loopinfinite

This is getting ridiculous. Here’s what I do all day: I sit on my ass and look at irrelevant shit on the Internet. If the Internet exists, how does anyone get anything done?

Perhaps I should be grateful I was born twenty-one years ago rather than a hundred years from now. A hundred years from now they’ll surgically install a browser into the brain of every baby born. It’ll be the first thing they do – before the circumcision, before even the vaccinations.

I get where this aimless web-surfing comes from. It’s a holding pattern I’m falling into because I don’t want to confront reality. This mindless low-level stimulation gets me from one second to the next. It’s not fun and it’s not an escape, but it’s a way to tune out.

It’s wasteful. It makes me sick. I should just stop avoiding what I have to do. I should try to study.

But even thinking about studying is enough to give me a headache and send phantom twinges of psychosomatic pain down my spine. I don’t want to study. I don’t want to go there. I don’t want to do that. Anything but that.

I only have so much energy. When I study, some of that gets sucked away. When I study, I don’t have the strength to do anything else.

If I saw value in the studying, i would be okay with that. If I liked where this was going, I’d be glad to give up the energy. But I don’t like where this is going. I’m not glad to give up the energy.

What would I rather be doing? Maybe I’d rather “be writing,” but that’s a fucking ridiculous thing to say, isn’t it? What kind of person has the douchetastic hubris to describe himself as a “writer”?

I picture a guy about my age lazing in an armchair in the corner of Starbucks. One of his hands twiddles the orange scarf he’s wearing for no reason. The other grasps a venti iced macchiato. In his lap is some Kerouac shit or something. On his face is a maddening, blood-pressure-spiking smirk.

Ask this guy what he does. He’ll tell you. He is a “writer.”

His life is a slave to his “art.” He only hangs out with people who’d make good characters for his “avant-garde fiction.” He intentionally tries to speak entirely in “insightful” epigrams, which he posts to Twitter when he can.

If this guy’s “literary career” doesn’t work out, he’ll angle for a job at Pitchfork.

If I say I’d rather “be writing,” I’m associating myself with that guy. That guy’s brand of foofiness is something I want nothing to do with.

If it seems like I’m ripping into him, it’s for a good reason. It’s because I think I’ve been that guy. I think I was him in high school. I had “literary pretensions.” I wrote a lot of awful stuff that I thought was very, very good. I believed I was some kind of genius.

I blame myself. I also blame the gifted education programs I was a part of in elementary and middle school.

In retrospect, the concept of “gifted education” seems breathtakingly flawed to me. If you put a bunch of already-bratty kids together in a classroom and tell them they’re “special” and better than everyone else, you’re not encouraging “gifted minds” to “grow.” You’re just cultivating a garden of insufferable dicks.

I have “a high IQ.” This of course means less than nothing, but I’m ashamed to say that for years I thought it was a big deal. Without knowing it, I was an insufferable dick.

In high school, I lived in a bubble, and inside that bubble I thought I was a brilliant, superior dude. If you read any of the stuff I wrote then, or even in early college, you can tell.

For example, I wrote “stories” that I thought were funny, but they were not funny. Their humor, which I’d thought was nuanced and intelligent and clever, came from a place of profound, self-absorbed naivete. The jokes only made sense in my head. On paper, they were nonsense.

I didn’t have many friends, and you could tell that too. The dialogue I wrote was stilted to shit because I had no idea how people really talked.

I think the only person I hate more than myself is myself five or so years ago.

So this is my problem: If “writing” is the only thing I’m good at, then not only am I not even particularly good at the only thing I’m good at, but the only thing I’m good at is a dumb, embarrassing thing. Why couldn’t I have had a more useful or interesting talent?

I have to study and I don’t want to study. I don’t know what I want to do instead. I have vague plans, sketchy designs that amount to nothing, to noise. I’d like “to write something.” I’d try to do that, but I’d be self-conscious about it, and I’d feel ridiculous.

So what’s the way forward for me?

I sit here at my computer and try not to think about that question. I go online, go to Wikipedia and hit the “random page” link, and read whatever the random page is.

I go to Google Reader and read the new shit there. There’s always new shit there, all the time. Even if I mark all the new shit as read, newer shit comes in five seconds later.

None of the feeds I read contain information that’s in any way consequential. I halfheartedly process what I read, and then I forget I ever read it. I am a cow who chews grass with no serious intention of swallowing it.

I open iTunes. I scroll through a boring list of boring artists. I decide I hate music and don’t want to listen to any of this crap. I close iTunes.

I go to Google Reader again. Hey, new shit. I read the new shit. Close Chrome, open iTunes again. Scroll through the same list. Close iTunes again.

Is this what my life’s turned into? Twisting little feedback loops? Why am I doing any of this?

I could shut the computer down. Then what? Get something to eat? Drink something? Take a leak? Take a shit? Take a shower? Brush my teeth? I’ve already done all these things today.

Study? I guess that. But not now, please, not now.

What if I could freeze time and then sleep forever, and then only turn time back on once I’m tired of sleeping forever?

Sleeping – there’s an idea. I’ll go to sleep now and I’ll dream.

In my dream, I’ll be studying, and then my cell phone will ring. I will pick the phone up.

I’ll say: “Hello?”

The guy on the other end will say: “Hello. I’m from the government. We’ve been watching you for a while.”

Me: “Uh, what?”

The guy: “We like you. You’re an okay guy by us. And in light of that, we don’t want you to ever have to get a job. We’d like to give you a stipend of seven million dollars, no strings attached. You can use that money to do whatever the hell you want. Will you accept?”

Me: “I . . . of course I’ll accept!”

The guy: “Are you absolutely sure? There is a catch, you know.”

I’ll ask the guy what the catch is.

The catch will be this: to get the money, I’ll have to drop out of med school.

The guy: “I know it’s probably a tough decision for you, having to drop out, but please think about our offer.”

Me: “I don’t need to think about your offer. I’m dropping out. I’ll take the money.”

The guy: “Oh, okay. Sounds good.”

Then I’ll drop out. I’ll take the money. I’ll be happy, at least until I wake up.