For Meadville, From Addiction

The title is from Thoughts of Ionesco's final record, For Detroit, From Addiction, which is a monster of a disc. When I say I doubt you'd like it, I am dead serious. The band, a hardcore punk/free jazz trio, is something of an acquired taste, but if you like it, means you can see twenty or thirty years in the musical future or there is something very wrong with you.

When listening to the record, I get impulses to lick the dirty side of a broken mirror.

When writing something with that title and feeling in my mind, it needs to be something real. It needs to be something incredibly personal. But it also needs to be something wrong. Twisted. To do justice to the title, it needs to lay me bare. It's not enough to have my heart on my sleeve. It needs to open up my chest cavity and show you how my heart beats and how the emotional drugs I take to stave off my fears, anxieties and demons affect that pulsing, throbbing organ and coalesce with my bloodstream.

I want you to see a tourniquet. I want to you to feel the back of my throat, rubbed raw by screaming these mad dogs of glory at a multi-hundred thousand dollar baseball field in six inches of snow in the dead of 12:45 a.m. Monday because I can't won't call up a girl and tell her how I feel. I want you to see the vomit in black and white as I did on the way back to my apartment.

I want you to taste the disdain and love in my mouth when I sit at the group table in the Campus Center listening to people I don't think understand what they're talking about talk about politics. I love these kids, but I think they're incorrect.

God, I'm an asshole when I haven't eaten.

But now that I've eaten, I feel better.

It's 3 a.m. Wednesday and I'm not sure what to write. My emotional state doesn't so much cycle out of control as spasm and I roll with it. 4 a.m. now. Read about comic books on wikipedia. I can't do homework like this and I have a 6 page paper on medical ethics, as well as an oral presentation tomorrow. February is cruel, as always. (It is a month with long, barbed knives.) I can do it (it being vaguely described as homework or survive, but for the purposes of this sentence, it's homework), but the motivation does not exist to push it through. And in all this, I like a girl, but I am intimately aware that I have little to offer her, currently.

Let us review my current mental state: Neurotic, emotionally unstable, insecure. Oh, I feel like a winner. Throw in the fact that I am beginning to distrust, hugely, one of my best friends over the last three years ("What am I to you?" ringing in my head and "I do not consent" written all over my left arm, with bloody underlines) and I'm about ready to call in sick for a week just to get my brain back in order. But, if I know anything it's that I don't really work as a lone knower, so meditating on my problems only goes so far.

Hello, readers. I promise I am not crazy. I am brilliant, so I hear. But, I cannot be trusted. I am in front of you, currently, at my most depressed, fearful and dark. Literally, there are not lights on in my room except for the computer screen right now. Even Zach has long since gone offline, meaning that he's either playing videogames or sleeping. I should get on that second part.

I am looking for physical contact in the wrong places and I am coming dangerously close to pushing away a good friend in my intense desire for a hug from a girl who is single. This has lead me to huge, huge emotional trouble in the past. Speaking of which.

It is now Thursday evening/Friday morning. Putting this on the internet makes me anxious, as does just about everything else in my life. I am scared. This fear is capitalized on by the reminders of my own failures and just how brittle I am. I have been taken advantage of by people I have trusted emotionally to the point where it just seems to be a sad fact of my romantic life. I will stand up for the rights of the less fashionable populations in college but I wouldn't stand up for myself until late 2008 in a romantic relationship. Twenty one years, I've been letting things happen to me.

Last Saturday, I finally did something that didn't feel like I was being used.

Let me start at the climax.

I kissed a boy and meant it. It had nothing, repeat, nothing to do with making girls around either of us excited. I did it in secret. I put my hands on his chest and waist and held him close to me while we kissed. It felt like finally acknowledging and claiming the feelings that had been festering inside me for a good decade.

Thoughts I had nearly decade ago riding along, going east, looking out the window of my car, were welcomed back with open arms. I was scared then. I probably thought about it for that entire weekend. Now, it just is.

It was a relief and a rush of positive reinforcement all at the same time. I wanted to inaugurate these feelings. The group that I'm a part of and spoke about on Valentines Day, makes a lot of homosexual innuendo but is, by and large, very straight. Going beyond that comfort level is a stretch. It's scary, and this is an accepting group. I used to date a girl from that group. She used to mention, often, loudly, about how "if another one of her ex-boyfriends goes gay, she's giving up". I am very cognizant of being "another" ex-boyfriend of a girl that's deviated from being straight, but in those series of kisses, those thoughts were banished from my head.

Hours later, I would walk down an adjacent hallway and begin to be scared about being banished to hell for what I did, even though everyone's clothes stayed on, but in those moments between kissing a boy and walking back into Left 4 Dead or Elysium, I felt as though something, finally, had been lifted from my shoulders and I could begin to relax in my own skin.

These feelings are mine. These feelings are native to me. I do not have to worry about whether these thoughts and emotions are drummed up by a bunch of people for whom I am another mental or sexual conquest, being discarded and picked up again for my emotional utility or for my big head and soft body. My trust is like everyone else's, hard to gain and very easily lost. Strangely, I have a lot of faith in people, but I think that is a product of my inborn cynicism. (My faith in God is more of joke, in which His existence or mine is the grim punchline.)

After acknowledging my own feelings, what's left? I've kissed a boy. How hard can calling a girl be? I am more confident in all this, but I am still frightened. Presuming I can even get her to talk with me late at night in person, what happens when or if she finds this? What if anything, really. I'm left with the four sentences below, and trying to deconstruct and interpret them in something that resembles an answer.

I am going to hell.
I am straight up crazy and also brilliant.
I am scared.
I am all of this and more.




Let me end where I was Thursday night/Friday morning.

I am still in my room. The lights are on, and I am talking to the girl I want to call. It is about Latin American history and the revolutions therein. I am making her laugh (when in doubt, say the CIA did it) and that is enough for tonight. My copies of Baldur's Gate 2 and Neverwinter Nights have arrived today and I might install them before I go to bed tonight.

Saturday:
I still have not installed those games. Perhaps I will tonight between a homemade Indian dinner and videogames. In terms of odd things to end on, after feeling like I was going to vomit in the bathroom stall yesterday, a group of drunk kids came in and just partied down and I...just listened and laughed. What else could be done? We talked and laughed, at once separated by a barrier, but united in the acknowledgment that they were in fact, drunk.

After that, I no longer needed to vomit. It's those moments that keep me going. The social absurdities which remind me, sometimes, I can only laugh and recognize how strangely invigorating the humor is. I could use a little more of it.