death

Tonight at McCune’s we put on the new Electric Wizard album (which isn’t very good) and lit some candles and screwed in a red lightbulb and pulled from the tarot deck. We were just messing around like a couple of dumb jerks, so we pulled cards for “love” and “wealth” and so on. He was about to put away the deck when I told him we should pull future cards—cards that represent our future!

Well, I got ‘Death’.

newvalues

“Yeah, somebody to talk to
And I like to look at you
Yeah, somebody to talk to
And I love to look at you
‘Cause you’re a real fine girl”

That right there is a sincere form of expression. Look how god damn simple and honest it is. Yeah.

When I wake up I don’t feel well. This lasts until mid-afternoon, and then I feel all right for a few hours. Later at night, when I’m biking home from wherever, I definitely want to be dead. And when I get in bed to go to sleep I pray that something kills me in my sleep.

Every day!

Every single god dang day.

;-(

When I was 23 years old I met with a half dozen psychiatrists to figure out once and for all what was wrong with me. See, there was a thing in my brain that made everything colorless and bad and weird. It made me sleep fourteen hours a day. It destroyed my appetite. It managed to convince me that I should die.

I took a lot of tests. I did a lot of talking. Ultimately a conclusion was reached, and I was told I was a certain kind of person who suffered from a certain kind of illness.

I still have that illness. I have had it since I was 13 years old. I will have it till the day I die.

As it happens this illness is poorly understood and almost impossible to explain to people whose brains are, at least on paper, perfectly normal.

And here’s the thing: when you mention the symptoms to people who are ill-informed or incapable of understanding (and often they are both), they suddenly transform into an expert on the human brain because they read a 150-word article on WebMD like ten fucking years ago. Eagerly they dole out some old-fashioned home remedies for how you might shake yourself out of possessing a genetic disorder that manifests as a chemical imbalance in the brain.

Read a book! Try going outside! Run! Swim! Learn to sail!

Listen: fuck off with this trash. I have been listening to idiots say things like this for more than half my life and I’m so god damn sick of it. I’m glad you were able to get over your girlfriend dumping you in college, but this isn’t the same thing by a long shot.

You know what the world is to me most of the time? It is a loud, violent, shapeless haze. Everything is peripheral. Everything is smeared. I can only hear my own bad thoughts. I can think of nothing except how I should be dead.

There is no book. There is no outside. There is no running. There is no swimming. There is no fucking sailboat.

There is only this: the invisible suicide time-bomb hidden deep inside my brain.

You can scoff at this all you want, but it’s just as absurd to go up to someone in a wheelchair and tell them they’d probably be better off if they just tried a little harder to make their legs work.

Have you tried standing up recently?

I mean, are you sure your legs don’t work?

So: Go ahead and gulp down that self-help turd smoothie and let those of us with broken brains live out the rest of our miserable lives in peace.

Hokay?

Drinking some cold-ass coffee and burning candles and incense and listening to ‘Dopesmoker’ and writing a story about a sad detective who tries to find out who killed the world’s balls!

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The power is out so Laura and Dante and I are in my room listening to Jessica Pratt

I think of the handful of people who have loved me and have been kind to me even when they shouldn’t have and all I want to do is phone the unfeeling, indifferent universe and say, “Just this once, can you reach out from beyond the great big nothing and reward these wonderful people?”

Laura told me most of the people I know probably have no idea that I absolutely despise myself

This was genuinely surprising to me!

Oh! I went to Virginia and Maryland and Tennessee two weeks ago. I don’t know why. My mother bought me a plane ticket and so I went. Here are roughly a hundred pictures of the weird, dumb dream I lived for nine days.