Friday, September 14, 2007

Things have changed greatly... (day 124)

Yesterday Natalie and I had a discussion about the significance of the year. I for one counted getting out of my Shitty job at Roger Penske's Truck Whore House (go with u-haul!!!) which ended climatically and transferred to my new employer on Feb. 19 of this year.

Also important, as noted by the omnipresent counter in the subject header, quitting smoking/starting to swim again on May 19 also of this year. But what is next?

What new Important Event can I bring about for the end of the year? I believe that it will be a return to that mental jujitsu of literary prose. I don't just mean this blog, though I intend to make it last a little longer than the last two. However does one begin anew entirely or should we all retain some of that which has shaped us.

Below is a hunk of a former blog entry from the days before Natalie and Alex I will ponder it as I muster the next post.

**************************

4.18.2004

I have not been angry for far to long.

I realize now that I have not been civilized or exercised restraint and thus cheated myself from greater reward in exchange for more immediate pleasures. This is not how I want to live my fucking life.

But I have been angry today. Did it change much? In a way, I got all I needed to get done over with. Do I feel any better about the costs of it? No, not really.

It got me to thinking about this crazy asshole that used to go out with Jenny from Anthropology. He cut himself a hundred times on the arm with a razor blade just to get the attention of said Jenny. Isn't that a little creepy and crazy? Yeah I think so, but then I wonder if its not one way towards attaining what you want.

I have known a lot of people that inflict pain on themselves as punishment. Certain ex half-girlfriends of mine and their friends did this for...you ready...colorguard. Now how exactly slicing up your skin translates into throwing flags and sabres around a little better I do not know. But they did it, and it must do something or mean something.

There have been times when I myself did stuff like that. When I got my sword I cut my hand and whetted the sharpening stone as a sort of Moby Dickesque blessing on the blade. That metal tasted my blood first and hopefully will never taste it again. Now I am far from superstitious, it was a weird but uniquely gratifying experience to sharpen a weapon with my own vital fluids. Maybe I have missed something by simply denouncing some of the oddities that people exhibit.

So I wonder now what kind of extremes do people go to that I am unaware of. Self inflicted pain is incredibly commonplace it seems. What about sexual fetishes, compulsions, weird habits, stalking people or obsessing over material things? Is there some nugget of wisdom tucked away in these little insanities?

Now I am tempted to believe that it is merely a vessel to carry power (or the illusion of it) to the person doing harm to themselves. Control this and maybe the universe is tolerable. But others can inflict pain just as well as I can. Is there something I just missed?

Maybe it is not the pain itself that they revel in but the knowledge that they are acting fucking crazy. When I nearly had a nervous breakdown sophomore year there were times that I flirted with insanity. Sometimes I wish I had just sunk away from my life and done nothing but study psychosis and write the rest of my 155 sonnets. Junior year first semester I wrote forty of these poems. Since the total has only climbed to sixty.

Now I wrote before my crack and probably would have written in the absence of it. But maybe I wouldn't have either. Any one that knows anything about me knows that the book came about as a way to justify my own failure at a relationship long since lost. Nearly two and a half years later I see my stupidity, my pride and the unblinking heat of failure staring out from the pages of Fair Coin.

When I get pissed or bothered I just jot it down and try and make it interesting and logical. Maybe that's the root of my problems...maybe instead of writing how I feel I just need to remember better.

On that note, back to work.

***************************

Hopefully my mental contours are not so treacherous as they used to be. When I think back about that particular time period I somberly wonder over which details I have forgotten. I know I was unemployed, rolling my own two-pinch fatties from an aquamarine can of bugler tobacco with zig-zag papers and tooling around with a huge chunk missing off the front end of my duct-taped wrapped civic.

I was still wearing my sunglasses full-time and weighed about twenty pounds more than I do now. Only a thousand days hence and everything just seems so different.

Also in case anyone actually reads this I am considering this training for bigger and better projects. Expect some shitty roughness at first but just remember: Bad athletes burn more calories per second (due to inefficiency) If you actually like some of this brain bashing then stick around. Things will only improve...



1 comment:

Anonymous said...

What was up with the old blog, dude?

Didn't you post a lot of weird crappy stories and that thing about how chicken nuggets are evil?