In further reflection upon the passing of my maternal uncle, I’m still curious as to when things went off the rails in his life. Was it just that he lived alone for so long, and given my isolationist tendencies, should I take his story as a cautionary tale?

I know that, as humans, we are social creatures. To some degree or another, we require social contact, but given the diversity in any population, we should expect some number of people to require less social contact. You know, mutations and such. Even before I became convinced that I was a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP), it seemed obvious to me that I was one of those mutants who required less social contact — that I was someone who needed to frequently be alone, sometimes for extended periods, because I just got on overload. Much of this might be sensory overload, but it feels to me to be emotional overload. I also like to think, read, write, do artwork — you know, alone time activities.

In any case, is it possible that I need more social contact than I think — or perhaps at least some closer contact, which is to say an intimate relationship, or even getting laid occasionally? It just seems to me that I’m not wired to be someone’s other half, as it appears most people are, because I just don’t fit with anyone. Or fit in general, actually. I feel like an independent unit all to myself, a monad of sorts.

This certainly isn’t to say that I don’t crave intimacy, even beyond the obvious and omnipresent desires to do wonderfully naughty things to an alluring, consenting female of the species. Its just that on the rare occasions its happened, when I’ve succumbed to that impulse — with a so far singular exception — its never been too long until I’ve felt suffocated, ensnared, and have the overwhelming impulse to be free of the relationship. Is this simply who I am, a monad, as it appears I’ve come to accept, or is this truly an unhealthy flaw that could land me in a demise similar to that of my uncle?

I’m not even certain what got me thinking about this on the drive to work today. Part of it may have had to do with the conversation I had with my mother last Friday when I visited them for my birthday.

We spoke about my uncle, who had become a shut-in and a hoarder plagued with anxiety and, it seems clear, depression as well. I tried to explain to her how anxiety attacks feel and how debilitating they can be. If not for my own social anxiety and anxiety attacks, I may not have dropped put of college and might be an English teacher right now, rather than working fast food at 41 years of age. When it happens, its like dying without hope of ever achieving death so the agony will end.

I had been getting mostly A’s in college until my,third or fourth year, when I finally took a public speaking course. The first day, I told her, we were told to have a brief chat with whoever was sitting next to us and then get in front of the class with them. We would then give a brief introduction of one another — a short, 20 second speech.

When my time came, I could hardly speak. It felt as if I literally had to push out the words. I sat down afterwards, my insides stuck in this horrible, sustained sort of tension, and I didn’t stop shaking like a goddamned leaf for hours.

I never stepped a foot in that classroom again.

Now, shit’s gotten better over the years. I try to have a high-protein breakfast, which is supposed to help. I meditate daily. I take CBD and smoke weed, though I didn’t tell mom that shit. I’ve also had to accept how coffee, my beloved java, tends to exacerbate my anxiety, rage, perhaps even my depression, so when I feel any of those rising in me, I force myself to just chill out on the coffee for awhile.

My uncle, he didn’t do much to help himself. He didn’t even recognize the anxiety attacks he was having for what they were, and was unwilling to accept it once he was told. I would have thought him to be a lot more self-aware than it seems he really was. His death recently put a lot of pressure on my parents, particularly mom, and the sad way he steadily declined before passing away in the hospice couldn’t have made it any easier.

Its frightening, looking at his end, and seeing it as a potential future. He lived alone. No wife, no kids, no friends, no dog. Just more possessions than anyone could ever need. A nest in which he suffocated himself, figuratively-speaking.

Now, there are clear differences between us. I’m not a hoarder. And I do have friends and, unlike him, at least keep some contact with my family. I watch too much porn, as it seems he did, but at least mine is limited to a folder on my laptop.

So there’s that.

Even so, I fear I show potential here. I can’t be sure how he ended up in the mental rut he did, so I can’t be sure what roadways to avoid. I just keeping reminding myself we’re not the same. And maybe, unlike him, I can handle enduring bachelorhood. But I am a member of a social species, and sex and intimate relationships are inevitably part of our hierarchy of needs, and perhaps I shouldn’t be so quick to think I’m superior in that sense.

Given the life path of my uncle, it could, in fact, be very unwise.

I call them flashback bitchslaps and though daily meditation has diminished them, they stubbornly remain.

In a way, its akin to what’s been called “the spirit of the stairwell” — when, for instance, you think of the perfect comeback to something someone said to you, but only after the moment is dead and gone. The difference here is that I’m spontaneously thinking of a moment from the past, recent or distant, and obsessively subjecting everything I said and did to detailed analysis and differing perspectives until I’m convinced I was naive, stupid or simply an asshole despite having no awareness of it at the time. With respect to other people in those past circumstances, I might realize that they could have meant something entirely different than I assumed they meant at the time or that I had misinterpreted the situation entirely.

It comes on strong, involuntarily, and with an intense, negative emotion. These may constitute what are known as automatic negative thoughts, or ANTs, though typically ANTs are described as thoughts in the sense of inner dialogue or monologue, not emotionally-saturated memories and personal-hell-seeking analysis.

I don’t know why I’m so intent on exacerbating my misery.

I’ve had a nice, quiet weekend, and Saturday I spent some more time reading HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds. The 1950s movie was a favorite of mine as a kid and though I’ve had the book since I was a teenager, when I’d inherited it from my maternal grandmother, I’d never read it. I finally felt it was time to rectify the situation.

What I find interesting about the book so far is how the narrator constantly tries to describe how we’re inclined to see the motives and behaviors of the Martians as akin to how other animals on earth might perceive us. The Martians in the novel feed on the blood of other animals, among them humans, for instance, and though the thought might initially disgust and terrify us, as he explains, rabbits, who feed only on plants, would probably regard meat-eating humans in much the same way. This rational way of framing “the enemy” is a rather healthy one, and I was surprised to read it in a book written in the 1890s. The whole “good and evil” dichotomy seemed prevalent to me in books, movies and television shows until the last decade or two, but perhaps that assumption was unwarranted. Or perhaps this motherfucker was really that ahead of his time.

Another item of interest from the book: when the Martians journeyed to earth in their interplanetary cylinders, they evidently brought along live food for the journey, presumably from Mars — skinny humanoids with huge heads and large eyes, which sounds remarkably like the Gray aliens that feature so much in modern alien abduction reports.

I had been cleaning the restrooms at work and had just stepped out into the dining room when I saw Dusty at the counter. My ginger friend was buying some food, pink glasses resting atop his largely-bald cranium. He works here, but it was his day off, though given he lives right next door, I wasn’t entirely surprised to see him.

Beside him was some guy I initially thought was his boyfriend, but I soon realized it was the thoroughly tattooed guy who often comes into our fast food establishment. Typically high on something speedy. I’d seen him in here earlier, sitting in the corner where no one else could see him, loitering, talking to me as I cleaned a nearby trash can despite my body language, which clearly conveyed I wasn’t in the mood for conversation. At least with him. It wasn’t indiscriminate in the least, either. I sensed he was only doing this, only being so over-the-top polite and commenting on how cold it was outside so I’d avoid kicking him out to avoid the guilt it would elicit in me due to the nature of his approach.

I didn’t have the authority to kick him out anyway, but I refuse to lie. I wasn’t fond of him.

He is the type of person found all too frequently in this shit hole of a town, the type of person that slowly but surely cured me of my naivete over the fifteen years in which I’ve worked at this dead-end, grease-infested job. The type of person that uses your empathy against you, manipulates you through manipulating your emotions.

For so long I had been a pushover, a goddamn door mat, putting the emotions of others before my own on default, devoid of any boundaries, and I have bags of shit like him to thank for my awakening, for my growth in this respect, for empathy without boundaries quickly becomes slavery. I still give a fuck, don’t get me wrong. I give a lot of fucks. Too many fucks. I have a bottomless bucket of fucks, but I no longer give them out so liberally, as people like him taught me a lesson. Let them have free reign pulling your heartstrings and you become a marionette; they become your puppeteer.

I know that my empathy, my sense — be it delusional or authentic; be the cause merely my hypersensitivity to subtle cues, largely but not entirely nonverbal, or some psi element, specifically emotional telepathy — that I can feel what others feel does not necessarily make me a good person, even when that empathy results in my compassion. It’s simple enough when you think about it.

If you’re empathic, for the sake of argument, let’s say that it is as it so often seems to me, which is to say that you’re actually feeling other people’s emotions involuntarily. What this means is that if someone feels bad, you feel bad. Naturally, you don’t want to feel bad, you want to feel good, but with empathy, in order to feel good, you need to make the other person feel good, and so you exercise compassion in an effort to make the other person feel good. Not only, as an empathic individual, does this mean that you have to do your damnedest to manipulate the other person’s emotions, albeit with the unerring aim of having positive effect, but that you’re essentially doing so out of selfishness.

If someone asks you for a cigarette, if someone asks you for money, if someone asks you for a ride, if someone asks you to give them special treatment in any way, as an empathic individual, you have to do this or face the consequences.

What are those consequences? Their hurt, their anger, their frustration that they failed in their attempts to manipulate you through elicitation of pity or sympathy — their selfish reactions, in other words, to the fact that you failed to take the bait and fall into their emotional trap. But you feel their selfish emotional reactions as if they were your own, and if you deny them what they want, if they feel that they’ve lost and you’ve won, you still lose, they still won, even if they’re too narcissistic, psychopathic, dumb and/or blind to fucking realize it, because you feel everything they feel and by killing them emotionally you kill yourself emotionally as a result.

Once they set out to manipulate you, they put you in a circumstance where it’s a lose-lose for you. You’re fucked either way.

Eventually, however, I learned — through being a pushover, a marionette, an abused slave far too many fucking times — that reactionary empathy does not necessarily need to result in compassion. To the contrary, reason can intervene. You just need to build up strength and endurance, that’s all. Learn to say no. You’ll feel their hurt, their frustration, their anger, sure — for fucking sure to the nth degree — but you learn to bear it, accept it, and you begin to gain back pieces of yourself you thought you lost forever. That you thought you’d traded in or had destroyed as a consequence of your “far-feeling” tendencies.

Nope. No more. Dispell those old illusions.

You’re no longer a stimulus-response robot, no longer a musical instrument they’re free to play. No longer a pushover, no longer a puppet. You learn to set up healthy boundaries. Show some signs of gaining awareness and growing some vital sense of self respect.

Which is where we come back to Dusty.

There was another guy, an even bigger shit-bag, that I have constantly dealt with. He used to come in constantly back in the day, hanging out in the dining room, making a mess for me to clean up despite rarely if every buying everything. He would expect us to ignore paying customers, asking for a free cup that he could fill with water. Once, and I’ll never forget it, he grew incredibly irritated, and said in a loud voice over the cacophonous chatter of paying customers, waiting eagerly on their orders, “I just want the water I deserve.”

Mr. Aqua doesn’t have a job. I sincerely doubt he ever did. We have a lot of individuals like him wandering around the town that I live in due to a place in town that focuses on behavioral health services and rehabilitation programs for those suffering from mental disorders, substance abuse and homelessness. They’re given access to housing, therapy, medication, and other forms of treatment, and offered a great deal of personal liberty in the process. Some truly need this and only accept and take what they need. Others? They take advantage of this compassionate system and try to extend that act of taking advantage of others in the neighborhood. This I’ve learned at a personal level. And with respect to some, not all, I must emphasize, they become enraged when you deny them unfiltered, nonjudgmental, mindlessly subservient compassion.

There was this one guy who would frequently ask people for cigarettes. One day, during one of many periods in which I was struggling financially and had limited funds to feed my nicotine addiction, I watched him gallivanting across the street, from just passed the parking lot of the church and towards the fast food hellfire shit-storm where I work. Towards me, I knew. I knew what would happen and, like an asshole, I awaited the falsification or verification of the intuition I still consistently cast doubt upon. And, as the perhaps bigger, yawning, cosmic-scale, gaping asshole that he might have been, he wasted no time in confirming what I would have been perfectly happy to dismiss as entirely paranoid and unjustifiably judgmental suspicions.

He crossed the street, entered the parking lot, and approached the area at the side of the building where I was crouched down, sucking the life from my cancer stick. I knew what he was after. How it was unfold. I called myself silly.

He approached me. Came right up to me and boldly asked me for a smoke, but I told him I couldn’t. And that was an honest confession, I should add. Highlight, underline and place emphasis upon. I told him that it wasn’t anything personal. See, I only had a limited supply that might carry me through to the end of the night, and only if I was careful.

He pushed. I still kindly said no.

He offered fifty cents for a smoke, but I had to tell him that fifty cents wouldn’t help me, as I still wouldn’t be able to buy smokes with my limited cash supply until I passed by the Circle K on the way home from work.

He pushes again, I again said no.

And then he lost his shit. Told me to fuck myself as he walked away, and continued bickering loudly under his breath how people were shit.

I’d given him a smoke before. I would have put money I didn’t have on that he didn’t even remember asking me on those previous occasions, or how I had actually provided him a smoke on those previous occasions, but that was another straw on the proverbial camel’s back. Not the straw that broke the back of that desert-bound beast of burden, I’m almost sure, but it was the straw that I highlighted, a moment that sticks out to me, one that I couldn’t forget for the life of me.

Sure, I was essentially a stranger, but he didn’t care about me as I cared about him at all — despite the fact that he was essentially a stranger. He was only focused on himself. A narcissist having a bad day, it seemed, with respect to his success as manipulating suckers like me. So over time, I decided to no longer be a sucker. I’ll take your hurt. Your anger. I’ll take my guilt and shame and self-loathing on top of it. I will not let my empathy make me a marionette. I will not be used and manipulated. I will grow a spine, grow balls. I refuse to be your emotional bitch.

One day recently, as I was cleaning the dining room, I had to deal with Mr. Aqua. He had long since overdosed, I believe it was on heroin, and had been through a program.He had come out the other end alive and healthy, but soon fell into his old habits, substance and thensome. I refused his ploys. I let him know it in my own way. I complained about him to Dusty, and in response, he told me a story. The guy had asked him for money. Dusty had asked him if it was for good, and he said yes, so Dusty took him to the place both Dusty and I now work and bought him some food. On the way there, the guy had explained to Dusty how he was the Guardian of Souls, and how he was currently fighting with the government. Dusty bought him some chicken sandwiches.

Tattooed guy was just another guy taking advantage of Dusty. Another piece of shit that used somebody, manipulated another person that cared enough to offer a helping hand, and it sickened me.

I wanted to grab Dusty by the collar and say, “Don’t be a tool. Don’t be a puppet. Some people need and deserve your help, but not this guy. Not him. He’s just using and abusing you and you’re letting him because you think it makes you a good person. That it’s scoring you points or something.

Wake up. Don’t be like I was. Don’t be a puppet. A pushover. Have some self respect.

Erect boundaries. Realize what you’re doing and why. Save yourself. Get out while you still can. Your compassion is important, but don’t invest it frivolously. You know better.

You must. You’re better than this. It’s not all black and white. You’re intelligent enough. See the spectrum. Accept the nuance. See it as it is, accept who you are, and don’t only aim to make yourself feel better through making them feel better. Be yourself. See it as it is. Truly make a difference.”

Though I said nothing, of course. Just went back to scraping shit-concrete off porcelain.

Me, a supposed empath. Enlightened, no less. Oh me: oh yes:

What a fucking hero.

Once upon a time, I wrote every day, and I wrote about the day in question. Sure as hell, I wrote about it in stammering, stuttering, unfiltered and often graphic and inappropriate detail. Sometimes I’d focus on external circumstances. On other occasions I’d ramble on about whatever thoughts I had been playing with inside my circus of a mind. What memories I had reflected on, what dreams I might have had.

It was my own, self-talk therapy. It was composed of the kind of diarrhea-of-the-mouth that people might offer or even push on a trusted friend, only in this case times ten. Or they might pressure-hose this brand of pent-up dookie to a shrink, who is legally bound to silence within certain legal constraints, or so goes my supposed understanding — though seeing a shrink never seemed to work for me.

Others, they always felt better when they walked out the office door at the end of a session, as if some enormous weight had been lifted, as if some things had been sorted out, but me? I never felt that. If I was honest, as I always strive to be even when it’s a challenge, I felt worse. I felt as if I’d highlighted my weirdness. Brought it to the relentless surface. I’d shone a spotlight down upon the fact that I never belonged, that I wasn’t really at home anywhere, that I was perpetually a stranger in a strange land. Forever foreign and hopelessly alien.

What the Normals felt when they exited the door of the therapist? I only felt that when I wrote or produced artwork.

Self-expression (in those realms, at least) served not only as a form of catharsis for me, but also a kind of alchemy. I could take the piss of my life and transmute it to wine. I could turn the shit of my putrid existence and transmute it into something that held some value for me, that made me feel as if the whole day had actually been worth something. Even the worst of days.

Then I somehow lost my way. Or maybe not lost it so much as utterly abandoned it. For so long I would come home from work, immediately go to my computer and start typing away at the keyboard till my fucking fingers bled, typically about the work day. After awhile, my daily experience stopped being interesting and inspiring to me, however. The same old shit just wasn’t funny anymore, and in coming home to regurgitate and reflect on it, I kind of felt like I was taking my work home with me in the worst way, letting it haunt my free time, and I just had enough of it.

Instead, I turned my focus on other things, higher things, deeper things.

Though I always did it to some degree, I spent more time researching subjects of interest and writing about them. Anything but the mindless minutiae of the daily grind, anything but mulling over the past. I’d still do that on occasion, but more often than not it came out through my really bad poetry. Now this poetry happens every time I get high and drunk, which in my opinion happens a bit too often — the drunk part; I don’t see smoking weed as a problem, as I don’t tend to overdo it. But the sheer volume of bad poetry I have amassed, the fact that I ultimately elected to start a separate blog dedicated to the practice, just goes to show how often I drink the bubbly beverage, smoke the Devil’s Lettuce and express myself in that vague, ambiguous format.

Currently, I have three blogs, all on WordPress, the most currently active being the aforementioned one that has been dedicated the flushing away the shit residing in my backed-up toilet of a psyche, which I write in, for the most part, exclusively while inebriated on the aforementioned substances. That was my most recent blog. The second most recent is a blog I’ve dedicated to documenting my dreams, paranormal experiences in my life, and my attempts to explain both through research, speculation and experimentation. I rather like that blog the most, to be honest. Perhaps because I’m most passionate about that aspect of my life. My third most recent blog, which was my first WordPress blog, is an utter mess. It’s also the most popular of my three current blogs, perhaps only because it’s been around the longest. It began as an extension of my “online journal” on two other sites — MySpace and Bluelight, two journals that have for long been defunct.

Bluelight was my first online journal, or blog, ever. It was so long ago that I can scarcely remember how or why it started. The site itself was, and for all I know still is, a website dedicated to users of drugs, though I was frequent on the site far before I tried any illicit substances beyond cannabis, and at that point I had only done it here and there, not the daily practice I presently engage in.

My attention was brought to the site through a friend of mine who was quite deep in the drug scene — deeper than I thought at the time, I later learned — and my interest was piqued when I realized all it had to offer. There were various sectors on this site, two of which I spent an embarrassing amount of time on. In the sector called Words, I would post my poetry — exclusively sober poetry at the time, no less. On another, called Thoughts & Awareness, I would follow, contemplate and engage in debates on philosophy and religion.

And when they eventually provided journals on the site, what would later be known (or for all I know, at the time were known) as blogs, it all took off. This was a place to spill my thoughts. Discharge the energy pent up and swirling in me throughout the day. I could be open, honest, unfiltered.

I was free.

Aside from my art, this became another avenue for creative expression, individual liberty. So few were watching, and most of those who did didn’t know me personally. I went hog wild. No concerns. No intended structure. Not even checking for spelling or grammatical errors. I’d spill my mind through my fingers without looking back and in the end press the POST button. No concerns at all.

Then a kid at work mentioned this new site, this new thing that was all the rage, and it was called MySpace. He liked my writings and thought I should get a blog, because he thinks it would be great, and that I’d like it. So I did. And enough people seemed to like it. I wrote everyday. About the workday. And the people I worked with, even those I knew outside of work, they liked it, too.

Until some of them didn’t. The frustration of publicity and desire for privacy (or publicity behind a mask, more accurately) then began to grow.

Then I got a girlfriend. One who wanted to know my thoughts in raw form. So I deleted posts, and when I needed to express even more that I was too self-conscious for her to see, I got my first WordPress blog. That relationship ended,perhaps because I was an unenlightened fool. MySpace deleted their blogs. Bluelight deleted their online journals.

I kept up the WordPress blog until it seemed to lack focus on a single subject. Mundane shit, shitty poetry, deeper things — they needed their own areas to thrive. I needed to compartmentalize. So I tried, and succeeded in keeping focus on specific sectors of my life in my two following WordPress blogs.

The role of the first, however, remained, and has since remained, utterly ambiguous.

Sometime within the last year or two I thought to myself that I should just start a new blog and dedicate it to the daily, mundane shit. Just as it was in the beginning. Some place for that good ol’ self-therapy. For that catharsis and alchemy. Some place to spill and post and not care. I should spellcheck, and if I wrote anything in this new blog, this new compartment, I should surely run it through the spellcheck and perhaps check it for other errors later on, particularly if I was or was in the process of being inebriated while writing it, but in any case, I needed it.

I needed to work on myself. Deeper than ever before. And for that, I needed self-awareness. Self-transmutation. And I needed it documented for the purposes of reflection, objective feedback, and participation in the greater processes.

For so long I had remained stubbornly abstinent, but I needed this catharsis.

Need it.

I need this in my life. I need it now more than anything. I need this alchemy. I need to write about the day, every day, just as I had once upon a time.

I need to spill here everyday. At least a sentence. Sometimes a story or a rant or ramble. Something, though. Anything relevant. Not a poem. Something more direct.

In any case: from this day forward, I need to spill something. Stupid or profound. Shallow or deep. Simple or complex. In any case, relevant to the day — and so, naturally, I need to spill it daily.

Barring any technical issues, of course. I can, at the very least, give myself a reasonable amount of leeway for that.

And so with respect to what will surely be yet another compartment of my stupid shit:

So it begins.