An Inhuman Condition

The website is back and mostly working as it was in days past. If you end up at a non-existent WordPress.com site, just add “www.” to the front of the URL. I’m hoping it goes away after the Internet shifts for cleaning.

I have solved the hosting issue, and hope now to finally get on with The Important Work.

Here are some unrelated ramblings and scraps from 2013.

• Untitled
  There’s a smothering asphyxia being inside this warm, aging house. Surviving the staleness requires breaking open the hatches and beckoning the cold, unruly wind in from time to time. The snowdrops melting on my face with their chilly, inviting breeze almost make me feel alive, almost. They’ve breathed air back into my lungs for a moment, and I can focus on other things. The question burns in my mind:

  When does depression end?

  And we (my brain and I) both know the answer, but can’t let ourselves get bogged down in some fatalist exercise. I keep hoping as the years amble by if an end might come. I can sometimes almost believe that I will wake up past it like a cold or some other injury. If you could just rest enough, get the right medicine, then you can finally cure yourself of it. But the drugs they offer are just a distraction. The drugs you can find on your own are just diversions. Functional days are a only a momentary lapse, and each smile, laugh, kiss and dance are just kindle for the waking fire of those feelings when they come back ablaze.

  It never ends.

  Not as long as I’m awake, it won’t. Sleeping is the only available solace; whether it’s literal or just a sleep of thought during some moment of frivolity or consuming activity that leaves little room for depression to roost, some drug that dulls it for an instant. These somnambulist spurts are where I find myself trying to live, love and dream. You have to ride the wave while it’s still rolling, but then you have to hit the sand or drown.

  And we both know what comes next.

• 11111011101
  It’s been a year, 2013. I’ve made some upgrades in my life, but it still feels like I’m missing some things. Despite being social, I’ve managed to build a little nook to rest in. It’s getting too comfortable, and I’m not accomplish much aside from survival. The past few months I’ve noticed it’s easier to keep up on mundane things like cooking, dishes, laundry and cleaning if you don’t have anything important in your life. Not that I necessarily know what important thing I’m missing. It could be the lack of scribbles, relationships or just stagnating in my work, but I don’t have that compass direction to find what’s lacking. All I have is the lack and no clue to what fits in the hole.

  There’s been little writing. I got to the point where I hate my usual themes, but I still feel trapped by the unfinished story I started earlier this year. It’s Not for Me is a fictionalized account of the last girl I cared about, and it still stings thinking about our brief encounter. I think I’m finally ready to jut out and try again with women, but it’s almost like I forgot how this past year. I ran into my serious ex and started thinking about her again, but I know that’s a terrible idea. I think we can co-exist without me doing something dumb, and I think that would be beneficial. I need to find out from someone what’s wrong with me, but it’s just more garbage on my mind that gets into the writing and poisons my figurative inkwell with longing.

  I was trying to work on a collaborative project to force myself into some stories that aren’t about girls, but I’m stuck on a chapter that involves three women. I’ve an idea for a heist, but there’s an ex-girlfriend that’s key to the story, and I haven’t been able to get past an outline. I’ve been thinking about doing some things with new media, and an idea that involves Craigslist, but the missed connection and my old ways drag me down. It seems that no matter which direction I go, it won’t be forward until I can put It’s Not for Me to bed and get my final thoughts down on last year’s mess.

  At the same time, I don’t have any optimism for the future. I feel like I’m just going to get myself into another mess and wind up in the same place again. I really need to be in a good state, but I still don’t know what’s missing or what that would look like to start finding it. Prescription drugs might help now that we all have healthcare, but I’d need Xanax just to get to a doctor to try to get some Xanax. There’s really not a system in place to get medical help for your anxieties when getting medical help is one of your anxieties.

  I suppose we’ll just suffer through and see where we get. I’m six years into this Inhuman Condition, and still looking for a way to end it and move on the what’s next. Maybe 2014 will be the year, but probably not.

  Pessimistically yours,
  N

• Untitled
  The things are always on, forever whizzing and humming in my head. There’s no way to escape them, they’re just on and there and they never go away no matter how many of them you turn off. You’d have to pull all the plugs, rip the electrical veins out of the walls, shut off the house’s heart at the fuse box. Even then, they’d still sneak past the edges of your vision. They’d whirl past your porch, creep along the crow’s claws on the outside lines and sweep overhead from Detroit, Chicago or wherever satellites are born. They’ve spun the Web, and it’s leaked from the wires into the air, penetrates the skin, all the 4Gs, HSPAs and CDMAs. You can’t live on this planet anymore without feeling the tower’s touch.

  And it’s not a problem if you like things, you see. If you’re comfortable with their clutching, these connections curl around you like a lover’s compassionate hug and kiss. Think of all the things we have! If you’re a thing-person, you will never be without again. Since you tucked in your mother’s womb, while half of you shot out your father’s cock to be there – the things have been holding you as a third parent. They got their eyes on you early from inside, listened for you in there and greeted you with welcome beeps while you screamed to meet them.

  If you don’t smile at their hiss and blink, however, you have no recourse. You’ve not made this world of things, but it made you. It wants you and covers you to bother you and smother you, big-brother you into being another who-what-where with its glare. And there’s no escape, it’s in the water, the wind, the air. When, why, how did we surrender to the glow, don’t we find a way to grow or have a place left to go beyond the static of this binary snow? Give in and be of the thing, they say. Throw the antique and analog away, forget there were times of organic sway before the coming of this digital day. The new world is here, and thank the wires it’s always on. Plug yourself in, sleep tight. Morning’s coming online soon enough.

• Thirtying
  One

  “Annie tried to kill herself last night. She mixed a fifth of Vodka with fistfuls of aspirin. You know that can actually kill you? The body can’t process it that fast I guess. It just gives up, thins out the blood and goodnight sweet princess. The messed up thing about it is there’s not much they can do once they crunch past the stomach and get into you. They just hook you up to an IV and wait it out. Meanwhile all the poor bastards wanna see you live get to stand around the ER thinking how much they love you, pissed they can’t say how dumb all this is (what you got to live for and the like), and just hope maybe you didn’t take enough to see it all the way through.

  “And Anne, man, she’s just all sorts of fucked up about it. She just keeps apologizing with this frail, sweet voice and you can’t do anything but melt an’ forgive ‘er. She’s just the prettiest thing there, like a pale angel waiting to be taken an’ all the while fightin’ against that last light. She’s got so much she could be doing, an’ I don’t know why she can’t just see that.”

  “Maybe she’s just trying to get attention,” Dave tossed back.

  “Maybe it’s that, but Goddamn it’s a messed up way to visit emergency the first time. She wouldn’t even let me stop for smokes. I was trying to quit, but fuck if I can do it today, you know? I had one yesterday, and she congratulated me on it. Then she pulls this stunt at my apartment, and I’m on the phone with Brad trying to figure out what to do. He says he’ll call her mom, and I should see if I can make her throw up. After someone watches vodka and pills leave you the hard way, least you can fuckin’ do is allow him a cigarette, right?”

  Dave pulls out the lucky strikes, pats one out and lights up. “Right?”

  “So we’re on the way there. I’ve gotten everything I can out of her stomach, and I figure I’ll need a cigarette. I pull up at the gas station, and you know what she does? I say I’ll be right back, and she just laughs at me. It’s like this condescending laugh that says ‘I might be dying and you can’t go without a cigarette for a little while.’ I should have bought them anyway, but I’m so fucked up and freaked out that it works and I shut the door. We drive our way around, and I’m trying like hell to see the street signs. Lived in this town twenty-six fucking years, and I don’t know how to drive to the hospital. So I’m heading that general way looking for those little blue signs I could probably see if it wasn’t four fucking a.m.” Jerry kills the rest of his scotch and lights up a Camel.

  “So we get there, and I help her out of the car and into the hospital. It’s like customs at a foreign airport to me. They don’t have any pamphlets on normal late-night suicide etiquette, so I’m making the biggest ass of myself with the staff. ‘She took a bunch of aspirin with vodka.’ ‘No, I’m not sure how many.’ ‘There may also be some Xanax in there, I don’t know.’ ‘I’m not sure if she did any other drugs’ Which was a fucking lie. I went through that purse with a fine-toothed comb pulling out the bowl, the weed, and anything else that might have caused more trouble than it was worth. ‘The bottle is in her purse.’ ‘Here’s her ID.’ And of course, Anne wants my help getting her in the exam room. She wants me to follow her and keep track of everything. I do my best to take care of her, but when they went to do the hospital gown they asked if I was the boyfriend. I told them the truth, and they showed me out. At that point I didn’t know what the hell to do.”

  “Damn, dude.” Dave filled up both glasses and sat down. “So how did her family take it?”

  “Her mom showed up while I was lingering around the waiting room. She had this worried terror on her face while I gave her the CliffsNotes version. I felt some scorn as I went over the drinking, putting her to bed and having her wake me up. I made sure to mention very clearly that I set her up in my room and took the couch downstairs, but it didn’t make the look go away. I could tell she was convinced Annie came over all sweet and innocent while I tipped the bottle down her throat, made her smoke the drugs and took advantage like young boys are wont to do with impressionable young girls.”

  “Did you call Cam?”

  “Yeah, she’s on the way, but I don’t know how much fun I’m going to be tonight. I still haven’t heard from Anne since the hospital. I don’t even know what the hell I’d say if she called. ‘Glad you’re not dead, Annie. Thanks for fucking me up some more.’ I mean it’s not like I’ve got a shortage of stressful shit going on, you know?”

  “Yeah.”

  The brief lull of being at a loss for words poked in to say hello.

  “And the most fucked up, of all the fucked up things last night, is that before we went to bed, before the pills, I wanted to kiss her. She’s been coming over more and more, and I just can’t help feeling like there might be something there, you know? And maybe I would have thought something was weird because she kept telling me how much I meant to her, how I was her only friend left in town. She just seemed so happy to be around me, and I guess I mistook that pre-suicide sense of gratitude for some kind of a romantic gesture. Leave it to me to be that fucking oblivious. If I’d gone through with it, I probably could have tasted the aspirin mixed up with all the booze. I might just be the dumbest asshole alive, you know?”

  “Dude, you can’t do it now. Whatever you do, don’t stick your dick in crazy. Trust me.”

  “Yeah, I know. I know.”

  They stopped when they heard the car door outside and the telltale clopping of Cameron coming up the steps. Jerry’s stairs were some fiendishly loud cloppers.

  Two

  “I think in a lot of ways, you feel the absence of love more than the actual thing, you know? Like when you’ve got it in your life, you don’t really feel it all the time, but when it’s not there, there’s always this looming lack that hovers over you.”

  Cameron took a sip of her drink, “So you think everyone just takes it for granted?”

  “It’s not just that,” Jerry said. “Sure, some people do, but I’m saying that even when it’s there how often do you really notice feeling loved? Even with family, they say it enough, but I guess I just never feel it that often you know. On the other end, when you don’t have love in your life, you feel it every day.”

  “Every day? Don’t you think that’s an exaggeration?”

  “Maybe not every day I guess. Sometimes you can distract yourself in a routine, get busy with work or just hide in movies and the Internet. But if you’re thinking about your life and a moment of self-reflection hits, it’s over. Then that’s the only thing you can think about until something distracts you again. Sometimes I just have to go to bed because I know the longer I’m awake thinking about it, the more depressed I’m going to be in the long run. It can ruin entire weeks a day at a time. Anything can set it off too. You might see a couple in a movie, hear a song that reminds you of someone, hell, I drunkenly got a lapdance from a short, blonde stripper that looked a little like Katie. You just carry that hollowness around with you waiting for it to go off.”

  “You’re so gloomy about it all, I’m sure there’s someone as pessimistic and literal as you out there. You just need to find her.”

  “Yeah, I just need to find the dating service for depressing downers that happen to see the world clearly for what it is. I’ll get right on that.”

  “I think you just get hung up on things and have a hard time letting them go. It’s really not as hard as you make it out to be.”

  “You don’t think you feel the lack of love more than its presence”

  “I don’t. I think if you’re looking for all the negative things, they have a way of finding you.”

  Jerry stopped for a moment and downed the rest of his scotch. Nodding at the glass, “I’m pretty good at finding them on my own. But think about it, you wear shoes all the time, how often do you think about them?”

  “I think shoes are a little bit different.”

  “Not really though for the point I’m trying to make. You wear shoes every day, but you never think about them. You don’t really notice them on your feet unless you’re putting them on, taking them off or they trip you up, hurt your feet, etc. You might stop and think about them if someone mentions them, but otherwise they go unnoticed as a part of your existence. If you weren’t wearing those shoes, you would know it though. You couldn’t walk down the street without the odd concrete scratches and rocks stabbing into your feet. You would feel the cold, hard ground every time you took a step. In effect, you would feel the lack of shoes far more frequently and much deeper than you would ever feel having shoes. Love is the same way, except the pain is inside.”

And that’s all for tonight kittens.