You wanted an update, I needed to vent

I’ve been sitting here for a whiling, pondering what I should put down on this. I haven’t updated in an extremely long time, for a myriad of reasons, but primarily just because I haven’t felt inspired to. I don’t feel particularly inspired now, to be truthful, but I have a inkling that necessity will bridge that gap which is normally filled by inspiration. Another issue is the fact I don’t know what to write. I have a very unstable life and so much has happened and I don’t know how much to bother explaining or how much detail to go into.
I’ve decided, after a bit of thinking, that those most likely to read this, i.e. nobody, myself, my girlfriend, and maybe one or two close friends, know the current state of my life and don’t need a detailed refresher. And as for who else is likely to read this, namely random strangers who stumble across it, probably don’t care enough to read pages of minutiae detailing how I arrived where I’m at.
As such, here’s the basics: I’m unemployed, living by bouncing from friend to friend and living on my air mattress, my car is down for a count for a long while and is back in my father’s yard. My credit score, lack of a finished college education and the economy as a whole have all made it extremely difficult for me to find a job. No matter how many applications I submit, there seems to always be someone better suited for the job than me and the employer either tells me such (which I appreciate) or just never contacts me (which I resent).
So, I am currently living in the dining room of my very gracious friend Eric, who has been very helpful and understanding during this time. He’s helped me look for work and as such knows about the fact that, despite my efforts, I have the hardest time being hired. I often wonder if I’m just not a desireable person overall or if perhaps I’m merely putting the wrong things down on my applications. I don’t have the greatest work history due to the fact I move around a lot, so I can understand that it may look as though I can’t commit to a job, but applications give so very little room to explain such things that I feel slighted by how little of myself is expressed by an application. I should probably just make a resume but that seems a bit futile when I have no access to a printer.
The current plan is that, one Kayla visits and heads back home, I pack up my stuff, have my friend Ben drive me to Virginia, where I shall rendevous with a friend, Kyle, whom I met over Xbox Live and who has offered me a place to stay with him and his family in Pennsylvannia. He assures me that they can find me a job up there and that, so long as I do my part around the house and cook dinner when the parents are unable to do so, I can keep my paychecks and save them up for when Kayla and I are hopefully able to get our own place next summer.
Kayla shall be visiting in a little under two weeks, so hopefully in a little over three weeks, I should be leaving the godforsaken Carolinas for the rest of my life.
It’s not until recently that I realized some things about myself. One is that I really do hate the South. I think the only think I do not hate about the South is the food. Everything else…the ignorance, the misguided priorities, the omnidirectional racism, the hypocrisy, the accents, the heat, the selection of overly loud cultures…it all just grates on me and puts me in a bad mood when I have to be engulfed in it. This may be the reason why I am in such a touchy, aggressive mood so often down here, particularly in Florence, which is a place of seeming magetism for the very stereotypical culture drones that piss me off the most. All the ghetto bangers, Good Ol’ Boys, scene kids, and overly competitive pseudo intellectuals just seem to congregate in Florence and my only recourse to avoid them is to stay inside, at which point I get cabin fever and my restlessness puts me in the same overly edgy mood I was trying to avoid in the first place. I can’t even escape into music or movies properly because Eric, living in a town home, has thin walls and easily offended neighbors, limiting the volume at which I can listen to and, by virtue of therapy, sing along with my music.
I do feel incredible lucky that the one aspect of my life that always calms me down and never fails to put a smile on my face is talking to Kayla. True, my efforts to make contact with her every day, whether dealing with the library’s stuffy atmosphere or traipsing around the property here grasping for some vestige of a neighbor’s wireless signal for Eric’s laptop to latch onto, cause more frustration than anything else sometimes, but it’s worth it to talk to her. It wasn’t so bad when I had my phone, but ever since Virgin Mobile decided they couldn’t stop sniffing their shit-covered thumbs long enough to transfer my service correctly I haven’t been able to call her and hear her voice, so the internet is my only recourse for my best therapy. I guess to some extent it’s a testament of how much she means to me and how much I appreciate the love we share. She never fails to bring a smile to my face, no matter how short our chance to talk.
Lately I’ve noticed that my social anxiety has gotten worse. Maybe it’s having spent so much time alone and away from a campus atmosphere, but I only seem to level out when I either alone or with only one other person. It reached a new high at the apartment, where, apparently, I lost nearly 2 weeks of my life and I don’t remember it. I thought I’d only been in Florence for 2 weeks, but Eric told me I’d been here for a month by that point and I honestly could not remember being here that long. He says I’d been at the apartment nearly the entire time and I don’t remember that. It frightens me that something like that could happen and I not remember it. I hate not being in control of my actions.
Normally in a crowd, I get nervous and either withdraw into myself or become manic and try and try to befriend everyone to an embarassing extent, which is why I generally stay alone. Except, whether cruelly or ironically I can’t decide, I get lonely very easily. It’s a frustrating catch-22 that I strive for social interaction, and yet that very social interaction stresses me so much that I am not myself. I really do feel as if I’m a completely different person sometimes when I’m in a group of people. But what happened at the apartment…it’s different. It’s as if I’d withdrawn into that environment to the point of excluding the part of myself that has become as a result of living alone for most of my life. Something similar happened during the time I was dating Michelle, but even then I was able to see myself from the outside and understand I was acting irrationally, even if I felt seemingly helpless to stop it. But this time…I don’t remember it at all. I remember bits and pieces, but Eric says I was over there for a week straight at one point and I just have no recollection being there for that long.
It’s possible that the shift in sleep schedules just caused a memory lapse along with the stress of meeting so many new people. That’s what Eric thinks and I really hope he’s right. It really scares me to think that there’s something deeper, more permanent at work. My mind is the only thing I can always call mine and that cannot be taken away from me; when I have nothing else, I will always at least have the sanctity of my mind. But if my mind is not reliable and is no longer the wall I have come to see it as…what do I have left when the world has taken so much else away from me? Even now, I’m not nearly as articulate and eloquent as I normally am when writing to nobody in particular. My heart is beating erratically and my thoughts flicker like film strips spliced in haste by a haggard blind man. I find it hard to concentrate when I think back on how embarrassed I am at myself for allowing a fugue state to overcome the part of myself that I consider nigh-unbreakable. My mind bends and flexes and strains with the effort of life, but never has it broken. But my time in Florence has shown me that the first stress fractures are beginning to come out of the shadows. How much more can my mind bend before it breaks? And if it ever does, can the pieces be reassembled into a still cohesive whole or will the self I know today forever cease to be, merely to be replaced by a cracked and cratered shell of what once was and what once could have been.
There are times when I can envision something so completely that it overshadows the physical world that I am looking at. I guess you could call it my over-vivid imagination, but sometimes I see scenarios, hypotheticals that could be real but aren’t. I see them as if they were true as day unfolding right in front of me. A hypothetical involving me hitchhiking the side of the road on a cloudy day, poised with my thumb up beside some massive 8-lane roadway, a pack upon my shoulders and cars wizzing by. A new scenario where I’m sitting in the living room of the apartment, thanking everyone there for being so nice to me and explaining my oddities and eccentricies to them so that they might better understand me. Seeing my father get a phone call from the police as they tell him I’ve been in a traffic accident. Were I asleep, these would merely be cast aside as dreams.
But I am not asleep. I am most often walking or observing a group of people I know while they’re talking. Often times, in situations where I’m already around people, the ‘dream’ is very similar to what I’m actually seeing, but instead the topic is something different and the conversation takes a different set of turns. It very well could be real, if only for the fact that I can look through this daydream and see the real world as easily as one shifts their depth of focus to look through painted glass. It’s as though a translucent movie screen is pulled over my eyes and across that screen plays things that could happen or might happen or I wish could have happened and if I’m not careful, I’ll forget that what I’m seeing isn’t real, but merely an imagined alternate reality acting as an accessory to the real one in which I live.
Maybe I’m making this out as more than it is. Maybe it seems more severe than it is because I’m the one experiencing it and I don’t understand it. It’s not extremely common; it only occurs when I extremely stressed about a specific topic or subject of my life. Maybe, like my nervousness in a crowd, it’s merely a new coping mechanism. It’s a small price to pay for overall stability in my daily lives. I guess a 5-minute break from reality is better than a complete and total mental breakdown, but I still don’t like the uncertainty that comes with it. I like to aware of my surroundings and in complete control of my actions and far too often I don’t feel like I am either of those things.
Of course, that seems to be the overall theme of my life at the moment: no control. I’m having to rely on the whims of the world and the convictions of those around me to help me through this. I hate depending on others for anything and now I’m stuck unable to take any other recourse. It’s maddening and humiliating. I’m strong, I’m smart, I’m perceptive, physically fit and mentally acute and yet I’m living in a goddamned dining room, walking to the library to use the internet and picking up loose change out of the gutter at every chance so that I can eat something other than ramen or rice. Maybe I’m supposed to get something out of this like humility or grace or a smaller waistline but lately the thing I’ve been gaining the most is the seething, writhing, barely contained rage at the world around me and the circumstances that put me here. I feel as though I could snap at any moment and break down a brick wall with all this resentment. I have to think of the possibilities of the future if I can only make it through this in order to calm my nerves. Eric has no idea how difficult it was for my not to hit Charles when I asked to talk to him and he blew me off. It’s not small thing for me to confide in a male and to be blown off when I open myself up to that kind of vulnerability…it’s an insult I do not lightly forgive…or forget. Maybe it’s merely bad luck on our parts that I am having all this thrown at me at once and I guess it has taught me better control over my anger than I ever previously had, but luck, by virtue of being luck, should not be consistent and if there’s one thing in my life that has been consistent, it has been bad luck.
At least I finally feel the inspiration to draw and write poetry and songs again. Ever since I’ve left Winthrop, my passion to create has been a withered, dead and dusty thing and finally, finally when nothing else in the world is thriving, my passion to release and create blooms forth, red and reeking with the rage of a slave to bad luck and a world that perpetuates darkly skewed chaos.
…I miss Kayla.
It always comes back to that. No matter how bad things seem to be or how bleak the outlook of my future appears to be, all I have to do is think of Kayla and I get this odd surge of confidence that if I can only be patient and survive, things will work out so long as she’s by my side; or, since she’s taller than me, I’m by her side. For some reason, she seems to be the only person capable to counteracting my bad luck because when I’m with her, nothing ever goes horribly wrong. The little things that do go wrong may seem severe to some, but in comparison to the disasters I’ve grown accustomed to, they’re all roses to me. Two weeks…


…also…I want to start a band.



“Distrust to Relent” (By myself)

Let’s not worsen these inward wounds
Bleeding, blacked out, emotions choking
Back the epitaphs of our bonded tombs.
You claim ‘never intending, always not knowing’,
The pain released by all your smiles, eyes untrue.

Fickle loyalties dancing back and forth
Movements graceful in their treachery.
Betrayal never known to taste more
Rich in tears falling so heavily.

Relent before we make you repent.
Relent before we make you repent.
Relent as we see you repent.
Repent. Repent. Repent.

Rediscover the beauty you destroyed in haste
Hold her hands and gasp inward
When bones break and you finally get a taste
Of a broken bond of trust delivered
In a loved one’s smiling crushing dying embrace.

Kneeling and crying, asking forgiveness
Your words still drip and dangle feeling distrustful
Saying anything in order to end this
All you know is winking greedy, you wake up lustful.
Your manipulations persistent, endless.

Relent before we make you repent.
Relent before we make you repent.
Relent as we see you repent.
Repent. Repent. Repent. Re-

Pent up aggressions seething and writhing
The pack turns inward holding you without dispute
Accountable for pains born from sanguine lying.
Weaken bonds break and friends turn against you
Ripping and tearing, their words snapping and biting.

Sitting there wounded, staring disbelieving
As your tools twist, and turn and easily trample
That which you thought incapable of leaving.
Head held in your hands, an unstable example
Of the chaos twisted hands wind up often wreaking.

Relent before we make you repent.
Relent as we see you re-

Pent up aggressions seething and writhing,
Sitting wounded, staring with resentment
Your mouth locked, discontinued guising,
Instead of repented you are forced relented.

Repent while we make you relent.
Repent as we make you relent.
Relent. Repent. Repent. Repent.

Repent.