It has been a while.
I'm getting lethargic again, but I'm trying not to let it discourage me. The last couple of nights, I've been spending a couple of hours trying to keep a written inventory on my goals in life. This summer feels like the first break I've truly gotten from the fucking chaos of the last 3 years, so I feel somewhag restless in trying to make the most of it before my time gets totally sucked up by school and such. I'm trying to confront through writing all the misery that I've felt these past couple of years, which may seem like a lofty and taxing project for the snail's pace I've been working at, but I feel like I owe it to myself. I mean, I obviously do. I am responsible for myself. So, with that as a serious task, my journals have the question of "What do I want my days to be filled with?" scrawled all throughout them. I have had plenty of close answers to that question: more reading, more structure, more meaningful work, etc. But a bigger question has been nagging me and every other God-denying person like me for the past forever: to what end do I do any of it for?
I have vague answers to this question: to be of service to others, to preserve what would otherwise be marginalized, to truly emphasize, to know, etc. But none of this seems to suffice. (Given how short-form and vague these answers are, obviously, they wouldn't suffice. They're short and vague. But they're not my actual answers. I've thought about this a lot. I'm just saving this post's word count). And I'm well-aware this is a tall, tall order to ask something to fill. Like, people have had entire careers trying to crack this one. There's whole centuries-long intellectual traditions that go along with it. I've really only spent a few nights working out a game plan, so I should quickly relax. I'm not going to discover the meaning of life in a weekend. Typically, Reddit ass questions like these don't bother me, at least not as much as they used to. Truth be told, this question doesn't bother me much in itself. It's more the questions that led me to it: what the fuck am I spending my time on? What am I doing with my life? I'm on track to he the most normal 21-year-old ever with this one, but I don't know. I feel listless. I feel too old to be this angsty, even though this is literally the age to be it. What are mumblecore movies about if not this very condition of being this young? But, fuck, I don't know. What am I doing?
I'm trying to keep my head up because I know for a fact I can not waste any more time bogging myself down with self-loathing. It's only going to put off the real work that I'll have to do anyway. But it's hard. I'm feeling the whole I-don't-want-to-talk-to-anyone-anymore-and-move-to-Alaska feeling. You know the one! My souuuul feels baggy or some shit. Makes talking to anyone feel like I'm lying, but it also feels like nothing at all. I'm tired. Should not have drank a Diet Pepsi before bed. Must finish this, though. I know this'll pass, and if I get what I need done - no, when I get it done (italics don't work in my version of the app because it fucks the entire body of text) - I'll feel better. Surely, I'll feel better in the future.
Dope Story About Ex-Girlfriend That's This Contextless Vignette of Me Crying Because That Shit Is Just Beautiful But Also Damaged Like A Damn Wingless Butterfly, Oh Muffin 🙄: One time, after me and YOU KNOW WHO were very overdressed and - you know what, I definitely wrote about this experience before a billion posts ago. I don't care anymore. Oh shit, I just realized that I didn't think about our break-up on the 2nd. It's been 7 months now. On the 2nd of every month, until then, I thought about it. Like, "Oh, it's been 4 months," "It's been 6 months." I must actually not care much anymore.
I'm trying to remind myself of how unhappy I've been for these few last years. It's beginning to feel strangely distant from me now that things have been going not too badly this summer, and in the interest of working towards something better, I think it's important to keep in mind exactly where I don't want to go again, which is where I've been. Since moving back from Edmonton to Red Deer for the summer, I have had this clarity about the past. I guess that's what the present is all about. But, anyway, I don't exactly know where I'm going with this, but it's overwhelmingly apparent to me how unhappy I was this last year in particular. And, knowing what all went down - moving away for the first time, being at a harder school, the girlfriend, what have you - it's like, yeah. Obviously, I wouldn't be ecstatic all the time. And that's not to say I wasn't unprecedentedly happy in spurts. But there's this truly nagging misery at the bottom of it all, the kind that comes with something like failure. Once again, with my few fuck-ups in school, emotions relating to failure make sense. But this feeling seems to be there even when not much was happening. It seems to have been around for a long time. It's the feeling that the deepest and most terrible of winters gives me when I'm in it for long enough, or the way car rides used to feel with Chloe, or the way D.H. Lawrence described "black misery" in this one short story in this anthology I half-read for class that I now forget the name of. It seems omnipresent and murderous, like if the pantheistic view of God was correct, and God wanted to kill you all of the time. It's very funny that I've now brought up God four times. This feeling - which, let's be fucking honest with ourselves, is probably depression - isn't the worst of my problems, but is definitely Top 5. I just want it to stop. I mean, if I feel it right now, I can deal with whatever version of it this is for the rest of my life, if I had to choose. At least now I'm lucid. But any version of it I feel from October to April I just want out of my life forever (funny how it sounds like I'm describing seasonal-affective disorder). I never want to feel like that again. I never want to fuck up like I have in those months again. God fucking damn it, never again.
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On the subject of Brooklyn, I was reading about The Dare last night and getting weirdly jealous. I'm assumed you've never listened to his music before, so just so this tangent makes a little more sense, he's Dimes Square's latest musical export (WOAAAH!!!! COOL 😭), but he's intentionally riffing on shit like LCD Soundsystem and Peaches. It's very horny, modular synthesizer-y party music. Anyway, obviously, as you know, those bands and that sound make me think about how it was to be 11 years old, and seeing the sound of downtown Manhattan turn back to where I never would have even considered it being possible to turn back to is strange and inviting. It's beginning to resemble the city I first got interested in again (talking about it as if it's my fucking wife). It's as if NEW YORK IS FINALLY READY FOR US, BABEYYYYYY!!
Two things and then I'll be out of your hair: 1. I can only imagine New Yorker me as a metaphorical speed freak. It seems like there would be too much for me to see and do without this sleepless, amphetamine-pace. Like, I literally don't think I'd be able to sleep. I'd just be moving and walking and talking the train constantly. I'd be totally locked in, trying to take it all in (Penis). 2. Or I'd just be smoking weed watching YouTube with you. Either/or, I would be very happy.
