30 days

Feelings of pride fill me.  Then wondering if I feel more satisfaction or sadness.  Then I try to fall asleep.

Eastern European authors

If you know me you know I am obsessed with fiction.  I fell deeply in love with Milan Kundera's writing as a 19 year old living in Hawaii, over my head in a grad school fiction class.  I hate school, but that class changed my life.  I was introduced to Kafka, Kundera, Borges, Calvino, Dostoevsky, and a host of other writers.  I remember sitting on the beach on the north shore of Oahu reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being and being completely blown away.  I turned straight from the last page to the first page and then went out and got everything he had written at the time and read it all within the next year.  I love that feeling of obsession that comes with reading an entire authors canon.  I devoured Vonnegut in a year, David Foster Wallace in two, and Ursula Le Guinn in half.  I am only 1/3 of the way through Delany's canon but I love living in those universes.  Being that into a novel is like having another friend who really understands you and continuously challenges you.  Recently I've been losing my mind over The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch.  The book was written partially in a concentration camp.  Fuck.  It reads more like poetry than prose, and it delves even deeper into the darkness than Infinite Jest.  A notable line, " emerging from darkness, heading toward darkness, sinking into darkness."  The entire book reeks of death.  White Noise by Delilo also reeks of death, but it's in a very different way.  Delilo has it dripping from the words, while Broch forces you into the darkness, into nothingness, and forces you to realize you came from the darkness, live in the darkness, and heading toward the darkness.  However, there is light, but not in the hope bullshitty kind of way.  The light lies in accepting timelessness, which to me cuts to the heart of anti-civilization ideas.  I run in circles now where anti-civilization can be seen as leftist, although I tend to disagree with that, but the larger point is, I am in a much different place. 

    My core group now is nihilists, anti-social anti-political @'s.  I find my views align with them more than anyone I've ever been friends with.  There is a general misconception that we are fucked up or don't care.  My response:  yes we are fucked up, and yes we care.  However, we refuse to live in a lie.  We refuse to believe or put hope in revolution or organizing or leftism, which is pretty easy not to do because it has a long history of failure.  If there is an answer, or a way out, or a way to change this shitty fucking situation, it definitely lies elsewhere.  Enter nihilism:  a freeing of myself to explore all ideas and become untethered from my past of liberalism and then leftism.  I am free now to think as I please, to play with ideas, to hold nothing sacred.  I am free to accept myself.  Something special is going on, and I refuse not to appreciate it. 

Maybe it coincides with this, but I am handling conflict in a much different way now.  I don't feel as paralyzed by the small dramas with friends and strangers.  I feel that I can deal with things, and when I make mistakes I don't go into cycles of self loathing.  I have continued not to date, and I find myself feeling more autonomous than ever.  It would be hard to date now anyways, since a large part of me is still in love with her, so in some ways it makes it easier to be alone, even though I wish I was cuddling with her or kissing her.  I would like to meet someone new that I like enough to kiss and wanna stay up all night with...but I am happy to have friends I stay up all day and night talking to.  Kissing will come eventually, but sometimes it is hard to feel like I won't always be a little sad if it's not here I am kissing.  Even though I am grieving her loss still, I am enjoying my autonomy and the fact that I am less anxious every day, since I am no longer worried that the person I am trying to be closest to is lying to me and not as interested in the closeness that I was looking for.  It is fucking sad, plain and simple, there is no way around that.  However, I must live.  Death is guaranteed and will come eventually, so now I choose to live.  I may one day have my life taken from me, but now it is mine and I will choose to live.  I will keep learning bright eyes and t swift songs on guitar, I will continue reading ridiculous novelists like Broch, Musil, and Delany, and I will fight to keep the fierce autonomy I currently have.  I will not submit to another person by choice ever again.  Any relationship I enter, I will maintain my autonomy, my respect for myself, and meet as a union of egos, people who meet up out of strength and not weakness.  I will write, I will read, I will create, I will burn, and I will live in the fire, not for the fire. 

Looking for

All I am looking for is a really proficient swimmer who loves the ocean and lakes and rivers and is a nihilist/egoist anarchist who hates civilization/society, and who has/is working through the shit things(read: trauma) that happened to them in their life.  It would also be nice if they appreciated bright eyes, being read to, and had some overlap in their personal literary canon.  Finally, enjoys making out and gives me hugs when I don't expect them.  Other that, I am pretty flexible.

nightmare

I awoke this morning with two full weeks of separation and a nightmare rattling in my head.  Friends knocked on my door as bombs detonated inside my skull.  I dreamed that she had been fucking him the whole last month we were together(a not too unlikely story) and I awoke fucking livid.  The nightmare continued into some amalgam of friends knowing and my rage at being deceived so completely.

Today I spent four full hours at the hospital.  As of this moment, I do not have cancer.  In the four hours, thre and a half of which were spent waiting, I did two things:  read the first part of The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch, and lamented on the nightmarish reality of our past.  How did she lie to me for two years? How did I keep coming back time and time again after catching her in lies, it must have been near 15 times, probably more.  I still cannot conceive of how one human can do that to another human. 

I think that with the two weeks of complete space, some of the feelings have started to fully settle in.  For me the first is anger, which covers up sadness, but still inhabits the first line of defense for me.  I am really fucking angry, and underneath that I am unspeakably sad.  I really mean that, I can't explain or speak to my sadness.  The fact that someone I loved so fucking much did something so hurtful, simply just fucking hurts, on a fundamental level.  I can feel it in my insides and on my skin and deep in my abyssal thought processes, it fucking hurts.  I will never understand how one can do that.  I have never intentionally lied to someone I was close to for more than a few days, and regretted each of those times. Never have I done it over weeks and months and years.  I regret putting myself in that position.  It was naive and fucking stupid to trust her, and I deeply regret doing that(or trying to).  She was well aware that the worst thing she could do to me was lie to me continually and over a period of time, and that is what she did.  She did what she knew would hurt me most, over and over and over and over and over and over, and months of not seeing her do not stop it from hurting so fucking badly

on endings

some things don't end.  In this moment, I know I will love her forever and with a passion that will always terrify me.  We may never ride into the sunset... fuck, maybe we will never even ride again, but I know an ending when I see one and this is no ending.  I know what I feel now and I know what I would feel standing in front of her and this is no fucking ending.  Somewhere, sometime, this story will continue.  I have no idea how or when, or even what that means.  But what I do know is that now I fucking write my story, every fucking day.  I will notch a fifth tally on my bookshelf, and remain in recovery.  I will wake up and surf, and I will continue writing until we stand face to face once more, the reason we are alive. 

on meetings friends and therapists

My therapist is a jewish man in the age range of  my father.  I fucking love this guy. Another time, when sleep feels further, I will write about him.  Tonight's story is shorter.  It is 11:30pm and I just got back from walking to some apartment complex down the street to sneak into their jacuzzi, a common occurrence these days.  More solid conversation and mediation with friends.  Before that I cooked a quick dinner with a friend and before that spoke to another close friend about some of the stuff going on with them for a couple hours.  It's funny how days seem so empty to begin with.  I also neglect to mention, that I went to an SAA meeting in between dinner and the jacuzzi.  I am not sure if that is a fit for me, but something about sex has never been quite right for me and right now I am resolved to taking a break from fucking before I get more of an idea of what is going on there, and also work on some of the attachment issues I have when I fall for someone.  It feels nice to take myself seriously and resolve to take a break from fucking and romantic relationships and focus on the full life I have.  I have many close friends here, and more spread across the globe who I wish to be in more contact with. 

 The whole point of writing this was that I spent a good bulk of the day beating myself up for not going surfing and didn't fucking give myself credit for going to therapy at 8am and spending emotional energy on people I care about.  I also completed a third day of not giving into the easy temptation of looking at her shit.  So, there is that. 

acceptance

Acceptance is usually a matter of fatigue, more than anything else. David Foster Wallace said that and it feels painfully true.  It is one of the saddest truisms that I can think of.  I definitely do not accept thing right now.  I am tired though.  Maybe I'm somewhere in between acceptance and fatigue.  I only know two things
1.  It's been two full days without looking at any of her online/social media shit.
2. When I am ready I will accept things from a place of strength and power, and not out of fatigue.

dark

writing more here feels like a sign of darkness.  I am having those feelings about running away and not telling anyone, just making a break for it to a place where nobody knows me.  This place holds so much pain.  Another day of missing her, is too much to take. 

my boat

I sail through life on rough seas and much conflict
Painfully me as much as can be
And though my ship is small and easily overtaken by waves rain and storms
There are others on ships close by who are happy to help bail

And sometimes buckets are hugs
And sometimes they are brutal truths I don't want to hear
And on the best of times they are the contentedness of two ships
who navigated high seas, nasty currents, and torrential rains to find each other bobbing calmy in the sun

And yes, there is not room for two on this ship
but the ocean is deeper than I can imagine
And I will continue to set sell and ride it out
through the worst storms and the calmest days

ebbs and flows

and today the tide is high and I am drowning. 

not my words

Philip Larkin explains my current state more concisely and precisely than I can right now:

Why did I dream of you last night?
    Now morning is pushing back hair with grey light
  Memories strike home, like slaps in the face;
Raised on elbow, I stare at the pale fog
          beyond the window.

    So many things I had thought forgotten
  Return to my mind with stranger pain:
- Like letters that arrive addressed to someone
Who left the house so many years ago.

New Year

It's a new year.  It's off to an auspicious start.  I feel that I have come full circle.  I started this blog in 2006, 9 years ago.  I started this blog dating a woman my friends called Allie 2, because I had only dated and only fucked one person before her, Ali.  I was with Ali for 5 years, from 17 to 22, from orange county to san francisco to hawaii and back again to so cal.  I loved her, I wanted to marry her, I wanted kids with her, I was a different person then. 

I just looked at my first blog and noticed Allie 2 had commented on it, and I looked at the post she wrote about me.   This was it.

"He told me yesterday, as the sun winked below the horizon, that
"if you weren't leaving, i'd fall for you."
and all I can't really say anything about that, because it seems like a reoccurring theme, though I don't discredit or trivialize it. I could taste seasalt on my lips, on his lips, staining our words with their acrid dryness. And when those calendar days peel away and we're left bereft with this sense of "there should have been more....there should have been more..."
...and maybe in a perfect world that would have happened, maybe it will happen (I don't doubt the moments of perfection in this one, eternally optimistic).

this thought should have been finished, i should have let it bloom in its entirety, but already morning is stealing away. sort of a metaphor, right?"

Those are her words.  I don't doubt the moments of perfection either.  These days I rarely think about Allie 2 and only occasionally think of Aly 1, but they were both people I had tremendous affection for.  I remember bringing Allie 2 snacks and flowers when she was pulling all nighters for school, and I remember the letter she wrote me as I dropped her off at the plane that took her to Chile for a year.  I remember coming home in the middle of a warm hawaiian summer and sitting in my living room and crying for hours.  I missed her, I cared for her, we were over. 

So I come to this journal today, writing to myself.   I still have many of the same problems, character flaws, coping mechanisms that I had back then.  Am i better?  I like to think so.  I haven't burned myself in nearly a year, though I want to at least once every other day, and right now it is all I want. 

Yesterday, I emailed Stephanie.  Today, I woke up late, cooked breakfast, and cried over Stephanie while smoking in front of my warehouse.  I miss Stephanie.  I don't doubt the moments of perfection we had, but we could have only had them with all my shit.  Now is as good a time as any to commit to myself.  It is time to commit to caring and loving myself, because I want to be better to those I love, and that will never happen if I keep hurting myself with my words and actions to others and to myself.  I am not one for lists or resolutions, but this year I will be one who makes a real attempt at loving myself.  I will accept the loss of Steph, I will continue to mourn her, continue to cry, and continue to feel waves of sadness as I am reminded of her. 

In front of me is my best friend's computer.  There is trash from yesterdays licorice used to cope.  There is a lighter and there are pills.  But I will sign out of here, shut down my dating profile, leave the pills and lighter in this room where they belong, and walk out and start again.