☆ Inertia Log ☆
Day 32 of Total Isolation From Any
Well-Intentioned Human-Shaped Entity:

I was hurled out of every stress dream imaginable (including the one where my guidance counselor tells me I don’t have enough credits to graduate high school) and checked my phone. I had to make a lot of calls and do a lot of PR. You know I guess there have been a few celebrities who have shaved their heads, and now it’s out there, it’s public perception that if someone shaves their head they’re cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. To which I say, of myself: Well, I’m no crazier than I ever was, I don’t think. In the core of my brain is a totally rational, laser-beam-focused halfwit who sees things from a top-down Sim City map . . . but there is swirling machinery all around me, and God knows I can’t get a lock on it. I mean I can a little bit. I know what I am . . . I have been this thing for a long time. Too bad about those things I have absolutely no control over.

And like all personality-having mammals, I experience horrendous grief when I lose something I care about, though maybe my feelings are amplified, because of this awful awful incurable ailment, and I struggle with being hyper-sensitive, and afraid everyone will leave me, because usually they do. My fears and feelings are not unwarranted I don’t think.

Some days I am so fucked out that I don’t even really feel anything at all. I get in the car and drive around at night, very cold, and I am wearing a Ryan-shaped mask that is perfectly still. I am still a good driver. I can rip around those backroads and make sharp turns and spin the car around very easily. You know I’ve always got cars, and how to use them, and can feel everything about them and can maneuver them however I want. Hell I was going 40 mph in reverse yesterday, way the hell down Lonesome Road. It is all that makes me feel good: driving around in that car and escaping from invisible enemies in my head. And listen: when I drive, and when my face is expressionless, feeling nothing, it is not because my heart has shriveled up Grinch-style and I am a cicada shell of a person. I have just been so fucked out and emptied that there is no juice left in me to shake around. When it comes back to me I will repeat the cycle of feeling everything and being fucked out again.

Now I am skeletal and air-thin. I have bags beneath swollen eye sockets so thick and badly-colored that I look like I’m turning into Darth Vader. My roommates in Oakland asked for a picture of my head and I had to take four or five so the lighting blocked out my terrible eyes. I don’t think I’ve lost any weight—I’ve been eating and exercising every day, mostly to have something to do, and to keep my mind off faraway people, but I am still spun together with twine and pipe cleaners and electrical tape. I wonder if there is any hope of restoring this body. After a certain point the many days and years of pitch-black sorrow manifest in your skin, and in your face, and you look ghoulish. No sleep, no love. It will tear you to ribbons, I swear it will.

There is about a foot of snow on the ground and I feel so very rotten.