I slid a goddamn razor blade across my face for the first time in about three weeks. I had no idea so much fucking hair could grow in such a short period of time.
I think I look even scuzzier now than I did before I shaved. That’s the problem with acne. It means your skin seems dirty even when it isn’t. It means that when you are clean, you don’t look it.
Sometimes people ask me what I “did last night” or what I “plan on doing tonight” or what I’m “gonna do this weekend.” I try to deflect the question but at times that isn’t possible, so I provide an answer. The answer is always a complete lie, some made-up thing.
“What did you do last night?”
“Oh,” I might say, “I watched some TV.” But I don’t even have cable.
“What do you plan on doing tonight?”
“Well,” I might say, “I’m probably gonna go see a movie with some friends.” But I don’t really see movies, and I don’t really have friends.
“What are you gonna do this weekend?”
“Just hang out with some people,” I might say. “Go to a party, get drunk, that kind of thing.”
People know I’m full of shit, I know they know, because I’m so vague. My lies aren’t credible. It’s obvious that I don’t know what I’m talking about.
Nothing about me suggests that I’m the kind of person who goes, or indeed gets invited to, parties.
In the past I’ve gone to parties, where I have gotten drunk. But I couldn’t make myself have a good time. I tried, I really did, but it didn’t work.
The more people I was surrounded by, the lonelier I felt, and the more I drank, the thicker the blackness in my brain got – the ugly, unspeakable feeling that’s (usually) just a background roar when I’m sober.
I can’t describe the feeling but fuck if it’s not always there. It’s not quite anger and it’s not quite sadness but it has characteristics of both. Sometimes it swells, it threatens to erupt. This can happen when I’m surrounded by people at a party, but it can also happen when I’m by myself.
I don’t understand why it seems like I’m always dissatisfied, no matter what I’m doing, no matter where I am. I’m never at peace. There’s always this creature trying to gnaw its way out of my subconscious.
I’m never at ease. At parties I could never relax. People say that’s what alcohol does – that it relaxes you. I don’t think it relaxes me. Maybe it removes my inhibition, but that’s almost a bad thing. It just means the insulation around the naked wires of my discomfort have been stripped away. It makes the problem worse just as much as it helps it.
I can’t communicate with people without feeling like a liar and a fraud.
“What did you do last night?”
Fuck, dude. I can’t tell you the truth. If I did, what would you think?
“Well, basically I sat in front of my computer and refreshed Google Reader for three hours. Then I got in my car and drove around in circles for forty minutes. Then I went back to my apartment and started thinking about doing my laundry but decided to put it off one more day.”
No, it’s better to lie – although it’s not like it’s a conscious choice I make. I don’t lie on purpose; I lie because it comes naturally. Deflection comes naturally.
“What are you gonna do this weekend?”
I can’t tell you. You can’t know what actually goes on in my head. I don’t even know what actually goes on in my head. The short-circuits and infinite loops, the occasional wave of almost hilarious self-pity that comes crashing the fuck over every other thought, flattening them the way a fucking tsunami might flatten a fishing village.
There might not be anyone out there. People sometimes say they have friends or significant others or whatever who “totally get” them, who are “on the same level.”
I’ve never had that kind of relationship with anyone, though. Nobody “totally gets” me. If anything, it seems like people misread me – you know, they mistake social anxiety for aloofness, and so on.
When I meet new people, I split off facets of myself for them to interact with. Mirrors, sort of. People say things I don’t actually agree with and I say, “Yeah, I agree with that.” Because it’s not really me saying that; I’m somewhere else, in a place I can’t escape from.
I think it’s raining out there. I don’t want to go look. I don’t plan on going anywhere tonight so if it’s raining that won’t make a difference to me. I have a headache and I think I might have just taken two Tylenol. I can’t even remember. It happened (or didn’t happen) less than a minute ago, yet I can’t remember.
I don’t know why my apartment is so dark. It’s dark even when I turn on all the lights. I need extension cords and lamps. I guess that would make my headache worse but I can live with that.
I can, at this moment, see my own reflection in my computer screen. I don’t want to look at myself. I don’t have to look at the screen to type. I’ll look at the keyboard, or at the wall.
There’s a lot I should be doing. I should, but won’t, tidy this place up. I still have a headache. I feel like my brain has shrunken, somehow. It doesn’t want to work.
Spent a lot of time doing nothing tonight, which wasn’t really my intention. I don’t know what the problem is here, this fundamental and total lack of energy, the extreme difficulty I have doing anything but sitting back and allowing time to pass.
Taking any kind of real action seems like too much effort and has seemed like too much effort for years now. I don’t know when, if ever, this is supposed to end, or how, if ever, I’m supposed to overcome it. It took a lot to force myself to write this, and what am I saying here anyway?
Right now everything is in alignment. I have no pending work to do and I can afford to just sit here at this computer and type. Right now I have no reason not to write something better than this but somehow I can’t. Everything’s in alignment except the actual inner drive, the conviction, whatever the hell you’re supposed to call it. I don’t know where that comes from.
Most of today I was at the med school, studying shit while also drinking Diet Coke. I had to do the latter to give myself energy for the former.
Because I was drinking so much goddamn Coke, I had to get up every hour or so to take a leak. One bathroom in particular happened to be close to me, so I used that one every time.
It’s a weird bathroom, because it’s so tiny. It’s only got one stall and one toilet. One sink. No urinal. There is also a shower stall, which I’m not sure anyone uses, and which is probably host to at least ten separate species of fungus.
First time I went in there today, I walked to the stall, got all ready to piss, and realized that a pretty significant amount of piss was, in fact, already in the toilet bowl.
Someone, I assumed, had put that piss there, and then had forgotten to flush. Okay, well, whatever. I pissed. Then I flushed. There was no piss in the toilet bowl. I washed my hands. I left.
I came back an hour later, and the toilet had been pissed in again. Was it someone else, who had come in and taken a leak and forgotten to flush? Or was it, maybe, the same person, back a second time? I didn’t know. All I knew was: I had business to do. So I did that business. Then I flushed.
I came back again, and yes, the piss was back. And this kept happening, every time I went in there. Every goddamn time.
It was one person doing this. I knew it had to be. The consistency was the proof. One person was walking in here, dropping his pants, letting out his stream of liquid waste, and then walking out. Without flushing, maybe without even washing his hands either.
He was doing this even though surely he must have noticed that someone – namely, me – was coming in every so often and flushing. Surely he must have noticed. But he still wasn’t flushing. Had he no shame?
Who was this guy? He was nearby, I knew. Several people were in the area, studying and shit. More then a few of them had caffeinated drinks. It could have been any one of them. I couldn’t pin it down.
I thought about writing a passive-aggressive note and taping that shit to the bathroom wall, but I didn’t know what to make the note actually say. “YOU KNOW WHAT’S COOL? FLUSHING THE TOILET” didn’t seem quite right. Neither did “FLUSH, MOTHERFUCKER.” So I didn’t write anything.
I thought about hanging out outside the bathroom, looking all nonchalant, leaning up against the wall, all casual-like. Just waiting for whoever it was to appear. And then what? Well, then there would be a confrontation of some kind.
I would say, “I’ve noticed that all day today a guy’s been coming into this bathroom and pissing in the toilet without flushing. Are you that guy?”
The guy would admit that he was.
Then I’d get all righteous and moralistic and shit. I’d say, “Do you have an apartment? Do you flush the toilet there? Then why don’t you flush this one? Is it because you assume someone else is gonna take care of it? Maybe one of those Mexican janitors, you figure? Why not let them do it, right, because it’s their job? Well, you disgust me, sir. Have you no sense of social responsibility? You’re a disgrace to all humanity. That’s why this is justified.” And I’d shoot the guy.
I just realized the Target logo isn’t just some abstract symbol; it’s supposed to represent an actual target.
This isn’t the first time I’ve realized this. I realize this maybe every six months. Then I forget all about it. Then I realize it again.
Need to sleep.
Oh man. Why the hell am I still up.
A dead cockroach is lying, belly-up, in the middle of this building’s lobby. It’s in the middle of the floor, alone. I don’t know how it died.
I do know that a straight line from the middle of the lobby to the middle of my apartment wouldn’t measure more than about fifty feet. I know, also, that a cockroach, if it were so inclined, would be able to travel fifty feet without a problem.
And I know what they say about cockroaches: for every one you see, there are about five hundred you don’t. They’re living somewhere in the walls.
I know that the walls that enclose my apartment are connected to the walls that enclose the lobby. All the walls here are connected, of course they are. If they weren’t, this building would have no structural integrity.
They’re living here. Just because I can’t see them doesn’t mean they don’t live here. Is there one in my apartment now? I keep looking for it out of the corner of my eye. So far I’ve found nothing. I can’t stop myself from looking.
That roach in the lobby, though – how did it die, anyway? Why does that happen so often – why do I keep coming across inexplicably dead bugs? Does something kill them, or is that how a certain percentage of bugs elect to end their lives?
Dead bugs are everywhere in the parking garage next to the med school. They’re on the elevator – on its glass roof. You can see them if you get inside and make the mistake of looking up.
If you take the stairs, they’re on the landings. Moths and fucking enormous grasshoppers, just kind of lying there. How the fuck does a grasshopper get to the fourth floor of a parking garage?
Are they really there? Am I just imagining it? I killed a lot of grasshoppers when I was a third grader. It was a kind of sick sport my friends and I played. I mean, maybe this is how they’re getting their revenge.
Pretty goddamn tired over here.