No Solace for the Monad.

Its time to just face it.

Too many opportunities have been passed up, some of them golden ones, and enough second chances have blown by me as well. And its been so long since I’ve had a girlfriend that I can scarcely imagine ever having one again. For my age I’m incredibly inexperienced in both intimate relationships and sex and I fail to see how any age-appropriate woman would be turned on by such epic naivete, or even have the patience for it, much less the growing list of kinks I’ve amassed through watching too much fucking porn.

During those periods in which I had sex, which feel so long ago now they almost seem like a fanticiful dream, I feel I did my damnest to make up for lost time, but those periods have always been painfully brief. For someone as shamefully horny as I am, it kind of blows my mind that I haven’t developed some strategy, but I just don’t know how to deliberately make those circumstances happen. Never have. After it happens, I can’t remember how I got there, and I’m just left chronically taking matters into my own hands, lost without a road map to the horizontal hokeypokey until it somehow happens again.

Well, its going on a decade now, and I’m honestly beginning to feel as if my last shag might have truly been my last.

Serves me right, I guess.

As far as relationships go, I’m a person who requires a lot of alone time, which typically doesn’t go well in relationships. Women don’t want a boyfriend a day or two a week at best, and that’s understandable.

Also, its come to my attention that the default for most people is to have a significant other, and most seem terrified at the prospect of being alone for any length of time. Me? I’m the exact opposite: my default is isolation, and I feel somehow simultaneously overloaded and drained after being around people for as long as a work shift, even if I highly value such people.

This is an issue with my friendships, and so clearly it makes intimacy next to impossible.

Part of me wishes I could just accept that this is how I am and move on, happily alone, but unfortunately I’m inhabited by contrary desires of equivalent intensity. Its like two bands of immortals fighting to the death that never arrives. I constantly imagine how it would be if I were with particular women I feel drawn to both inside and out (a short list, I must confess — at least when they are repeated fantasies — but a cherished list), and the fantasies certainly involve sexual acts of a wide variety, but it extends beyond that as well.

So I’m not, like, entirely shallow.

Unless I can overcome my introversion and hypersensitivity, however, it seems doubtful this could ever happen, and both introversion and hypersensitivity seem to stem from core qualities of my character. It seems that this is just who I am. So in this respect, at the very least, it seems clear that I’m doomed.

II.

I’ve never been able to hop from girl to girl, either, which also seems standard operating procedure for the majority of people on their quest for a stable significant other. It takes me years to get over a failed relationship, even when I was the one to end it, which is typically the case.

If we’re counting high school, I have had but three girlfriends, two of them off and on. The first I met was Anne, then Claire the following year. The third, Kate, was, like Claire, a California girl, and our short but intense relationship lasted perhaps two to three months and, while I don’t blame her for how it ended, it fucking ripped my heart out and reinforced my trust issues.

As I’ve said elsewere, I’ve come to the conclusion that Anne was the only one of the three who truly loved me. I don’t think she understood me, however, and I found myself at times actively trying to prevent her from doing so, so I can’t lay her ignorance on her.

When I still lived in the trailer with Nick and Rena and we were sleeping in my pathetic, tiny room, she would think I was asleep, crawl out of my too-small bed, sit at my computer chair, and start diving into my files. I had a blog at the time on an old website that might still be around, it was called Bluelight, and only a small number of people who knew me in person might read it, so I felt more free to expose my mind to strangers there.

Even that wasn’t enough for her, I found when I hopped out of bed to stop her. She wanted me unedited, unfiltered — “raw,” as I believe she put it. She wanted to see me naked, uninhibited, transparent. I hesitate to say honest, as I’m not deliberately deceptive, but perhaps that’s a fitting word after all.

Evidently exposing my goofy, naked body wasn’t enough — she wished to see the depths of my mind, the complexities of my spontaneous thoughts and natural, emotional reactions. She wanted to peer behind the layers of masks and acquaint herself with that alien spark within me, the core of who I am, my weirdo soul in all its awkward, fucked-up gore and glory.

And I would have none of it. Absolute exposure? That was fucking suicide.

There were things I was hiding from her at the time, of course, but I didn’t do it through overt lying, only silence and self-censorship. I was still struggling to get over Claire, for one thing, but she sensed that one. There was a deeper and far more embarrassing secret, however.

For years when we were apart, I was haunted by the paranoid suspicion that the child she had had after we severed ties half a decade back was, in fact, my own. The twisted tale my overactive imagination spun like a jacked-up arachnid was this: she had gone back to the army after having taken my virginity to find herself pregnant and, knowing that I was immature and unfit to be a father, she elected not to tell me. Instead, she would marry Ronnie, who would, if nothing else, be mature and established enough in life to help raise and provide for the child.

After she came back, after her and Ronnie were separated, we mended our broken bond and began seeing each other again, and she learned of an online journal I had had by that time for years. I was deeply embarrassed about my concerns and didn’t want her to know. Now that I’d met her adorable, bright kid, who was clearly part Latino, I knew I couldn’t be her genetic father. So in a mad rush I searched for all references to this paranoia of mine in my journal entries over the passed five years and erased them.

Ultimately it was my apparent inability to trust and open up that ruined the relationship — that led me to ending it.

Kate killed me inside. Through Claire, I nurtured a fantasy that could never be. With Anne, I murdered what might have been a meaningful future.

My heart committed suicide.

III.

I haven’t had sex now in a decade. I haven’t had a girlfriend in roughly a decade and a half. Yet like a pathetic, perpetually indecisive piece of shit I keep wondering, fanticizing what could be. By all external apoearences, I’ve hung up the hat. I’ve been alone for too long. And I’d like to believe that what you see is what you get, but I can’t get my dumb ass off the fence in my fearful fucking heart.

I’d say I need to choose a path already, but by not chosing, I think I’ve already made the choice.

I need to stop beating a dead horse. And engaging in that same abuse with respect to the monkey on my back.

Chronic Masturbation & the Monkey Dream (7/30/21 Dreams).

Just in case the title didn’t give it away, too much information lies ahead.

Proceed at your own risk.

There were three dream scenes I recalled upon awakening.

In one, I was talking with two or three writers from Rick and Morty, who were sitting across a table from me. I was asking them if the first episodes of season 5, as I suspected, weren’t the Rick and Morty we usually follow, but ones from an alternate universe. I cited Rick’s lack of using his portal gun until recently as suggestive evidence, as well as him drinking out of a champaign glass rather than his typical flask (though I’m not sure this one is accurate). They all seemed to be checking out the episodes on the same laptop after I said this, as if they were curious themselves — as if, despite being writers for the show, they didn’t know, either, and wanted to know if I was telling the truth.

In an even shorter scene, I’m walking to a convenience store dressed in a monk’s robe, but as I do so my pants, from beneath my robe, begin falling down to my ankles.

It was the last dream scene that I found most curious, however.

Looking out the second-story window of my old room at my parent’s house, I see the big pond in our front yard that we used to swim in (which doesn’t actually exist), which in turn makes me think of a bigger and better swimming area just a short distance away (which also doesn’t exist).

Suddenly, in the tall grass and bushes down below and between the pond and our house, I see something moving. Its a monkey. Somehow it sees me, too, and then it comes up to my window impossibly quick and stares at me through the glass. For a moment I think its going to start masturbating, which for some reason made me consider masturbating, but instead it just continues to stare at me with this ambiguous expression and uses one hand to open what turns out to be a door in its chest. Inside, there is a circular mouth of sharp teeth.

The monkey image sort of hung around with me, perhaps only because of my desire to draw it, and it took me a few days to take the time to try and interpret this dream scene.

Water often signifies emotions and the unconscious aspect of ourselves and, at least on a personal note, there are also associations with sex. Then there is the matter of the monkey, which, given what I thought he was about to do at the window and the phrase “beating the monkey,” likely was symbol for masturbation itself — associated with sex, clearly, and as a consequence also emotions and the unconscious as well.

This might make even more sense given I’ve been kind overdoing it in that department as of late.

Instead of masturbating, as I anticipated, the monkey opens up a door in its chest; instead of a heart, it has a circular mouth with sharp teeth targeted inward. As for the teeth and the chest, they’re supposed to be symbols of power and aggression — showing teeth, pounding one’s chest. An open mouth, on the other hand, is seen as a symbol of openness and receptivity, and this seems to resonate with the alleged meaning of an open door — being open or receptive to new opportunities. The window is also said to suggest new opportunities, or perhaps just a new perspective.

So the chest is power and agression; inside it, an open mouth, which is receptivity and openness… but within the mouth, sharp teeth: again, power and aggression.

Like the monkey was a goddamn Russian doll of dualities, a Chinese box of polarities.

And though it only struck me long after, there’s the presence of a mouth in place of a heart. Especially given that it was such a sharp-toothed, inhuman mouth, this struck me as a little unnerving in retrospect.

Even so, the image of the monkey at the window as a whole doesn’t necessarily suggest something bad. It may just imply that behind the aggressive masturbation I’ve been engaging in is a deeper, heart-centered hunger that I may still have the opportunity to satisfy.

I feel a bit uncomfortable writing that, but that’s honestly how I would interpret this dream image if it were someone else’s dream.

This may be even more relevant due to something I’ve been writing lately, a blog post I’ve constantly been putting off finishing. Which leads me to wonder: are my dreams heckling my blog posts before my procrastinating ass even gets the chance to finish them?

Of Masks & Microchips.

At work, Steve’s wife came into the dining room, and as often happens, we struck up a conversation. After venting to me about her daughter for a bit, we somehow get on the topic of the pandemic.

I explained that though I’ve gotten my first shot, I was freaking out early last week, as I felt congested and my throat was scratchy. Within a day or two I convinced myself that it was all in my head, that I was just being paranoid, but I went out and got tested anyway, just to be safe. Thankfully, the results were negative, but I decided that for the time being, I’d continue wearing the mask due to the new variants out there.

She nodded and told me she should start wearing her mask again, too, but she found the thought of getting vaccinated “scary.” This despite the fact that she has already gotten covid and said she had never felt more sick in her life. That she thought she was going to fucking die, as a matter of fact.

What should scare her is the thought of getting it again, not getting the vaccine.

I teased her a bit, asking her if she was afraid of getting microchipped — and then I saw it in her eyes. She was. Calmly, I explained to her that if she’s worried about being microchipped, she should take a look at that device in her pocket. Edward Snowden already gave us the truth regarding it years upon years ago. They can remotely activate the camera and receiver on your phone. They can triangulate your location. They don’t need to microchip us.

“Not everyone has a cell phone, though,” she countered.

“Clearly not everyone’s going to get vaccinated, either,” I replied, giving voice to the obvious.

She knows I’m not religious, she begins, and I interrupt her.

“Please, please don’t tell me you think this is the mark of the beast.”

Indeed, she thought this could very well be the mark of the beast. She said that things in the Bible are coming to pass, and I try to tell her that people claim that’s the case at every moment in history. The so-called “predictions” in that damned book are so vague that it serves as a sort of Rorschach test. If it truly is the word of some omniscient creator-being, one would think he’d be a bit clearer so as to avoid such confusion.

She enlightened me in a way, though. I’ve been so frustrated with political cults like the Trumpanzees on the right and the Woke cult on the left that I have been entirely ignoring the continued prevalence of crazy religions in their original form, of the anthology of “alternative facts” they call the Bible.

I like the woman, I truly do, but that conversation left me feeling more than a bit frustrated and disappointed.

Check Your Wooly Finger.

“Think for yourself,” you say, roots deep and heels embedded in the Land of 1, in the Land of 0.

Well, think about this:

How strange is it that by knowing a person’s position on one issue — abortion, lets say, or gun control — you can, on average, predict with startling accuracy their position on other hot-button issues?

How likely is it that people would have independently — through their own, individual thought and personalized value systems — arrived at conclusions that make them resonate nearly perfectly with either Team Red or Team Blue?

Sure, you could argue that positions on such issues naturally clump together because at some level they flow into one another, that they are all manifestations of some shared, underlying value system, but that would be to ignore the fact that the positions of the political parties aren’t static; to the contrary, they have changed over the course of time, often dramatically.

So what else could explain the political polarization in our country but groupthink, mob mentality, the herd instinct? And given that, what could be more hypocritical than a card-carrying member of either party pointing an accusatory finger at anyone and confidently damning them for not thinking for themselves?

If one truly thought for themself, after all, their positions on issues, in all likelihood, would be, for good or ill, all over the damn map. It would be impossible to justifiably pigeonhole them. They might agree with the right on some issues, the left on other issues, whereas other views might be incredibly difficult to classify in the political binary.

If people in general thought for themselves, the political polarization we presently experience in our culture wouldn’t — couldn’t — be a thing.

So move your bleating head just a bit so you’ve got room to stick that wooly finger of yours right up the pupil of your crusty brown eye.

A Broken Nap of Sleepless Dreams (7/18/21 Dreams).

In the twilight state of consciousness, I see a vision of a single person standing in the distance to the right. To the left is an overturned bicycle, with one tire in my line of sight. From outside my field of vision comes an inhuman arm — greenish, I think, and it has no wrist or hands, just slender fingers positioned on the front and side of it’s arm in the general area where hands would be. It moves slowly, touching the tire, and though I can’t see the rest of it, I feel certain it is watching the person, who is none the wiser.

I wake up and decide to make a rough sketch of it, as I felt it might be something cool to draw later on, after I awoke from my nap.

I then went back to sleep, but again awoke briefly in the twilight state when I heard the sound of wind rushing in my ears. This is often the prelude to an out of body experience, though this isn’t always the case. Feeling too tired and comfortable to awaken and write it down, I let myself slip back into slumber.

Suddenly I find myself walking through my dark bedroom towards the equally dark bathroom. I reach inside and flip the switch on the wall, but the light doesn’t come on. I flip it a few more times in succession. Nothing. I turn to walk away when it hits me that all the bulbs shouldn’t be burnt out, so maybe a fuse blew, or perhaps the entire apartment complex lost power. I listen carefully to see if I can notice the humming of any machines, but I hear nothing. Still turned away from the bathroom, I reach my hand and flip the other switch, the one for the fan. For a moment there’s no response, but then I hear the fan grumbling and growling to life. When I turn to look back into the bathroom, the light is suddenly just on.

I’m confused for only a moment before I wake up in bed. I then close my eyes and drift off again.

Next, I’m walking from the kitchen down a dark hallway. I feel a subtle fear of the dark, too, and I don’t know why, but it arouses my curiosity. I think its at this point that I suddenly have the urge to get drunk, but I see that a digital clock in the darkness shows that its around 3 o’clock. I initially assume its the AM, but ultimately relax when I realize I had taken my nap early in the day, so it must actually be PM. Eventually I come to my open bedroom door, to the left. I put my hand inside to flip the light switch, but when I do, nothing happens.

I wake up again. I grab my notebook, write it all down, and try and drift back to sleep.

At some point I realize I’m staring at my cellphone in my hands, and just passed it I can see details of the room I’m in, but I’m not just awake this time — I know that I’m dreaming. It crosses my mind that at least in this place the blue light won’t hit my eyes and fuck with my melatonin and sleep cycles. I then take a moment to appreciate, to be in utter awe over how utterly indistinguishable all this is from so-called waking reality.

As I do so and try to stabilize myself there, I hear this “womp, womp” sound that might be the blood rushing in my ears, but in any case, it feels as though this increases the instability of the environment and ultimately sends me tumbling back.

I again wake up in bed, but this time its a false awakening. Much like the hallway scene, this also isn’t my actual room, my actual apartment. My bedroom is dark, and someone I know comes in and sits on the chair by the desk against the wall opposite the wall my bed is against. There’s some talking between us, but I’m still groggy, and then one or two other people come in.

As they’re talking, I see a large notebook beside me on the bed where I’ve scribbled my dreams in the hurried and messy way one does in the dark when frantically trying to record a dream before the details fade. As I see it, I remember the cell phone incident and desperately try to screen out their conversation as I write it down.

I also remember writing down the dream scene about Rose, though upon awakening for real I also remember this dream scene occurred after this false awakening, not before, so I’m rather confused at this point.

From what I recall, after writing that shit down Rose either enters the room or was already among the three people talking. We both walk out of the room, strollimg down a long, dark hallway, and she puts her arm around me as she walks beside me.

“Good,” she tells me, “now we have fifty minutes alone together.”

Immediately a part of me gets excited about the prospect of having sex with her, but I tell myself that this is a ridiculous assumption, and just because she wants to be alone with me doesn’t mean she’s eager to jump my bone.

I then wake up, either for real or into the false awakening formerly described.

Its difficult to convey how different these kind of dreams are from ordinary dreams, but there is a definite difference. The environment is vivid, indistinguishable from ordinary reality, and while I’m awake within them, I’m not always aware that I’m dreaming. Some memories from my ordinary life seems accessible in this state, but I don’t notice the differences — such as the fact that my apartment isn’t the same. It fascinates and perplexes me. When I finally awake from them and into ordinary reality, I’m always left in this strange mood.

It really does seem like a parallel reality to me, and I’ve gotten to the point where I really don’t care how fucking crazy that sounds.

Among the Lost Souls of Planet Earth.

It was about a year away from when things in my head and in my life would go bat shit crazy. I was a freshmen in art class one day, listening to my Walkman as I drew. I was listening to a recording of a record (vinyl? I guess we call them vinyl now) my father often listened to at home, and which I found funny. It was basically two guys doing skits, pretending to be old, backwoods characters.

Derek was across the table from me, and while I recall him mostly talking to some guy beside him, he asked me what I was listening to, and I told him it was comedy. He wanted to listen, so I took the headphones off my head and offered them to him. He put them on for maybe twenty seconds, took them off, placed them on the table and with a dismissive laugh and shrug turned to the other guy and said, “its just two old guys talking,” and then went on talking with the other guy as if I didn’t exist. I was and am and will likely forever be one hypersensitive little shit, so yeah, it embarrassed me a little. Even so, I put back on the headphones and went back to my drawing.

I didn’t even remember it until recently, in the wake of Derek’s initial Facebook messaging. Even so, I don’t think it was his messaging that triggered this memory — not entirely, anyway.

After hearing about Bill Cosby being let out of jail, I couldn’t help but think of the records my father had of his stand-up, and how I used to enjoy listening to them as a kid. His stories about when he was a kid in particular. His story about the chicken heart. His story about lighting his parents’ couch on fire and how his father would shake his head and go, “What’s wrong with that boy?”

And then there was that bit he had that has always confused me as a kid, the one that dealt with his itch to get his hands on Spanish Fly, which I later learned to be a sexual stimulant. It kind of made me sick, thinking about all the shit that pudding-popping, Jello-jiggling, family-man, serial rapist got away with all those years. And so I thought of other records I listened to, and I remembered about Derek listening to it and laughing only at the fact that I could find something funny that he thought to be so lame.

Still, that was the only vaguely negative interaction I ever had with Derek. Granted, it was really the only interaction I can recall having with the guy, but even so, it didn’t make him an asshole, it just made him someone who had different tastes in comedy and might have been a bit insensitive in expressing that fact to a hypersensitive classmate.

I don’t condemn him for it, but he was clearly intent on condemning himself for being the asshole I never recall him being. Not just with respect to me, of course, but I can’t even recall him being an asshole to someone else.

And it did interest me to discover that this memory took place in the high school arm room, particularly given his apparent appreciation for my art and the desire he evideny always had to be an artist himself.

Art was also the topic of the message he sent me around noon on Wednesday, as I was preparing for work.

He said that I was a great artist and that he admired my talent. While he was quick to add that he was poor, he wanted to buy an original piece from me. If he paid for shipping plus whatever I wanted for it, he asked, would I make him something to hang on his wall?

Absolutely, I told him.

I confessed I would be horrible at commissions, but if he could at least give me a ball-park idea of what he was looking for, I’d do my best. He said I should call him, as it was too much to text and he had poor communication skills. I told him I was getting ready for work, but I could call him tomorrow.

Later, at work, he messaged me again, saying that he knew me, and that when it came to art I had the tendency to overdo it, and he wasn’t rich. All he wanted was something simple, like a caricature. I messaged back asking for more details and he again insisted that I just call him.

Goddamn it.

I thought he had been pressing me to call him because he felt that he communicated poorly through writing or it simply wasn’t his preferred means of expression, and I understood that. I’m the exact opposite. When it comes to communicating, I prefer writing and imagery to the spoken word. So I went to take the trash out and, out there by the dumpsters, I lit up a cigarette and finally called him. At least this way I’d have an excuse to get off the phone in a short amount of time.

He didn’t know who I was at first. Even after I said my name. Only when I mentioned we went to high school together did it finally click, and this should’ve been a red flag. It turned out that talking to him verbally made our conversations even more confusing. His thoughts seemed rather disconnected and he repeated himself a few times without even realizing it. His voice was all over the place and sometimes he struggled to say things, like he was placing incredible effort to remain focused and push out the words and string together the sentences. In short, he sounded horrifically drunk, maybe heavily medicated, but most certainly out of it.

I tried desperately to piece together what he was saying.

He spoke on how when he went to high school, he just didn’t get it, didn’t pick up on things, and it didn’t prepare him for the so-called real world. Not in the least. He left school thinking we were the only free country, he confessed to me, and that the rest of the world were the poor and oppressed, scrambling just to eat bread and drink water.

He kept bringing up duck and cover, too, as if him and I grew up in the 1950s as opposed to the 1990s. My assumption was that he meant to draw parallels with the education system, which was providing data that we were taught to believe would give us safety and control in the world beyond high school when in fact it was a bullshit sham propagated to give us the illusion of control and safety.

He felt betrayed by the school system, by society at large, and he has continued to feel lost, as if his life has been a waste. In a better world, shit might have been different.

He called himself stupid a few times, and I insisted it may have just been ineffective education and propaganda that were to blame for his ignorance and confusion, not some lack of intelligence. He also made references to being a bad person, though without saying it so blatantly, and I again assured him that I’d seen no evidence that was the case.

He then confessed to me that he had liver cancer, or that his liver was failing, and he may not have a lot of time left. This made me hope he wasn’t drunk. In any case, that’s why he started reaching out, messaging people, apologizing. That was the weight I had sensed in him — he was looking death straight in the eyes and found life to be unfair, and felt guilty over his suspicions that he had been unfair to others in his past.

At some point, after my cigarette had burned down to the filter, we got disconnected. I messaged him. He didn’t message me back until my break, when I was in my truck with Sean, and after I had taken two or three hits off the joint he offered me.

And I thought communication was difficult before.

Though he had spoken little of the art he wanted to purchase from me on the phone, which had been the reason I called, now he was back on the topic. I told him the last person I had sold a piece to, it had been only $25. I asked if that sounded good. He said no, it was too little. I asked him to give me a price, and he said no. I was getting mildly frustrated. The pot did not help matters.

Marajuana, at least when it comes to me, serves as a sort of amplifier for whatever my attention is invested in at the time. If I’m focused on relaxing, it boosts it. If I’m enjoying Cosmos or a nature documentary, I’m drawn in like you wouldn’t believe. Art, music? I’m entirely absorbed. Frustration and concern? Welcome to my personal hell.

Our conversation ended and I went about the rest of my work shift high, frustrated, and socially anxious.

Then I got a text. It referenced me by name, and said that with my permission, they would “post all my stuff.” The text had no name, just a number, but I assumed it was my sister’s father-in-law, who I had sold the aforementioned piece to. I was slightly confused because he had mentioned “stuff,” suggesting the plural, and he had only a single piece, so when I texted back “yes, please do,” I added that I assumed it was from him. The person texted back that I was wrong.

Instant paranoia. Depths of paranoia.

I knew he wouldn’t fuck with me like this, so it couldn’t be my sister’s father-in-law. So naturally my first assumption that someone had hacked into my computer and stolen all my writings, or found my blogs despite my pseudonym, and were going to publish them on the net under my real name and embarrass me and bring shame upon my family and judgement upon me by everyone.

I asked who it was. It took them forever to answer, and they kept fucking with me, and my paranoia deepened, I became self-loathing, and I finally looked up the number on the net. A Florida number. Derek told me he lived in Florida.

I checked Derek’s number. It was him.

Indeed, I was too high. When I texted back, called him by name and asked what he meant by “stuff,” his response was entirely incomprehensible. I didn’t respond and I haven’t heard from him since.

I was more than a bit irritated and emotionally spent by the end of the shift, but after that faded, my sympathy for him remained. He’s feeling guilty and betrayed and afraid and alone as he’s dying and maybe perpetually drunk as shit in Florida.

It feels as though most people are born into our society and they adapt rather quickly, that they can pick things up with ease, and they’re eager for adulthood. I was never that way. I remember when my sister, Eve, and I were attending school and my youngest sister, Linda, was excited about attending school the following year. So excited, in fact, that she filled up a bookbag with random things and hung it on the hooks in the hallway where Eve and I hung up our school things.

Unsurprisingly, she adapted to society just fine. Eve didn’t do too bad, either. Both have done infinitely better than I in this respect.

Maybe Derek, for whatever reason, is just another member of my category. Another one of the lost children of America. Another lost soul spinning in circles on planet earth.

Derek’s Message & the Omnipresence of Things Past.

He comes home from his shitty, passionless job to an empty apartment, perhaps an empty house. He sits at his dining room table and drinks cans of cheap beer as a painful reverie of all the shame, guilt and regret from his past plays over and over in his mind like a morbid, mental picture-show.

He picks up his beer, strolls into his bedroom, leans on his dresser, and stares at himself in the mirror, looking into his own eyes for a hint of hope in himself, for a reason to love himself, for a reason to live another day.

After awhile, he sighs and sits down on the edge of his bed. And after a few more moments, a few more swigs of liquid courage in the effort to swallow that persistent lump in his throat, he reaches his free hand beneath his bed, pulls out the shoebox, opens it, and stares down at the gun.

He puts down his beer on the corner table and picks up that little machine of death, staring at it another moment before putting the barrel into his mouth — but thankfully, he can’t do it. Trigger shy, as always, he thinks to himself. Even so, it focuses his mind on the moment, and the picture show in his mind slows, slows, until it lands on one of the many he’s known, if only in passing, and feels he had wronged during high school.

He puts the gun back in the box, fastening the top, and pushes it back under his bed with the back of his foot. He then takes out his phone, looks up that person on Facebook, and messages them.

Just to say hi. Just to apologize. Oh, how might this one respond?

Its like spinning the wheel of potential misfortune. Its like Russian Roulette without the mess.

And so he waits…

***

On my way home Tuesday, I stopped by Circle K and there was one or two people in front of me. Rather than just let my mind wander, I took a quick glimpse at my phone. On the lock screen I found that I had I gotten a Facebook message from Derek Maddow. I was confused and curious, but by that time it was my turn at the counter, so I elected to leave it to read when I got home.

Before cracking open a beer, I took out the phone and discovered that I had yet another entirely unexpected message from yet another person.

As for Derek’s message, it was short.

“Just saying hi. Sorry if I was a jerk. I was. That’s all.”

Though I went to school with him, I don’t remember ever having had a conversation with him, or even interacting with him much, really. I heard through the grapevine that he had “behavioral problems” and that his mother, a rather crabby-looking woman who worked at the school, had gotten to the point where she just couldn’t deal with him anymore. Nothing she did worked. She didn’t know what else to do. In the end, if I remember correctly, he got sent to military school, after which he fell entirely off my radar.

No one at school seemed to dislike him, at least so far as I could tell, and I always found him to be comedic relief during class — Mrs. D’s English class specifically. She was this short, perpetually red-faced woman with puffy white hair and intense emotions. She drove a red sports car and was constantly getting pulled over. The dynamic between her and Derek was amusing as hell, and as frustrating as his jokes and sarcasm might have seemed to her at times, he always got her laughing, which was something that tense little lady certainly needed, if you ask me.

And there were assholes in school, without doubt, but Derek? Not once. Not on a single occasion can I recall him ever being a dick to me.

This is essentially what I told him, too, when I texted back. He thanked me and told me that using humor has always been his defense mechanism. He then told me he had always admired my artistic ability and that this was a talent he’d always wished he’d had.

I wondered if perhaps that was what had inspired him to message me, as I had recently posted some recent artwork of mine on Facebook after failing to do so for some time. Years, I think. I was rather shocked at the response I’d gotten in general. One other person, a girl I had also went to high school with, would also text me within the next day or two complimenting me on my work. And then my sister’s father-in-law wanted to buy one of my pieces, and as a consequence I sold my first piece of art in the last decade or two.

I never knew my artwork — or myself, or anything about me, for that matter — was ever on Derek’s radar.

He said that over the past twenty-plus years since we all graduated, he had messaged a lot of people and found himself surprised. Everyone who should have told him to go fuck himself had failed to do so, he explained, and those he anticipated might just say hi back to him more often than not tore him a new asshole.

I was still looking for some clue, some faint hint, some vague suggestion regarding what he might feel so guilty and self-loathing about. It clearly didn’t begin and end with me. I made one good, sincere attempt to get him to explain himself, to describe what it was he thought he had done that was so wrong, but he dodged all those bullets Matrix-style. He clearly only wanted to reach out and apologize — on the surface, anyway. I respected his right to privacy and pushed no further.

Its strange how we can judge ourselves, and how differently the same world can look through the lens provided by a different pair of eyes, a different mind, a different pathway of life experience. The guy seemed so tortured. And as apologetic as he was, it seemed to kill him inside so much he couldn’t bear to express, even in writing, specifically what it was that plagued him about himself so much.

Over the years, more than one person from my class of ’97 committed suicide, and after what he wrote to me, a concern in me began to emerge that he might be a candidate. Whatever plagues him weighs heavily on him and a haunting scene began to play out in my mind days later when contemplating this.

That was the little portion that proceeded this rambling of mine. Nothing more than a dark, worrisome fantasy of mine, I sincerely hope.

His message wasn’t the only I received on Facebook that evening, either. Another was from Claire, who decided to drop me a line after two fucking years because she was coming back to Ohio for a short vacation and thought it would be weird if she did so without informing little ol’ me. And she added that she guesses things are weird between her and I right now.

She guesses.

Things, really, they’ve always been weird between us, its just that I’m no longer willing to invest in the kind of fairy tale I’ve always cautioned her not to chase after. In other words, I’m no longer willing to be a blindly hopeful and hypocritical dipshit. Her and I would never work out because despite my empathy for her, despite the connection between her and I that I felt so strongly and cherished for so long, we’re too different. I’m too weird. Her and I, I had to admit to myself, are simply not compatible.

Hell, I’m not sure I’m compatible with anyone.

I’ve got guilt, shame, and regret of my own. Fuck, that heap gets higher by the goddamned day, but I’m not going to kill myself, nor am I willing to fool myself.

I know we can’t escape history. I know that the past is always present. But doing the same thing over and over expecting different results, that’s bloody insane. And with respect to that particular flavor of insane, I’ve had my fill. So I turn my back on this. I deny this. I refuse to allow myself to fall into the same empty hopes and delusional thinking I’ve fled to in the past.

I will not engage. I will not succumb to the temptation. And I refuse to kill myself, for the record, save for perhaps in metaphor.

I will get through this. I want to believe Derek will get through this. And for all I know, Claire, in this marriage — yet another fucking, fucking marriage — has already gotten through it. For all I know, she’s finally living that fairy tale she always fucking wanted and I would never be able to give her.

And I hope she’s happy. I hope that this is her present and her future and that she can leave me in her past, where I likely belong.

I keep telling myself that that’s enough.

And so tonight I yet again place that metaphorical gun back in the metaphorical shoebox and push it back under my metaphorical bed with the back of my metaphorical fucking foot, and then I pick up my phone and spill it all in my fucking blog. And then I decide to go to my new art desk and draw some more.

And I keep telling myself that that’s enough.

Light at the Window (7/2/21 Dreamlet).

I’m in the living room of my apartment with someone, standing nearby the window. Its dark outside and I suddenly notice someone shining their flashlight in from just outside the window — disturbing, as I live on the third floor and there’s no balcony.

In terror and disbelief, as adrenaline shoots through my system, I find myself yelling aloud, “What the fuck?”

For a moment I try to rationalize it — is someone climbing the walls of the apartment building? Are they on an absurdly tall ladder? I frantically pull aside the curtains and lean closer to the glass for a better look. I see nothing. Looking down toward the parking lot, I can make out no movement, just cars in the darkness. As my eyes fall on the vehicles below, I suddenly hear a car alarm begin to go off, but it only gets two honks in before I’m jolted awake.

I got up and quickly wrote it down in my phone. I hadn’t been asleep for fifteen minutes, and my hopes of taking a nap were now pretty much shot to shit, as the adrenaline was still coursing through me. I’ve been drinking too much this week, so what minimal sleep I’ve gotten hasn’t been restful, healthy sleep, so perhaps this was due to that REM rebound effect. Regardless of the cause, it was an incredibly vivid and realistic dream or dreamlet and I haven’t the foggiest clue what it means.

Curious Eyes & the Inner Child.

This last weekend I decided to finally drop by the Rite Aid near my apartment to see if they had any of the covid vaccines. Turns out they have all three. Though I still have yet to get vaccinated, I plan to by this week’s end.

And its taken this long, I should mention, because I’m a procrasting piece of shit and not out of any fear of being microchipped. I mean, come the fuck on. We have cell phones on us pretty much at all times. We tell Facebook and Google Maps our location, share photos and statuses regarding our lives. Algorithms on the net have built up a personality profile on each of us. When it comes to who and where we are, the data the government and corporations have stockpiled on us are an embarrassment of riches. They don’t need to fucking microchip us.

In any case, I was talking to the woman behind the counter at the pharmacy and as she told me that they had all three vaccines and an appointment wasn’t necessary, I was looking in her eyes. They were bloodshot, subtlely wiggling all of the time and occasionally shooting off quickly to the side before returning to their point of focus, which is to say my eyes. I was fascinated, but as I watched her it felt like my eyeballs were somehow becoming synchronized, or at least naturally trying to, and following her jerky gaze. It didn’t hurt, though it wasn’t exactly comfortable. Regardless, I kept eye contact throughout our entire exchange in part out of my curiosity.

I wanted to ask. I was dying to ask. Not asking was like holding in a massive shit trying to push its way out with agonizing pressure. But I had restraint.

I did not have restraint during a strangely similar circumstance a few days prior, when I finally burst and asked Emory a question that had been gnawing at me. Interestingly, this incident also involved eyes. Or a single eye in this case, to be exact.

Years upon years ago, Emory’s father frequented our fast food joint. While the guy could annoy me, for the most part I really liked him. He’d often talk with me and was often with his son, a cute little kid. Well, his son, Emory, is maybe seventeen right now and works in the kitchen.

Shortly after he started working here, his father died quite suddenly. He took maybe a week off, and when he came back to work he seemed to be holding it together really well. I’m 42 and my parents, who are both in their 70s, are in good health, but I know they won’t live forever, and just the thought of losing them fills me with unbearable dread. When they’re gone, it will unquestionably shake up my life, and a year later I’d probably be in shambles.

Maybe he’s good at hiding it. Maybe he only needed to grieve for a week. In either case, he seems like a strong kid.

When his father used to come in, he always wore these sunglasses. Given he almost always came in at night, I found this perplexing, though not for long. When he was talking to you he’d bow his head a bit to look at you with his naked eye — singular.

Shades are more stylish than an eye patch, I suppose.

For years I was dying to ask him, my curiosity nagging me every time he’d stop in again. Recently the question arose in my mind again, nagging me, though I couldn’t bring myself to ask Emory something about his deceased father out of the blue.

Then, just the other day, I found a convenient opening. It was just him and I out in the dining room and he had said to me something about his dad, though I can’t recall precisely what. In any case, it came flying out of my mouth before I was even conscious of what I was saying.

Curiosity killed the cat, and I was tired of being a pussy.

I didn’t just blurt it out, but began by confessing I had always wanted to ask his father something and then posed the question. It didn’t seem to bother him at all.

When he was really young, it wasn’t on his radar at all, but he remembers it kind of hitting him one day. This didn’t sound strange to me at all. When you grow up around something, its normal to you, so your less apt to question it. After he noticed the cyclops nature of his dad, however, he became quite curious himself and had asked his father about it all throughout his youth. In response, he only got the dodge — his father had always given him a goofy answer, reluctant to get into it.

Once he was older, though, he asked again, and his father finally relented.

Evidently he had come home from the bar one night and the woman he’d been seeing was convinced he had cheated on her, so she had shot him in the eye.

I was rather surprised, and I told him as much. Someone getting shot in the fucking eyeball and surviving? I always thought that kind of shit only happened on The Walking Dead.

“I knew there had to be a good story behind it,” I told him, perhaps a bit too enthusiastically.

People often talk about getting in touch with their inner child, but mine isn’t too far below the surface. But a thin veneer separates my inner child from this so-called outer adult, and he wants to burst out my ever-thin skin and ask blatant questions like a curious, innocent, ignorant child would — an in a manner only children can get away with. No build up, no candy-coating, no hesitation, no strategy working within the cultural conventions we commit to.

Yet while kids can get away with that, as I said, adults are expected to have more finesse. More restraint. And remarkably less curiosity to restrain.

Not to sound like a whiney twat, but that isn’t fair.

Surfing OCEANic Algorithms & the Sea of Possibilities.

Beard care. Every commercial on YouTube that morning was about beard care: beard cream, beard brushes, beard vitamin supplements.

Paranoia flooded me.

I suddenly found myself doing something I’ve often done with respect to my own thinking. I don’t know when I developed the habit, but I often I find myself thinking something and wondering how I came to think about it, and so I retrace my mental steps, try to backtrack the pathway of associations in my mind that brought me there until I find the root cause. And I must say, I’ve become quite good at it, too.

Now, however, I was trying to do the same thing with respect to my internet search history. It didn’t take me long until I remembered that I had done a Google search on beard cream and beard brushes during work the day prior, either.

Success. Mystery solved. Yay for me.

To be honest, though, the beard ads weren’t nearly as annoying as when this sort of thing has happened to me previously. I use Google rather frequently, after all, and I often look up shit I don’t understand in order to gain some basic understanding even though I’m not incredibly interested or explore possibilities when I don’t necessarily believe in those possibilities. I read articles that run contrary to my views, try to wrap my mind around other perspectives to see if I’m fooling myself or missing something. Hell, I even join Facebook groups dealing with subjects I’m on the fence about.

When I constantly get ads or suggested videos regarding those subjects after I’ve had my fill of them, however, it can get rather irritating. Far more irritating than ads for beard products, I should mention, as I actually plan on purchasing those beard products. And its come to the point where I find myself hesitating to look up particular things simply because I don’t want the onslaught of ads haunting me like ghosts of fleeting, former interests as I later meander around cyberspace.

All of that is irritating, yes, but its not creepy, because I can trace it back. This is not always the case, however.

Algorithms? They can get hella creepy.

I have a basic understanding of how they work, mostly due to watching that Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, and the subsequent articles and videos it inspired me to watch and read. As I understand it, these algorithms automatically extract data from our online activities, subject them to analysis, and produce a personality profile of each individual user so that they can, for instance, customize advertising, suggested content, and search results.

They do it so well, in fact, that more than once I’ve had the paranoid, however fleeting, suspicion that these algorithms were reading my fucking mind.

This is where they get creepy. I think about something, go online, and ads or articles or videos regarding that very thing are waiting for me. Sometimes I’ve spoken about it with a friend, though I haven’t searched for it online, nor was it inspired by anything I saw or read online — so far as I am able to discern in retrospect, anyway.

So, what, are these algorithms covertly listening in on my conversations through my cell phone, just like the NSA? Those in the know insist that this isn’t it. I’d be less inclined to trust them if not for the fact that often enough I’ve only been thinking about something in the privacy of my own noggin and the same damn thing happens.

If it isn’t telepathy, what is it?

In truth, they say, these algorithms are so advanced that, in a sense, they come to know us frighteningly well — seemingly better than we know ourselves. They can predict what we’ll be interested in based on our previous interests as betrayed by our footprints throughout cyberspace. More frightening is the fact that barring some catastrophe that throws us into a global dark age, these algorithms are just going to keep getting better — and therefore creepier.

It seems they’re here to stay.

Few, I think, would argue that these algorithms are having a detrimental effect on our psychological health as individuals and a negative impact on society as a whole, but here’s the thing: they’re just tools. That’s all. And all tools are inherently amoral; they only become moral or immoral in how they are applied and what the motivation is behind their use.

Nuclear energy can be used to power a city — or blow it off the fucking map.

I can’t help but suspect that if this data they’ve extracted regarding us were actually provided to us, every personality test available would be rendered obsolete and our self-awareness as individuals would skyrocket and perhaps bring about beneficial social change as opposed to a “social dilemma.”

Why do I suspect this? Simple. Algorithms track your internet activity and reverse-engineer your personality in a manner that seems to be much more sophisticated and accurate than would be the case if you took an overt test where you gave conscious, deliberate answers to blatant questions. I’ve taken a handful of such personality tests in my time and one of their obvious flaws are questions that, while presented as personality test questions, actually seem to function as veiled tests of one’s intelligence.

One form of this are questions that are essentially repeated yet asked in a different way, apparently to see if you’re being consistent, which would, of course, be taken as a sign of your honesty with respect to answering the question in question. Unfortunately, if the one being tested catches onto this one can be both deceptive and consistent, which is clearly a flaw in the test.

Another form of this is when such a test is given to you by a psychologist and one of the questions is whether or not you’ve ever considered killing yourself — for anyone who has (and has any good sense) knows damned well that a storm of unwanted circumstances are destined to rain down upon them if they are foolish enough to answer this honestly to this kind of professional.

Algorithms? They circumvent all of this. They don’t need to ask their questions, and you don’t need to hear their unasked questions in order to provide for them the answers they seek.

In creative writing, they always recommend that you show rather than tell. That you steer away from “data dumps” where you overtly explain things vital to the story you’re sharing and instead reveal that data through things such as the behaviors, interactions, and dialogue between the characters in the story. In our online activity, we’re showing; in standard tests, we’re only telling, really. In standard tests, we give conscious and deliberate answers; while traversing cyberspace, we’re unconsciously and automatically proving revelations.

If these algorithms know us better than we know ourselves, imagine how it might be if that feedback were provided to us. Where do we fall along the “big five” personality traits — openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism — or OCEAN, for a convenient acronym? What other insightful details regarding our tendencies, motivations, phobias and fetishes, attractions and aversions, talents and shortcomings might we be enlightened to if offered this transparency?

Self-awareness is but a step, this is true, but is a crucial one for growth, specifically growth in the form of adaptation, and these algorithms that irritate us and sometimes creep us the fuck out could provide the most objective, impersonal, third-person perspective on ourselves that is currently available. Then we would at least have the data necessary to implement deep and lasting self-change.

Rather than having corporations mold us or reinforce who we are, we would be given the option of taking the wheel, grabbing the remote control, and perhaps learn to mold ourselves. Mind control ourselves. Brainwash ourselves.

Ascend to a higher level of being.

For the record, though, in the meantime I’m probably going to cave and order some of those beard-care products on Amazon. And I’m fairly certain I’m doing that out of my own free will.

At least, like, 60% certain.