November 2017 – Page 4 – ☆ STARSAILOR ☆

i experienced a sort of SUBCONSCIOUS REFLEX a few minutes ago, and played into the thing THAT I EVERYONE TELLS ME I AM, but which i refused to BELIEVE I AM, which is a guy who smokes cigarettes

yes: it has been said to me many times that i just seem like a guy who would smoke cigarettes

i am usually told this when i am outside with some people and i’m the only one not smoking

to which i reply:

but: i have smoked for short periods of my life . . . usually the worst ones! i guess that’s how it goes sometimes huh. i’ve never been a real smoker, not really, and i couldn’t ever be, not no way

i just don’t wanna

i’ve already spoiled it for you though: as if fully morphing into a complete parody of myself, i did in fact drink a cup of coffee and walk around the block puffin on one of the damn things a few minutes ago

it was just like in the movies: i really did mutter things out loud, and refer to myself in the royal / editorial “we” (we’re all we’ve got, dude. we don’t need all those other people . . . they can only hurt us!!!)

i eclipsed myself further by staring at a bag of garbage that had ripped open and blown all over the street, and ended my lonely diatribe THUSLY: “jesus christ. what a nightmare this place is. we need a meteor the size of jupiter to slam into this godforsaken rock as soon as possible”

you see: i am experiencing what a trained medical professional might refer to as a nervous breakdown, or maybe even a major depressive episode

lord knows i hate to label things, but you can’t deny that it’s convenient sometimes

my skin and hair and eyes look awful

you know those before and after pictures you see

the bad ones i mean

well: let’s just say i’m looking a little more AFTER these days

best way i can describe this thing that is always wrong with me . . . . . . is that it has rendered my brain into a sort of slot machine, and the three (or four (or five (or six (and on and on)))) spinning reels are mood flavors

the slot machine NEVER STOPS SPINNING

at any given moment my moods cycle and transmute themselves kaleidoscope-like into a trillion different (mostly bad) combinations

this ever-shifting ghoulish face in my brain, man! it warps me bad. i can’t get a lock on it!

it’s bad enough just BEING ALIVE

and it’s bad enough dealing with the tried-and-true manic elation / utter despair thing . . . but then the reels start lining up “doubting reality” and “suspicion that everyone is your enemy” and “your friends will soon abandon you” and “the world is definitely ending” and “you’re a fake and a fraud” and “you’re going to be like this forever” and pretty soon you’re on a one-way train to DOOMSVILLE and uh oh baby good luck with that

i have gotten out of these things before

(i somehow just sort of get out of everything, now that i think about it)

but (here comes an obnoxious sentiment): i really do feel, and have felt for a long while, that you can get whittled away by this stuff. you know? i am finite, man, and so are you

how many times can you crawl out of it before you just stop being able to any longer? like how older people heal much slower, now that they’re burnt and bust, and tired, and so on

our regenerative powers are weak to begin with! and even if the body willed it, healed us whether we wanted to be healed or not . . . what if our minds wholly rejected all instincts toward self-preservation, knowing the big picture?? is it exhausting to you as well to know there are literally decades of these low periods to endure? the next one worse than the one that came before it? no matter what you do, you can’t get out of this thing alive, and one of these days a thing like this will happen to you and it’ll be the last time it ever happens to you if you know what i mean~

how many more times can i sit by and watch the god damn boulder roll back down the fucking mountain????

basically everything wants to kill you. have you ever noticed that? on the other side of everything is death, which is why things are fun and scary, i guess. i am suspended here, a few inches above a vast black ocean called DEATH, and so are you. it takes a lot of time and effort to stay upright, even if most of that time and effort seems invisible to you, or is at least obscured by other things, or whatever. you have to keep going because you get hungry and tired and sad and all that. you can’t exactly just sit down on the floor and die. trust me! i’ve tried!

but with no real interest in this place or in myself anymore, and with the skin peeled back like this, and all the machinery exposed, i see no reason to carry on as myself inside of this thing anymore. you could say that being married and having children, or having a bunch of money or a rewarding career, or whatever, are a sort of poetry, and it is fine and nice to many people to have that poetry in their lives. otherwise: ??? what the hell am i doing here and why am i mindlessly repairing myself when there is nothing on this planet that requires my attention. i dreamed of things once, and saw myself in those dreams. i saw other people in those dreams too. where did they go? i think about this all the time. without those dreams and those people, all gone now, i cannot conceive of any life i could possibly frankenstein together that would make me reconsider an entire lifetime of unending painful misery. there has been misery and there will be way more misery if i’m alive to feel it. just being here inside myself in a room or on a bus or outside of whatever hurts me a lot. i’m sorry if that sounds stupid or melodramatic: it’s true, for whatever that’s worth. i am tired and i have remembered how bad the other times were. and you know what: the time between those times wasn’t all that great either~

what had hali said to me last winter?

something like

‘i woke up this morning and was glad to see that it was snowing. and then i remembered everything else.’

AND THEN I REMEMBERED EVERYTHING ELSE

ah, what the hell

what the hell can you even do

just before i graduated from college, i applied to work at a post office in antarctica

they turned me down because of it being funded by the UK government, or something, and i was an american citizen

i wonder how that would have played out otherwise

my lungs hurt and it’s cold outside

the sun will set at five p.m.

maybe i’ll just rent a car and go down to LA