dragon quest xi is so cute

some people get really touchy if you call them “dude”

c’mon chill out dude

i mean get real

relax y’all

i didn’t look at my phone all day. it was great. i’m going to try to keep going as long as possible. otherwise i’ve just been sleeping and bathing and lying awake in the dark not doing much of anything. yeah. well, sometimes that’s just what you got to do

all isn’t well, though hey: good-night just the same

I had a hell of a night. Really I don’t think I slept at all. My last memory is looking up and seeing a halo of soft blue light around my black curtains and I supposed the sun was coming up . . . but I didn’t necessarily pass out just then. What happened was that I stopped making memories . . . caught between two or three or even four states of being and all that, and belonging in none of them.

Lately my body has been loaded with too many foreign elements that are each delivering conflicting instructions: stay awake, go to sleep, relax, go insane, and so on. I’m so tired, having been slushed hard by uppers and downers, some native to me and some I introduced to my body on purpose. I was trying to see something new, or at least something I had not seen in a long time. I can’t live without novelty and it’s a real problem. It is killing me I think, because sooner or later all the novelty will go away, and then I’ll be left alone to deteriorate with all the old things I am tired of seeing.

I told my friend today that this has all gutted me, and that the things that once brought me comfort or reminded me who and what and where I was are wholly alien now. I said it is as though the other guy died, and I have been sent to continue living his life. Only they forgot to implant me with all of his old memories, and so I am lost and alone in this story I have been dropped into. If you’ll excuse the poeticism, I have become a stranger to myself in my own life. I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing. None of it works on me anymore. If I can’t remember who I am, then how I am to expect anyone else to go along with it? I am terrified someone will notice that a stone in the castle’s foundation has shifted overnight, and that while the thing might look the same on the surface, it is rewired beneath . . . or worse still: hollow altogether.

I have turned off my phone and have cut the cord otherwise on a few other things and a few other people. I don’t want to look at any of that stuff right now, or maybe ever again. Because I am a pretty unstable person in general, I’m sure I’ll change my mind in the next few weeks . . . but for now at least I’d rather just be completely alone and not talk to anyone anymore. It is painful for everyone, and I’m tired of embarrassing myself. You wouldn’t believe how embarrassing my life is. I feel as though everything I ever do or say that is pointed in anyone else’s direction is a death-blow. I am handing them this catastrophic burden they didn’t ask for in the first place, and who good blame them. Of course my brain is exaggerating this to the point of making me wish I were dead (no man / no problem) . . . but it feels so real I have no choice but to believe it is. If I can’t trust my own brain: then what? At least when I’m alone I can’t hurt anyone except myself. Then I am only accountable to myself for the miseries I create and inflict inwards while I am in this backwards place.

Modern medicine has failed me, man. I guess I always figured this was how it was gonna go. The people who have treated me have vaguely confirmed that my life is just a test of endurance, and thus a losing battle. You can’t best something so dark and far-reaching. I just wish I’d had a little more time. I don’t have anything to do anymore, but there were people I wanted to take care of. I can’t take care of anyone when I can’t take care of myself. I can’t even lift my head up anymore, for god’s sake. I am completely sapped, having been born with a vampire in my brain. The vampire is almost succeeded in killing its host, and that’s bad news for me.

I have written desperate things like this before plenty of times. I can see how this would sound no more dire than any other time I’ve publicly screamed into a black hole. I don’t know, man. I’ll say it again: I could make a chart or use math or something to prove I have less than I did the year before, and the year before that, and on and on, all the way back a long time ago to some day in late January that is supposed to have some significance to me, but that I will be angry about until the day I die. I realize no one asked to be here, but I really really don’t want to be here. This is hell. I am neck-deep in the “involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet” phase of my life. I cannot get out! I just need to find something to sacrifice my body to. It has got to have some use still left in it.

I will conclude this dreary entry with an animation of a ringing telephone I made. Originally I set out to say “I’m not going to answer my phone for a while, so here’s your notice.” But of course I have been vast with my descriptions of my many unassailable sadnesses. I guess that’s just the sort of person I am. I’m sorry. It’s very embarrassing for me. Imagine an alternate timeline in which Prince Hamlet did not die after being stabbed with a poison sword, and instead continued to haunt the world holding poor Yorick’s skull while emptily pontificating and feeling sorry for himself until the sun was extinguished from the sky. Do you know how bad that would be? You do, because you’re staring down the barrel of it right this god darn second, dude. Trust me: I may have lost my place in time and space, and I may be living inside the cicada shell of a dead man who looked and talked exactly like me, but I at least know the shape of what I am, which I have displayed for you in seven enormous overwrought paragraphs, and hundreds and hundreds of pages here otherwise. OK? I’m not saying it does either of us any good to know that, but I suppose it allows me some degree of self-awareness that some other idiot fool like me might lack. If anything, I am perfectly screamingly aware of the endless nonsense I so readily pollute my environment with!

Anyway here’s the fucking phone:

• paranoia
• restlessness
• irritability
• racing thoughts
• slowness
• loss of interest or pleasure in activities
• feelings of deep sadness, emptiness, or hopelessness
• feelings of worthlessness or excessive / inappropriate guilt
• excessive sleepiness or insomnia
• disrupted circadian rhythm
• loss of appetite
• delusions of grandeur
• reckless behavior
• impaired decision making
• excessive involvement in activities that have a high potential for painful consequences
• unexplained or uncontrollable crying
• rapid cycling between states
• recurrent thoughts of death
• suicidal thoughts or tendencies