the fog

i'm walking through life in a blissful fog right now. lexapro is doing wonders for me, and it apparently hasn't even kicked in fully yet (according to the doc.) but this isn't a long-winded pitch about america's favorite addiction, oh no; this is me squeezing out the last bits of fear i have in me before they get lost in the fog and i am forever a different man.

there's a lingering, nagging voice in the back of my head right now. that voice of paranoid, fearful logic that is clinging to the notion that who i am is getting lost in who i'm hiding behind. i'm terrified of what these pills are going to do to me once they kick into high gear. i've become apathetic about sociality, my work ethic has plummeted even further if you can believe it, and i've generally become a grey blob of contentedness. and tantamount to that transformation, i'm okay with it most of the time. i said to myself yesterday while i was walking around, "i'm so happy that my mind isn't racing like usual anymore." but is that truly a good thing? am i actually losing what made me 'special,' what made me like myself in some small but wholly important way, to the drug-addled ideal of american youth that i'm shoving down my throat every morning?

and now i find myself troubled for the first time in weeks. staring blankly at my computer screen as my mind putters along, trying to regain the pace it once kept. is this really what i want? or am i being fooled and conditioned by the artificial synapses firing in my brain? i don't even feel comfortable asking such things now, because i'm not the same person whose answer i seek now. i feel like i should be asking a different question...

what would lucio want?

the lantern lights

happy october. i'm sitting in my room, less than half an hour away from a cornerstone moment in my life, wiling away the minutes on this stupid blog. i could be doing the work i have to finish by tomorrow, or study for a test, or get a jump on my research paper...or go to the bathroom!

...

better.

the eyes

three shots of straight vodka, a few beers, and a bruised vertebra = my night. a hangover fortified by my having forgotten to take my allergy pills and possibly a cold, with work barreling towards me by the hour = my morning. fuck you, saturday night. why aren't you ever as good as last year? when i was hooking up with 2 girls a night, having drink races into the morning hours, and making cute lesbians rethink their inebriated sexuality? now it's always me dancing like a little white man, drowning the music in alcoholic moose piss and hoping i don't slip into a dramatic episode. i don't do the club/dance scene, i just don't. i'm a talker, a charmer. not a dancer or a really physical guy in terms of meeting people. those rooms parties were my stomping grounds. no wonder alan hated me, i used to steal women from him at those apartment mixers.

i met a girl who lives in casc yesterday while i was moving my car. i bumped into her and we had the awkward OH MY BAD DIDN'T MEAN TO GROPE YOU WITH MY SHOULDER BONES moment...but she stopped for a second and looked into my eyes. it was very genuine. ah, what a thrill, the chase is. unfortunately, i've realized i shouldn't really be going for people living in this building. just another little tidbit for me to remember when i decide to go looking. it hadn't hit me until last night that what i did to lauren was tantamount to me breaking up with a girl and screwing her live-in sister. i.e. probably the scummiest thing i've ever done. and of course because she didn't get mad at me i won't learn. because to me i'm a good person and not in the wrong for living my life and pursuing a true connection with a woman. i'm not a tucker max, i'm no barney, i'm not an alpha, therefore i'm incapable of being an asshole. it's simply commutative.

but then again, i'm oversimplifying life by believing that. how can i think people are so flat? i don't even think that about most people! i'm just so attached to this idea of me weaving into this archetypical mold that doesn't even exist in reality, it's something i've made up to try and understand the absurd mixture of my quirks and flaws, in my inefficably desperate attempt to make my life easy like a television show. maybe i still believe in the magic window...i hope not. i really couldn't tell you at this point.

t-minus 3 weeks until i become another number on prozac's quarterly sales report. then again, once that happens, whoever i become won't care. it's sad that i'm no longer terrified of letting who i fundamentally am drift away into the inky abyss of my knotted brain. whatever. the only downside is that dust will now collect on my jams notebook.

the classlessness

i'm really bored in chemistry right now. fucking a, i got a 5 on my ap chem test, and yet i still have to take a nonmajors class to fill out my credits. there are people in here marvelling at the idea of orbitals. i'm absolutely stumped at how i ended up here. it's almost a comment on my work ethic, or lack thereof. waning ever since middle school, and by junior year i was firmly locked into senioritis. sometimes i wonder if i ever shook that feeling of carefree lack of responsibility. that laziness that seems to define me in the eyes of my hard-working, get-it-done-yesterday friends. i used to take offense to their jabs, but no longer...it's just their way of venting. i deserve it; in a way, to them i'm one of those kids that coasts through life without regard for the concept of hard work, the enemy of the working man. ehh. i don't have a huge problem with that.

the professor just made an incest joke. my spine is in pieces.

i wonder who that kate c is. i really do think i'm in love with her, mind you. not because of the whole gay porn thing, but for a more normal reason. she writes so fluidly, her ideas flow exquisitely without weighing down what she's trying to say. i want to write like that, that oscar wilde "i'm short and sarcastic and dry love me" way of spewing your ideas onto paper in a quick and acidic fashion. people lap that up. i don't blame them. it's easily my favorite style of writing, that point-blank deadpan snarker type of pen.

awful chemistry pun. now he's wondering why nobody laughs at his jokes.

man, i'm still lovesick. saturday night proved that. aggressive drinking seems to bring out my dramatic pre-highschool self, and from what i have pieced together thus far, i apparently couldn't handle being at that party with all its different implications. between dancing around one of those girls long enough to realize i still have feelings for her despite saying i bounced back a few hours after being rejected, and remembering last year's phi tau escapades with kristen and abby (god, was THAT a shitshow,) i snapped and left in a huge, messy production. i need to stop dragging people down with me. like i said yesterday, i'm sort of a train wreck. it's slowly but surely happening. regardless, i'm still stuck on her, even though this could just be me idealizing her after she dumped me because i haven't been dumped in years and forgot how it felt. we would be awful together. remember kristen from high school? it would be that bad. no, not the pool hookups, us actually being together. THAT bad. but i don't care! because i don't think things through. that's exactly what i vowed to stop doing, racing in without thinking. then again, what else does a train wreck do but run headfirst into things?

the professor's talking about smoking crack in austria. class dismissed.

the drive-by

"And I've never been so alone, And I've never been so alive..."

the last words of third eye blind's motorcycle drive-by are rattling around my skull. such a gorgeous song, easily one of the best of the nineties. that feeling of being at the absolute bottom, knowing you've hit an extreme, it affirms that you're truly living your life to the fullest. that's how i try and live when it comes to romance. feeling on top of the world, afraid of the future but pushing through it anyway to be with that one person, lying alone at the bottom in the dark times, that's true emotion straight from the rawest vein of lifeblood.

but apparently this has become a bad thing, for myself and for the people who care about me. racing from girl to girl, trying to catch that feeling again and never let it go. it's like she (we all know who she is) got me hooked on a high i shouldn't have felt at a shallow 16 years old. now that it's in my blood, i can't ignore the craving. you remember that little hairy guy from the old honeycomb cereal commercials? me before i cut my hair. totally.

i look back on the past three weeks and see myself falling to pieces. not the way i used to "fall to pieces" when i was younger and just lose touch with a part of myself (el oh el suicidal tendencies, all that nonsense was part me looking for attention and part me having absolutely no regard for the little man i call lucio.) now i'm actually starting to change... i've become the asshole i see in the mirror, oblivious to others' feelings that i used to be so good at fixing. no concept of self-worth, waning self-esteem, and falsified mountains of confidence, all mixing together to make me finally become what i see as a bad person. it's as if i've been tainted by something. i'm hurting others that try and get in the way of my age-old self-destructive bender now, too. i've always been on this path, but because everyone's trying to stop me, i see them as threats and kick it into overdrive. it's like i'm against the world as a whole, as a living entity, proving myself worthy to be on it by vying to be absolutely normal. friends that all remember me when i'm not around, women that clamber for my affections, a nice knit family man... that's how i used to see myself. now, i guess i've finally hit a point where i need to get to know the man i'm becoming and steer him in the right direction, instead of trying to "complete" him with somebody else. it's a good thing i got rejected so soon, in hindsight. well, the fact that this whole entire debacle happened in the course of a week instead of dragging it out. knowing what little bits i still do know about myself, it would have taken me far too long to realize any of this and if it hadn't have transpired the way it has, i never would've listened to some of the advice i got. the really important stuff that forced me to look at myself from the outside and stop this ridiculous competition i have with nobody in particular.

i've been in eight relationships by this point in my life. i used to think of this as bragging rights, that i was a ladykiller and on par with my friends and i would never be alone because of it. now i just see it as disgusting and sad that i wasted so much of my life refusing to stop and learn about myself, instead trying my hardest to learn about other people long enough to screw them. i fucking bounced back four hours after i got dumped once. that's got to be some deep-rooted psychological bullshit right there. i did think for a good bit of time last night that i was codependent, i mean it could always be true in ways, i guess. but i still think it all stems from my lack of ability to even conceptualize the idea that somebody could care about me. the price of being aloof? or the result of being depressed for years and letting it whittle away at my self-image? that's the sixty-four dollar question, ladies and gents.

"Tell me, tell me you'll be alright when you start to fade."

the shitty morning piece

So many things swimming in my head
Floating in an ethereal pool like the souls
Of lost ideas waiting in the pits to be freed
Making their trek to the castle across the stream
Locked in time above the fogs
Stroke, stroke, stroke
I’ll make it halfway and watch from the shoreline
Staring out as the sun lays with the horizon
To regale us with stories of the day since passed
Spirits now lost become strands of the yarn they spin
An epitaph to keep them eternal
Lie upon the fiery embers and burn
Into memory fodder
Wisplike and fleeting and curtly forgotten
Are these things swimming in my head

the abhorrence

So, yesterday I was diagnosed with clinical depression. What a big fucking surprise; the doctor might as well have informed me "two large symmetrical growths in my scrotal area." (in before people snicker and question my sexuality.) I've been closing myself in my room all summer, slowly losing interest in everything I love to do. Haven't played any music or games in weeks aside from one or two respites. What's worse, I don't go out with my friends nearly ever. There was a whole week in which I told them I was sick and couldn't leave the house...because I just didn't want to be around anyone. It makes me feel horrible for doing so, and that just compounds the weight hanging off my shoulders, and the pit in my stomach is getting larger and larger. I barely eat anymore. I'm as pale as a ghost (davies.) My voice is going, I can't sing worth shit now. I can almost feel the neurons shutting down every minute I stay bolted to this desk in front of the computer, staring blankly into the flickering nodes of light that are slowly but surely giving me cancer. Fantastic. None of that is even the most frightening, though, not to me. See, before this even came about, I was what you would call socially retarted. I'm so scared this is just going to make it worse, make me completely unable (I spelt inable and thought it was right, my mind is going, dear god I'm becoming more and more stupid) to even talk to other people, cowering in my baseless fears of society. People are constantly judging me, I can feel it, no matter how much I tell myself it isn't true and that I'm merely fucking batshit crazy, it's always in my head. I'm afraid this could very well be the hypothetical point where my sanity begins to slip...if all the dominos fall in the way I fear they may. Obviously the chances of that are astronomical, but in my state it's not like I'm going to write it off. I just want to feel normal, I see people every day who lead healthy if not charmed lives with lots of friends, enviable romance, and a grasp on their doings. I know in my head and heart that I could be one of them, one of the well-adjusted peons that live their lives so fruitfully. Maybe it's all of this conscious plaintivity that's keeping me, like I'm putting up mental blocks that I can't take down unless I accept my place. But that's not what I want! What is my place meant to be anyway? A nameless lower-middle class person, few friends, homely and not very noteworthy...that's not what I want. I want to be known, I want to be the guy people miss when he isn't around, the one that when I'm not around, people still acknowledge me. Not the distant friend. Not the fringe guy you invite at the last minute to fill out the crowd. I don't want to be boring or awkward or socially inept...I want real respect. I want to be my own person again. Not to say I want to be ALPHA AS FUCK, but not a useless person, which is sort of what I am right now. I wish I could just get over myself and appreciate what I have in life, and not take things so personally. Christ, it's ridiculous how pathetic I am for not being able to. I guess this is just another cry for attention to try and spark that facet of my mind back to life after laying in its dormancy for so long.

the ramble

i am inept to societal cues sometimes making me an absentminded self-unaware tool. i have no idea how to make friends let alone meet women when im not drunk. io still havent gone on antidepressants yet to curb my anxiety issues. i miss the feeling i got when i was pursuing a woman and was legitimately scared of what was gonna happen. it felt so good to feel something. now im vapid because i havent met anybody that i feel so strongly for in a long time. i hate that i complain about my romantic life. it's like i dwell on pseudo-problems and shallow bread-and-circus conscripts of life and it gets so old. i just really hate overthinking myself, because that's what i'm doing right now and it's irritating me and making me crazy. and i'm also ranting just because i feel like saying all this before i go to sleep. i should write it. i wish i still had the passion, the fervor for writing that i did when i was younger. when i used to spend weeks just cracking out story after story, flimsily spilling my guts while i made up the goings-on. trying to make something matter. makign an outlet. i don't do that anymore! it sucks. i'm not even as articulate as i used to be. my mind has become complacent, stagnant. i don't sing nearly as well as i believe i can sometimes. phil says i don't give myself nearly enough credit. alex used to tell me i'm a doormat. miranda would say i have no self-worth. i just hate being this stewing, bored muddle of plagiarized personality and ideals cobbled togetehr into my being, my mind. i'm not proud of anything i've ever done. i swear to god, i better have kids so i can teach them to never be like me as i am right now. a loser.

the disparity

Nagging voices, that tightness in my chest took hold, she loves him, you’re both only fooling each other, why don’t you just give it up, I began panting to relive the stress, but no avail, you’re no good, just second best like always, my eyes shifted nervously, scanning the room for something that was not there, ha, what a waste of time, you’re just the punchline to every joke, my eyes must have been as big as plates by then, I dare not look as they passed, shutting out the world around me, don’t try and ignore it, you can see them going by in the corners of your eyes, you know it’s all true…

Just give up.

Don’t bother anymore.

You finished last, again.

Accept it.

“I won’t.”

You must!

“No I don’t!”

Why not? What good does being hopeful bring for you ever? How many times has it cut the rope out to leave you falling back into that pit of despair you seem to live in? You despicable pissant, you don’t even make an effort to get out, either. Just stay in there and stew, then. Once you fall without your precious net because “this time it’s different, I won’t get hurt, it’ll be good, we’ll be good,” just stay down there for good. It’s not like anyone else will give two shits about your precious absence.