Night Call

Dude. Shits crazy.

I’m in love with everyone. Just want to go out all the time. Hang out. Can’t stand being home the only one awake late at night. Need somebody I can text all kinds of crazy shit. Need a day job. I ran all day, did all kinds of shit, had fifteen moments of transcendence. Get home and it’s not enough. Staring at splotches of color on my lovers face under the harsh subway lights.

Ah.

What to do. Get a different job. Keep this job. Drink all night. Sleep all night. Calm down, you’ll be asleep soon enough what’s the big deal? I don’t know but it is a big deal. Never want anything to end. Except this interminable loneliness at the end of the night. 

Wife is asleep. Wife wake up. Let’s be together now. Don’t wake me up, she says. Don’t make me not asleep, she says. If you stare at me too hard she says it wakes me up. 

Nah. 

Maybe jerk off. Maybe I should try some pills. Maybe I shoulda smoked some weed. But no, tried that before. Came home the oven light wasn’t even on. Brother’s down the street. What’s good? Could try it out. He’s only 66% as old as I am, what does he know? Maybe if he was a girl I wasn’t related to. Need to work harder apparently. Work too hard to sleep. 

Probably figure I’m looking at porn right now. With the bathroom fan on. The only room I can be alone in. I suppose I could write at the table, who would know? I suppose I could try that after all. 

But then again I need my rest. I must go to bed. I must go to sleep. It’s only a few minutes of restlessness. Just push on through to the other side. 

Righteous Anger Isn’t an Oxymoron

I used to think that if Molly got mad at me I had to fix it right away. Stop everything, find the source of the problem, make it right. Sometimes I would do all that and she still wouldn’t be happy and then I would get frustrated. Especially if we were on vacation or something. It felt like the vacation was being ruined, that we would remember only that time when she was mad over some insignificant thing.

Today she got mad because her plan didn’t really work out and we wasted two hours driving around. Instead of trying to fix it with words or touching, I just drove around acting normal. I didn’t try to pretend that it didn’t suck that we were wasting time. I didn’t try to make it into a joke to make her see how trivial it was to worry about such things. I just let her be mad about it as if that were a reasonable response, which it is, really. 

I guess I used to think that you could die at any second so you might as well not worry about dumb shit like the fact that you’re wasting time because shit didn’t turn out like you had planned. I also used to believe that nothing really mattered, so I couldn’t see the point in getting worked up about anything really. I said I believed in that kind of shit, but I would get worked up about shit, too, just much different shit.

So now that I am allowing for the fact that things have value, I can see that being all mad about some dumb shit has its place, and maybe the reason Molly used to be mad for so long was that I was just quietly acting like she was an idiot for even bothering to be angry.

This time I let her be mad and I didn’t pretend it wasn’t frustrating and she got over it quickly and I didn’t get all stressed out that she didn’t like me or something.

I think a big part of why I built up so much resentment towards her over the years is because any time she would get mad I would blame myself and then slowly I would get mad at how unfair it was for her to think that it was my fault when I hadn’t done anything. So all this dumb shit was going on inside my head that didn’t have any basis in reality and should have been handled externally.

Any time I start to say something passive aggressive, I’m now trying to stop and instead say something more direct and constructive. And if Molly says something passive aggressive to me, I try to swat that shit down aggressively so we can fight about it instead of internalizing some made up bullshit. It’s not always easy and I don’t succeed every time but it’s not as hard as I thought it would be. 

I used to have these revenge fantasies, not against Molly but against other people, strangers mostly. So someone would do something I didn’t like and then I would fantasize about beating the shit out of them, some disproportionate type shit. But in reality I wouldn’t do anything, probably be even nicer to them the more I hated them because then slowly I would start to feel bad because I hated them so much and they hadn’t really done all that much shit to me.

So I have this darkness inside but I try to lock it up and pretend it doesn’t exist and it comes out in fantasies and in a growing resentment towards humanity. Instead it would be better to integrate the darkness into my personality and react to things I don’t like by making sure people know that I don’t like those things. Even get mad sometimes. I used to think that even getting angry was a sin. And then after I stopped believing in God, I thought getting angry was a sign of weakness. But I think now that getting angry is necessary for having a healthy relationship with the outside world. People should know when they’ve made me angry. I don’t have to hurt them with words or actions, but if I don’t indicate the fact that I’m unhappy how arethey  supposed to know to change their behavior? And besides it becomes so much worse when I just resent someone quietly. Instead of just snapping at someone and apologizing for it later maybe, I end up smiling at them and wishing they would die.

It’s important to have a healthy relationship with anger instead of just trying to avoid it in myself and others. 

Clean Something, Clean Anything

It was the strangest thing, after I got done writing that last post I read three articles about hating on white people and stuff like that, and then I went inside and started washing dishes. Then I did that cleaning project I wanted to do: take shit from under my bed and dust it off and sweep under there and shit like that. I told…what was my wife’s name again? Molly. I told Molly I would do it sometime soon yesterday. So I did it today. Why not?

Anyway I had no intention of doing that shit when I was sitting out there on the balcony. I figured, fuck it, I’ll just write a bunch of shit down. Fuck this day. Waste it.

It was either the coffee or the writing that gave me the energy to start cleaning shit up. Or it was because I went into the living room and Morgan was there talking on the phone and I was going to say something to him but I figured I might as well do the dishes first while he was on the phone and once I started actually moving my life from disorder to order in that way, I had the strength to move forward onto bigger projects.

After I cleaned under my bed and shit, the apartment felt pretty good, less dusty anwyay. I heated up some quiche and I went back out to the balcony. Morgan and I sat there just staring out into the day. It is really nice outside right now. It’s too much too fast though. I miss the spring. It was spring yesterday, but today it will be summer. Who knows if we’ll ever go back to spring because last week it was pretty much late winter.

But we’re always romanticizing something that probably isn’t real. Like the idyllic part of our childhood before we became self-conscious, and other shit like that.

Now I’m laying on the bed, typing more shit. It’s about time to go to work. I guess I have to get dressed and set up the feeders for the cats. What else? I guess that’s really it, although I should start work on Molly’s website, or else apply for a job, and I really should get back on my exercise program before I lose all the gains I was seeing, at least I should do the sit-ups. 

I don’t know if I’ll do any of that. I might just lay here and fall asleep. Fuck it. I have a weird life. Morgan asked me if I would ever get a tattoo. I said I didn’t know. When I was 16, I wanted flames going up my arms from my wrists like the lead singer of Linkin Park. He said that would have been ok. I said yeah but everyone would know that I had gotten that tattoo in the 90’s. 

I thought about it and I probably wouldn’t get a tattoo because who has the time or the money to do something like that. It would be cool to have a tattoo, but the way I live I probably wouldn’t get around to planning something like that. According to my value system it’s frivolous. I try to only do things that aren’t frivolous, at least that’s what I tell myself. And then I sit around on balconies staring off into nothing.

But some people just go around doing things that they want to do. They go to work and they work and then they come home and just do things. But I can’t even think of things that I want to do when I really think about it. Like Molly asked me yesterday, what do you want to do? And I tried to think of an honest answer because most of the time I would never assert myself about some shit like that because I just go along with whatever she wants to do and I couldn’t think of an answer. Besides have sex. Sex and eating, that’s all I do. I like drinking, too, but I like that less and less as it hurts more the next day or the night of, even, when I drink just enough to feel good but not enough to knock me out. I know there are things I want to do, I think, I never thought it was just going somewhere and eating, but maybe it is.

I mean sure I want to go hang out with the girl I was formerly obsessed with, but I don’t even know what I want to do with her, just go dancing I guess or sit on a bed talking, basically anything that seems like it’s leading to sex. Or eating.

But I also like just sitting and talking with people. I like talking with people, especially the girl I was formerly obsessed with. I like playing basketball, too, and writing down dumb shit. I like learning shit, I think I do. Sometimes I even like cleaning, but I don’t know if it’s just because I feel like if I’m cleaning, I’m safe from my inner critic, the one that tells me whatever I’m doing isn’t right, that it would be better if I did something else entirely. And then I do that and it’s the same thing. It’s always something I can’t even do, really, or won’t do, because I’m scared. I should just go around doing things I’m scared of, I guess, is the lesson. I don’t know.

Fuck it, I think I’ll go to sleep.

Habits

Can’t I just make up my mind to feel the way I do when I tell the truth without actually telling the truth? 

Hell doesn’t seem like a bad place. Can’t I stay a little longer?

I texted a million people this morning. I still feel lonely.

If I work hard and focus, I can get my life on track. I don’t need to actually tell the truth, do I? 

I don’t need to face myself, right? 

It’s her fault, isn’t it? It’s not my fault.

It’s not my fault, right?

Where’s the bottom of this fucking quicksand anyway.