We've Gotta Stay Positive

A friend of mine once said she didn't like Woody Allen's stuff because it felt like he was using the movie as his psychiatrist. I wonder if I'm guilty of the same thing here. As is standard operating procedure when one of my posts don't have a demos tag, it's about intensely personal stuff (read: girls), goes up and down like a roller coaster and then hopefully finds a happy ending that feels natural and not put on.


Yesterday, on the strong urging of a friend of Eleven Names, I went to my college's Counseling Center, to talk about a girl. I have spoken about her before. I spoke about how I feel it's her social group I've inherited or been promoted in and I wonder if she believes me to be enough of an emotional liability to keep tabs on me by well-meaning friends.

We used to date and, well, go to the above link and read it. I'll be here when you get back.

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I told the very nice woman that I probably wouldn't be in her physical presence until commencement, so now was probably a safe time to come up with some coping mechanisms and strategies.I left armed the office with a little pamphlet and the feeling that I've got a little bit of time.

Two hours later I see her taking out money from the campus' ATM right in front of me. She sees me, smiles and says the following:

I'm just a figment of your imagination.

She was only stopping by for a half hour at most on her way back from the north side of the state, needed to be back in her hometown in two hours.

I could only sigh.

I get out of talking to the counseling center about her and she shows up (even for a moment) not two hours later? Seriously. Does she plan it? Because one of the big ideas I tried to explain to the very nice woman listening to me was that she just can has a way of knowing what's going on and showing up with an impeccable sense of timing.

I, very carefully, try to explain that it's not like a spider at the center of a web or like a puppeteer looking down on their pieces, because that's too sinister, but, she shows up again, after I put all my anxieties on being paranoid (and even believing it!). I was getting ready to believe it. She's the Metal Gear Solid 2 of my life, because, after playing that game, for six months afterwards, I would peek around corners, expecting a armed patrol of terrorist gangs. Now, I peer down corridors of conversation and expect to hear the thump thump of her mental mercenaries approaching on the minimap of my mind.

It's an extended metaphor, but the surveillance I worry about is real in my mind. Her communicative dexterity is greater than my distaste for social games and well, I'm sick of feeling like I'm an emotional liability. She has the talent and the desire, occasionally, to do good things, which as I've learned from Eric Burns, is the way to really screw things up.

I'm just a figment of your imagination, she says.

She's right. All of my anxiety (well, most of it) about her is manufactured by me. I'm like America in the 80s, the troops and cities I'm afraid of are all Potemkin in construction. There's nothing to them. My imagination, I think, has a military-industrial complex.

It's what my imagination knows how to do, so I guess I can't technically begurdge it, but I have to move forward. The beat will go on, no matter what I do. Forward motion is hard, especially when I can see that the last four years have taken a toll on me, noticed these ways over the last six days, tops.

You look like shit.
You sound like you're going through a break-up.
You look worse than I feel.

This is what the college does to me. I'm not tired. I'm exhausted. I need to get the hell out of Meadville, on foot if I have to. But, I've done that already. Time for something new. Time for something far more awesome and positive. And that is where the title (stolen from the Hold Steady) comes from.

That title might seem now, like a cruel reminder of just how fucked I am, that the phrase no matter how earnestly meant, might feel sarcastic or disingenuous, but, its what I'm keeping inside my head. No matter how many times I think my life sucks, the only way it's going to get better is if I stay positive.

It is hard more often than not, but the road I've taken is not easy or clear. Reminders are tough. They come and they go and depression sticks around, like a black cloud, forever on the periphery of my horizon. My favorite lyricist, Aaron Bedard, tends to find the light at the end of tunnel, in his band, Bane and I try to draw strength from his words. In that vein, I think, the more I hear about Kurt Vonnegut, the more I'd like his books. He, so I hear, finds the humor and the joy in life that seems to elude a lot of other authors.

And sometimes (but only sometimes) the light is real and it is the end of the tunnel. Even less often, I find it, but for now, I think I'm going to finish the post and move toward that light.

Said Vonnegut's uncle, appropriated for A Man Without A Country: "I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

I am alive. I have ingested coffee and that will keep me going until my group's formal, in which case I ought to sail on based off little more than adrenaline and pure joy for a) having gotten this far, b) being a part of a group that is not Greek that has a large formal and c) being a part of a formal that is silly and may involve lolcats. Lots of lolcats, and if those three things, put together, aren't nice, I don't know what is.

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.

The Zombie Menace

Today I am going to write about the Zombie Menace, and how unprepared our society is for this looming crisis. Now I am not talking about your 1960’s, raised by some mad scientist zombies, I mean your infected with some crazy disease, unstoppable, completely uncontrollable zombies. I really feel that people don’t realize what would happen if a zombie outbreak got out of hand.

To be honest, zombies are also my biggest fear. As I lay in bed at night I find myself mentally checking the room’s defenses. Is the bedroom door locked? Is the front door locked? How long would our food and water last if we had to isolate ourselves? What sort of anti-zombie weapons can we make from what is in the house right now? And then I wonder, would my friends and family survive, would I be able to reach them before the outbreak got too widespread? Even if I did survive would the government declare a state of emergency and napalm the whole area anyway?

This thing is, despite all these fears, and the fact that they regularly keep me up at night, and are the subject of some very frightening reoccurring nightmares, I have an uncontrollable fascination with zombies.) This fascination that lead me to the book The Zombie Survival Guide and the realization just how unprepared the world is for this kind of disaster. The U.S. government refuses to even acknowledge the existence of the undead, including zombies, so how can they have a coherent plan to deal with the outbreak when it happens? And that means it is up to us to protect ourselves.

People often ask me why I am so afraid of zombies, seriously, there are plenty of other things to be afraid of out there in the world, and zombies aren’t even “real”. I mean, really, all they want to do is eat our brains. Well, real is a relative term in my mind. I mean, what are the chances that you are going to be killed by some ax murderer who just happens to walk into your house? And what is the likelihood that you are ever going to be thrown into a pit of poisonous snakes? But what it really all comes down to is the fact that ax murderers and snakes are real things, they can be dealt with, stopped, and killed.

Zombies for me symbolize an every growing, never ending destruction. They are the pinnacle of hedonism: always consuming, never satiated, never stopping. Sure you can kill one, but they have an endless supply which is always replenishing itself. And they are all driven by the uncontrollable desire to eat human flesh.

Of course, this is all conjecture, maybe zombies really don’t exist. Maybe my fear of zombies is just my overactive imagination. Maybe they are simply the personification of humans acting on their most basic urges, and what I am really afraid of is the animalistic nature that exists in everyone, our inner zombie as it were.

Either way, if the outbreak does come me, my shotgun, and my machete are going to be ready to save the world . . . . or at least defend my apartment.