I am obligated to write the hell out of this manifesto or whatever it is.
Despite all my thinly-veiled concerns towards keeping myself in check throughout all faucets of my life, I have been stumped. Stumped is the wrong word for it. But ever since this whole calamity of uncertainty happened within me I haven’t felt that there have been right words for anything. I haven’t read a decent book of English literature in months; the ones I purchased specifically for that enjoyment were read half-way and then abandoned. Abandoned. I purposely made the decision to ban them from my life, because I couldn’t handle the stress of living up to their silent expectations. Henry Miller and Hunter S. Thompson are like deities to me. They shower me with their grace but I receive only five percent of it to keep permanently. The rest is squandered on inattention, recklessness, and all manner of derogatory adjectives I’d love to show off in order to describe myself.
Because somewhere along the line everything truly went to shit, and I remained none the wiser until just about a month ago from today. That date isn’t approximate, because in actuality this whole semester thusfar has played out like one agonizingly long anxiety dream to me. For a long while I sat around waiting to wake up from it. And while I did that the world corroded beneath me; still, I refused to take notice and attributed the patchwork of falling-outs to some spike of mood underplaying my every action, thought, behavior, belief, and conviction. I have grown accustomed to “dark seasons”, as I’d like to call them. They are defined by me as being stretches of time in which my capabilities as a creator, as a lover, as a friend, worker, and son…fall apart temporarily. My capabilities, I mean. The potential I possess to be all I can be and do all I desire to do is suddenly choked and gagged like a kidnapped child, or something. Goddamnit.
But I’ve come to believe this is no mere “dark season”. If it turned out to be just that then I’d have to admit something to myself I’m deeply, deeply terrified of coming to terms with.
You know what I’d started to hate about the way I thought and wrote? The selfishness of it all. On and on and on I would rant and rave in abstract terms (just as I am doing now) about some existential, un-concreted, crisis occurring somewhere within the vast abyss of my psyche. Or soul? Or consciousness or cognition or whatever else it might be named. Oh son of a bitch why do I have these emotions, why are they back? Why can’t I either shrug them off or manipulate them into some better use? For the first two years I succeeded in doing just that.
Oh motherfucker why am I still going on about my goddamn feelings? Because, because…because they are the greatest threat to my wellbeing. All of them. Passion, anxiousness, exuberance, envy, lust, longing, ire, and Wrath; oh so especially wrath. That one emotion I sought to rid myself permanently of, because I am a kindhearted motherfucker above all else. I am I am I am. I AM. Nowadays it seems I must scream everything just to get it through to myself; because I can’t even imagine the notion of telling all of this inside me to somebody else. It would drive me madder and subject the pitiful listener to either boredom or aversion towards me.
I have let the poison of my own unchecked emotions dismantle me from the inside out. Let me tell you one of my greatest fears (I have several, that much I know, but they never get properly expressed until such a time occurs that they explode outward from me; chaos all around on those dark days, let me tell you): That there might come a time where I don’t recognize myself at all.
One day I’ll wake up and forget who the fuck I am. It’s happened gradually and sadistically before, many a time, but usually it only sticks to my soul for a set period of time. This uncertainty, this Grand Uncertainty, is like a demon waiting to devour me the moment I shy away from the light of righteous living. How can a man like me, who never received the doctrine of God or teachings of some spiritual guardian, ever know what it means to live righteously? Does that mean behave like a saint, one who bears no ill will or makes no unkind action towards any living creature before him? Or does righteousness imply acting as such? Because I am a terrible actor now, and I know with great certainty that I was once a magnificent actor.
For I used to be loved by a great many people, and could swear that in my soul I truly loved each of them back. For every ounce of affection, kindness, goodwill, guidance, respect, enjoyment, insight, kinship, solidarity—and every other manner of positive impression left upon one’s mind by a dear friend—I sought to repay sevenfold the amount to them in kind. I was bent on magnifying and multiplying the positivity bestowed upon me by the good people of the world who I was blessed to call my friends, compatriots, comrades, partners-in-crime, archangels, prophets…and so on ad infinitum. I used to worship those who gave me their friendship, and then somewhere along the line I decided I had to separate myself from them.
And by Them, I mean all the people who are not me. All of those strangers and rakish acquaintances that I’d collected during my waltz of extending the hand of friendship to anyone who cared to dance. Eventually, this concept of Them would be turned against me, quite literally. In my decision to separate and isolate myself from the opinions and [infections] of Others, I would inevitable come to alienate Myself from myself. Sooner or later I began to perceive myself as two or three incarnations housed in the one body. Mirrors; depending on what state of being I’d be in upon looking into them; would become gruesome experiences. That wide-eyed, sleep deprived, motormouthed bastard grinning back at me was a fucking charlatan the whole time. So what? I wanted that charlatan to be me, it was my decision—my chain of gradually worsening decisions—stacked single file behind one another like neglected dynamite sticks.
I could go on like this for days. I could keep writing this for days—weeks even if this head of mine keeps behaving like it has been these past weeks…[these past weeks have been the most dynamic weeks of my torture; instead of a slow agony spread over a course of days it’s just been hitting me like rogue streaks of lightning coming out of the nowhere to assist me in that heart attack waiting somewhere in the wings]…but I have much work to do with this precious free time.
Hah! Free time.
Free time he says!
What a shameful term to denote these hours subsisting of anxiety-slathered manias with. It feels like a game of Russian roulette every time, only I can’t see the gun and I can’t hear the bullets. It adds an element of suspense—and panic guised as surprise—to it all. It possesses that element of the Hunt (or the chase, depending on which side I’m on) which a younger Chandler absolutely craved in his day-to-day life. All I wanted was adventure, at the start of this that was all I wanted, needed, sought after, and ceased. But at such a tremendous price. Did I know at the time what kind of burden I’d be placing on my future? [but who at that age would expect The Future to arrive in only two short years].
It’s all the fault of the pills, trust me Chandler, it is all the fault of the pills. Rest assured, you are blameless when it comes to atrocities committed against You by you. Nevermind that you were the one who craved them, pursued them, acquired them, abused them, and then fastened them forever to your life. Blameless is what you are. That word blameless is particularly sweet sounding to my mind’s ear; it has connotations of safety and relief and, by a stretch, forgiveness. I desire blamelessness for the same reason a barefoot vagrant desires shoes. I need some goddamn protection from this world before madness infects the last-standing parts of me.
Because once upon a time there was a man that challenged me to take a shot of jameson every paragraph and see where it got me in 5 pages. That is not the nature of this correspondence henceforth, but it goddamn is now. The change in pacing and vocabulary will be fairly obvious, for the scotch brings its own vocabulary into play. If i had stronger fingers this whole charade would have been composed via typewriter, but alas, i am a modern man who has no patience for that preindustrial bullshit.
That makes two. Paola if you’re reading this I have a crush on you, and I mean that with all fullness of creeposity and the awkward distance of the internet. If you’re personality is anything like the one you project over this soundless interweb, then rest assured that i was serious about that proposal. Don’t try to overlook this, i’m getting drunk and it’s important to me that you know. Hahaha. I really hope she doesn’t read that, i find her far too attractive to repel her with such brazen marriage propositions. You know what the best medicene has been since i kicked this poisonous amphetamine shit? The radio. WW0Z New Orleans ninety point seven has been saving my soul with the sheer power of the blues. It must be the blues, no other concoction of music could have piereced my drug-addled heart harder in this time of crippling need. Oh religion, why didn’t i ever get you?
The blues are a music that have been pre-programmed into my prenatal soul. Prenatal existence I say! When i was in the whom my father serenaded me on the outside with his tenor saxophone, his baritone saxophone, his soprano saxophone, his alto saxiophone, and lastly his flute. His silver flute of excellent quality that he always tried to get me to play, but I could never learn, the mouthpiece was problematic.
And for those of you who so much as suppressed a giggle over that condom innuendo expressed in that last sentence: go fuck yourselves. A thousand times over fuck yourselves, until the bleeding lubricates each new thrust of your pompous cock’s summersault into the asshole. I’m tired of thinking about sex, I’m tired of the demands it makes in it’s absence.
It’s been months and I’m terrified of having to face up to the fact that no women remain who are looking for a stable, uncompromising, unwavering dedication to someone else. Everyone’s youth-drunk mind surrounding me. Mine is no exception. But I don’t use drinking as a means of persuading a snatch to fall on top of me, that’s a waste of a good drunk. If I had it my way I’d be able to crash a car each time I reached that revered pinnacle of true, seamless, Intoxication. When Intoxication visits me with it’s holy presence I am in awe of my own fluidity; a boundless adventure so long as my perceptions remain skewed horrible by that ambrosiatic poison. I have never, ever, reached as many states of Intoxication as I’d like to among my drinking nights. I’ll get about one true Intoxication every 2-3 months; always a surprise.
I suppose it would befit me—as well as my glassy-eyed, methamphetamine-addict sympathizers gathered in the front row of the audience [you are my only fans…you toothless scoundrels you.]—to diagram exactly what I mean when I say Intoxication.
(n.) |-ˌtäksiˈkā sh ən|:
The state in which one consumes the perfect amount and/or combination of liquors/beers/wines/etc that one is endowed with a temporary godliness of sorts. A perfect percentage of alcohol present throughout one’s bodily system requires proper factoring of time (minutes, seconds, hours…fuck, even weeks if you’re into that kind of suspension) between drinks and juxtaposition of liquors consumed is measured to an impeccable accuracy. One, upon achieving the first moment of Intoxication, will be rendered immediately lucid and made aware of the power coursing through one’s veins. She/He shall gain unparalled vivacity, exuberance without limit, an overwhelming sense of goodwill, infectious command of her/his adrenal glands, and a straight-up baffling magnetism to fantastic reels of luck. Intoxication can last anywhere from 5 minutes to three days when utilized properly and conducted wisely.
I want to write a ditictionary. I want to revise all the dictionaries out there right now. I want to include the impressions a word summons in a human mind, not just the definition whose correct wording can never be recalled. The way I see words differs from how other people see words. It’s taken me a long time to really understand that about other people. They see words as stepping stones used to get an idea, belief, or assertion across in conversation. Others might see words as case-specific in regard to an emotion or situation. In all cases most people’s relationship to words ends at their ability to pronounce them coherently enough, and only in selecting words that are the least taxing to the jaw muscles and speech center of the mind.
When did I become so removed from college society? Why did I miss so many memos as to end up here in the pits of self-supplied despair and consternation over each prickling detail of my days? I worry too much, but i do have reasons for worrying and exerting the kind of energy on stress that I do. I have no orginiality as a writer, and now I’ve began to copy machines. Copy machines would produce more original actions than this tired rountine of a behavior-system. I am annoyed eternally at the fact that my overall array of behaviors are only represented as surface impressions that I may often get wrong because I place much stock in their belief because I need a solid pillar of assurence from which to erect my canopy of confidence and fortitude. Until then it will be a bunker that I live in; a bunker shaping up to be a fine tomb if the internal rot persists. Like a disease I must purge it from my system. And also like a disease it is omnipresent within me, and I am no anatomist of the mind [I don’t think anyone can make that claim without controversy].
