30

I've stopped and started numerous #30 posts.. deleted a few and drafted the rest. Maybe this time I will finally pull through.

I feel I come here in my moments of desperation. I feel like one of those people speaking into a camera during a crisis, panting heavily, sweating, and all the while maintaining the mantra, "Situation normal," repeating these two words in order to prevent their mouth from completing the anagram in their mind. Both hands on the lens, tilting it slightly - this is the director's way of showing everything is not okay, that things are off kilter.

It is as though I've gone through numerous periods of disenchantment... without ever having a recovery period. Maybe those are the periods in which little meddlesome things, or even the larger ones, are no longer meddlesome or are replaced by less meddlesome or non-meddlesome things and I don't pay attention to them and they go by because I am selfish and spoiled and I take things for granted. And when the meddlesome things return, I turn my hands in supplication to the sky and ask the heavens, "why?" as if something grave has been done to me. I don't even believe in a god. Which is more pathetic?

There is some wine here (but I'm still dead sober). Disenchantment with wine makes it noble, makes the mild suffering sophisticated. It isn't trite, it is human. Validation. That there was validation, and don't I know it. Always validating everything. This shirt was on the last-call rack and it was stained and size Large and it looked unloved so I got an extra 10% off so I'm saving even while I'm spending. I have talent, I'm sure of it, I got positive feedback from the one and only writing class I've ever been in. I haven't any talent because, without praise, my paycheck, my raison d'etre, I'm washed up. I'm smart, I'm sure of it, because I have high marks and a measly automated note printed on a thicker sheet adding me to dean's list each year; surely it just came out of nowhere because I always had mediocre marks before and thus was of mediocre intelligence.

Then maybe perhaps it is perception of the interior, the unknown truth that I ignore, or maybe even relegated, because my inner monologue is malignant and torturous and voiced by ghosts of my past; a decrepit hand cranking the gramophone, replaying all the shaming things I've ever heard ... all of these things combined placed up against the palpable and tangible. This parasite... validated, always validated, by everything else. And I haven't any Levaquin. And worst of all, my eyes are burning out of my head. The swing of things has yet to swing my way. I sleep but I might as well be awake.

I keep writing letters in my head. Letters that I'd write and crumple up, letters that I'd never send. Scribbles and etchings, eraser shavings ground into the page, always college ruled - my handwriting always slants terribly and it drives me crazy. But even the thought of giving the words the dignity of putting them to paper causes my cheeks to redden and then having to be confronted with their physicality, their reality, maybe one day cleaning the crammed bookshelves where I tucked it away from plain sight, my plain sight, would be to re-endure this torture in my head. There are words, viperous words, the curvature of their letters become fangs, and they haven't a place to go so they sink into my mind. I want to say all the things I want to say but I cannot and so in my heart they stay, turning bitter against the intended. Maybe this is why people grow to be so cold and sour - because all of the unsaid words, the unspoken curses the spoke to themselves, hurled with the same velocity back to the sender. The hate they have for everyone else becomes a hate for themselves. But what do I really know? It's always a surprise when I say anything at all, isn't it. Sometimes it's even introspective even if it isn't always grammatically correct.

Or maybe I'm just in a bad mood today and I'll feel better some other time. Why would it be anything at all?