Elementary Sadomasochism.

By at least the third grade, girls in my school tended to express their affection for boys by means of chasing them down in a vagina-bearing mob on the playground during recess. Once they got close enough, they would grab the boy’s hair and violently pull until they fell to the ground, where the gaggle of she-devils would then proceed to repeatedly kick or punch him. Stranger still and twisted even further, all the boys seemed to secretly like it, myself included.

Looking back, there can be no hiding it from myself: this was elementary school sadomasochism, plain and simple.

No teacher, from what I can recall, ever said a word about this, but at least one delusional teacher apparently saw into a parallel reality where the roles were reversed. One day at recess, a kid was sent to fetch me, as one of the teachers watching over us on the playground wanted to speak with me. I came up to the building, where the teacher adamantly insisted that I had pushed a girl. I had not, of course, and the girl in question denied it was the case right along with me. Despite this testimony, the woman would not let up. She refused to let it go. She said she had seen it with her own eyes and proceeded to passionately defend the girl, as if she thought she was putting up a front because she was afraid of me or something. Eventually she gave up, as neither the girl nor I would waver from the truth.

It honestly befuddled the ever-living fuck out of me. None of the emotions I sensed from the woman made sense or added up. I mean, the girls would gather together and aggressively chase down targeted boys and give them a gang beating on a daily basis and no one had ever uttered a single word about it. No boys ever complained, not a single supervising teacher seemed to give a single, tootsie-roll-sized shit. Despite that, here was this teacher losing her shit over an incident that never even happened, however committed she was with respect to investing in the delusion.

For most of the time she was accusing me it seemed as though she was trying to convince herself of the reality of the incident as much as she was trying to convince both of us, as if that would somehow make it true, which for some unknown reason she desperately wanted it to be. Eventually, I considered that perhaps she had been recently cheated on or abused by her boyfriend or husband, or perhaps this had happened to someone close to her, and so as a convenient way to vent her anger she had seen what she wanted to see and was consequently able to express what she needed to express. Maybe she had witnessed the pack of prepubescent pink-holes hunting down the age-appropriate sausage-bearing beings on the playground that day but her personal issues had forced her to see it in a gender-reversing manner, as that rendition most easily aligned with her preconceived beliefs regarding the male of the species. Maybe the horrid selfishness inherent in that truth had dawned on her in the midst of her conversation with me, cast as the villain in her story, but by that time she was too committed to the comforting lie, too unwilling to back down for fear of seeming weak before two consenting, sadomasochistic third-graders.

While we’re delving into underlying, psychological influences on perceptions and behavior, maybe the girls at school had picked up their sadistic behavior from their parents, who used violence against one another and perhaps their children in place of empathy, and this was their way of expressing affection. Maybe the boys adopted their masochistic behavior for the same reason.

That didn’t track, however. After all, I happened to be one of these boys and my parents certainly never lifted a hand to my two sisters and I.

While there may have been a brief hiatus, given the teacher’s unfounded accusation, this by no means signaled the end of the wonderfully aggressive girls and their sadistic, circadian, playground rituals. Initially, there were two girls that seemed to lead the pack, too: one was a slender brunette named Kate; the other, a fiery redhead named Angela. They also featured prominently in my fantasies at the time. To call them sexual fantasies would be a bit too extreme, perhaps, as at the time I didn’t recognize them for what they were, and they had evolved from much more innocuous fantasies I’d engaged in slightly earlier in my youth. All these fantasies did undoubtedly generate what I would subsequently recognize as sexual feelings, however.

In any case, the fantasies I had regarding Kate and Angela were always essentially the same. Hidden in the mountains in the midst of a thick forest with ever-blue skies above, far away from civilization, I imagined a building. Inside, it looked like an abandoned school, like we might be in some post-apocalyptic landscape, though I would have had no idea what that meant at the time. Inside there were girls, just like the girls on the playground, but they had a clear objective — they wanted me to join their clan or group. The common image I have regarding how they did this involved being with Kate, their leader, in a dark room. My arms and legs were spread and strapped down to a table that was held at a slant, and Kate would stand right beside me, taunting me, trying to coerce me into becoming one of them, into submitting to her bliss and being her brainwashed slave.

Eventually, my value in both Kate and Angela were downgraded, however, as another, far more adorable and enticing little sadist entered my life, and she outshined them all. A pair of red-headed twins moved into the apartment complex across the street from my house, and they were in my grade. One was rather quiet and reserved, whereas Claire (not to be confused with the Claire I would meet later in life, who shares her true name), the brutal and outspoken one, was the target of my interest. Why I liked her was beyond my comprehension. All I knew was that she elicited a feeling in me that I could neither explain nor deny.

Treating them both like the wild and feral creatures they were, I gazed at Claire, forever with her sister, only at a distance. Even as I stood one day a good distance away from her and behind a tree during recess, the little circle of outcasts that had only recently become my friends were quick to caution me. “Never look such a dangerous creature in the eyes,” went the general message, “for they will take it as a challenge and attack your feeble ass.” Undaunted, I continued to steal quick glimpses from just beyond the vertical horizon of bark. Their recommendation that I talk to her terrified me, so one of my fellow outcasts returned with the suggestion that I write her a letter — a technique that was far more my style, though ultimately I decided to draw her a picture. I sure as hell wasn’t going to go up and hand it to her, however, so the next issue was where in the apartment complex across the street she actually lived, so I could slip it under her door. As could be expected, no one in my newfound gaggle of geeks knew or had so much as a clue. When I began blabbing about how I liked Claire, however, Spitting Mike caught word of it and approached me.

He was this skinny, ugly kid with short black bowl-cut hair and goofy teeth. He spit a lot when he talked. He knew where she lived, he told me, because he followed all the cute girls home. Though I failed to inform him, I found this confession of his to be creepy as fuck, and his beaming pride over his serial stalking made it even creepier. Regardless, it was through this blithering saliva-sprinkler that I learned where she lived, and he offered to take me there himself, so I decided to overlook his rapey aura and let the drooling gremlin guide the way.

Following him home that day after school, he showed me right where her door was. Calmly, he asked if I wanted him to knock, which inspired an instinctive, pleading, “No.” He made like he was going to do it, so I bolted out the door and ran home.

Later that evening, I peddled back over there on my little black bike for some solo recon. Within perhaps a foot or two of reaching the door to the building’s lobby, the door swung open and the twins came barreling out on their bikes, the woman who I would presume to be their mom following close behind. The last thing I wanted was for them to see me, so retreat was reactionary. I was perhaps a bit too frantic about it, however, as I accidentally turned my front tire off the cement patio, hitting both the curb and the bumper of a nearby, rust-bucket of a car. The bumper made this loud, enduring, weird noise when I hit it and threw little rusty metal pieces about in a swiftly-expanding cloud. I turned my back and took off just as I saw the sister look my way, and I couldn’t manage to convince myself she didn’t recognize me as the guy gawking at them from behind the tree on the playground. Yet I soon realized that if she didn’t recognize me from school, she might now recognize me at school as the same weirdo who slammed his bike into a parked car outside their apartment.

In either case, this was not what I wanted my first impression to be. Not at all.

Despite that, I was intent on giving her that picture, so on the following day I returned with it in hand. It was a page from my sketchbook which I had filled with hearts, puppy dogs, and poorly-drawn renditions of Ziggy all about it, unsigned, as I still had some naïve hope she might not presume it was me. I was content enough to simply express my feelings to her anonymously without the threat of rejection or gross bodily harm.

It seemed to have worked in that respect, too, for a day passed and nothing happened. The ever-chatty grapevine on the playground had nothing to contribute. Something seemed wrong, and so the next day I went back to the lobby of her apartment. Finding my picture in the little slot below the mailboxes, where all the misplaced mail goes, I realized that I had put it under the wrong door. Cursing my stupidity, I put it under the right one, which was up the stairs and to the left.

Consultations with the third-grade grapevine on the playground just before school confirmed that not only had she received my drawing but knew that I was the amateur artist in question. Rather than assuming she had made the connection between the drawing and when her sister saw my bike hit that damned bumper, my brain decided to lay blame upon Spitting Mike, who it was easy to believe spilled the beans. To make myself feel less hate for him, I imagined that he had not gone up and told her blatantly, but had rather teased her with knowing who had drawn it but refused to tell her who. I imagined her pinning him to the ground in frustration and kicking him in the groin over and over and over again. I imagined that pathetic kid struggling, drowning in a filthy sea of his own saliva as he begged for mercy, eventually telling her, through his gurgling and bubbling, that it was me.

When I got home that day, it wasn’t even supper when I got what my mother has referred to as my first love letter, hand-delivered to me by a girl who lived across the street and who I had known when younger but had since distanced from. She handed the sealed envelope to me without saying anything and then ran off the porch. With anticipation I opened it to find a letter that read:

“Please don’t write me no more notes.”

Even back then, I could woo a girl.

More persistent now more than ever, the following day I went super-creeper, drew her yet another picture and slid it under her door again. At school the following day, all was silent for a while. This led me to worry that she had not received it, but such worries, I would soon find, were entirely unwarranted.

This I discovered during recess, when I suddenly found a hand drilling my face into the wood chips on the playground. A voice I knew to be Claire then asked if I had drawn her those pictures, and after a pause for dramatic effect, I confessed that I had. She asked me why I’d done it, why I’d made those things for her and I told her, through a storm of wood chips and pain, that it was because I liked her.

She stopped a moment, fist clenched around my shirt, and when that moment inevitably passed, finally spoke.

“That’s gross,” is what she said, and then she punched me in my stupid, fat head.

That summer we moved away and I never saw her again.

When I think of how she might have turned out, I find myself imagining she has become a delicious-looking, latex-skinned, whip-snapping, red-headed dominatrix out there somewhere…

A Plague of Chocolate Starfish.

After parking at work the other day, I hung out in my truck, smoking a cigarette, wondering what the day would be like. As I scrolled through Facebook on my phone, I came upon a video. Just another video someone posted about a fast food joint like the one I work in where the employees have to deal with an asshole customer.

Just the other day, Sean, a closing manager, went to the clearly locked door with the clearly visible sign on it that said closed to address the guy standing there and verbally tell him we were closed. It was a biker. The guy spit on him and told him he fucked his mother. Very high school for such a bad-ass persona if you ask me.

Sean said he wished one of these assholes would punch him so he could go apeshit on their ass.

Not too long ago, the store manager was spit on by some lady, too. Whether it was because she got the wrong order or they made it wrong or the woman was angry our doors were closed due to covid, I can’t quite remember. This shit happens so frequently. And more so since the pandemic.

Hell, at another store in this franchise, not more than a few months back, some disgruntled employee came in and shot one of the managers.

You would think that after this enduring isolation people, just due to social deprivation, might be kinder and more empathic with one another, but that’s not the case at all. Not in the least. They’re bigger assholes than ever.

Jumbo, yawning, chocolate starfish flying everywhere.

All of this shit is running through my head as I start watching the video that I’m sure will display a circumstance all too fucking familiar. I had no idea how right I was. Strangely enough, the manager actually looked a lot like Kelly, my store manager. And the other lady, she looked a lot like Jan, another woman I work with. And the set-up looked remarkably like our store. Suspiciously identical, actually.

Oh.

Oh fuck.

Monsters & Misperceptions.

6/2/21

When the store manager sent me to the nearby dollar store for supplies yesterday, I intended on buying two Monster Java drinks, but I only saw the Loca Mocha flavored ones in the cooler. Diasappointed, I thought that perhaps I’d stop at the Circle K on the way home, but I was too tired and lazy at the end of my shift. So I drove home that evening, vowing to myself that I’d stop by the dollar store before my shift started, where I’d settle for the Loca Mocha.

With the Mean Bean, at least, it was something I looked forward to on break and it would also give me sufficient fuel to drag my sorry ass through the latter half of my shift.

Despite the anxiety of driving in the rain today, I managed to do just that, but after I grabbed the two Loca Mochas from the cooler I was overjoyed to find some cans of Mean Bean hiding behind a row of the Mocha. Instinctively, I moved the Mocha cans over to expose them and took two cans for myself. Just as I did so, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was an elderly lady, an employee I had seen in there before. I had to ask her to repeat herself, but she said something akin to, “Thank you for moving those. We got it.”

“Sure,” I said.

I had woken up depressed and driving in the rain made me anxious, so perhaps that’s why I couldn’t read her vibe or tone of voice. I was too distracted, on overload, my head filled with noise. Perhaps that’s why I couldn’t ascertain whether she was being sincere or sarcastic.

Was she irritated because I was doing her job for her or did she honestly appreciate it — and why does little, subtle shit like this hang in my head, buzzing around inside like an irritating, cranial-dwelling housefly, and bother me to no end?

It reminded me a lot of what happened on Memorial Day, when I again couldn’t get a good read on a situation.

I was working, of course, because people wedded to this fast food shit show only get two unpaid holidays off a year — unless, of course, we’re lucky enough for those holidays to fall on our days off. I got off work at 9:40 or so and left to get beer for Gus at Circle K. Since I was going anyway and Marjie was dragging ass, I offered to get her a Red Bull as well, which she could just pay me back for later.

When I got there, of course, of course, of fucking course the place was packed. All I wanted to do was go home, to be alone and free, but behind it all, Gus is a good guy and he’s done a lot for me.

Still, I was getting angsty. Cranky. My people tolerance had been far exceeded.

I could hardly fit all Gus’s beer in my arms, let alone the Red Bull, so I couldn’t grab the two 24s I had planned on getting for myself. My fluid to kill the fire within. In irritation, I decided that once I dropped this all off at work I’d just stop by the other Circle K on the way out of town and get my shit there.

The long, long line at Circle K was slow, the 24s and Red Bull so damned cold they were inflicting pain on my naked hands and forearms. I thought I saw Monica walk by, but convinced myself I must be wrong — and then I heard my name from behind me. I turned around.

Indeed, it was Monica after all.

She spoke to me a bit, and I immediately asked her if she had found a place to live yet. She explained how she was still homeless and kind of preferred it. I’ve asked her this before, too, and her response hasn’t changed, so I’m inclined to believe her. If that’s her path and that makes her happy, more power to her, and I told her as much. Different strokes for different folks. What I’ve been telling her since forever and it seemed she’d finally come to agree with me about is the nature of the people she tends to associate nowadays — those that lie, cheat, steal — and how it would be in her best interest to get the fuck away from them.

She went on about a few things, like scams she might engage in to make money, but I told her she has to be careful or she’s going to end up in jail again — or worse.

She followed me from the counter to the truck and, for once in her life, seemed keenly aware that I was eager to go. She seemed authentically pleased someone had just taken the time to listen to her, and thanked me for doing so, and made some off-hand comment that prompted me to tell her that I did indeed care about her, despite what she might think, and that was why I was always so concerned.

Though I didn’t say it to her, the issue has always been that she’s a hyper-chatty extrovert and I was a hypersensitive introvert and I could only take her in small doses.

I politely escaped her tractor beam, told her to be careful, and drove myself back to the grease-laden fatty-food distribution center where I work. I put Gus’s beer in the trash bin by the corner, as usual, and ran in to give Marjie her Red Bull. I them stopped at the other Circle K, got my own beer, and headed home down that long, dark road.

As I’m driving, I find myself behind this car that’s driving at varying speeds — over the limit, under the limit, and occasionally swerving back and fourth a bit, playing pingpong between the white line and the yellow ones. At one point, the car swerved over the yellow line and came a bit too close to colliding with oncoming traffic, at least enough to make me uncomfortable.

It was Memorial Day. American holidays are an excuse to get drunk. And I’ve been behind drivers that seemed to be drunk before, and they did the speeding up, slowing down, pingponging back-and-forth thing. As I have before, I slowed down, kept my distance, winced every time they inched towards the ditch or swung towards oncoming traffic.

Its always stressful, being in this kind of situation. Draining as fuck. And I was already drained. So when an opportunity came, I decided to pass him.

I rarely pass people, always terrified I’m not going to get over in time. I’ve seen cars pass other cars and come so unbelievably close to having a catastrophic, Hollywood-style accident. I did not wish that to be me, even a close call. I don’t prefer to drive behind unpredictable and potentially inebriated dumb-fucks on the road, either, though. So yes, I proceeded to pass him.

When I do this, is pedal to the metal. I want this process to be swift, and for them to be behind me as quickly as possible due to the aforementioned fears, so my truck growls. And how it growled. But no matter how hard I pushed down on the pedal, no matter how aggressively the Tacoma roared, the car remained right beside me.

This motherfucker was matching my speed so I couldn’t pass him.

My anger was defeated by fear, and I slowed down and veered back behind him. Then I cussed him out in the privacy of my truck. It initially came out as an aggressive, pleading question:

Why? What the fuck?

Back behind him, he exhibited the same behavior as before. I awaited the point that my anger overpowered my fear and another opportunity to pass him arose, and when it did, I proceeded to pass him again.

The same thing happened. Fear of hitting oncoming traffic again overcame my anger and I slowed down and veered back behind him.

This time, I was enraged. Highbeams were on. I was laying on my horn. I was imagining doing violent things to the faceless driver. Screaming descriptions of the perverse, torturous things I was going to do to him in graphic detail, in grotesque poetry.

All I saw was red. I was spitting fire. Blood was boiling in my veins. I was roaring louder than my truck in my failed attempt to pass this irredeemable fuckwad.

Some guy in a truck a few cars behind me shot passed me and the irredeemable fuckwad with ease. No response from fuckwad. No change in his driving behavior.

Did he not see the guy coming? Was that guys truck just faster than mine? I know diddly shit about vehicles. Or was it that this fuckwad, this diahreah-gargling gutter-twat, had something against me specifically?

So now I was enraged, afraid, and irritatingly self-conscious. Its safety first, so caution won and I decided to stay behind him, but still, I felt homicidal rage.

Then another guy — maybe in another truck, maybe in an SUV — appeared behind me suddenly. On my ass. And he had those bright blue, shimmering, retina-scorching headlights. I was confused: was this an asshole defending the asshole in front of me, participating in making a strategic, autombolie sandwich in which the innocent victim, myself, was hopelessly wedged between these two, evidently-impenetrable asshole-slices? Or was this just the random and unlucky circumstance in which I happened to have an asshole both before me and behind me?

Or, perhaps, was this a good Samaritan stepping in to defend the person in front of me, thinking him to be the innocent one, having only witnessed the aftermath of when the asshole in front of me passionately refused to let me pass, specifically when I blasted my brights and started honking the horn like a maniac?

As often happens when rage or fear soar to such heights, I don’t recall what became of the vehicle behind me: he may have turned down a road, he may have passed us, he may have vanished into the ether or even teleported to another planet.

When it came time for my turn, I turned, and fuckwad kept going forward. Part of me hoped he sped up and drove into a brick wall, but that was the blind-rage part, and that part swiftly left the scene once I escaped the circumstance. Another part of me began to question my perceptions, however.

I found myself thinking: what if it was somehow me who was in the wrong? What if, despite the fact that he was driving slower than the limit, for some reason my truck just couldn’t exceed it as I attempted to pass him? What if he wasn’t a fuckwad and I overreacted to an absurd level and Captain Bluelights behind me was, in fact, just defending the innocent? What if I was truly the asshole?

What if I’m just bloody insane?

I suppose the simple solution to issues such as these would to stop giving a fuck, but I clearly have a bottomless bucket of fucks and have the irresistible impulse to give them out far, far too liberally.

I really do hope I’m not insane, though.

Running Out the Clock (a Soliloquy).

I hate it. I hate it all.

The desire for food and drink. The need to sleep, to escape this shared dream of so-called reality and sanity. The need to shit and piss and release the inner pressure to fuck like a goddamn jackhammer, to pound away this inner aggression till the goal is achieved, or at least till my elderly sides ache and my blackened lungs need to catch a breath.

For years, I fought against these impulses.

Writing and engaging in artwork in the privacy of my own room, I would suddenly be distracted by an ache in my stomache, a sudden onslaught of thirst.

The alarm bells would go off, demanding the need to expel waste.

I’d be in the middle of writing something, my mind wound in the complex webworks of higher things, and the pathetic worm from below would pitch a tent, standing in rock-hard, purple-viened attention, demanding my own, demanding to be dealt with. Yearning to be violently strangled into a frenzied state of eruption.

Unable to take waking consciousness anymore, exhaustion would overtake me suddenly and with strength and I would walk to my bed and literally hit the sack, crash onto the mattress. Prolonged insomnia had met its end.

My body, in other words, would have to go to extremes to remind me of its existence, of its needs. Eventually I’d cave. Its inevitable. That’s so-called life. Its the cost of corporeal existence. Still, back then I put up a fight, goddamn it.

What happened?

I used to pride myself when I attended parties where everyone was shitfaced drunk plus and I never went harder than coffee and cigarettes. Now I smoke weed every day, pat myself on the back when I go a night without drinking, take CBD to quell my anxiety over driving to the local Circle K, pop ibuprofen for muscle pain, and pop sleeping pills in the hopes of gaining some still-insufficient sleep before the alarm goes off.

I jerk off on schedule.

Trying to cut myself down from once a day, even skipping days. Trying not to watch porn so much. Stare at photos less often. Ease back into just using my imagination.

Still: I jerk off a lot.

I have given up and given in. I lost. I am a slave to the body, and one that now qualifies as old. I don’t have it in me to believe that I’m closer to my birth than I am to my death. I’ve broken too many vows to consider myself reliable, and without that form of self-confidence, I’m utterly lost.

I’m just running out the clock now, to use the rare sports reference.

What the fuck happened to me, man? When did I get so weak? When did I get so goddamn reckless and irresponsible?

Of Couldabeens, Maybes & So-and-So’s.

The last few years — perhaps longer, as my sense of time becomes increasingly skewed as I continue to age — I made a deliberate effort to stop dwelling on and mulling over the past, and I met with surprising success.

I just stopped writing about the past, stopped reading and editing old things I wrote about the past, and tried to focus more on the present — weaving in past experiences into my writing when they’re relevant to current experiences, yes, but that is different in my view. I also do look back on my incredibly strange experiences over the years, though again, I find this different, as I typically do this when I’m exploring hypotheses, doing research, doing my damnedest to build a context through which those unusual experiences might make sense.

Lately, though, I’ve found my mind drifting back to past times, to old friends and aquaintences, as well as old relationships — the few I’ve had, but mostly Anne in this area. In any case, what I try not to dwell on is regret: what could have been, might have been, perhaps should have been had I been wiser. What if I had committed myself to Anne? What if I had finished college? Even earlier than that, and more to the point here, what if I had did what my art teacher suggested, put together a diverse portfolio, and tried to get myself into art school?

When I entered college in my thirties, I did so as I had decided what I wanted to do: become an English teacher. I’ve wrote every day since as far back as I can remember, and to be a teacher in that area had become profoundly appealing to me. Not only could I make an impact on young minds and hopefully do my little part in trying to make the world a better place, but as my creative writing and literary analysis courses in high school and college revealed to me, I could incorporate damn near anything into my teaching. I could talk about social issues, philosophical issues, religion and spirituality, politics and the paranormal. I could both stimulate minds, give them a space where they could engage in self expression, and guide them towards more effective means of translating what they held within to those who were receptive. On the way to earning this role and once I managed to embody it, I, too, would learn about such things and be able to share my knowledge. It was not only a meaningful vocation in the sense that I would be helping others, thought I, but a path that would help me evolve myself as well. In addition, I would have a day job involved with what I really wanted to do, which was write for a living.

I did great in college, too — until my last semester, when I had my first public speaking course and it all went to shit. The first (and last) day of that class that all-too-familiar anxiety attack reared its ugly head.

In college, I had focus and structure; a meaningful goal and a step-ladder approach to achieving it. And then I fell off that ladder, flat on my ass, and that dream was crushed. It was a horrid ordeal. I dropped out and tried to accept my pathetic lot in life.

I’m still working on that.

Maybe it wasn’t the right path, though, or at least the right process. I should have gone to art school, disciplined myself in the visual arts, and established myself as an artist. Once established, once making money by means of my art, I could have then branched out — writing articles, books, blending my passion for writing and the visual arts through producing a comic, children’s books, and onward from there.

I just needed some foundation. I feel it should have been art, but it could have been writing as well — in any case, upon that foundation I could have then had the necessary discipline and opportunities to pursue and incorporate the other passion. Multiple passions.

Insights from this lifetime that I hope carries over into the next incarnation and has a considerable impact on my decision-making.

Yeah, yeah, its not too late, even as I’m bound in my present flesh. I’m only 42 and could live for another half a century or more. Or I could die tomorrow. In any case, its never too late, so they say — and though I would argue it certainly could be, at this exact moment, at the very least, I confess there is no certainty that it is.

After all, So-and-So didn’t publish their first book or become a respected artist until they were fifty-something, you constantly hear. Still, there is no certainty that I am among the So-and-So’s.

“Why not try?” Asks an internal voice. “You have nothing to lose, so much to gain here in the mere attempt. So what, then: are you a pussy?”

I mean, I am warm right now, moderately moist, and wound tight inside, so the comparison might have some merit.

“You’re deflecting.”

Well, you’re attempting to manipulate me.

“I’m trying to inspire you. And if that constitutes manipulation, I’m only trying to manipulate you into veering down what you would experience as a more satisfying and productive path. And anyway, I’m you, dude. Can’t you trust yourself?”

Not entirely. I mean, I am sort of dwelling on the past again.

Of Chronic Daydreaming & the Evolution of Insomnia.

Most of my time is spent daydreaming — subjecting memories to analysis, playing with ideas, fantasizing in this internal simulator of mine — and this is the case regardless as to whether I’m loafing or engaged in some physical activity. I suspect this is what my last psychologist, who I saw back in college, meant when he said I was “very cerebral.”

I’ve been like this for as long as I’ve been myself. My mother always explained me as that stereotypical kid in the classroom who wasn’t paying attention in class, but rather looking out the window, mind wandering freely. I even daydreamed at night, which may stretch the definition — it was in the evening, after all, and so couldn’t technically be daydreaming — and I remember this especially being the case when I got my own bedroom.

What I called insomnia when I became a teenager wasn’t something altogether new, I realized at some point. I’m just nocturnal, it seems. There were differences, however, and this is when I came to distinguish “passive insomnia” and “active insomnia.”

Passive insomnia is what I did as a young child: I’d remain beneath the covers atop the loft bed in a dark roo., contemplating, remembering, and fantasizing for hours on end. Only in my teen years did I shift to active insomnia: turn the lights on in my room, fuel myself with caffeine, and begin engaging in activities — watching a movie, documentary or show, but often enough drawing or writing, where I could put my chronic daydreaming to some use in the external world.

While I don’t produce artwork as often as I used to, and despite the fact that I write I write less than I did in my 20s and 30s, I still daydream like mad. And I sure as fuck engage in it at work, too — almost 80% of my day, I’d say — and this is one of the few true benefits of being a detail maintenance man stuck in a shitty fast food job at 42 years of age.

Short of acquiring money through doing creative things I’m actually passionate about, this kind of job may actually allow the greatest amount of subjective freedom available. Maybe.

So as pathetic as my lack of ambition is, as deep as my hatred of this job has grown… there is that.

Of Moody Minds & Altered State ID’s.

When I’m depressed, life is agony, my mere existence is almost unbearable, and I feel like I’m moving through the thick, hungry mud of some grueling swamp. Though I would never allow myself to do it, the depression often reaches such depths that ending it all seems like a far more rational, merciful course of action than continuing to force myself to endure this self-evidently wretched corporeal existence, to keep dragging my feet through this empty, ultimately meaningless life. There is this feeling of certainty that things will never get better, and that even if they did, I surely wouldn’t deserve it, and in any case it wouldn’t last anyway — life would be lifting me up for a single, solitary, and purely malicious reason: to set me up for the inevitable descent. The higher you climb, after all, the harder you fall, and life is so determined to fuck me so hard in the worst way possible that it is willing grant me that temporary reprieve if it means it will ultimately be able to use it as a means of exacerbating my torture.

Then I get some sleep, take a hit from my vape pen, watch one of my favorite stand-up comedians, or have a deep, meaningful exchange with a friend and the impossible happens: the dark, heavy stormcloud lifts. I’m fine again and I can hardly wrap my mind around the dismal fellow I was just a short time ago.

When I’m anxious, this unbearable tension grows inside me. I imagine pulling back on a bow, but rather than releasing to let the arrow soar towards a target the hand keeps drawing it back further and further until I feel certain it can go no further — and then it goes further still. I can’t understand how I can bear the inner tension, how it doesn’t rip me apart and drive me irreversibly and unquestionably insane.

In this state of profound anxiety, the world, to paraphrase Jordan Peterson, becomes a dragon, a monster of inconceivable size, a powerful and malicious animal hungry to devour me, to squash me, and so I collapse into myself, feeling small, powerless, defenseless against it.

Anxiety attacks take generalized anxiety and then crank it up several notches: it’s like a relentlessly painful process of dying without the sweet release that comes with the finality of death.

Hot flashes wash over me in waves. My mouth is dry as a desert, my throat as narrow as a straw. Too much energy seems to be residing in my eyes, which are feel dry and cracked despite their watering. I’m blinking with decreasing frequency, too — its like my ocular highbeams are on. Every inch of my skin seems laminated in cold sweat and my entire body feels like a white-knuckled fist. My jaw is clenched like a goddamn vice and when I walk or move it feels jerky and stiff, as if all my joints need oiling. If I have to speak, I feel as if I have to physically push out the words and my voice, its all over the map, as wild and unpredictable as a runaway firehose.

Only when I’m pissed. angry, enraged, it appears, does my full-spectrum hypersensitivity vanish and this venomous insensitivity rush in to fill the vacuum. Confidence, or perhaps simply not giving a fuck, enable me to push away my baseline empathy, send my inner restraint home for the day, fire my fear of guilt and walk the sadistic fuck off the property. Consequences be damned: I become viscious, ice flowing in my veins and red staining my eyes, poisonous filth flowing ceaselessly from my mouth before I even realize what I’m saying — if indeed I do at all, as memory always seems so spotty in retrospect. In verbal fights I’ve had, I can’t always remember clearly how things went down or what I said, and at least on occasion, as with my one or two semi-physical fights, I’ve blacked out entirely.

When I’m drunk, I’m happy but hopelessly stupid. Its an escape from the ego, from the inhibitions that typically hold me in chains, and that is liberating. Ideas that seem great while drunk, however, reveal themselves to be utterly insipid when sobriety returns.

When we used to go out barhopping in the college town on the weekends, I’d often call or text people apologies for my behavior when memories of the goings-on crept back into consciousness. Now when I get drunk, typically at home and alone in my apartment, I feel just as embarrassed about comments or YouTube music videos I shared on Facebook while under the influence and have developed the habit of promptly deleting them when possible once sobriety returns. Even if I might have said or done these very same things while stone cold sober, often enough the mere fact that I did them while drunk fills me with embarassment, shame, guilt and self loathing.

Almost every girl I’ve had sex with, fooled around with, or has merely made me horny has commented on how I look angry when I’m horny. I’ve had to explain that its just the aggression I feel, the intensity of the state, and I am anything but angry. This state is the easiest way to become focused and absorbed, to become simple and singleminded. How I wish I could access those qualities in other states…

When I’m high on cannabis, at least nowadays, I feel happy and comfortable, inspired and entrigued, absorbed and peaceful — so long as I have control of the set and setting. At work, a hit or two from a joint or a vape pen lifts my mood, though too much can trigger self-consciousness and anxiety. This is due to being in an environment that isn’t my own, that I don’t control, at least to some degree, but its also due to the presence of other people. I become too concerned regarding how they perceive me, too paranoid about revealing how weird I really am. When I’m in my one-bedroom apartment, when its nighttime and I need not fear anyone knocking on my door (which almost never happens), I am entirely at ease. In my experience, the altered state of consciousness that marijuana delivers you into is one in which your focus becomes amplified: if you are anxious, it will exacerbate your anxiety; if you are experiencing pleasure, it will enhance your pleasure; if you are interested, it will amplify your curiosity. It elevates that which you draw your attention to, and it begins to work for you once you realize this, even if its not at an entirely conscious level. Once you start using it to amplify your enjoyment of things you already enjoy, you condition where you tend to place your attention while stoned and you can, as a consequence, then carry that conditioned enjoyment into other contexts.

That’s my working hypothesis, anyway, at least with respect to personal experience.

What I’ve called my dark moods are the most difficult to explain. These occur once a certain type of weirdness arises in my life once again. I feel very inside of myself, very still and hyper-aware, and the external world seems overcast, yet crisp, vivid, clear. I am in a state of fear, awe, and a strange kind of powerlessness. Immedeate affairs seem laughably trivial; only the big picture matters. The birds eye-view looks down at my worm self and the rest of the worms and finds our lives and perspectives so silly, so primitive, so utterly childish. It feels as if we are part of a far greater context than we could ever hope to imagine — and yet the details elude me.

Finally, there are moments of happiness, of joy, which come all to rarely. When it happens, the universe appears indescribably beautiful. I’m in the moment, rooted in the here and now, and feel connected and grateful to be alive. This has happened in the rare, deep and meaningful relationships I’ve had with certain women, it happened during a particularly intense out-of-body experience in which I found myself floating in space before the earth, and also during the first night I ever tried MDMA.

Its amazing how our outlook on the world and ourselves can change so dramatically given nothing more than a shift in mood, in a change in our state of consciousness. Not only do we more easily remember things when we are in the same mood in which we originally learned them, but mood alters the way in which we interpret our memories. Similarly, our outlook on the world in real-time and our interpretation of it also changes, specifically in a manner that tends to reinforce the mood in question. Most unnerving, however, is the fact that our personality can change, either moderately or drastically, which is to say that we can have state-specific or mood-dependent identities: state IDs, if you will.

Each mood, each state: a new world, a new altered state ID.

Once you throw in the fact that some moods or states — such as anger, for instance, or the dream state — can also involve amnesia, you begin to suspect we all have the psychological ingredients that, if combined and baked in the right way, could lead to Dissociative Identity Disorder.

With this crowd in the broken mirror, where could the true, inner self reside — the soul, or whatever you wish to call it? The closest thing I’ve experienced to it is that state I’ve had but a taste of in the midst of meditation, that place within us some have called The Witness, where you look upon all your bodily sensations, all your thoughts and emotions, as some spectator from a third person perspective.

It may constitute the pure inner light that is broken up into the spectra of states or moods through the prism of the mind, and how I wish I could anchor myself there…

Day Residue & Issues of Trust & Control (4/29/21 Dream).

Its the closing scene of an enduring dream.

The van stops outside of a building, the door opens, and my two companions get out and go inside. There are people walking by and I get the sense that we’re just outside of some concert, though it was never established in the dream what band is playing. As they open the door, I realize that I forgot my hat at home, though this bothers me only fleetingly.

Alone now, I sit, feet outside the door, as I struggle to put my shoes on. I also want to bring books, notebooks, and other things with me — things that in waking life I’d typically put in my bookbag, but for some reason in this case decide to put inside plastic bags that I intend to place over my feet once I get my shoes on and tie tightly around my ankles.

As I’m in the midst of working on one foot, a girl comes up to my other shoe, which is just laying on the curb beside me, and asks, “You want this?” She says it in a way that implies she intended to steal it, so I just look at her very seriously and say, simply, “I do.” Then she leaves it there and just walks away.

I accomplish getting both shoes on and tying the bag to my left foot, but can’t get the right one to work. It won’t tie tightly enough, but in the midst of my struggling I remember I only intended to do this to one foot and so abandon the effort.

As is often the case recently, it was after writing down the dream that I realized there was a song playing in my head. It was Mr. Brightside, by The Killers.

In terms of what the dream may have been attempting to communicate through symbol:

The van may suggest that I need more space as I move forward in life and bring things and people (like the two people in the van) along with me. Much the same could be said of the shoes, which alone have associations with moving forward, and given the bags full of my possessions, it resonates with the van symbol even more. Shoes also have associations with identity, however (“to walk a mile in your shoes,” for instance), particularly one’s persona or social mask, given they cover the foot like the persona covers the ego in Jungian psychology. In this sense, the shoes also share similarities with the hat that I’d forgotten, as hats are decorative and a means of protection for the head, so perhaps also serve as a symbol for the persona. The sense that I was just outside a building in which there was a concert — which is said to symbolize harmony, enjoyment, energy and music — may suggest that if only I’d let go of things (my hat and the stuff in my shoe-bags) I could find community, energy, and enjoyment in life.

This dream reminds me of two things.

The first thing it reminded me of dealt with the symbols used in the dream, and how it related to events that happened yesterday — little things.

For instance, yesterday morning, as always, the pair of shoes that had been gifted to me awhile back were a bitch to put on. After my shift ended, I had driven a drunk coworker to a nearby Circle K to get more beer, and he wasn’t wearing the hat he almost always wore. The zipper on my bookbag had also broken and my book and papers had fallen out as I strolled from the truck to my apartment security door.

All incidents that may have been cherry-picked for useful symbols with which to weave the dream. In other words, this may suggest the dream was in part constructed of “day residue” that was reorganized or appropriated by my unconscious in the dream’s construction — which does not me essarily contradict its symbolic meaning.

Second, the message of the dream reminds me of my attempt to relax myself through self-hypnosis last night in an effort to get to sleep. I finally articulated to myself what has been a consistent problem with me: I can’t entirely relax or let go because I always seem to be on guard, sleeping with one eye open, afraid of being caught unaware and controlled, or taken advantage of. This applies to my perhaps-paranormal-related fears during meditation and sleep, but also more broadly across my mundane life.

Its disturbingly all-encompassing, as a matter of fact.

Potential Narcissistic Underpinnings.

There’s this woman at work, Jan, who tries desperately to appear nice on the surface, and the customers evidently love her. Before the pandemic, the owner of the franchise would post some of the customer comments on the monitor by the kitchen and it got sincerely irritating, the number of times you’d see her name mentioned.

Of course, if a person working the register as she does got good customer reviews, they gave out cash prizes, gifts cards, or whatever, so I imagine she’d always urge the customers to leave a comment and mention her name in the process. Given there are plenty of regulars on morning shift, when she typically works, I’m sure some degree of obligation was felt on their part to do so.

In any case, I get along with her well enough, but she’s one of those people that always seems to turn the conversation around to something horrible that’s happened to her or her loved ones (and so resultingly her) in her life.

When they desire to strike up a conversation, some people default to the weather, others to sports. This? This is her thing. Only it isn’t just for the purposes of small talk, of temporarily bonding with another human, its to elicit your sympathy and see her has oh-so fucking strong for being able to endure it all.

That’s my sense, anyway.

I was reflecting on how annoying that was today when, as is usually the case, I suddenly found myself shifting mental gears to self-reflection mode in order to ensure I wasn’t engaging in psychological projection; to ensure I wasn’t doing the same damned thing when I talk with people.

I identified two tendencies of mine that served as potential candidates.

People tend to come to me to spill their problems, and I don’t mind it, but it does get on my nerves when they refuse to let me get in a word edgewise now and then, when they talk over me or entirely ignore what I have to say. I always listen, so can’t they just take a goddamn commercial break and return the favor — just a little? Eventually, I began to aggressively interject occasionally just to prove to myself, if not to them, that I wasn’t just some mute ear to them, that I was certainly no door mat for them, that I demanded back at least some small degree of the respect I granted them in this context.

I considered whether this made me hypocritical with respect to my annoyance with Jan, but the circumstance with her, in all honesty, seemed quite different to me.

A tendency of mine that was also a candidate and has annoyed me for some time reared its head most often when in conversations with Elizabeth, who I’ll call Liz from now on. Liz is an intelligent, weird girl. She’s short and cute, seems to love driving and is rather ambitious in general. On top of all that, she’s had some paranormal occurrences in her life, has great dream recall (or at least used to, prior to the pot-smoking), and is generally open to the kind of weird shit that has happened to me all throughout my life. As a side note, I’ve actually been thinking a lot about her as of late. I miss working with her, miss her in general, and I regret not letting our friendship evolve into the sexual, potentially even the romantic.

In any case, as much as I liked being around her, I was always anxious being around her, too, maybe only because she’s smarter than the average bear and I feared sounding or looking stupid, which she would be more apt to catch onto than most, and which would impact me more given the degree to which I liked her and wanted her to like me.

The annoying tendency I noticed in myself while talking with her was this: she’d be talking about some experience and in response I’d offer a similar experience of my own. However reactionary, the underlying intention was to convey to her that I understood what she was saying — and beyond that, through that, in hopes of strengthening our bond, and perhaps due to the fact that despite the similar experience I was too nervous to come up with anything else to say.

To my ears, however, it always sounded as if I was trying to steal the spotlight from her and bring the focus of the conversation onto me, or perhaps indicate that she need not talk of it as I already knew. That I was trying to steal her story or one-up her story. That wasn’t the case at all, but that’s what it sounded like to me from that third person perspective on myself — and that’s how I feared she interpreted it, too.

So was this the same thing — could this be behind Jan’s annoying habit? Or was she truly trying to hog the spotlight, one-up people with respect to life’s sufferings, and in her case it truly stems from rather narcissistic underpinnings?

Or could it be that my self-analysis is faulty and despite my conscious rationalizations it truly has unconscious, narcissistic underpinnings in my own case as well?