I thank you for bringing me here, for showing me home
I would like to thank everyone who read and enjoyed this blog during it’s short existence. Granted, there are only about five of you, but the page views and comments were still much appreciated. I’m returning home to my Endless Days blog for not-so-fresh, but decidedly familiar restart. Thank you for your support, and I hope to see everyone again on the other side.
I came, I saw, I conquered, and now I’ve gone back home.
Gate 8 Steam of Consciousness
It is my belief that airports who don’t provide free wifi access are, in fact, evil communist dictators who feel the need to profit share from the evil t-mobile companies of the world, which in turn screws over fliers who have no desire to pay 39.99 a month for airport wifi. In theory it works, but in reality, it’s a bloody pain in the ass.
On a lighter note, there is a really vain woman sitting across from me, and she has been doing her make up for about 15 minutes now. She’s about 45 years old, obvious smoker, obvious self-conscious issues. Oops. I was talking about her and she got up. Maybe she can read my mind. Also, I hate the people with the big ass carryon luggage who feel the need to roll their pathetic asses across my feet. I have long legs; pick another fucking space to roll in. Then again, common decency died years ago.
I have little love for the airport. There always seems to be the same people. There is always one male and one female sitting at the gate, talking on their cell phone to a person that sound like they have not seen in 10 years, and thusly feel the need to relate every single life experience they have had in ten years to said person on the phone. At the current moment, you have about five people on their cell phone, and one of them is using their Bluetooth headset, and keeps looking at me with this begrudging look. Maybe it’s because I’ve noticed her idiocy. Oops. My mistake.
Eventually I just break down and shove the headphones in my ear, and sit with a clear view of the gate so I can see when the cattle call that is Southwest airlines is about to begin. I would kill for assigned seats, really I would. A nice assigned window seat, where I don’t have to make sure I get in the A boarding group just to have a shit chance in hell of sitting by myself. I do tend to scare people off, so maybe I will get a row to myself. Also, it is the airplane rule that you look despondent so that no one feels the need to share your life story with you. Call me crazy, but if I’m never going to see you again, I don’t want you pretending to be Forest fucking Gump. I just want a nice, quick hour flight in silence with my 4 ounce plastic cup of diet coke and my painfully poorly dry roasted peanuts.
Vain woman is back…and she is on her cell phone. I thought evolution was supposed to take care of people like that. “Hey! Oh, I’m at the airport!” Unfortunately if I were to scream ’shut the fuck up, you stupid hag whore’, I might get kicked off the flight. That would be bad.
Oh shit. The requisite cowboy has showed up. You know what I’m talking about, the man, about 40 years old, wearing his tight ass wrangler nut huggers with the white Stetson. While he might impress people in other states, people in Texas know that he’s never set foot on a ranch, ridden a horse, or done other cowboy like activities. In fact, I’m pretty sure most people in Texas are embarrassed by him, because he is the reason that people from around the world think we ride our horses to work and eat out at the chuckwagon, ya reckon?
I hate the people who start lining up before the plane even gets here. What the hell are they going to board? Is the jet way going to fly them to Amarillo? Are they going to get there any sooner?
It occurs to me that I don’t need to be at airports that often. I tend to get a bit angry.
You saw all my pieces broken, this darkness that I could never show
I figured I should do the obligatory New Years blog post while I’m still semi drunk. I figure that way, I will at least be more honest. I figure I’d be blowing around a .010 to a .015, so this should be interesting. It is certainly not the first blog post I have done while drinking, but probably the most honest as to the circumstances. If anything, I can come back tomorrow and take out anything bad, and correct the spelling errors, should I make one.
Okay, I’m definitely above a .11, what with the emotional swings and all.
I’m honestly not this used to being this coherent after drinking. I’m used to drinking so much that I wake up and wonder when I passed out, and wondering what all these bruises are from. There is also the vague remembrance of falling over. I guess here’s to knowing one’s limits. Sort of.
Fuck it, I’m supposed to be talking about the new year, for this is why my brothers and sisters came. First of all, never underestimate the hell that is cheap champagne. Mine tasted so bad that I needed a chaser. What is a chaser? A chaser is drink consumed immediately after a shot of liquor or other other alcoholic beverage to remove the bad taste from one’s mouth (i.e. “chasing a shot”).
Thank you Wikipedia.
It was even Brut, it was supposed to be sweet, and the bottle promised it would show a nose of apples and such. FALSE. It had little nose, and a taste of dried fermented moose mucous. It tasted way more alcoholic than it actually was (about 12%). This is coming from a person who drinks hard liquor and would have killed for a Jack and Coke. It was skunky sparkling wine. I should have listened to fucking Gary Vaynerchuk and gotten some growers champagne, but nooo, I’m the poor college student looking for a buzz.
Bah.
Focus.
Right, let’s talk about 2007. 2007 was a shitty year. The second half was okay, but ended shitty, and the first half was just plain shitty. I failed out of one college, made it in another, but at the same time discovered that I was all alone at the same time I thought I was someone. It was a rebound year, which was semi successful, yet that didn’t work out either.
Compared to 2005 and 2006, it was a good year. It was no 2004 though. 2004 was the last good year I remember. I’d go into why, but I’m trying not to depress myself.
What do I want to happen in 2008? I don’t want anything to happen. I expect it to be a very busy year. I may even graduate college this year, which would be absolutely amazing. I do have a better basis on what I believe will happen, but this is limited to my own drunken perception. Will I end up in another stable relationship? Probably. Will it work out? Probably not. I don’t expect to ever maintain a relationship for long anymore. I’m a person who doesn’t want kids, or to get married.
Will I graduate college? Probably not. I’ll come damn close though. Will this mean anything? Probably not. I expect to find myself engulfed in another crisis, as it is how I thrive. I crave stability, yet I thrive on crisis. Let’s called it learn’ed behavior.
Will I die in 2008? Always a chance, probably a pretty decent one. Everyone has always told me how I am going to die young, and all signs point to that being the case. I only hope I go out in a blaze of glory. I don’t want to die silently. I want people to remember my death as an esoteric exercise in the sublime. If I should die, my one regret would be not appreciating those moments when I truly had everything, because I took for granted how quickly they could slip away. It’s fair to say I took life for granted, and I took a lot of people for granted, and I would be forever sorry for that, and it still brings a tear to my eye to think of the life I have squandered.
I suppose that is the key to a resolution. Identify what would be your dying words, and manipulate them into ways you can change yourself. I can resolve to get into shape, I can resolve to change the world. Only when I realize what I would regret in life can I begin to untangle the massive web I have woven for myself. Will I ever find rest? I know not. Will I ever stop wondering? Probably not.
I think the ultimate lesson is that no matter what you plan for, things will always exude themselves from your plan, leaving you feeling helpless and alone. I, for one, am tired of feeling helpless and alone. I am tired…shit, the phone rang and I lost my train of thought. Let the drunk dialing begin, and not on my end.
I guess in 2008, I want to truly live. Again. Or for the first time. I don’t really know, but I want to find out.
End drunken transmission.
Happy 2008. only five more years until the end of the world. Or maybe that is just the drunken Mayan in me speaking.
The dubious adventures of a gas station bathroom
There are many vile and disgusting things in this world. Some things are naturally worse than others, but I think the gas station bathroom is close to the top of that list, for it presents a minefield of dangerous obstacles to brave and overcome.
I was on the return leg of my road trip today when I stopped to fill up the gas tank and have a wee before the last two hours to the apartment. I chose a gas station I’ve stopped at before, it’s about ten miles outside of the last major town, and it’s across the street from a 7 Eleven where I know the bathrooms to be quite vile and disgusting. The 7 Eleven bathrooms will even sell you various super ribbed condoms flavored with banana coconut studded surprise for 75 cents, as you stand in a puddle of regurgitated toilet water, clearly the sign of a classy establishment. Either way, it’s a bathroom I’ve learned to avoid, so I stopped in across the street.
I walk in and to the back of the store to the creepy little hallway where they keep the bathrooms out of public view, and I push open the door hoping for the best. Things went downhill from there as I caught a whiff of the first scent of pine fresh scent that only a gas station can offer.
I quickly take stock of the situation as I walk in. Both stalls are occupied, presumably by children and a father that have slung their coats over the stall door, possibly as a sign of their presence in the confined space of privacy. Kind of like a Nikes strung over the powerlines kind of thing. This distresses me greatly, as I am a stall pisser. I don’t generally like to stand out in the common area of the bathroom taking a piss waiting for Big Earl to walk in and straddle the urinal next to me. I prefer the confines of the stalled toilet where I can handle my business in peace, and with the privacy a nervous pisser needs.
Yes, I am a nervous pisser. I don’t like to piss when other people are around, especially when they’re making noise. I don’t know why, but it throws me off entirely. I need to be in my own world when I pee, or else things just don’t happen.
So, the stalls are occupied, but there are two urinals attached to the wall right next to the sink. Keep in mind that a decent urinal will have a little divider thing between you, the urinal next to you, and the sink. Some urinals even have this built in where the porcelain extends out a few inches on each side so that Billy Dan has a harder time trying to sneak a glance. The urinals in this establishment had none of the such. No, these were urinals designed to simulate taking a piss in the great outdoors. Free, open, and unconfined. All that was missing was the tree and the John Deere tractor.
Free, open, and unconfined is fine when you’re alone, and there is no door allowing ingress for new participants in the sick little game. As a rather busy gas station, this would not be the case. This bathroom turned into the great outdoors, and everyone was invited.
I decided that I was going to grab the urinal near the sink as it was placed higher up on the wall, and as a rather tall person, it offered the possibility of a more comfortable urination process in an already difficult circumstance. Now comes preparation time. A male in a situation like this normally has a second means of defense to the outside world: the fly. You unzip, take care of business, and zip back up and the only thing that comes out is the only thing that needs to be out to complete the piss. Not so for me, the road tripper wearing elastic waisted track pants, an essential item for comfortable driving. Oh no, I had to pull the front of these sons a bitches down and show the bathroom world the triangular area of fun, which includes…well, use your imagination. Again, this would be fine if I was in comfortable private piss land, but I wasn’t.
So I stand there, willing the piss to come out at an extreme rate of speed so I can pull up the pants, wash my hands, and exit the hell hole before anyone walked in or walked out, because I was definitely in full view of someone with misplaced eyes, or a Republican politician looking for a good time. I don’t want to paint the picture that I was someone who was standing eight feet away from the urinal, pants down and arcing my piss into a urinal. Rest assured, I was as close as I could comfortably get to the urinal.
By some stretch of fate I manage to defeat pee shyness and push out a liter of fluid before the status of the bathroom changes. I pull up the pants, wash the hands, and blow dry them. Of course there are no paper towels, so I have to use the sleeve of my hoodie on the handle to open the door to freedom.
I realize I could have had it a lot worse, and believe me, I have. I’ve walked in on countless toilets frequented by people who apparently lack the ability to shit downward into the toilet, instead choosing to shit everywhere BUT the toilet. I’ve had the honor of standing in puddles of piss in order to take a piss. Oh, and don’t forget the asshole who lacks the ability to flush, and leaves the surprise of five pounds of shit and toilet paper inside the fixture you were about to do business with. This doesn’t even have to include gas station bathrooms, as college bathrooms are notoriously bad as well.
I know the pay toilet idea has yet to catch on, but as a pee shy person with an unrealistic vision of bathroom utopia, I’d pay a dollar to take care of business in a clean, sanitary environment.
I shall wait with bated breath for the bathroom revolution.
Freedom can be an empty cup from which everybody wants to drink
I did something most horrible today. I went back to Junior College.
First, a little background. I’m taking an online class this semester at the junior college where I grew up to make up for a previous indiscretion. It’s easy, it’s online, and it’s cheap because I can claim my parent’s address for residency requirements. Everything sounds good, right?
Wrong.
As things are bound to happen in junior college land, they fucked my files up. In fact, they reached such a level of fucked that I had to go see them and talk to them about why things were so fucked. My plan to easy college credit had been momentarily derailed.
So Monday, I skip my lunchbreak at work, and make my way through the thicket to the junior college “assistance center”. Assistance center is a relative term, mind you. No where it is ever stated how they will assist you. They have, however, apparently had special training in it, because the sign right before the desk read “Wait here for one of our specialists to help you”.
So, on Monday, I get “help” from a specialist. This woman apparently had special training in resetting accounts and proclaiming it a problem solved. Turns out she was just a specialist in fucking things up more. By this time, lunch was over and I had to head back to work with the inevitable feeling that I would be back this week because they hadn’t solved a damn thing.
That brings us back to today, Wednesday. I get off work early at 4:30p so that I can brave the murky abyss to the assistance center. This time, I’ve come prepared with print outs of my error so they can see what to fix. I walk in thinking that this will be easy, and I might even get home before 5.
Wrong.
I open the door, and I see a line before me that stretches from the roped off assistance desk waiting area back to the doors marking the entrance to the counseling area. I’ve happened upon a hour wait in a hallway where the main scenary includes a bathroom. Begrudgingly, I get in the line and begin to wait out the torture.
Immediately, I stick out like the elephant in the room. Here I was, blue sateen oxford tucked into a pressed pair of dress pants flowing above black dress shoes. There they were, wifebeaters tucked into Dale Earnhardt Jr. approved Wrangers, sleeves made of ink, and even worse, Senior ‘08 t-shirts. It’s fair to say I was out place.
Like the above observation, my wait in life was a highly introspective one. I took time to examine the notable types of junior college people, and their impact within the junior college environment.
There were, of course, the couples. There was one couple in particular that I had my eye on, as they were about four spots ahead of me in line. She was cute, maybe about five foot tall. She had the classic MTV type look the kids are fond of these days, and was obviously no older than 18. The boyfriend was maybe one inch shorter and dressed so preppy that he’ll be highly disappointed when he learns that junior colleges don’t have fratenities. His hair was in possesion of a tube of hair gel, but he is probably blissfully of the slight baldspot taking root on the crown of his head. They were unequivocally the quintessential junior college couple. You don’t know whether to feel happy for them or hate every minute of their existance, but sleep only comes soundly with the knowledge that they’ll fucking tear each other apart before their first year is over, but not before she gets pregnant.
Speaking of parents, that makes up another big junior college group. These people are absolutely some of the worst, because they bring their children everywhere with them. This includes, but is not limited to, registration, lab, lunch, the library, study groups and, of course, class. These people are likely to be the education majors, which is scary in and of itself because they’re so shit at parenting their own kids.
Then, finally, you have the people who “are really going to make it this time”. These are the people who are going back to school for the fifth time, the people promising themselves that they’re not going to drop after they’re made to do real work in the second week. This is the most depressing group, because junior college is so affordable that everyone can up and decide they want an absolutely meaningless associates degree, so they keep coming back for more.
You want to believe that everyone can make it through college, you really do, but it’s just not true. College is fucking hard. Sure, it’s only hard for four weeks out of a 16 week semester, but that one month will knock you on your ass and catch you out so fast that you won’t know what hit you. College isn’t for everyone, and shouldn’t be for everyone, as the world needs the structure that comes from having a wide subset of education. It is in that way that junior college is like a casino. 60% of the clientele are throwing their money at the place hoping for some chance at a better life, and most will fail horribly. You can fuck up as much as you want, and they’ll still take you and still give you the dice.
It’s fair to say that I don’t miss junior college at all.
I don’t mean to be crass, or pompous, or even an ass. Junior college was there when other obligations meant that there was no way I could have gone anywhere else. It was cheap, and gave me a GPA that allowed me to pick where I wanted to go from there.
I would never go back, though, and attend an actual, real life, non-online class at one.
My visit today made me so happy and so grateful that I get to go back to University, because it’s so much different and better than I ever imagined it could be. The atmosphere difference is so astronomically different that I can’t explain it.
The best way I can think to describe it would involve portraying junior college as the 100 meter dash. There’s all this excitement, you’re going to get done really quickly, and it’s hard not to finish. University is like running the marathon. You have to pace yourself to be there at the end, and when you do get to the end, the sheer fact that you got there is an accomplishment in and of itself. The marathon weeds out the 100 meter dash people pretty quick, and the environment is a better place for it.
Above all, University feels like what one would expect college to feel like. Everywhere there are people listening to mp3 players as they walk about, students fervently study to pass their imminent test, bicyclist try their best to kill you on the sidewalks, and people rarely go anywhere without their laptop or source of caffeine. Gone is the incessant bitching from the 50 year old who just now decided to be a nurse, or 55 year old bitter about the fact that they waited to go back to school.
It’s a far better place for it.
Epilogue: I did wait in line for an hour and did finally get my probem fixed. I’m now officially enrolled in a junior college class again. My major source of joy came not from the knowledge that my problem was fixed, but that I didn’t have to go back to that dreadful place. Sure, one junior college class costs the same as my University parking permit, but it’s money well spent.
We apologize for the inconvenience
It is weird to not to believe in “god”.
Every so often, you’re placed in situations where a bunch of people start talking about their beliefs, how they pray or worship or attribute every success in their life to a higher power. Undoubtedly, you’ll find people within this group who will start to nod and share their experiences regarding the same subject matter, and everyone there just “gets” it.
I don’t get it.
This very thing happened to me today. I’m taking a summer class that involves learning leadership and management techniques…basically it’s a required class I need for my degree. Today, we were supposed to come in and talk about a leader, based on our impressions from reading their biography/autobiography. I came across a autobiography of Jack Welch for six bucks, and used it to complete the assignment on the cheap, but today I had to sit there and listen to everyone talk about their leader of choice.
Religious leaders or leaders who were devoutly religious seemed to be the norm for the way the day was going, and person by person, you could just feel the churchie vibe grow, like they understood what it was like when an aforementioned leader led the football team in prayer and bible study, or the Pope upheld the values of the great Catholic church. It was obvious that these people felt something.
I felt nothing.
It gets a bit awkward really, the whole feeling of being the outsider and the knowledge that you’d be the first one to be ostracized from the group if you chose to reveal your position as the evil person who doesn’t believe that everything we do is because of some supernatural being.
I’ve never been truly religious, though I admit I have faked it to gain acceptance into social circles during my childhood. My parents were never ones to go to church, and I wasn’t even aware that there was some weird belief system in place until I walked through the steps of grade school. It was odd, coming across a sea of people that had dedicated their young lives to something I’d never heard of before. I didn’t quite know what to make of it, and treaded cautiously into the future.
As I grew up, the pressures to become one with the lord grew stronger, and for some reason it was an acceptable question to ask each other what church one was attending. I would make up churches, of course, or I would pick a church once obscured to side of the road background blur. The revelation that you didn’t go to church was, of course, an invitation to save one’s soul, but my ten year old soul was just fine.
As I grew up and I started to learn what I believed in, I realized that I couldn’t bring myself to believe in “god”. The logic was just too strong, and since I hadn’t grown up in a strong belief system, I didn’t suffer from the years of brainwashing in my childhood that emphasized religion, so off I went, a clean young boy who didn’t believe. As I continued to grow older, my viewpoint strengthened. After all, I believed in all the things churches didn’t, like LGBT rights and women’s rights. I didn’t believe in fate, nor did I really understand why this Jesus person had so little faith in me that he died for my sins long before I was born, and then used some Houdini shit to escape his tomb.
I just wasn’t god material.
This was all well and good until my brother started dying. My brother, faced with a terminal illness, had begun his descent towards death, and faced with the prospect of death, became very religious in the process. Dually faced with the grief of losing their first born son, my parents also began to walk down the path towards religion, and I guess you could argue that all three became born again Christians.
This left me in a very awkward situation.
For sixteen years up to this point, what I believed in had never been directly questioned, and I was allowed to live my silent life free of religion. This changed very quickly. I think that since they all walked towards the light that they expected me to go too, and to an extent they tried to drag me along with them — albeit kicking and screaming. I never really stood up and quantified what I believed, perhaps knowing it was not the best time to be sharing my religious insight with the masses. Instead, I went along to the events I had to go to, such as the baptism of my brother, and consequently the funeral of my brother.
In between, there was mostly a lot of praying. I don’t think that I ever prayed along with them, failing to see how wishing that things were going to get better would actually impact reality. Perhaps if I had prayed with them, prayed long and hard, my brother would still be alive. Logic and medical science would disagree, though. I remember the Sunday after my brother died, my Dad woke me up to go to church, and finally I made a stand and refused to go. I told him that I refused to be a part of something so horrible that it caused people around the world to kill each other for no reason based on the word of a loosely translated book. My position apparently became upsetting for him, and off he went to meet my mother at church without me, though not without a few comments in passing.
Over the next few years, I would continue to be pushed towards religion by numerous familial calamities, and a girlfriend that I think was uncomfortable with the notion that I didn’t really believe in anything. I continued to push back, though, choosing my battles as they came and supporting others that needed to be supported in light of my viewpoints. I tried to find a happy medium, and I often sacrificed my viewpoints for the well-being of others.
Those times were very hard for me, as I struggled to maintain this delicate balance where I keep the peace between everyone, but don’t compromise my values in the end. It’s never easy to be the agnostic/atheist. The world isn’t supportive nor conducive to us, and the terrain can be filled with land mines.
For instance, one day in the past year, I got into a discussion over religion with my mother. It peaked with her asking the question, “Well, you believe your brother is in heaven, don’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
I had told her the complete and honest truth. I don’t know if my brother is in heaven, and the knowledge either way doesn’t affect how I view what happened to him. A lot of people quantify the loss of others by saying ‘at least they’re in a better place, or they’re with god now’. That doesn’t bring me any solace. Death is death, and I think I do a disservice to my brother by choosing to believe that everything is peachy keen because he’s floating in the stars somewhere with a mystical being that created the world and has the power to control everything in it.
Instead, I choose to use the memories of my brother as a reminder to live, as a reminder that life is short and that we ought to make the best of it, for as far as we know, it’s all we get.
It’s easier to leave than to be left behind
When I think about life, I often think of the things that I’d absolutely love to do, but I’m not allowed to do, or I cannot allow myself to do.
I have very few real addictions in life. I classify a real addiction as something I need to survive, something I go out of my way to make sure I have whenever I need it, and something I cannot live without but can humanly survive without. If I do go without, I freak out and cannot function as a normal human being. For me, those things are medicated lip balm, tetrahydrozoline eyedrops, caffeine, and ibuprofen.
I’ve been addicted to medicated lip balm ever since I was in middle school, so it’s been a very long time. I usually went without any kind of lip balm and rocked chapped lips at the time, but then I read an article on the internet…and this was back in my AOHell days, about how girls didn’t like to kiss chapped lips. Since I was a lonely, desperate twelve year old at the time, I immediately needed some lip balm, even though I logically knew that I would not be kissing anyone for a very long time. I’ve had this burning desire for medicated lip balm ever since, and I cannot leave home without it. If I do, my lips start to hurt and I get panicky, but luckily it seems like a faily common addiction to have, and if nothing else it serves as a conversation starter. Plus, when I did kiss a girl for the first time when I was 14, you can be damn sure that I had nice, soft lips.
My addiction to tetrahydrozoline eyedrops started around the same time as my lip balm addiction, although I think I was younger. I kept having constant eye irritation, which was stressful because I had already worn glasses for a year in the third grade, and had since graduated to contacts in the fourth grade, and being the vein person I was at the time, I didn’t want to wear my glasses back to that horrible place that was public school. So, after many eye doctor visits that ended in steroidal eye drops, my parents up and bought me wonderful Visine. It took the redness out, and soothed my eyes like you wouldn’t believe. After that, I learned I could put it in my eyes every morning before I put my contacts on to keep the burning out, and with that, I discovered what every pothead knew before myself: Visine is a wonderful thing. Now I struggle to put on my contacts without it, and I’ve been told to stop by my eye doctor, but alas, every morning I succumb to the Visine monster.
I think very few people in this country lack a caffeine addiction. It is our stimulant of choice, making every day possible and more bearable. I remember my first experience with coffee in particular, I was around 4 or 5 at the time. My mum was at a tire dealership having the brakes replaced on her Volvo sedan, and I saw this wonderful pot of black goodness sitting on the counter in the waiting room against an array of styrofoam cups and cylinders of powdered non-dairy creamer and sugar set next to the iconic red and white stir sticks. As I was a wee boy, I demanded to try this goodness that I saw sitting there, and my mum, in her infinite wisdom or infinite stupidity doctored up a cup of coffee and it was the most wonderful thing I ever tasted. I’ve loved coffee and caffeine ever since, and I even remember waking up for elementary school at 7 in the morning to turn on the coffee maker and watch the original Power Rangers. Yeah, I’m that old. Everyone told me it would stunt my growth, but it didn’t. I grew up to a six foot two behemoth, or so I’ve always been made to feel, although I always feel like everyone is taller than me.
I don’t recall what started my ibuprofen addiction, but it rages within me every day. When I wake up, I immediately pop ibuprofen to keep the rebound headaches away, and the other body aches that will occur throughout the day. I haven’t aged well, and even in my 20’s I have a hell of a lot of pain. I even have sciatica for fucks sake. My doctor says I don’t take enough ibuprofen a day to do any harm, and so I keep on. I’ve even gotten others addicted to the stuff. My last girlfriend refused to take painkillers when she first met me, but I changed that, and to this day she still subscribes to my ibuprofen philosophy of why be in pain when you can just take something. She’s a good kid, I’m glad in the midst of ruining her life that I gave her magical insight.
Those things however, are relatively benign. They’re socially acceptable addictions, addictions that it’s okay to talk about out in the real world without fear that you’re being blacklisted by the listmakers of society. Those things I do everyday, but I don’t think about everyday. I don’t think about what it would be like to have some or do something involving them, I just do it. No, it’s the other things that get to me.
I often think about the joys of smoking a cigarette. I’ve smoked very little in my lifetime, no more than 10 packs in my entire life, but the feeling of that burn of smoke and nicotine and tobacco is wonderful. Smoking for me is so incredibly calming, and I’ve used it during rather piss poor times in my life to completely unwind, and it does the trick. There is absolutely nothing better than standing outside in the dark, listening to an introspective song on the mp3 player, and just having a burn. Whenever I start smoking again, I eventually get bored or I force myself to stop because of the fear of death and the sheer fact that I can’t afford to spend six dollars for a pack of cigarettes. I enjoy the cigarette more than the cigar too, the cigarette is much less refined, much more personal. A cigar is bulky and enjoyable. A cigarette is rough and deeply personal.
I used to try to avoid alcohol as much as possible, but as is normal in society, I think to myself anytime I see someone drinking alcohol or I’m having a bad time that god, I could use a drink. I really do enjoy alcohol in all different forms, but when I drink it, especially when I am alone, I am driven to the darkest corners of excess, past the target of the buzz and straight into the hells of drunkenly stumbling back to bed. Alcohol is one of those drugs that I crave, but I never feel particularly good about it afterward, no matter how much I drink. I feel like such a stigma has been placed against alcohol in my head that I’m afraid of it, and I don’t know how to use it properly, and when I do use it, I don’t feel like I want it to. Alcohol is both inspiring and disappointing at the same time.
All of those things though, those things are perfectly legal. What comes next blurs that line.
I’ve not done many drugs in my life, I haven’t even smoked pot because I just never knew the right stoners to acquire some, but I had a rousing desire to get wasted, so I resorted to other, primarily teenagerish methods of escape..
My first foray into aspects like this included taking 1400mg of diphenhydramine, or benedryl. The experience, as it was my first time to truly “trip balls”, was absolutely terrible. I had taken so much that the walls were breathing, and I saw red and green bridges being built by invisible fingers to different reaches within the room, and I just sat there staring stupidity at things that didn’t really exist, not knowing what as going on. My most distinct memory of the trip was the clock. It casted a shadow on the wall, and as I watched it, it would peel itself off the wall, almost melting as if Salivdor Dali was controlling my mind into a persistence of memory. Things went okay until I panicked, and then I had a bad time. I don’t remember most of the end, but I remember saying things to people even though I couldn’t hear them or see them. My drug induced mind would have conversations that my conscious mind couldn’t ascertain. I finally got through it with the help of my trip sitter and best friend, even though the experience thoroughly freaked her the fuck out. My hands shook for about a week after that too.
Next, I moved onto DXM. I was having a really bad time of things in life, and one night at about midnight, I needed to escape. I went down the street to the CVS and the Walgreens and purchased enough cough syrup based on my calculations to get me to the upper second plateau. It was one of the most wonderful experiences of my drug life, the first plateau of feeling the joy and utter euphoria of movement and the upper second plateau where I could lay in bed, put on the right music and truly believe that I was flying. I’ve done it twice since, and I’ve never gotten back to where I was that night, which leaves me with great disappointment.
The next thing I ever did was inhalants, primarily inhaling the contents of the gas duster you buy to clean out your electronics. I’d had friends who did it, but ultimately I was afraid to try it. One night, I finally worked up the courage to get after it, and I sat in the bathroom, stuck the straw in my mouth, and pulled the trigger. The high itself is one of the worst I’ve ever had. All you feel is your mind making this high pitched skipping noise as your brain cells waste away from lack of oxygen. There is no euphoria, nothing to feel good about, but still it was a new experience. The most troubling thing about gas duster is my propensity to redose to the point where I don’t even know I’m doing it. I think that’s how most people die from it, you fade so far away that you keep redosing without logic, and the next thing you know you’re waking up in a pool of vomit happy to be alive.
Lorazepam, or Ativan is quite the interesting experience. I happened onto a bunch of it after my mum had ordered some from Mexico, but then circumstances got in the way and my ex-girlfriend Natasha and I intercepted the box. We acquired a collection of 60 tablets of lorazepam, which lent itself to many interesting experiences. It in and of itself exists to relax you, and at first we took it as such. I took it before giving a presentation in freshman psychology, and then I took another one when I got my tongue pierced because I was so utterly terrified but I wanted to do something completely bad ass. My girlfriend at the time took three of them when we went out for her 20th birthday to relax, and consequently she doesn’t remember much about the night, but I do.
We went to go eat at TGI Fridays, and before long, I knew I was in trouble. Natasha first got up to go to the bathroom, and I watched her walk to the entrance of the bathroom, stop for a bit, and then come back to the table pretending she had just been to the bathroom. After we finished our obviously frozen and defrosted appetizer, she looked up to the waitress and with the most straight and sincere face, said slurredly “Tell the chef the chicken was excellent”, and she meant it. We got through dinner without the waitress calling the cops on me for drugging my date, and then it was off to the mall. We walked into Hot Topic, and my ex-girlfriend grabbed a corset off the wall and then proceeded to the dressing room for 30 minutes. These were some of the longest 30 minutes in my life, as I was terribly worried about what had happened, and when she finally emerged, my anger couldn’t be suppressed, and she bought the corset, and we went to the car to have a crying argument, which was the norm since we were having a lot of trouble at the time. I remember spending the rest of the night driving around town looking for a playstation 2 game as she slept in the front seat. She still doesn’t remember most of that night, and I’m glad.
One night I took four lorazepam for myself, and I don’t remember much of what happened either. I do remember saying a lot of things I didn’t mean to people I really care about, though I don’t know what, and they won’t tell me to this day. I also remember getting an e-mail from the university about how someone molested a female resident in my apartment complex that night (I lived on campus), and I was terribly afraid I had done something terrible because I couldn’t remember that night. Finally they sent out a picture taken from the security camera, and when it wasn’t me, I was so terribly glad that I threw away the rest of the lorazepam and I’ve never touched any since.
Finally, lady vicodin. When I was in high school, my mother was addicted to vicodin, though I didn’t really make the connection at the time. It wasn’t until my early college years and the collaspe of a long term relationship that I started experimenting with hydrocodone. At first it was one here, one there, just to get the feeling of ease and relax, but then as I started to procure a stash of my own, I began to play around a bit more, and with higher quantities. I absolutely adore hydrocodone. I love how you get such a rush of bliss and euphoria if you take enough, a feeling to close of what I’m told is a low dose of heroin. I love the feeling I have on hydrocodone that the world truly is a good place, with good people, and I just want to completely wrap my arms around the world and give it a hug because it needs one. Hydrocodone turns the world from the horrible place it really is to the world I wish I lived in. On hydrocodone, I believe anything is possible, and my faults and fears and discrepancies fade away.
I’m not a habitual user of any of the less legal things I discussed, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think about them often. I think about lady vicodin, how it would be so wonderful to feel like that all the time. I understand addiction, I really do. I understand how easy it is to get addicted, but so far I’ve stopped myself from getting there because I have no logical alternative once I get there. I know I walk a slippery slope, and I know I’m one step from falling apart into blissful addiction, but I do the best I can.
I know drugs are things you shouldn’t do everyday, especially the ones like lady vicodin that make life so amazing. I know that if I did those everyday, life would lose all meaning. I go through life right now knowing that behind all the misery and all the suffering, that something exists that can make life so wonderful and so amazing that it feels like your heart might explode. Drugs are probably the closest we’ll ever get to experiencing the modern idealogical idea of “heaven”, and I guess you could say drugs like hydrocodone are my god, because I have no other god.
I don’t pray to her everyday, every month, or even every year, but when I do, I truly feel alive.
That’s enough for me.
The battle against the inner-self
I have this immensely bad feeling that I can’t explain, but deep down I feel that something, somewhere is going to go terribly wrong, and in a very big way.
That’s right, I’m having an anxiety attack. I’m pretty sure I brought it on by drinking too much caffeine, which is what I get for using my coupon for a free two litre of Diet Pepsi Max on an all-nighter project night, but alas. It just blows me away how quick it comes on, because one moment everything is absolutely fine, and there is nothing wrong. The next moment, you’re overcome with this immense feeling of terror, like the roof is about to cave in, or the building is about to collapse, and you know for certain it’s going to happen, but there is nothing you can logically do about it. All the while, you have this immense amount of energy, and you can’t sit still, and then the paranoia takes over.
What was that sound? Was someone just talking?
When it starts, it’s almost as if there are less colors in the world. If I remember correctly, the human eye can perceive millions of colors, but when that feeling starts, it’s like the world is reduced to 32 colors. Everything becomes a little darker, and vibrant colors stand out more, almost as if they have some meaning that you’re meant to interpret. Things made up of more dull colors just seem to fade away, almost as if they don’t exist. It starts to become a very Silent Hill-esque world.
If you’re listening to music, it’s like you can hear more of what is actually going on in the background. You can hear the guitar pick scraping along the strings, the subtle notes of the synthesizer, once subjected to the background of the track, now projecting as clear as the guitar and bass. If you’re listening to a concert bootleg, the talking of the audience sounds like someone has walked up right behind you and proceeded to ask you a question, or make a comment about the band, which is the most terrifying thing in the world. Other normal sounds of apartment living, such as the downstairs neighbor shutting the door, or the next door neighbor turning on the faucet or flushing the toilet now seem like vast conspiracies of invisible people to infiltrate your apartment and your living space against your will.
When you remember to breathe, you realize it doesn’t come as easy as it did only twenty minutes ago. You start to inhale, but your lungs will only fill half way, almost as if there is some rubber band around them that won’t let them fill all the way. Panic ensues, you try harder to fill your lungs, but the harder you try, the less they fill. That’s when the hyperventilation and lightheadedness starts.
Finally, in my case at least, I tend to start to see things that aren’t there. I will see things that make me blink, and then they’re gone. Shadows around the walls, objects on the table, things out of the corner of my eye, they all exist until I blink, and then they disappear, never to be seen again. I think scientifically it may be the paranoia, and lack of oxygen to the brain, but I don’t know. It’s just one of those things where you know you’ve reached the pinnacle of the anxiety attack.
And that is what it’s like to have an anxiety attack.
I knew I should have bought those road rage cards
Today I was driving to school to make my afternoon class. Driving to the university involves getting on the most feared interstate in Texas, and consequently, where all shitty drivers congregate. The elderly gentleman in the left lane going 40 miles per hour as he struggles to see over the wheel. The 16 year-old high school girl on her cell phone who doesn’t quite understand that you’re only supposed to use one lane, not two. The ignorant fool who stops in the middle of the on ramp hoping that maybe traffic so magically stop so he can merge into traffic without fear.
Those people annoy me, but there is one thing that bothers me more. People driving on the access road of the interstate who don’t yield to traffic exiting the interstate even though there is a clearly placed YIELD sign with an auxiliary sign underneath it that reads “TO RAMP”.
Yield To Ramp. Simple enough.
So I’m about to make my exit, and I see this gold Chevy HHR speeding along the access road, and I can tell that pretty soon, we’re going to be in the same place at the same time, and instinctively I know they’re not going to yield. How did I deduce that? Well, for one, they drive a Chevy HHR, so they think they’re driving an automobile that is hip and stylish because the sales representative at the Chevy dealership told them so. People who believe they’re cool don’t yield, and they tend to be self righteous assholes.
Self righteous assholes also don’t yield. Mark it down.
Anyway, I speed my car up to the point I know where I can exit the interstate and get across the access road in front of them without endangering either party, but I’m out to make a point today, and I want to fly across in front of them so maybe they’ll learn how to yield next time. Is it wrong of me? Yes. I should have just slowed down and let them go, but I wanted to be an ass and make my point because sometimes you have to stand up for yourself and people who can’t read a damn road sign.
So I fly off the interstate, and execute the manuever that involves me cutting off the HHR because they didn’t yield to exiting traffic on the interstate. I continue to drive normally, and proceed to make my right turn at the traffic light down from the exit. I’ve made my point, and now my major concern is finding a parking space and then making the ten minute walk to class.
Well, I make my turn, and then I realize that the HHR has started to follow me.
I wasn’t exactly prepared for this turn of events, but I kept driving normally as if they weren’t there. Now, I would have been a lot more fearful if I had cut off a black BMW 5 Series, or a Chevy Impala from the 1960’s. These two drivers most likely have guns. The guy in the beamer is a hitman, and the guy in the Impala is defending his turf. You don’t fuck with these people. I, however, was dealing with something far more innocuous and wasn’t fearing for my safety.
I pull up the my next light, and nonchalantly stare straight ahead, and do a little changing on the radio, normal stuff you do at a stoplight. All the while, there is an orange Chevy HHR next to me, with someone flailing their arms out the driver’s window trying to get my attention. From what I could tell from the corner of my eye, they were very insistant that they get my attention. I, on the other hand, just keep looking ahead, waiting for the light to change as if they weren’t there.
I could have rolled down my window and educated them on the various traffic laws in the State of Texas, but I think I got more satisfaction by being passive aggressive, and letting them get all their energy from their bad driving out through the flailing of arms. I don’t really get off on the whole personal confrontation side of life, I prefer to watch and take mental notes, or just not be involved at all, so I wasn’t going to dignify this person with a response.
That wasn’t the best part, however.
When the light turned green, and they had failed to get my attention, they promptly and angrily turned to the right, which happened to be one of those cool one way streets that every university or college campus has, and the asshole in the HHR was about to see a bunch of WRONG WAY signs. Me? I just kept on my way, as the inept asshole continued to embarass him/herself on a grand scale.
Does it make me an asshole that I exacted some vigilante driver justice on someone who failed to yield? Probably, and granted, I wouldn’t have done it if I thought there was any possibility that I could crash the car and injure myself or them. I did it knowing that I was completely in the right legally, and that nothing would come of it except a little bit of satisfaction.
Sometimes it feels good to be an asshole. Just be one of those assholes who yields to oncoming traffic.
I’ve been watching your world from afar
I try to keep my distance from society, maintaining a buffer that allows me to observe and interact as little as possible. It allows me to watch people and how they interact with their environments while keeping a comfortable distance so I can stay to myself and just watch. It’s all part of my noted introversion and general misanthropy. It’s not that I don’t like people. I love to watch them, trying to figure out why they do what they do, how they operate. That said, I just don’t trust people and stay away in most situations and choose mainly not to interact.
I fear I’m integrating myself too far into society. I’ve started going out drinking with friends, doing things with other people, and trying to enjoy being around other people. I’ve started acting like a normal twenty-something college kid.
That terrifies me.
I often feel like I’m walking through a forest, and I’ve just met a bear. This bear isn’t like most bears. He doesn’t sell toilet paper nor does he have any interest in eating me. Instead, he befriends me. We keep walking through the forest, enjoying ourselves as friends typically would, and all of the sudden, the bear snaps and mauls me to death. That is how I feel every time I’m around other people. I feel like I constantly have to be aware and constantly have to be looking behind me, or I won’t make it out alive.
That is any social situation for me in a nut shell, the constant awareness that I’m not in control and that the bear could snap at any minute and take me out with it. It doesn’t mean I completely fear social situations, I don’t. I dislike them, but I don’t fear them. I don’t necessarily avoid social situations either, but I’ll never be that person who walks up to an innocent bystander minding their own business to shoot the shit. People like that terrify me, and I won’t be one of those people. Consequently, I wear headphones and sunglasses so that people can’t make eye contact, and won’t try to talk to me.
I’m destined to be a wallflower. I know this, and it is what I want to be. A normal, sane person wouldn’t jump into a crocodile infested swamp and hang out waiting to be eaten, and I won’t do the same. That is why it terrifies me to integrate too far into society, to start behaving like the perception of a normal specimen. I feel like when I start going out with people and building relationships that I’m betraying myself and setting myself up for the inevitable backlash that follows such an event.
I fear that I might eventually lose sight of who I am, and my purpose of observing to learn. I fear that one day I’ll get sucked in, and I’ll just be the normal person with friends, 2.5 kids, a house in the suburbs and a wife that is fucking the gardener while I fuck my secretary. Not in the same room, of course. That would be trashy.
I think overall, I fear being everyone else. When I look at everyone else, and their lives, all I see is misery. Misery in relationships, financial misery, misery at work, and sweet misery for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I don’t want to get sucked into that life that everyone else seems to have where their soul is completely drained from them and they become hollow shells of what they were.
Everyone I know is getting married, having kids, getting divorced, hanging on a thread to things they yearn for but can never have, and I don’t want to be that person. I want to actually enjoy life, because I spent so long hating it. I’m relatively happy with my place in life right now, and I realize how delicate a balance that is. I know that it is a razor’s edge between here and crying myself to sleep every night and medicating myself into an oblivion of twisted reality in order to forget about why I feel like this. I’ve been both places, and I know one of those places is a place I don’t want to be again, and I know how to get to one of those places, and I fear it is the road I am on right now.
Is it irrational? Absolutely. Then again, I’m a very irrational person, so it all works out.
