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."