More of the same

[20:24] Lent Somnolence: you mean it's like that feeling where you aren't sure if you are having a heart attack or if you're having a nervous breakdown, or if the white noise in your ears and the slow motion in your eyes and the feeling in your heart means you're still heartbroken

No longer fine

no words inside my head. so here are borrowed ones. goodbye, farewell, drama and all, toss in a few blahs and half-assed tries, nights of crying, mornings of anxious waiting, obsessive dreams. people make me feel alive when i'm around them, right now i'm not alive.

It's about time that I came clean with you...no longer fine. I'm no longer running smooth. I thought I found myself onto something new, just one more line I repeat over and over again 'til I'm blue in the face with choking regret.
It's about time you got sick of me, no longer fun and so far from interesting. I thought that I found me a cure for feeling old, just one more line to keep me sleeping loudly and cold in disgrace with a shameful regret.
Can't say I blamed you one bit when you kept it all inside when you left that night. Somehow we lost our heads for the last time and all that followed fell like mercury to hell.

Some movies I've seen this month

Babel - Pretty good film with converging stories and a multicultural cast for a change. I didn't know what the film was about so it was a nice surprise to watch it all unfold.

Candy - Another heroin love drama rehash. It doesn't really add much to the stories other movies about the topic have other than having a less tragic ending than most. It follows two Aussie bohemians. One, a hopeless guy and the other an innocent (at first) aspiring artist falling madly in love and what follows as their addiction worsens and worsens. I liked the movie quite a bit, regardless, if the same kind of story has been told ten times.

The Departed - The American version of one of my favorite Korean crime/gang films, Infernal Affairs. Everyone seems to think the American version is great, the story was translated well, but the portrayal of violence in Korean films was lost. The violence in this movie is standard fare and doesn't give you the tense, anxiety causing, fist-pounding scared and at times crying feeling that was present in Infernal Affairs.

Half Light - A thriller with a good background and mood pacing, but without the thrills. The scenery is pretty to look at, that's about all I can say.

Tristan and Isolde - I had no idea someone decided to turn the welsh/french myth into a movie until someone mentioned it to me. I'm somewhat at odds at how they can mangle the story so well, there's so many retold versions of the legend, this retelling drops too many of the important parts, and adds very little that is original. An alright movie to watch if you like medieval love & war dramas, and feel like you need a reason to cry. But it fails to really express what the legend is about -- a more toned down Arthurian type story with the expected Lancelot love triangle. The emotions all three main characters share, Tristan, Isolde, and King Mark isn't quite convincing, especially in King Mark's case.

Missing person report

Franny where are you?

God isn't so bad sometimes

[00:26] Lent Somnolence: i only went to church a few sundays or so in elementary
[00:27] Lent Somnolence: in high school i went to i think 2 or 3 sunday services, when i was baptist.. but i went to a lot of wednesday youth group, and most of the summer camps and ski trips
[00:27] Lent Somnolence: i did the fun church things
[00:27] Lent Somnolence: like watergun and water ballon fights
[00:27] Lent Somnolence: and banna split eating contests
[00:27] Lent Somnolence: and skiing trips were good too
[00:27] Lent Somnolence: baptists rock
[00:28] Lent Somnolence: too bad i've never been baptised. sh
[00:28] Lent Somnolence: shhh
[00:28] Lent Somnolence: i've rocked out to christian music and danced
[00:28] Lent Somnolence: lol

Trying isn't it

when you try, you become something else, trying is being their dream, it is false for yourself and false for them; we never think of it, that love and friendship comes without trying, but only lasting dreams come with only feelings

My wolf

coming to terms with our weaknesses and secrets and admitting that we have them and they are our wolves in sheep's clothing is the only way to truly give yourself to someone, if that person can accept this wolf in sheep's clothing and if you can accept that wolf that other person has

Silly stuff

Drunk dialing.

Drunk blogging.

There's no entry for drunk emailing yet, not so much as I do it while drunk, but far too often while inebriated. There's also me inebriated and chatting with people I shouldn't be.

Scripted drama

Lent Somnolence: our lives are scripted from the days we are born, it's how we choose to act them out that makes us different. whether we are the star of the party, or whether we are the failure in the corner
Lent Somnolence: we're given our script, cut, drawn, and plain. well read and unpracticed, however, and we go through each day either bold in our actions or fumbling in our lines. that's how we live. scripted, bad or good.
***: but i think really, if i would just give a wild percentage, maybe 25% or fewer, definitely fewer are intellectual feelers"
***: that's analyizing it too much allen
Lent Somnolence: no, it's romanticizing it
Lent Somnolence: not analyzing it
***: yes
***: it is
***: you're right
Lent Somnolence: being me isn't analytic, i'm cold and rational and heartless, but i'm romantic in expression, even if it's as cold as dry ice
***: the poets, the lyricists, the playwrights, the screenwriters
***: they are the minority
***: you can relate to them, because you are like them
Lent Somnolence: no. i can relate because i can feel without regret
***: you "hear" them, and have that one sided discussion with them
Lent Somnolence: people regret, even i regret, but regret for me comes later. feeling comes first
***: and feel that source of introspection and rash of feeling because it's already *in* you

[...]

Lent Somnolence: i'm making every statement into a pithy quote. sorry.
***: last night, do you know what i thought
***: i wished that i could live in a song
Lent Somnolence: that i should write love drama's full of suicide?

modern insight

Lent Somnolence: you know this rash of insight i have lately? the source of my introspection and feelings? television drama. the modernization of talking to your best buddy about how you feel.
Lent Somnolence: except now, you just listen, and they talk. and you get to think. not talk about. not discuss. not argue. just face your feelings.

Cut, suture, close

Lent Somnolence: (paraphrased) Emotions are messy, tuck them neatly away and step into a clean sterile room where the procedure is simple. Cut, suture, and close. But sometimes you're faced with a cut that won't close. A cut that rips its stitches wide open. They say practice makes perfect. Cut, suture, and close. And the harder it begins to turn it off, to stop thinking and remember what it means to be a human being.
Lent Somnolence: that's what you are doing to yourself you know. by admitting defeat
Lent Somnolence: cut, suture, close
Lent Somnolence: one day those stitches will rip right out again
Lent Somnolence: hearts aren't meant to stay healed

the things that hold two people together

Lent Somnolence: i knew a lady named star, who wore sparkly glasses and spangly bracelets, and was a bit odd.
Lent Somnolence: she murdered someone with a heart that i knew
Lent Somnolence: backed over him with the family van in the driveway
Lent Somnolence: drove over his body twice
Lent Somnolence: went into the kitchen and called the police and waited
Lent Somnolence: calmly
Lent Somnolence: her name was star
Lent Somnolence: was star
Lent Somnolence: his name was *******
Lent Somnolence: that's all i know about murder. it happens when it isn't expected over the smallest things. they had an argument in the kitchen. a mild one as fights go.
Lent Somnolence: then you are dead.
Lent Somnolence: he was **** uncle
Lent Somnolence: i told *** to sit at her sentencing and watch her eyes
Lent Somnolence: so she did, for herself, and for me
Lent Somnolence: this was when we were apart, i was in colorado
Lent Somnolence: but sometimes ties like that aren't broken, common threads between people that make us human through all the hate we can harbor for those we love

passionate mistakes

Lent Somnolence: there's a thing some people have called strength, some people call it being emotionally void, some people call it inner will, but i just call it something i don't have. some people call that being passionate about life
Lent Somnolence: i just call it making mistakes

If it works...

Lent Somnolence: i'm only doing things to try to forget why i'm depressed and upset in the first place. denial, avoidance, and all that, to get past. meh. but, it works for millions of people everyday. ask anyone on the street. they'll deny it and you'll have confirmation :p

Left the lights on

I blacked out last night. First time in a while that it has happened to me. I didn't take that much stuff, compared to what I used to do on a nightly basis. I have 6 or so unaccounted hours for that are a complete blank. I never did like blacking out, but I always woke up feeling kind of good and kind of dreadful, but chances were I did something amusing and unusual and at some point in the future someone would tell me what crazy things I said or did. I have a feeling I did something crazy. Woke up this morning and, felt like, wow, I lost a few hours of my life! Cool, what better way to spend one of your worst depressive episodes of your life with fuzzy memory and gaping holes in what happened.

On a related note, this is one whole week of being on no Emsam, no antidepressant at all. The lowering of Lamictal didn't seem to effect anything, so I might go lower on it again in a couple months. Two more weeks until I get to start being on an antidepressant and I can hope to feel a little bit better, instead of waking up and wishing I hadn't.

Pollywogs and shellbacks

There's a old ritual, repeated in different forms that dates back to Sumerian rituals. It's mostly known now as a kind of military tradition in the air force and navy, practiced in different ways. Crossing the line means a lot of things. Some of the way it is done now is an acceptance ritual, and for some, it's more of a religious promise. For example, drawing a line of salt between two groups of common people having to go seperate ways, but having each group step over the line and rub out the line of salt with their feet means that they will see each other again, no matter the difficulty that arises. In old seafaring rituals, uninitiated sailors were called pollywogs, or greenbacks sometimes, the experienced who have made a voyage across the equator or some other significant landmark usually call themselves shellbacks. There isn't so much salt used, except the salt in this case is sometimes used as a variation of splashing of salt water on the pollywog during initiation; it's almost a kind of hazing ritual depending on the time and captain and ship.

The merits of dinosaurs and robots

there is this child, a young boy, that from the moment he saw me treated me like a father. i'm not used to that. i'm not used to children, and i'm not used to having such protective feelings for a kid in general. but the way he reached out and made me feel, it was kind of odd. i never felt like i'd be so protective and so caring, much less for someone i had just met a moment ago.

i never felt like discussing the merits of dinosaurs and robots would be the most important thing in the world, but it was, for that moment. i never knew how deep my fascination with fire trucks still was. i never knew how much i suck ass at video games compared to this kid. i never knew i could look into the eyes of someone so much younger and see such promise and also see the hurt that had already taken place. i never knew i could cry for someone so much younger than me and wish i really could make it all better, instead of being a grownup who says it, but doesn't have the slightest idea of how to make it better, or says it by rote, because their own parents said the same thing to them.

things won't be alright, but kid, you'll still have me looking out for you.

is this what it feels like to be a father? i don't know. i do know that dinosaurs are better than robots.

composed in halves

it's a childish way to try to explain myself through the actions of others, but what am i doing with my life. i'm living in the moment. i'm living as that freshman in college, experiencing all that can happen, fully aware of all the hurt i'm putting myself through. fully aware that the more i hit myself with a hammer, the better i'll feel afterwards, because it's so damn good. the more hurt that happens, the more lessons i learn, and the wiser i become, with enough years and time. i'm immature socially, especially when it comes to friendships, relationships, and anything dealing with another person with feelings. i understand my feelings, barely. i don't understand others. that is a huge gap, and it has led to me doing a lot of things that has resulted in pain, all around.

[...]

that's just the only way i can think of trying to possibly explain my actions. half a child. half a man. but i'm not either yet.

comfort in familiarity

maybe you used to be like me. who knows. maybe you can understand from that perspective. maybe you never were, and maybe that is why it's so painful.

i hate pain. i hate causing pain. i hate that i do cause pain, in such vindictive ways. i do. it hurts me more than the other person to read what i write or say. i do it anyway. i'm sick of it, but change comes slow and it might not ever change.

we change for ourselves, if we can, we don't change for others even if that's the biggest reason why people want to change. it's a hard situation to deal with and to be involved with in any kind of way. even as a passive friend, seeing a person do the same mistakes, over and over again. it hurts you. it hurts me to be told what i already know what i'm doing.

there is comfort in familiarity, there is comfort in pain, there is comfort in the cycle of anguish. and there is disgust at the thought of all that i keep doing.

Places to see

There's a few more places left in the world that I'd like to visit. I've gotten most of the far away places done at some point earlier, but I haven't had a grand old time stomping around elsewhere. Here's my list of the *necessary* places I need to visit.

1. Australia & New Zealand. These are put together because I want to observe the speciation of offshore saltwater silversides into more brackish type species, and the do some cast netting in the various river systems all along the northern and western coast of Australia, seeing the subtle differences in the different rainbow fish. Who knows, I might even find a new species or subspecies, it's still happening today by amateur enthusiasts. But being able to bring home some wild stock that I caught myself and knowing what river they came from, location, water conductivity, hardness, all of that dorky stuff; would thrill me to death. Having my own colony at home, a little refuge for such beautiful fish. Whoever decided to give them the broad vernacular name "Rainbow fish" was spot on. If I'm lucky or find a fellow dorkist who can help me find some of the Australian lungfishes, that would also cause a spontaneous orgasm. Just being able to see one in its natural habitat.
In New Zealand, I'd be looking for rainbow fish also, but this time seeing how they differ from lake to lake (rather than river to river). There is a wealth of undiscovered species, it's not uncommon for a new one to be discovered each year. And of course, the varied, very varied geography of New Zealand will give me plenty of eye candy to oogle at and take tourist pictures of.
2. Madagascar. What do I have to say about this wonder of a place? I probably could spend an entire lifetime there, feeling like I was in heaven, with the plethora of fauna and flora around me to observe, helping with conservation efforts and trying to educate local fishermen about better catching practices and local farmers about diversity and how to help preserve their local flora that is sadly, disappearing rapidly.
3. Canada. I want to see people who have undergone a natural breeding process and see the results of this in their personality, physical traits, and mental traits. I chose Canada, because you obviously can't observe natural breeding in the USA; and Canada is a short hop away.

look me in the eye and tell me

letter to an undisclosed person

it snowed tonight. not as much as they said it would, of course. but enough. more than it has the past few times. enough to call it a real snowstorm, with a few inches of snow hanging off the branches. not the shroud of white covering everything when you open your eyes and you don't know where the ground is because the sharp, cold air is making you high, and your lungs are feeling like they should always feel, and your feet aren't quite on the ground, and you can't quite tell where your body ends and the soft crunching, delicate, white powder snow sinking beneath whatever you think is your feet and where that stops and what is the ground.

i cannot sleep again. i'm very sick in some way. i think those nights of repeated insomnia i spent with you took a big toll on my body. my body takes less and less abuse. the signs of age aren't the signs we are looking for. the things we used to do that we could roll over in the morning and not give a second thought, now gives us days, weeks, and yeah, months of pause, while we wonder how did we grow up, and why did we grow up, and why is being an adult so difficult, painful, and most of all, devoid of all the things in life that we grew to love, to enjoy, to wish for, to dream for, to hope for. being an adult is about learning to love pain, except in some people's cases, we already learned how to learn how to love pain before we became an adult. all that growing up did was give us responsibilities, our problems aren't other people's anymore. they are ours. we don't want them to be ours. we want to be that child that dreamed at night and woke up in the morning with a smile, because, faith was a real thing, because dreams were a real thing, because hope was a real thing. all of these things are still real now. we just have to pull our nails out, hair out, do stupid things, things we regret, to get to where we want, to sacrifice what we are, what we think we are, to learn what we really are, and then find out what disgust we hold towards ourselves for surviving. is surviving worth it? it must be for most people. at some level. they are alive. is surviving worth it for me? it's only a question i can answer for myself and anyone who knows me, knows that my answer would be pretty firm. it isn't worth it. it isn't worth the pain. the struggle. the hurt. the loss. the loss. the loss of friends, of family, of love, of what is instrisicticaly you. surviving isn't change, it's being something else. i don't think anyone can be someone else, for themselves, or for someone else,. we can try. we can try really fucking hard. i've tried. so many times. i persevere, i try, i do what i can, as best as i can, but, failure is always what looks back at me in the face. what, allen, am i doing here alive. waiting day by day, crying when i can't sedate myself to sleep. i cry because i have no reason to cry. i cry because i have no reason to want anything. i cry because i want something. i cry because i know i can't have anything. i cry for every reason. i cry for myself and i cry for what i am. i cry that i let myself get like this. this isn't pity, it's angst, it's anger, it's hatred. allen -- if i had the courage to do things earlier in my life, to take those steps before my life became what it is now, then i wouldn't wake up each morning feeling sick to the stomach knowing that my name is allen. knowing that this person, allen, is a coward, a fool, a weakling, a person who avoids everything and who is still that child who is desperately trying to cling onto what a child does. the dream. the want. the hope.

i've lost the dream. i've lost the want. i've lost the hope.

i lost it a long time ago, but i kept on trying to be the child i knew. being a child living in an adult world doesn't work. every single thing someone says to me, if it's a bad day for me, i'll drop deep down into sadness, and blame becomes what i am, first it is blame myself. then it's blame the world. finally if it is bad enough it's blame them and yet again, make someone good in my life leave me.

people like hurt. i think i'm proof of it, in what i do to myself. in what i do to torture and make my life move as slow as molasses, as slow as the molasses incident that killed hundreds of people in an accident -- funny isn't it? death by being too slow? slow as syrup? that is my feelings inside, turn my upside down, bang on the neck with a knife and try to get something to pour out, minutes, minutes, minutes go by, and you might get something from inside me. the rest of me is stuck together, stuck in this whole, stuck. stuck coagulated feelings, sticking all together, in one big mess. my brain is a child who fell asleep with gum in their mouth. except my brain is that everyday. i need to pick apart the fibers of my being, and not tear our even more strands and lose what i am, again, i do this, almost every day, the same kind of action. the same kind of waking up. life didn't use to be like this. sometimes i don't care. sometimes i rip a knot of hair out and say, i can't remember yesterday, i won't remember this, let me cry now, and tomorrow i'll forget why i cried. who cares? in the end, we can ask ourselves that. who cares? who cares? does anyone? i'm losing what i had, the care i had, the care i had came from being something for someone, i won't do that anymore. it isn't true to myself, and how silly is it for me to throw in something moral sounding like that in my diatribe on self-loathing. i'm true to my own ideals, flawed as they might be; perhaps that's why i can't be something i feel is human. i'm certainly not human in my own eyes. i'm cobbled together, taken pieces from those people who have shared with me, taken here and there, and incorporated it into myself. that isn't how a person becomes. it isn't how a person figures out who they are. it's a person who isn't a person, a person so devoid of themselves, that they need so many other people to fill up what is missing, and whatever a person gives me, i treasure it more than gold, and make that idea, that action, that word, idealistic. i'm a mish-mash of ideas, from here and there, from people who would disagree with each other, and even i disagree with myself, but i don't budge, because it's what i made myself. you know the simple things people say when they make a snap judgment about someone? like, for example, you're fucked up. well, that is as accurate as i can say, and as accurate as anyone can say about me. i'm fucked up. the reasons are there, the few of them, the few that i can let out a little out at a time as that drizzled molasses tries to come out of the bottle onto the fried omelet that was my adolescent brain.

i don't have a reason to keep going. this is all what these words mean. i need a reason. a reason for myself. i'm desperately trying to find that reason. i haven't.

i'm scared. i'm doing things i would never think i would go back to doing. the thought of not waking up has turned into a comfort instead of a fear. that is fearsome in how it effects my daily behavior, my daily thoughts, my daily actions, and my future.

i have nothing right now for myself. i have lost the reasons that kept me believing that there was an alternative. i'm still trying, but please don't be upset if i can't find an answer on my own. i want to more than anything.

if only meanings were like apples and one would fall on my head. i could use a kick in the head, but that wouldn't give me a reason. i could use something to the head, to give me this thing i'm searching for. i could use something.

i just wish it was a thing that i could obtain from friendship. friends are there to catch you when you fall. i've fallen, and i've been caught. now what? now what happens?

you tell me. i don't know what happens.

sneeze

I feel sick. I went out once. I got a bug. That tells me I shouldn't ever go outside. lol. Wrapped up in blankets and drinking lots of water and enough vitamin C to feel positively fruity. At least I get a lot of sleep out of this.

*yawn*

The next 3 weeks

Saw the psychiatrist today.

I asked to reduce my Xanax XR dosage, she said no. Surprise! I am being taken off Emsam, like I wanted to. I did, happily, get my Ambien CR doubled again, because of the severe lack of sleep I've been having on the MAOI. One week on the 6mg/24hr Emsam dosage, and then 2 weeks of washing out. No antidepressants. I'll also be doing a one week taper down from Lamictal 300mg to 200mg. I get to drop the lithium next month, and we're going to start Topomax for my non-psychiatric problems mainly, and see if it might help as a lithium replacement since they do that fun sodium stuff. We're going old school and deciding to try Zoloft, and do a slow, very slow, taper up to the max over many months and see how it goes. If needed we'll increase the Adderall (I asked to be taken off it - she said no), and we'll add in a TCA if needed too.

Some quotes, that aren't that memorable

"Maybe we like the pain. Maybe we're wired that way. Because without it, I don't know; maybe we just wouldn't feel real. What's that saying? Why do I keep hitting myself with a hammer? Because it feels so good when I stop."
Meridith

"Sorry. Up late. Internet porn."
House

"Wow. It's a big jump from ‘Infidelity is wrong' to ‘Do her.'"
House

Sadly, all three of these are particularly relevant right now, or rather the past couple of months. Okay not so much the internet porn one, but I can't help but like that quote.

is it 6 or is it 6?

[00:57] Lent Somnolence: you know i have 5 blogs, no one asked me i think, if i had others. and i have a paper journal
[00:57] Lent Somnolence: so 6 journals.
[00:59] Lent Somnolence: my life is the simplest people can have, but i have to make secrets in secrets to make this life a different life. so do i have 6 lives inside myself, or 6 lies

Is it 6 lies or is it 6 lives? Or is it both? Lies that keep my own life going, because the real life I have isn't the life I want, and I'd rather be in one of my other more fantastic worlds that no one else knows about. If people don't know about where I go off to in my head when reality hurts too much, then they can't harm me in that place.

Slip up or mix up?

[00:52] ***: well, then you have two options
[00:53] ***: either be honest
[00:53] ***: or don't tell people you have a blog
[00:53] ***: then you can be free to be expressive about all the things you want to be expressive about in your blog
[00:53] ***: or there is a third option
[00:53] Lent Somnolence: no i can't take not lying. people think i do it easily, maybe those white lies that come out might come out easily. but lies like that, they haunt me forever and ever. for years
[00:53] ***: you can't take not lying?
[00:54] ***: what does that mean?
[00:54] Lent Somnolence: the opposite. i wrote it wrong
[00:54] ***: oh
[00:54] ***: the third option would be to assume a pseudonym
[00:54] Lent Somnolence: or it was a real slip of my mind. who knows

Expessing

[00:49] Lent Somnolence: i was so good at being expressive, at saying words that meant depression, loss, love, death, in ways that weren't one word answers that we've heard before

End of the line

I did the begging thing, not once, but twice. I didn't get an answer the first time I asked *her, but the second time I asked they wrote back to me. Surprising, I didn't think I'd hear a single word from her ever again. I asked a silly question both times, just wanting to reminisce about things we used to do together and be able to forget together. I guess I wasn't that much of a fun kind of guy, as she doesn't want to do that; I can't say I don't blame her. It's hard to enjoy your own life when someone else is talking about their own life and horrible it is.

I'm sorry everyone thinks I'm looking for sympathy, I'm not. I want empathy, and no one seems to know how to give it to me. I want those words that people say to other people that mean nothing, but I want those words to mean something. I want the words "It'll be okay Allen.", to really mean it when that person says it, because they believe it. Not because they are trying to keep me going another night or day.

I guess today the days of nostalgia ends. It's funny, the day I crossed the line was this month last year, and the day of thinking about it ends this month this year. Strange coincidences and strange attractions. In this case the strange attraction died far too soon before I could mature enough to give back what another human being deserves. After the years have past and I can understand what someone you care about needs and should be given, it's too late to wish upon a star and wish I was that person I am now, those years ago. Nostalgia hurts. So lets stop thinking.

It's the end of the line, I'm just a year late in realizing the truth.

Results of an experiment

So putting several Emsam patches on your body isn't a good idea. It makes you a little bit crazy. No blood pressure issues or anything else. I did get very, very oddly manic with a great deal of motivation and energy, but I was still in the same mood as I was before -- feeling awful. I also couldn't sleep at all, but I didn't have any feelings of being tired. I went 3 frantic days of no sleep, doing a lot of crazy things and I remember it all. Usually when I get in a state like that I don't remember much of what I did and it's all a bit fuzzy, and all I feel is a bit of dread, because I know I probably did something out of character.

my words go here, my brain goes missing

The View From the Top

I could write a long similar article about reasons I had up and left virtual worlds like that. So I might as well, I'm on Adderall after all.

Lets start from my own beginning of text-based BBS doors that one would play on a Bulletin Board System (BBS) usually running off of an a Amiga, Commodore, or PC clone and a single telephone line. At home, on my lowly Tandy PC that I had conned my parents [which took several months of whining] into getting me for "academic" reasons, I'd wardial with my top of the notch 2400 baud modem to find these phone numbers hooked up to computers, hoping that some of them were public, or semi-private, or even invite only, and register on all of them I could. Unfortunately, war dialing now is illegal for silly reasons in most states unfortunately, but sometimes I still like to pull out a DOS terminal and terminal program and let the computer war dial all night -- there's all kinds of interesting phone numbers you can find.

Registering back then was a big deal, not like it is on the internet now where you fill out a form and get to lie. Most of the owners of the BBS in question would actually *follow up* and call you back and verify your information -- so every Operator on every BBS you register on has all your real information, a scary thing which I found out later. I remember one time I was registering on a new BBS, I believe it was called The Sanitarium, and I was getting line noise (which happens when the phone line is picked up or there is static in the line from rain or snow, etc.,), so you see a bunch of #@~AVCD#@! (nonsense characters from the line noise, like imagine hearing your neighbor on the phone, but seeing it as random indecipherable text on an amber monitor) and finally after your modem has given up the fight whistling and screaming you see the dreaded NO CARRIER on the screen (which means you've been disconnected). Unfortunately the Operator can see exactly what you were typing, and I was typing god fucking dammit fucking fuck stop fucking fuck, or something of the sort (memory is a little fuzzy, but there was a lot of fucking involved), and behold 5 minutes later I receive a scolding phone call from the Operator (we called owners of BBS' Operators), lecturing me on how if I wanted the privilege of being on his board I'd have to follow his policy of no cursing. I obliged and he talked to my parents explaining what I had done, thankfully he still let me have access. moving onto the larger world of the internet and connecting to long distance out of the way BBS in Norway and Sweden and all sorts of places where I could barely decipher what I was reading, all for the thrill of playing in another world with different people. Before long I was lying about my age (some Operators are a little more lax than others and didn't stick with the fax in a copy of your driver's license and I sought those Operators out) and getting onto adult boards and being a mischievous preteen downloading naughty material, of course, when I wasn't involved in playing Legend of the Red Dragon or TradeWars 2002. Or the end all of end all games on BBS MajorMUD on a local BBS called Metropolis Big 12 (check out the Google Searches for Metropolis BBS, the amount of people with fond memories of it is amazing, and the amount of names I recognize is also a bit eerie. Metropolis Big 12 even had not one, but two! local numbers right here in Longmont, plus it had phone numbers in all the other college towns (the big 12 athletic college schools in this part of the USA for those of you not living here are: Baylor, Colorado, Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech) so at times there were almost 50 or so people online at once! It was the first time I had the experience of chatting, by the way, the coolest people to talk to (as a young 14-17 year old during this time [it was a long and torrid affair of modems and the early internet], were by far the ones from Texas, they weren't quite as dull as the others). It was scary as hell. It was was amazing no longer was I limited to single phone line BBS' playing games and using up all my turns and having to wait an entire other day to see what everyone else had done in the game and then agonize over what I was going to do with my 10 or so turns I had that day. Now, I could play MajorMUD for hours on end, for as long as I wanted. I would spend hours and hours figuring out the puzzles in the game, and meticulously making maps out of graph paper, annotating them with loving detail. Here's some online ASCII maps for example, but I made mine on graph paper with much more detail. Frequently I'd bring my entire computer over to my best friend's house and we'd both lie on the floor the entire night long drinking caffeine and terrorizing other players, no one else had the advantage of being able to communicate with each other person to person except us. As long as I had enough money to keep paying for the credits to stay online I'd be on there every second of my spare time, letting my grades, social life, and hygiene suffer. If my memory is right $300 paid with a credit card gave me enough credits to be online for 40 hours. Those 40 hours all went into playing, and I could easily use up those 40 hours in a single week. At the worst of the addiction, I wrote scripts for the DOS based program I used to connect to different BBS, so that I wouldn't even have to be at the computer to play; I'd just keep racking up the experience and money and further distancing myself in the rankings from everyone else. I wasted so much money in such a small amount of time. But, I was the best, on the top, and envied by everyone. It's kind of a nice feeling isn't it? Although, I don't think my parents felt that way after receiving their credit card bills. Thankfully that early in time, it was fairly trivial to generate fake credit card numbers that validated and charge the money to other people. So I was an addict and a bad person then, but wouldn't a crack addict do the same if given the chance and technological know how?

After a while, the thrill of only having the competition of a few hundred people lost interest to me and I stopped playing MajorMUD, and I had also been banned for hacking into an opponents account and deleting their character; coincidentally i was never caught for credit card fraud. I did have a friend caught for check fraud, but I told them from the start that they shouldn't use checks to defraud a company. What can I say, competition is fierce and I cheated in every legal and illegal way possible, if the 2nd best in the game has a password of 'orange' (yes, it was orange) and orange is listed in their public profile as their favorite color, how does one not reasonable expect someone not to try to type it in. I'm a curious person, of course I'm going to stare at a login screen and type words for hours until I manage to get lucky. It's how life works, you keep trying and failing, but eventually you get something happy and unexpected. So, I rationalize it as it not being my fault. It's like you leaving the front door unlocked with a note saying the key is under the flowerpot and not expecting your next door neighbor to be polite and respect that the note is for your friend coming over, and not take a peek inside for themselves out of curiosity. All I did was something a little more fuzzy in the illegal department, I don't think they had laws to really prosecute me at the time, so all that happened was I received a phone call from their legal department threatening some undefined action if I ever was caught calling there again. That really didn't scare me, it's hard to scare someone who isn't 18 yet, and someone who likes to get in trouble, so I called there again. Many times. I was smarter though, falsifying my information with other people's addresses and making sure I was home at the time to answer the follow-up calls, so that I did indeed seem legitimate and not that other evil person. None of this is the behavior of a deviant person or an addicted game and chat addict, of course not, and if you keep saying it to yourself it starts to sound true. Plus, it's really funny to laugh at years later. The charm of the place did slowly wear off, having to stay vigilant and pretend to be someone else wasn't fun at all, I couldn't keep the same friends, those cute and totally impossible to understand college girls I had met in chat that teased me in all kinds of sexual ways that I am still very clueless about, I couldn't talk to the same way. I couldn't play my game as the character I was, starting over was a chore and I realized the only reason I kept on playing was for the status, not for the fun.

I moved onto different, more devious and angry things. A local BBS, right here based in Boulder, called Liquid Sky, had 4 incoming phone lines! That's a big deal for a local BBS, they almost all only have 1, which is operated off their parent's real voice phone line until the kid gets screamed at enough, but no, this place was a luxury and it had 4 lines. I could talk to anyone else dialed in at the time. Coincidentally this is where I met Caylina, the first girl I really ever had a crush on and started to date. Unfortunately, she was a bit depressed and crazy, and decided to have a mental break down in the kitchen of her house in front of her mother and confess she wanted to marry me and have my children, which sent her parents running like headless chickens and before I knew it she had seen a shrink, been put on Paxil, and was forbidden to talk to me. A few months later I received a letter saying that she had been shipped off to New York and couldn't ever see me again. That devastated me for a very, very, long time. Sometimes, I still cry about it. The only real good thing I can say is, the first antidepressant I was put on, was the same one that Caylina was put on, and that makes me smile for some idiotic and charming reason. I guess you can tell how much I miss her, and all the idiotic poetry I wrote after we lost contact -- I was 15 and 3/4 at that time, one of the few times I can recall how old I was when something in my life happened. Another thing that happened on Liquid Sky a while later was I was fiddling around late at night trying to telnet into random .gov IP's, and had managed to get into a few because they never changed the default root password so I snagged all the /etc/passwd files to crack later for fun. The next day I got an email from the Operator that was sent to every registered member asking for a confession or he'd turn over all the BBS records to the FBI, so I was scared and said I did it and it was an accident and made up an elaborate lie basically saying I didn't know I wasn't supposed to type a name and password when it asked me for one. Anyone can make that mistake.

I moved onto the Internet right when it was starting to slowly, ever so slowly get more popular. I could get online through Big 12, read the old Fidonet groups on the older generation BBS even (if the owner shelled out enough money), and on Big 12 I could read real Usenet, and I could even hop into this weird thing called IRC. IRC back then was a great deal more chaotic, EFNet was pretty much the only place in existence, net splits every 10 minutes it seemed, Eggdrop bots in every channel, Bouncer bots all over, it was pretty hectic and was more of a battlefield than a medium for chat. In IRC I learned all about internet slang, especially "A/S/L" (age, sex, location?), and "want to cyber" (cyber being a prefix used to connect the subsequent word loosely to the world of computers or the Internet or sex over a computer, and the oh so common question from other guys (I'm not a girl dammit, I don't care if my nickname looks welsh and girly!) "how big are your boobs?". I also solidified my knowledge of different emoticons like the simple :) to the more complex ones like: <°)))>< (a goldfish), <=======}==O (I used this interchangeable with a sword, penis and a syringe. It was very multipurpose.), @-,-'-,-- (girl's really fell for these roses!). IRC was a good learning and social experience for me, as I was still very shy at the time. Until I found an obsessed 19 year old freshman sex fiend who was into molesting (nicely) online young innocent people like me (I blame her solely for my sexual perversion and corruption), I certainly blame her for my rather abnormal (compared to other people), love for blowjobs, because it was the only thing in the world PoshPuffs (her IRC nickname, who later explained that it as an allusion to tissues, I sure blushed then.) wanted to talk to me about, and I'm the obliging kind of person. After the charm of IRC and Usenet started to wear off, I got a real ISP provider with my very own Unix shell account. I was so excited, I could write bash scripts, I could annoy the hell out of other clueless users logged in who barely knew a single Unix command. I could read my email in Pine, I could compose text in Pico, I could be hardcore and write in Vi [which came in handy in college by amazing professors when my brain did not explode during that part of UNIX classes]. I could telnet and FTP to everywhere in the world trying to guess passwords and user names. I could use Gopher and wonder what the point was in WWW, when you could get exactly what you wanted without waiting for stupid colored text and pictures to load (at this point I had upgraded to a 14.4 baud modem, and even still the WWW was agonizing slow). I could be snobbish and look down on people who used Emacs. I could even use make to compile my own programs written in C. I remember the first time I got the source for tintin++ (the über, at the time, MUD client program) to compile.

That was one of the happiest days of my life. From there I went hopping around the world, telneting to wherever I could to find that perfect MUD. I found it on Sojourn and played for about 6 months I'd say. Then, like drama in real life, the administrators of Sojourn had a fight and they split up; or at least I think this is when I started to play. I was a dwarf cleric happily killing bunnies and then the game I loved was gone. For a while. Toril always keeps on coming back to life, it's that addictive and even death threats (yes several of the founders would regularly get phone and mail death threats for various reasons, like why the hell did you ban me, etc.). I know the rough sequence of the evolution of Toril, I was there for most of the middle and latter parts of it, I missed out on the early part, not having a computer all the way back in 1990. I started playing sometime around 1996, and had the rare opportunity to adventure with the legend Aradune Mithara, who if I remember right, was a stinky half-elf ranger, but an overall friendly guy who helped me powerlevel by killing some tough buffaloes. Aradune is the online persona of Brad McQuaid who left Sojourn sometime in 1999 to help found the MMORPG Everquest. It was a pretty sad day to see such a respected player leave. Toril has been around in various names and forms for a little more than 10 years and it's strange to have witnessed all the influences it's had on the outside world. Such as Forgotten Realms. It's also interesting to take note of all the fantasy authors that have profited from further fleshing out the world, like the well known author R. A. Salvatore, and the creation of several unique iconic characters that really haven't had any equivalence in historical fantasy, but are quite similar to NPCs already present in the MUD itself.

For a while I played Everquest, during one of the times when Sojourn had dissolved and no one really knew if it was coming back, I never did get far in that game, losing interest pretty fast. But, I subsequently became a serious Asheron's Call addict the same year, 1999, and continued to play that game for 2 or 3 years before having to force myself to stop, due to dropping grades and a serious lack of a social life, but I did make a nice profit selling my soul on there (my character, persona, and horde of shiny equipment) by selling it all on eBay, making about 300% more than I had invested in the game. For a while I stayed away from MUDS and MMORPGS, but I started to play Horizons, which lasted for perhaps a year, and I took another break (after yet again making a profit from playing), and picked up World of Warcraft the day it came out. I played that for a short while too, before, yes again, selling myself on eBay for yet more money. I would of never started to play those last 3 MMORPGS if it wasn't for my exgf asking me to, as she needed someone else to play with. Does that make her the worse addict? Requiring a partner so that they don't feel guilty for wasting all that time, and well, their life? I know I wasted a lot of my life on those games, but it was fun, and I can't see myself doing something much more productive during those years of not being medicated and barely being able to step outside my own house.

Now comes the question of, do I start to play World of Warcraft again in November, when I'm expecting her to ask me to pick up the game again with her? In November, the expansion pack for the game is supposed to come out, giving addicts more to do. It's tempting to even think about, I don't even need her to want to play, I'd do it on my own just so I could avoid my own life and have a fantasy life that was better than what I have now. What I have now is, pretty much nothing. I mean I'm playing suicide games lately, anything other than that must be better. Further on in the future, Vanguard will be coming out, which is what Aradune is working on now, having disagreements with how Sony was handling Everquest, so he left to work on his own vision of what Everquest really should of been. I know I'll be there in Vanguard, I just wish someone I knew would be there too. Well, it's a fear years away, so I don't have to worry about that quite yet.


This post has been brought to you by 30mg Adderall and a very, very large Emsam overdose. Mania? No way. It only took me 8 hours to write this through all my sidetracking. I completely missed the whole point of why I was writing this and failed to communicate what I wanted to say, but if I spent this much time on something stupid I might as well click Publish.

:)

test two

test: one 9mg/24hr Emsam patch, 5 6mg/24hr Emsam patch
result: posted later. time of intake 7AM.
cause: have given up on life. am curious to effects. am not suicidal, but close.

test one

test: 100mg xanax xr taken orally. 400mg cimetidine on intake, and 200mg cimetidine every 2 hours later for a total of 1800mg.
result: 12+ hours of sleep. upon waking disorientation regarding location and time, mild confusion, slight lack of balance and noticable clumsiness.
cause: wanted to sleep. wanted to hurt myself.

conversation

[15:29] Lent Somnolence: then why are we having this discussion, did you ask yourself that?
[15:29] ***: because i'm sad
[15:30] Lent Somnolence: some part of you wants help, or else you wouldn't admit to me what is going on
[15:30] ***: i'm just sad
[15:30] ***: i don't want help
[15:30] ***: i just wanted another reason to cry
[15:30] Lent Somnolence: i'm not going to give you reasons to cry. friends don't do that
[15:30] ***: you don't have to even try
[15:31] Lent Somnolence: i'm sorry
[15:31] Lent Somnolence: do you like to torture yourself? like the way i do? doing things to make yourself worse?
[15:31] ***: yes
[15:31] Lent Somnolence: that's what you're doing
[15:31] ***: i know
[15:31] Lent Somnolence: i just wanted to make sure you understood
[15:32] ***: lifes not fair
[15:32] ***: do you know that?
[15:32] Lent Somnolence: and you know that's the reason why we have never really gotten much better in our whole lives? that we go through the motions of wanting to get better, but there is safety in staying the same. familarity. comfort in knowing there won't be change
[15:32] ***: i'm sick of life shitting on me
[15:33] Lent Somnolence: life isn't fair. but life is only what you let it be to you. it's the truth
[15:33] ***: i try to let life be great to me *****
[15:33] ***: where has that gotten me?
[15:33] Lent Somnolence: like you said ******. life isn't fair
---
[15:34] Lent Somnolence: where has it gotten me? 5 years in the same room. 5 years of being alone. 5 years of wanting to get better, but not taking the steps to
[15:34] Lent Somnolence: 5 years of being scared to live
[15:34] ***: well you and i are different
[15:34] ***: i've lived through the last two years of my hell
[15:34] ***: and it's gotten me nowhere
[15:34] ***: i tried to get better
[15:34] ***: i fought
[15:35] ***: and it's not a fair fight
[15:35] Lent Somnolence: no, i don't think so. what has happened to us might be different, but in the end, you say you've given up. i had already given up
[15:35] ***: well how long are you supposed to keep trying
---
[15:35] Lent Somnolence: life was a fight ever since you took your first breath, the first breath that you didn't want to take to be in this world. but every day that you stayed alive you were fighting even if you didn't know it
---
[15:55] Lent Somnolence: depression is like cancer, we don't know it's there until one day out of the blue things are different and we aren't sure how it happened or why. there isn't a why, there isn't a reason, it just happens.
[15:56] ***: a crying mess
[15:56] ***: you being the only person in the world right now i can talk to
[15:56] ***: of all people
[15:56] Lent Somnolence: depression kills us slowly, depression hurts, depression takes away everything we value and love
[15:56] ***: are you copying/pasting off the "depression hurts" website?
[15:56] Lent Somnolence: we try to treat it, the things we take hurt our own bodies, the side effects, all so we can have what we used to have
[15:56] ***: you sound like the commercial
[15:57] Lent Somnolence: i'm talking from years of being depressed
[15:57] Lent Somnolence: it kind of gives me a lot of time to reflect
[15:57] ***: can't you just say yeah it fucking sucks


change the names, the supportive person could of been someone else, and i could of been the other person. that's how i feel. i give advice i can't follow. i give help that i don't listen to myself. i'm the person who has given up, i'm not the person fighting.

death in the family

my papa royal pleco was found dead today at 5:15 PM, judging from skin pallor, overall degeneration of the flesh i'd estimate it died 48 hours ago. both eyes were missing, meaning it was murdered. the aggression level has increased dramatically in the tank, although the former bonded mismatched pair of the texas cichlid and blood parrot is now gone after a successful spawning. the texas cichlid is still exibiting signs of bacterial infection even after multiple treatments with several broad spectrum antibiotics, an external cotton growth has appeared and has been treated with salt and a general antiseptic. i've excised the inflamed external growths twice now, using topical neomycin sulfate, methylene blue, cyanocobalamin; but the growths always reappear after a couple of months. i'll continue treatment with salt in the water to aid healing, and tea tree oil in the water as a weak antiseptic to cover external bacterial or fungal causes. if it continues to worsen i'll have to excise the cysts again and isolate the fish and try a much stronger approach or euthanize the fish, as i believe it's untreatable tuberculosis.

another depressing day.

snowfall

first snowfall yesterday.

freeze advisory today.

i like to lie naked in the snow until i stop feeling. it makes the emotions go away, the thoughts that don't stop, and when i come inside it's one of those rare times when i have a clear head. it makes me feel alive.

talking in circles

[14:33] Lent Somnolence: it's like every morning you wake up and don't know if you're dying or if your pulse is racing because you're missing what you dreamed, or that nightmare you just had really is true, or you can still remember the physical sensation and the timelessness of the moment and realize that it's all gone, just in a blink of an eye

WoW

any WoW addicts want to team up with me this coming November? please say so, i don't want to have to resort to playing with my ex-gf for hours on end. if not, well it's back to nostalgia and just like how times used to be so many years ago -- like when we played AC for months, hours and hours on end, but i'd rather not have that. at least not with her as the constant companion.

aged

i wish i could start over. i don't want to be 27. i don't want to know i've made the same mistakes over and over. i don't want to know that i feel the same now as i did last year, the year before that, and so on. i don't know if there are second chances in life when most days i can say i've already given up. what's the point in crying when i know i'll cry again the next day. what's the point in trying when i know i won't succeed. what's the point in talking to anyone when they all go away.

what's the point?

treading water

birthdays suck all around. especially birthday's of people you thought you had forgotten, or at least buried deep enough in the past. yesterday i got an email from amazon reminding me that an old friend's birthday was coming up. nothing like a computer generated reminder make my mood come crashing down even more, when the birthday in question is jen's. i had one big ugh and that feeling that comes with unwanted memories, and then i deleted the message. i wish deleting things would do the same for my memory sometimes. the harder you try to forget about something, or to move on, or to do whatever you need to do to keep yourself alive, the harder it is to do just that. the harder i try the more reminders i see around me of all the things i never quite manage to resolve fully. i guess now i just cry and weep, go into my own little nest until the feelings of regret, loss, sadness have subsided enough that i can poke my head out a little. i'm still treading water, but at least i've moved past a few things. that has to be something?

stupid, stupid, stupid

saw the doctor yesterday, nothing much changed there. dropped another med (trying to drop everything, one a month). continuing the patches, went on the next higher dose, need to restrict the diet a bit more now and be more careful. i had one crisis a week prior to seeing the doctor, and probably should of went to the hospital for it. i was, mehhh, to scared to ask for help. scared to ask for help, and i am asking for too much help these days. i kind of hoped the hypertensive crisis would end up badly, in a very painful way. it was a few days of non-stop make it go away, cry it hurts so bad headaches from the elevated blood pressure. the obsessive me made sure to document my blood pressure every few hours -- i was going to go to the ER if i hit 160/120, but i was pretty steady around 150+/120. yeah, stupid and lazy. lazy and stupid.

feeling a lot of self-hatred, emptiness, and some bits of hopelessness. i can't tell if this is getting over, or if this is the falling that i've been fighting. words to people that i can't speak, words to people that i shouldn't speak, and words that won't get out of my head. they are just words, in the end.

just words

ballons

a hot air balloon landed in the front yard this morning. they are kind of like pests around here, but it made me remember the first time i can recall one landing. they had a really huge ballon, and were nice folks and gave us a bottle of champagne to excuse the landing.

lonely

Unexpected words lead to unexpected goodbyes

Sometimes the people you think might not give you a straight answer, do, and it's a bit shocking. It actually hurts less, to be given an answer instead of being left to wonder what exactly did I do, what exactly am I doing wrong, what exactly am I not doing, or... or... any of the things our minds do when they go in circles.

Allen, it's too hurtful to talk to you. No one has said that to me before, and I was really shocked, not like it probably wasn't true, but for the first time someone told me something like that and I was able to respect it and just let it go.

I'm making it easier on everyone else in the world and stopping myself from being a burden, it feels fairly clear to this crazy paranoid mind that some friends need a lot of space and room right now, and I might be complicating things a great deal, or holding onto them far too much for them to handle right now. I hope that they can talk to me when they are doing better, and I wish they would tell me what I could of done or not done to make them better, or if needed flat out tell me I'm driving them crazy right now. But, I know it's hard to tell a friend something like that. Very few people read this, someday they will come around and maybe read this stupid post.

Until someone tells me otherwise I think I'm relegated to that thing called email, that most people don't really communicate with anymore, I'm less of an agitation there and more easily set aside. It's easier on everyone, and no one has to worry if I do not have a presence online.

Breathing

Still breathing, is about all I can say. I'm trying to think of words that would mean something more, but I guess that's all i can settle for.

Sometimes people can't ever forget, what's worse is when two people can't forget. I've dwelled and dwelled on the past so much, that now that I look around, I see how many changes have occured in just one year, or two, or more. Where did all that time go, I guess into that empty part of me that I keep on trying to fill and won't ever be filled -- not the way I keep on living this life. What's the point of my life when I've reached 27 and everyone else has outpaced me, even the people I was holding hands with trying to help; and now they have their own lives, their own futures and responsibilities. And here I am, just me, just the same person. Have I grown any? Maybe a little, emotionally, but that isn't a whole lot to say, when life seems more like a game of putting everything ahead of emotions.

I'm walking backwards and no one is waiting for me. I'd cry about it, but I've already cried about things like this enough.

I think I'm getting better at endings, and that isn't something to be proud of; shouldn't a person be getting better at not having to end things? Maybe I shouldn't feel so responsible for other people's lives, but even if I shouldn't, I would. It's like breathing, and if that part was lacking, I wouldn't be this mess of who I am.

Breathing each day, is harder than living. Being whatever kind of person I am, makes living seem like an impossibility, especially when I'm so dark down in this hole, and the people I rely on have so many of their own problems that I find myself pulling them down with me -- I can't do that. So it's just another night. Night, after night, after night of solitude, of that gnawing desperation inside that I don't know how to escape, fill it up with chemicals, fill it up with sleep, fill it up with anything; it just won't get better until this head gets better and it's been several years I've been stuck with this cold, but these past few months have turned into one of the worst winters I've known. The last winter like this, I was in a hospital, hooked up to machines feeling nothing, not wanting to feel anything, and it took months to feel something, but I still didn't find myself, and I still didn't find that life I used to have and still wish I had, and I still didn't find a new life.

I don't live in the past as much as I used to, but I do so more than other people. I know most people don't cry at night about things that could of, would of, might of, or just cry because, hey, I felt alive that day or week or month and now I don't feel alive.

I don't feel alive, and I am not living, I'm just breathing, and it's becoming hard to breath.

It's more and more pathetic, or is that me?

[21:25] Lent Somnolence: i keep ending up, crying so hard each night. why do the lies people tell me keep on getting worse and worse, and why do the things i do wrong to them, whatever they are seem to get worse and worse. and why when i search myself and my heart and my soul for whatever i am doing wrong, i can't find anything, but i sure can find a big empty hole, black and dark and hurtful and i can't remember what used to go in there. why is it everytime i try to feel for someone they close the door on me. why is it so hard to just live life. i'm sick of mornings when i can't have evenings. i'm sick of just being half of someone

quoting myself saying something to someone is stupid, but i can hardly even say how i feel to anyone, so i might as well quote myself when i say something that i feel. even if it comes out as a jumble of words, and i look back on it, and i only half understand what i wrote, but i do know i felt something, and i was crying when i wrote it. so it must be feelings inside, and it must of been hard to say.

so those are my cold emotionless feelings, that i give everyone. i'm sick of being called cold. so take all my damn feelings, so make me cry, and i guess somewhere along the line you'll hear a bit of what i feel inside.

morning mad[sad]ness

woke up to a storm this morning. the nightmares i've been having have been so real, i thought it was just my heart aching and stomach rumbling. took a walk outside to see what my body was telling me, but it's all thunder and lightning, and i couldn't tell if i was crying apart from the rain; i get so mixed up when i'm being pulled apart. shivering, and cold, shirt all well like you had me crying all night, maybe i was. it's so hard to tell when i wake up each morning, what was part of the nightmare and what was part of the dream i wanted.

I'm one of those

You know those people, those people who are great friends, who are there to make you laugh, to make you smile, to do whatever you might need? Well I'm one of those people, but I'm the worthless kind -- not worthless, but the kind that you damn well need a lot of patience for.

Someone can come wrap up all that I have, feelings, emotions, and they are the focus of my life. That's a serious flaw, and it has it's charming moments, yeah, but when you decide to let someone become that integral to your life, they have all the power that you had previously given a close, and guarded group of friends. And they can wield that power over you, as a single person, throwing shards of ice into your heart and immobilizing you with pain and fear, unable to continue with life, because they are your life. The can call down lightning and strike you dumb, emotionless, and so malleable, that what has happened to that inner person that you were? I never thought any of this was bad, well of course I did, but I always thought that I made good choices in life (and no, I don't make good choices), but because I felt like I had made a good choice, I saw no harm in what could be done to me, and I never felt like I had a hold on someone else in such a way. Things are never reciprocal, no matter how much we try, no matter how much we want, and no matter how much we need any kind of relationship to be, whether or not it's a friendship, a love, or any person in our life.

I think I've had a history of things like this, how I always get into this pattern, I don't know, yeah I have inklings about it, but that's an entirely different post.

I don't know if the other person, in this relationship with me, the current person, or the past people, know how slowly my own persona is being replaced by what is being shoved there (whether they are intentional, or whether they are doing it for other subconscious reasons), but I always wonder. So many people ask? What has changed? You know, it's such a simple answer, but the blame is always on my end. In fact, the blame in every problem is always on my end at this point. Beautiful, how things start, and then how things degenerate into such... mediocrity, that I am still pouring my heart and soul into, and yet they can call me a cold-hearted asshole, when I have my entire life invested in them, when I have my entire self invested in them, when I have my entire future invested in them. Well, if that emotion is so cold to them, I guess I deserve that title. I hope not all people see me that way. Not everyone says I'm an awful person, and not everyone says I'm this manipulative asshole that they say I am, in retrospect, after they have broken every piece of my heart and are demanding why I can't still be there for them. Well, some people that still care for me, can realize that what they give on the surface to me and the world, is complete and utter bullshit, and they can hide behind their own flaws, they can substitute their own reasons for my apparent inadaquecies; that's the problem, there is always something wrong with me. And no matter how hard I try to fix it, or make it better -- just attempting at all is an admittal of wrong. I know damn fucking well, that there is nothing wrong, and that what they are seeing, is something lacking in their own life, that they need to tack onto me, in a pathetic, sad, way. I feel sad, that they can't move past this, that if I confront them with it, it's so much of a shock that verbal accusations follow of how I'm a demeaning, awful person, who could never understand living in their shoes.

You know what? I couldn't. I am not a perfect person. I'm not a good person, either. I'm not, much of well, anything to be proud of. I do a lot of wrong things, on purpose or on accident. But I can recognize when, living in their shoes, is another saying for, let me put the blame on you, because I can't live up to my own life, and I can't live up to my own problems, and it's easier if the blame is squarely on someone I love, because my problem is magically gone now.

I hope these people, when they have driven me to the limit, and I have the patient of a saint, and then some, realize that just maybe, maybe, they might regret not wanting to work things through and instead of forcing words in my mouth about, wah wah, that _I_ cannot handle it, that _I_ don't want it to work, that I have never said any of those words, and if those are such big concerns to them, them maybe, just for once, they can utter a little bit of truth. It's pretty scary, I know, I'm bad at the truth, but if they could tell me that bit of truth; you know what? I could understand. And life could go on, and I could be *that* person that you want me to be, i'll be malleable, moldable, whatever you want, just give me the real truth, the truth behind your truth, the truth behind your anger, the truth behind your sadness. Just think for a moment darling, and tell me what really is the problem, and I would be there for you, 110%, but if you cannot do that, if you can't take that step back, if you can't pull yourself back when you're lashing out with every hurtful emotion and blame game, that you won't admit to yourself that maybe, just maybe, there might be something deeper behind such silly emotions on the outside, that I might be willing to listen, and help you, and help us.

Call me your lost cause Nicole, put words into my mouth, put feelings into my body, do what you need to do, to make this something that is my fault, to make it something easier for you to deal with.

You know the torture I went through, you know the abuse I went through, where did that truth you showed, where you admitted to me, how awful things were for me, regardless of your own situation, you could just say things. Without putting it through bullshit, without any of that. That you could just say things, for real. Consider it ironic, that I always sought out dreams, and consider it ironic that when I sought out reality, it was you that refused to give it to me.

I won't live a love constructed on a lie. You know your own life is built on a stack of cards, and that at any moment it will collapse, and that is no fault but your own. Reach out, be honest, be truthful, be caring, and yeah, fucking do ONE thing I ask for, write me an email about how this love will continue to work. You couldn't, wouldn't, and had all the excuses in the world, mostly filled with conclusions that it wouldn't already work. Well, I guess I fulfilled your presumptions, let it make you happy, let it make your life flourish, let your fucking life get on without me as baggage.

I'm sure as hell not letting another manipulative, borderline, person use me as baggage, and I'm sure as fuck not letting that pull me under.

Call me someday, lets compare notes, and see where you are in life, and I'll ask you if you really meant to turn your back on what I offered to you; and you can ask me if I really am happy with who I am now, and where I am now.

I'll not predict the future, but you're more than welcome to, just put those words into my mouth and those feelings into my heart. You're very good at it.

I sacrified more of myself for you, than anyone, ever, and you let it end all so easily. Oh, I'm so fucking sorry I grew a backbone. Oh, I'm so fucking sorry I started to care about my own heart. Oh, I'm so fucking sorry that your excuses that you give me month in and month out, that seem tailored to rip apart my own self-will, just wasn't enough to make myself break-down in front of you. I asked for truth, I said I will work on this, for years, just give me that one thing I asked for. You couldn't and that's it. A small thing? Maybe? A big thing? Maybe. But, at the stage we had reached, deceit between us and your husband isn't something that was helping anyone, it was hurting everyone involved, it was hurting me. You have your problems and your solutions to fix those, I respected that, and was willing to go through a sham of love (because what really was this?), and continue knowing that this was driving your husband to the end of his wits. It's cruelty, and I commited myself to a future of cruelty. I guess I have said no to that, now, I never got to say no to you once ever, not even in the end, you got to say the endings for me. And when it's gotten to such a pathetic point where you will end it all _for me_, just because it's the gosh darn right thing (who are you kidding?), well, the relationship has become silly. You've forggetten I can think for myself, and whenever you convinced yourself of that, is when things went downhill. My opinions mattered less, my wants mattered less, and it was the continual blame game; substituting your own personal problems in with my perceived fuck ups.

Enough of me talking, none of these words can change what a person like you thinks or feels. But I owe it to you to tell you my side of the story, when you wouldn't let me.

Endings are hard, and my heart is broken again, and I'm crying all to fucking hell, and that's all the story you're going to get out of me.

We learn two things from each relationship.

goodbye nicole. goodbye to this life, goodbye to myself, and goodbye
to what we were trying to have. we tried, but trying isn't enough --
we all gain lessons, and that's the lesson you showed me. that life
isn't good and that life isn't what we want to make it, that life is
cruel and bitter, and kindness isn't appreciated in the long run, and
one day, things can change in an instant. it's a cruel lesson, but at
least one i've been taught.

i learned another thing today, that friends are there for you, and talk to you, and listen to you, and comfort you, and care whether or not they told you so. i learned that you can rely on them, that you can lean on them, no matter how long you've been out of their life, or if you are their best friend in the world. a friend is there for you, in a crisis, and they are there for you until that crisis is over, moment by moment, even if they have to hold your hand through it. even if they have to listen to you cry, and listen to you talk of your anguish, daily, monthly, and for who knows how long. friends, really are forever.

for those people that have stood by me, regardless of what you feel about my lifestyle or decisions i make, i love you all, and thank you all, for doing all the hand-holding, and doing all the reassurance, and doing all the things that a human should do.

which is care.

another lost cause, but what a beautiful cause it was.

it hurts, to lose someone over a person they say they have disliked and not loved for years.

is it a competition? some days it really felt like it. some days it felt like a juggling act. appease the monster you live with, or appease the person you say you love?

i guess, you confused me far too much today. i called. i just wanted an answer, free and clear, without it being influenced by him.

i realize your situation nicole, i realize your life, i know it's hard, i know that i chose something very difficult when i started to care for you.

but, maybe i just can't do it anymore. when i want the truth, i need it, and i need it then, even if someone's breathing down your shoulder. give it to me in secret, tell it to me in words that only i will know. please tell me.

you filled me with wonderful feelings these months we've known each other, you've even kept me alive on those days where i wanted to say just fuck it, and i am always and forever grateful for the kindness and the heart of character you had.

i'm sorry that two hearts were broken today, but i can't keep thinking, maybe if you had told me the things i asked when i called today, we could of saved something.

maybe there is something left to save, but this broken person, has a lot of fixing to do, and if i make it through these nights; well i guess i'm holding the door open because i'm pathetic, sad, suicidal and needing of you.

i already closed the door on you, is how i feel, that feeling inside, that lets you know the truth from fiction; says that what i said was with finality. truth or fiction, you couldn't tell me what was the truth, so i went with both, and said what was not just in my upset head, but what was in my heart. if it hurts you, i'm sorry. someone has to come first, in these relationships, and if it isn't the person you love, then it isn't going to be me in this relationship.

i hope your offer to be a friend was real, and you accept that i was rash, angry, upset when i shoved it in your face with a fuck you; because i need a friend before my nights, become just nights, and there's no hand to give me pause, reason, or cause to wake up.

i'm half-way there, waiting until the night to hope some truth comes through, but if not, you know where i've gone.

thank you for those memories, remember the good ones i left you.

A bitter heart that bides its time and bites.

i had a dream about you.

is that non-specific enough, for whoever you are, person of the day to feel good about yourself? you can fill in the blanks with whatever you need today, it's mutual, all the names we call each other. there's not a word for abuse, you take what i give and get angry later, i take what you have, and say it wasn't enough. but chances are, next week we're doing the same, and behind all the feelings we're really quite content with this non-specific person of the moment, with a replaceable name, and why can't i quite remember your face?

what day was that again? when we did that thing? there's a reason why some people can't recall dates and times, it's because all of those special things that the other person remembers with such touching, glowing, disgusting gushing warmth has already happened in my life. so sorry. didn't you ever wonder why everyone is nostalgic and that people are full of stories? it's because you can't come close. you can't even come second. you're the ghost of tomorrow trying to haunt my past. it just won't work that way, but i still love you, whoever you are. the person of the moment.

there isn't a word for whore. lets call you a well-read script, that we all take parts in. tomorrow, who knows, maybe i'll be in your play for today. don't take that to mean you are special, because for the moment, you're reading my script quite well, and you have a penchant for drama and that's the genre most people shuffle my review into.

i'm sorry - was all tomorrow's parties not what you were expecting?

let me put it this way. try to figure out which vinegar taster you are, it's still the same shit, no matter who's living it, but how you feel doesn't make you any more special.

if you're confused, i'll sidestep for a moment and fill that empty brain that must of been sleeping through life.

there's these three people gathered around a vat of vinegar, each putting their finger in it and letting us know what's up. it's a simple allegory of three eastern ways of thinking (sorry there's no jesus or replaceable male of the moment here, we all know what a bitter apple that is). the three guys gathered around are K'ung Fu-tse (Confucius), Buddha, and Lao-tse. Confucious said this is sour stuff. Buddha said, like, wow this is some bitter stuff, man. Lao-tse said, "It's all good.".

i had a dream about you. is that specific enough? what were you expecting that day you cried and thought you were special?

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.
The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.
in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

Who is Tyler Durden?

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-05-29-fight-club_x.htm

This is why I want to be hurt, and why I end up with some form of self-injury as a means to just keep on going, to keep on waking up the next day. I guess more and more males are coming to grips with that aspect of themselves, and finding a comfortable social outlet where they can express it, as violent of a way they need.

From the article:
There is also a sadomasochistic thread running through underground fight clubs, said Michael Kimmel, a sociology professor at Stony Brook University in New York.

"Real-life fight clubs are the male version of the girls who cut themselves," he said. "All day long these guys think they're the captains of the universe, technical wizards. They're brilliant but empty.

"They want to feel differently. They want to get hit, they want to feel something real."

One of the simple motif's of Palahniuk's Fight Club, that is glossed over, is the basic concept of want. This desire of lack that so many men in society feel, those goals that once we obtain, give us no feelings, that give us nothing for all the struggle that we've put into it. It's simplified into the modern conception of what most people know as the Oedipus complex, but instead as understood within the concept of psychoanalysis as a tool that instead of helping, produces neurosis and that within modern society, namely capitilism, where one cannot ever reach a point of satisfaction, it can be compared to the organic disease of schizoprenia -- all of this was elaborated on in detail by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (and explained much better than I ever could).
When we're left wanting, empty, stretched beyond our abilities, there has to be something to fill the void. Self-injury is often labeled as a borderline trait, when yes, they frequently use it to survive, and yes I do mean survive, but they've grown up in a chaotic world and are faced with a stagnating society where their goals equate to working meaningless jobs, with meaningless promotions, with meaningless marriages and meaningless lives -- and they just happen to see clearly and honestly through the bullshit media, friends, and family give us each day. With men, no one really thinks about how they might deal with this. We see so many examples of how males hold their feelings inside, and how they struggle and make their goals green lawns and a better job, but do they honestly ever feel happy with these small changes? With that greener lawn, that they have to spend an extra hour a day on now? With that higher paycheck, that they have to come home angry and upset because of the extra stress that it comes with? I wonder how many of those men cope with their problems in ways that people don't want to think about. Abuse, hurting their wives, self-abuse with drugs: alcoholism, cocaine, whatever -- the numbing way to hurt oneself or a passive way to say, kill me now, because I have lost the willpower to do it to myself, or, again, there is always the stereotyped and well-known idea of self-injury. For me, self-hurt, is the most consistent and easiest way to fill that emptiness that you are faced with when you come home from a long day, and realize that you really have accomplished nothing for yourself. That self-awareness that I'm just another cog on that wheel, being ground down day after day, holds no comfort to me, and so I turn to the simple things that do. Hurt.

"sometimes the best treatment is no treatment at all"

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/30/health/psychology/30beha.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=login

Thanks, Heather, for the link.

"A few years back, one of my residents was treating a young man in psychotherapy who had great difficulty deciding what he wanted to do with his life.

He wasn't depressed, but he was a very passive person.

It became clear that the patient was using the treatment not to understand his passivity, but to indulge it; he enjoyed talking about what he should do, but made no steps outside of therapy despite many attempts to address his behavior. We stopped his psychotherapy and referred him for vocational counseling.

The possible benefits of no treatment go beyond just patients who get worse in therapy. Some patients have been in psychotherapy for so long that it isn't clear what the advantage of treatment is; in some of these cases, stopping therapy gives patients a chance to discover that they might do fine without it.

Others might seek treatment during a crisis or when they are grief-stricken. As painful as these situations can be, if people are generally healthy and have good social supports, they are likely just to feel better with time and probably don't need any treatment at all.

At first blush, it might sound paradoxical — even uncaring — but sometimes the best treatment is no treatment at all."

Starting out

Starting today wasn't the best. Starting usually is where I screw things up. Waking up, starting out, remembering those dreams that you wish you would stop. Stop wishing, stop having, just stop.
I'm no big loss, is what they say when they turn their face, or say it doesn't matter, or shrug slightly and shift the topic.
I feel so empty lately, no reason inside to write, it's a tired story that isn't any better in the retelling. I don't charge fees, I don't charge admission, and it's still a wonder that there's anyone listening. I'm late night TV, blury and something only to watch as you try to fall asleep.
I want some pity, some attention, something from someone, to make myself lie a little more to myself so the days are a little easier.
I'm so tired of starting each day. I'm all run out, and it doesn't matter if i'm awake or asleep, my life won't change and my state won't change anyone else's life. Just dream those dreams that make me cry, and wake up and take those pills that make me sleep some more, to escape the more pressing weight of being alive and awake with an empty heart and mind.

Just rinse and repeat, as these days turn into months and somehow my life has turned into years of push-button numbness.

Sleep some more, lie to me some more, give me some empty pity to make the days a little easier.

Why the fuck did I pretend

i can't stop thinking,
and my heart won't stop beating.
it's just one more drink, i say.
a few more pills won't hurt, i say.
abuse makes things better;
it's the most familiar feeling i know.
lets hurt ourselves, allen, one more time
it makes other things hurt,
and stills that persistent, beating heart,
and slows those damn, flowing tears,
and helps dull that paranoid mind.
i can say, the clarity and truth
with my mind washed away
of daily cares and daily worries:
why the fuck did i care anyway,
and why the fuck did i pretend,
that you cared.

A partial portion, of a truncated self

[several pages of the initial email deleted for my own reasons]

the remainder of an email I wrote today, after a very, very, difficult day. Addressed to Nicole, who is my world.

you aren't the only one scared of someone leaving you, or used to that. I lived in constant fear of being left in my only relationship, my own stupidity deciding that an open relationship is morally (yeah grand-standing podium me again...) acceptable and that platonic love, regardless of sexual adventures on the side will always triumph. Well, I was fucking wrong. And I want you to help me. [extremely personal parts removed]

today was a really hard day for me, emotionally, for you even more so. The fact that we made it through it together, I think shows us how much we care about each other. I made some fucking mistakes all through my life. I'm the classic person who always "patches things up" by telling white lies or outright lying. I don't want to get into how it started, it's Freudian bullshit memories, and mostly deals with how my father treated me in regards to wrongs I did (whether I did them or not), and somehow ingrained by the memories of my mother breaking into tears whenever I "broke the rules", or did "something bad", and I cannot stand someone falling apart like that, not my mother. I'm not close to her at all, but she's so sensitive, if you think I'm sensitive, she is ten times more, and growing up in an cloistered environment with the overprotective mother stereotype (but, many times worse than what an American mother might due, because of cultural differences), and with the regular beatings and name-calling I got from my father from whatever fucking ill-deeds he thought I committed, just, started the pattern. I remember one time, vehemently arguing that I did not do this time. He had just bought a trailer? (one of those things you put on the back of a truck for vacations), and I was there while he was at the people's place looking at it. And I noticed the ceiling was dented all to hell (on the top -- and it was metal), like severe hail damage or someone really going angry with a hammer and I nagged him and tried to say, the roof is messed up, but he shoved me, almost to the ground for interrupting "business" (I quickly learned to leave him alone if he was doing anything involved with money -- it was a quick route to physical discipline after the guest(s) had left). So I tried to tell him that I thought he was getting shafted, and I was what, 5 or something years? fucking innocent little kid, and little kids nag their parents all the time, but I rarely did, that was beaten out of me a lot younger, and I learned a fucked up American-Asian centric concept of what respect should be. Bullshit, I can all that, it's just an excuse to treat the weak like shit and take advantage of them, the wife, and the children conceived are just trash that should respect the father, and not dishonor the mother, and there was no room for tolerance. And...I was a really crazy kid, the most outgoing kid in school, at least in elementary, before most of that behavior had been whipped out of me. My father picked up a habit around that time of going outside and finding a nice sapling and setting it up on the dinner table and just leaving it there, as a visual warning. He had moved up from belts and two-by-fours to young saplings (they hurt more like a whip, than a thwack that a belt or two-by-four leaves, and he did it hard enough to make me bleed most times). So I grew up for a while in constant fear of that, placed right there, at the dinner table, forced to ignore it each night while I ate. Dinner was a silent affair. The children didn't speak, unless spoken too. Which wasn't often. I ate as fast as I could every night and dismissed myself to get away from that living nightmare. Anyway -- I've gotten off track about white lies and real lies. When my father bought that mobile trailer and brought it home, my uncle visited to admire it and noticed that the top of the thing was, hey, all fucking smashed up. So, the only suspect, of course, like they would question their own fucking stupidity, was me. I cried and cried, and I went through beatings and beatings saying I didn't do it. I fucking didn't do it. But that wouldn't work. They wanted a story, they wanted details, they wanted admission, they wanted the exact *way* I did it, and *exactly* why I did it. Eventually I caved in, I was so young, and I'm surprised I endured the 3 or 4 beatings they gave me while I cried I didn't do it. So I made up a story. It was a simple story, but it was hard to find a reason for me doing it that convinced them, they thought I was a fucking dimwit and any ideas that actually made sense they rejected and I was beaten again. I was beaten several times because my reason for breaking the roof of the trailer wasn't believable to them. It was like torture. Nothing I could say, the truth wouldn't work. I tried and tried until I couldn't do it. So I made up their fucking story, and got beaten for each step of the story. When I admitted I did it. I got beaten. When I said how I did it (they wanted to know how a little kid could manage to do it), I said I climbed up the side ladder with a wooden mallet hammer at night and banged on the roof over and over. Then they wanted a reason. First I said I was mad at my dad. That didn't work. They wanted to know why I was mad. fucking idiots, there was a million reasons why I could be mad at my dad. I don't quite remember the bullshit answer I came up with, I think it had to do with them catching me stealing a bouncing ball at a toy store a few months back and I wanted revenge (like a kid that little could even envision the idea of revenge. Well they taught me the idea at a young age, and I think revenge is a concept that comes later in life, certainly not to someone as young as I was). So I learned revenge, and I used it. I fucking used it. I did everything that would accept my mom (mostly making my room dirty by throwing fits and pulling dressers over and knocking down lamps and basically doing anything that would accomplish the most destruction that left the most shit on the floor (that was the worst thing somehow, stuff on the floor). Anyway she cried and couldn't understand why I did it, and I couldn't respond, I was scared to say, because I'm angry at my father, because all she would do is just cry. It was impossible to get her to side with me, as with the American-Asian centric view, her husband is always right, regardless of her own feelings towards me. It tore me apart to see her cry when she knew that I had *at least a little bit of a point* in things, and to see me get hurt, whipped, beaten, humiliated, and she'd cry while it happened, hysterical and leave the room if it happened in the same room that she was in. So I learned to be a bad person in school, learning what a fun thing rage was, and now I had grades. That gave me fucking power. I was supposed to be brilliant, smart, successful, I was the first son, and they expected me to fulfill that duty. Well fuck them. I made sure all my grades were as low as possible, which was really hard cause I liked homework. (yeah it's fucking true - I was a dork from the start, I liked school). But I expressed my rage and frustration other ways, by lighting backpacks on fire (in those days in elementary school we all hung our bags outside the classroom on racks, so it was easy to unzip a bag and toss in a flaming match and hope a notebook or something would catch fire. I wasn't quite smart enough to figure out that I should be lighting paper and tossing that in. I liked school, but I wasn't brilliant. I've told you some of these stories of elementary in pieces, but this kind of relates it, at least in some mish-mashed timeline way of things, and how it came to be and progressed. I pissed on the boy's bathroom wall, god that punishment fucking sucked. I had to clean the bathrooms for who knows how many weeks, after school, and the stench of cleaner and piss really gave me a real disliking for dicks because they all fucking miss the urinal, so who the fuck cares if I miss it completely and piss on the wall and laugh like a maniac and shout. What's the difference? As far as I see it (and still do), there is no fucking difference. Public bathrooms are, well, America's shithole, and we treat them with shit and no respect. I didn't know that I was doing something wrong, I knew I was doing something "not right", but I really had no sense of right or wrong, except for what would for sure get me in trouble with my dad, or what I could get away with. At that time through elementary, I had two moral viewpoints, the first was, I'm going to get fucking beaten if I do this, and the second was, I *might* get away with this. That was pretty much as far as it went, every action I did, was based on if I could get away with it and know that I was inflicting pain to my father in some karmic way, like some kind of payback for all the hurt he did to me, taken out on society. I didn't hate people at all, I just hated...life, structure, and everything. And school was my playground to give payback to my father, by getting U's (insufficient) or S's (sufficient), but no, uh well whatever meant better than sufficient, I never got those. I always got a whipping for each report card, and a lecture on each grade and a detailed report was wanted from me for why I failed yet again and did so pitifully and got such a grade. I mostly shrugged and said, 'I dunno'. That wasn't, really, the best answer, but it pissed him off the most. Anyway, god, I don't know where I was going with this. I just sat down to type you a letter about meeting, and somehow it got long and way off-topic. I wanted to somehow explain how my early life made me feel forced to tell white lies, because in some situations the truth was not accepted by my dad, and how those things turned into blatant full-out lies, because nothing else would stop the hurt, nothing else would stop him, and he didn't want the truth. He didn't want me to say I fucking hated him, that I fucking wished he was dead, that I fucking blamed him for all my problems (yeah - classic, but I did), and all that fucking shit. And he didn't want me to tell him why I felt this way, oh no, if I even tried to explain it, those were the worst beatings at all. Finding fault in my father, is a major mistake, he has no faults, and to attempt to point out one... Well then his rage shows. I guess it comes in the family.

I've calmed my rage, through high school, I learned to adapt, be pacifist, chameleon, blend in, to avoid the taunts and schoolyard beatings that I saw other people, just like me, but not quick enough to learn the right words to say, or the right way to act, to be labeled queer or weird or just strange. I learned quick, I was pretty fucking smart by high school, at least in manipulating people into what they thought of me. And I'm fucking crying that I said that. It's not a thing to be proud of, but learning how to manipulate my father, was the first thing I learned to stop the torrent of hurt from him, and after that, everyone else just came easy. High-school kids were so transparent, so caught up in their day-to-day bullshit, that I was almost never picked on, and if I was I was rescued in minutes by people of all groups, usually the cool girls though. They thought I was cute cause I was so damn shy, shaking and stumbling around all the time and dropping shit and my voice cracking, it's good to know that my first real confrontation with day-to-day social phobia had a positive effect. Blah.

I fucking hate men, by the way. And I'll never trust one, and never let one close to me, or get close to my emotions. I'm too scared of them. Every guy I walk by, I shiver inside and am scared of the hurt that he might be capable of. All because of one male figure in my life, I distrust an entire gender and categorically place them as a simulacrum of my father waiting out there to hurt me. That was the root of my social phobia, I couldn't exist outside my house in high-school and post high-school without a friend with me. I trusted one male, that I knew from elementary through high school. We never really talked, I didn't know how to talk them, other than simple grunts and affirmations or shrugs. My most used fast was 'I don't know', it's really amazing how fast someone will leave you alone if you simply repeat that, especially with your head down... John parker was his name. When I came back to Colorado, I tried in vane to find him again. His parents separated long ago, during middle school years. And I had no luck tracking him down in my hometown (Longmont) or the last place I knew that his mother lived (Fort Collins). I've come to fear that he might of killed himself. He was bipolar because people knew what the fuck bipolar was. He was on lithium in middle school and high school. I didn't even know what it was for, until he told me about one of his suicide attempts and numerous times hospitalized. I felt awkward, and couldn't...tell him that I felt like dying a lot. It really hurt me, that I couldn't tell my only friend, closest friend, something so simple. That such simple communication I lacked, because avoiding communication was the best way in life to avoid conflict, and resulting hurt. I wish I had known how to converse then. I really fucking miss john. He accepted me, didn't ask me why I was so silent, didn't ask me questions, didn't think I was weird. He just hung out with me, didn't give reasons, just accepted me.

And I haven't found that kind of pure acceptance since. Everyone has their own agenda, he didn't. He just lived day-to-day, that was his agenda, that and where could he get more pot. A simple life and no demands or desires or what the fuck over on me, it was okay to just be... me, even if his other friends thought I was strange, he didn't care. God I wish I still knew him.

I've lived my whole life trying to meld myself into what I thought people would like the most. It's so fucking natural that it takes very strong effort *not* to start to style myself after what I think someone wants. It's so fucking hard. It's so fucking hard to stop that desire to please everyone, and be 100 personalities in one, one for each person, custom matched as best as my mind could figure out. At least I stopped that, at least I figured out that people, in general, are shit, and aren't worth my sympathy and aren't worth that twisted devotion I gave anyone who showed the smallest hint of appreciating the bullshit fake me I made for them. fuck them. fuck their agenda's. fuck them all. It took me a long time to move past that phase, after I learned how to communicate, probably sometime in my early 20's. So long, so long to learn such simple skills that a loving mother and father would naturally show their own son or daughter through affection, that they wouldn't need to *learn* things that are considered human. I'm a freak, and I'm not really even human, I just try to pass off as one, but I ring so hollow when people get close. Close to what? I don't know what is beneath my outside, because that's all I've been for my lifetime.

I haven't developed a self, I developed selflessness out of the cruelty I saw inflicted by people on the ones they love, every day, starting with my own father. It felt right. It felt good. To devote myself to what I felt was true altruism, and it was almost a religion for me, it felt so right inside after all that I had been through.

I have a really hard time, placing myself before others, and trying not to tear myself apart at the expense of other people. It's such a natural feeling inside me, that I feel so fucking wrong, when I try to feel for myself, to completely feel, without strings or attachments or disclaimers. It's a really scary feeling and I don't like it, but I know it's something I'm going to have to get through if I'm ever going to be able to reciprocate to someone, to not only be altruistic, but reach what I feel is... good, reciprocal altruism, maybe that's my idea of love and of friendship too. Don't ask, don't take, just give what you have to give. But, I'm flawed, and I can only give so much and the other person, like you, give more, and are hurt because I can't share more, because I can't show you what I feel inside. I don't know what I feel inside, I'm scared to look inside. I'm scared to let a self develop, or let whatever stunted little runt of a self I might have from my childhood before I learned that life isn't about smiling. It's about tears and nightmares and staying under the covers, because monsters can't get you. I don't know who I am, and I have feelings, emotions, and other things, but whatever they are tied to inside, are vague things that I can't even describe or figure out, I know most of what I am is because of my life and the life I went through. That's all I know. But, the inner core, that a person always has, from the beginning...I'm really scared that mine has been killed, like some cancer ate it away while I grew up disillusioned, slowly losing myself, to sacrifice it for the pity, attention, empathy that I could get. I'm afraid that there might be nothing inside me, and I really am a shallow asshole, who pretends to be a good person, but fucks everyone over in the end. I can't find anything to really say no, that isn't me. There's no inside that says, Allen, you know that's not true. There's no voice that tells me that what I just said is plain wrong. There's no voice inside.

and it scares me to hell.