Thu, 19 May 2005

fishbellied
I never learned any of the big lessons that everybody told me drugs would teach me, but I did learn that no matter what I’d be less crazy after eight full hours of sleep. I’ve been working too many hours, trying yet again my kamikaze schooling strategy, catching ten minute naps with my head in my hands at the library, or in my car. Gradually, things which I knew were sociall unacceptable didn’t seem so bad, the lagtime between intention and action razor-thin, the words out before I knew what I meant to say. For a while this was fine, as I didn’t see anyone who would mind, and the occasional nasty glances I got from strangers was just another reason to be angry about everything. I didn’t worry much about how I looked, or how clean my clothes were. I started falling down more often, including a nasty spill down eighteen metal-edged stairs that gave me a nasty gash across my forehead. I was constantly staring at nipples every time I left the house. I hated the sun, and wanted a place to hide, but there was no such place, even after I covered all the windows at the trailer. That’s how it happens. That’s how you end up like that.

If I could finish it, if I could put down the words, everything would be different. There’s this other self that I can almost see, when I am very tired or when I get this chill in my chest, like a reflection in the glass at one’s side, walking beside myself, only that me has finished it, done the work, and has entered this other life. I am not fully changed in this other life, not stripped of my habits or faults, but I am settled in a way that I cannot understand from where I currently am. I do the things I am intended to do, instead of all this scurrying and scavenging, all this biding time. I saw it the longest while I was in Austin, taking the number seven bus downtown, the sunlight caught in the trees, and I closed my eyelids and felt the pulses of light and. I know this is weird. I know that I am not helping myself by saying these things. I saw myself sitting in front of me, and I reached out to touch the back of my head, only I could not reach that far. I was not thinner, and not perfectly loved, and not fixed in the way I cast myself in dreams. When I was a child I realized that much of what I thought constituted cool was based on a kind of exhaustion, all the nervous twitch and jitter spent, everything burned away but that which cannot be destroyed. I saw that on the bus, in my other body, and I tried to ask myself what to do, how to solve this neural trick that marks the here and the there, but I could not make myself speak, and I realized that it was because this other self would not hear me. This sort of thing would not happen to him.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #