearable. It's not a solution to a very heavy problem, more of a capitulation; but it solves other, more immediate problems that I have and have been having for a long, long time.

Several years ago I would have given just about anything to feel the way I do today, so dead and lifeless and utterly without fear. Walking dead, barely sentient to the overwhelming problems haunting my existence or at least completely apathetic to them. It should come as no surprise then, that this revelation of a nightmare was more of an annoyance than a wake-up call.

Because during these moments of clarity, when I realize that I'm drowning in a sea of lies and kick upwards to take a deep breath of cold crisp truth, I find myself sucking in a lung full of vacuum and it seems that my entire existence is on the verge of imploding.

For the past twenty years, my entire life has been fixated on two points: fear and false-hope. Fear is the cattle-prod that pushes me, sometimes to a specific goal and sometimes just blindly, while false-hope is the carrot on a stick that pulls me. Both are illusions that leave me feeling desperate, weak and sick, but still they lead me, somewhere, sometimes nowhere but it keeps me moving. Now that I find myself standing still, I wonder what's going to happen next, if anything's going to happen at all, and how I should react if and when it does.

One year later...

It's been a while since my last entry, and although things may look the same, I feel very different.

I have a new job now, it's a ball-buster and a back-breaker, but at least it isn't exceptionally humiliating and I get paid fairly decently, enough that I'm actually skating above the poverty line for once in my life. I also have decent health insurance, and with it a whole new battery of meds to keep my brain from imploding into a nihilistic and self-hating singularity of inescapable despair.

Venlafaxine...this stuff is simply amazing. So much better than fluoxetine; I can't even believe I used to take that shit. I haven't had a real mental collapse in months...a few partials here and there, but nothing that shook me to the core and sent me reaching for my .357 magnum.

And I've avoided most of the traps set out for single men in life; I don't have a mortgage, I don't have kids, my expenses are at a minimum and I'm not married or in any kind of a relationship that could lead to one. In short, I'm a free man, or as free as a any man can be in this day and age, in this increasingly totalitarian world...which isn't much, but every bit counts and ever bit is a breath of fresh air that keeps me alive.

But still...

I still act like a slave, think like one, feel like one...a wage slave perhaps, maybe I still am a slave. I have to remind myself that I don't have any of the chains and shackles that weigh down other people, I don't think like them and don't share many of their responsibilities...but my other thoughts, my other responsibilities...maybe it's possible they weigh me down just as much, if not more.

I'm surrounded by exceptionally dull people, and through interacting with them I feel that my mind has become somewhat blunted. I'm starting to feel trapped, confined, cornered...not so much physically (which I suppose I am) but mentally and emotionally as well. I feel the need to unwind, to break free and explore new territory. Spiritual worlds, psychological landscapes. I feel myself compelled to push the boundaries which I have never dared to push before, at least not so forcefully and with so much conviction.

My ancient enemy, the final boss...am I strong enough to confront him yet? Could I even find him if I wanted to? He's always been so fleeting, darting in and out of the shadows...if I were to kill him, would I die as well? And is the only way to kill him to kill myself?

But if that's the price, then so be it. Death has never been the worst case scenario.

Ass to mouth, muzzle to breech...

What is this burning, itching sensation inside my mind...is this gonorrhea of the soul? Who did I pray with to contract such an unholy blight? This is really killing me...this is the kind of irritation that can only be properly scratched with a 12 gauge shotgun.

I won't die alone though, that would be too selfish...how can one hoard such a wonderful gift as non-existance for himself? Suicide is a choice, the best choice...it's a choice to stop making all other choices. Let me choose it for you too.

Whenever I start thinking about my imminent self-destruction, I start thinking about my father as well...I'm not sure why, but the two always seem to go hand in hand. I've been thinking about him alot these days, the original madman, mechanically insane. I think it was from him that I inherited my particular brand of psychosis...when murder and suicide are the favorite topics of conversation around the dinner table, something tends to get...ingrained?

I try to conquer my demons, but should they be vanquished who would be left standing? I'm a shadow held up by ghosts, there is not a shred of substance in my being. I'm tired of willfully swallowing all this bullshit, I'd much rather by force fed broken glass.

Life has stopped fucking me in the ass long ago and is now fisting me with both hands. I'm just so wrecked, I can't even believe it, don't want to believe it, I just want to roll up my eyes and believe that I'm dead...