chapter four.

sometimes i have the feeling i'm letting life pass me by, looking at it and commenting on it rather than living it. i mean, i can imagine there are more fulfilling ways of spending one's time than what i do. what i do... not much. i sleep, eat, fart, watch tv and movies, drink too much, take in too many drugs, and i write and i sing nonsense and i dance alone and i break things and i fight and i yell and i do things for no reason, or rather for a reason: the reason is there is no reason, if you get my meaning. sometimes i wonder what more there is or could be, and the answers i find around me make me want to vomit. work? giving my life meaning through work? give me a break. if i can work (see, pun pun) around having to work, i will. giving most of my life to some jerk boss who thinks he can replace me at any given point of the day? why? no really, why would i do that to myself? having to behave, to be polite to assholes, to be productive, to punch in... that is so not me. and finding another way of life, another way to define oneself? that was the ideal, and i must admit it sort of floundered. went crash in a big heap of car parts. i'm having difficulty thinking outside the box that made me. and being my own boss never really worked. if i'm at home, why would i work forsome jackass customer when i can scratch my ass and drink another beer. i'm wasting away, i guess. that's what adults of my parents' generation would say about me. but there's a basic hope that they never instilled in us, in me anyway, or that died on its own. either way, the problem is i don't believe. i don't believe anything will get better, i don't believe i'll manage to have a pension when i'm old, i don't believe what politicians, preachers, bosses or hoboes tell me. hell, i don't believe anything i read or hear, and i don't often believe what i say. that leaves me a little paranoid, sure. don't mean they're not after me, right? that leaves me alone too. well, there is the boyfriend, who drops by whenever convenient for both of us, which isn't very often and that's okay - we're not the clingy type, and we have so very little in common except an undying attraction for the other's skin. other than him, i don't see that many people. well, i see just as well as you - i see people in stores and on the street and shit, but i don't invite none of those fuckers home, and i certainly don't want to know more about them than i can tell from one look. if you haven't noticed, i'm not a people person. never was.

i wasn't always that "bad". i'm probably not, even now. i just like to sound tougher and meaner than i really am. why not. words are there to play with and to make fun of. words there are to terrify and to break. words for sorrow, words for pain, and words for blue skies through the tears. yeah my intentions are few and vague and my sources many and cheesy. tough luck.

i spent my teenage years trapped in a private prison. school they called it, but i felt trapped. oh it wasn't the learning part that was hard, no - i can be a spunge when i decide to be, and when the teacher appeals to me somehow. again my problem was with people. surrounded by these rich kids who had seen it all and thought they knew it all and who knew, for the most part, where they would be ten, twenty years down the line, because daddy's footsteps are so easy to follow, because the business needed new blood, because the doors just opened before their feet. contacts. plugs. well good for them. but i felt like i was human and they were something other, or else they were human and i was not. i still haven't figured that one out.

i shouldn't complain about my teen years. thought they were bleak and seemed to last forever. that school is where i toughened up, became able to self-sustain and self-assess. i spent years in my head - more years in my head. where else was i supposed to be? out there, in the physical world, my clothes didn't fit the aura of money emanating from the walls and the designer school bags, my look was outdated or too wild, my opinions undervalued because coming from a nerd, my efforts invisible. i suffered from not fitting in, as do most kids in most school, i guess, or so we are told. i developed weird hang ups, weird theories that, it turned out, didn't pan out in the "real" or after school life. like putting all those popular people on a pedestal, thinking of them as somehow genuinely superior. it took me years to understand that i wasn't worth any less, isn't that ridiculous? i guess it only goes to show how damaged i ended up being after years of banging my head on grey peeling walls. i thought i could never connect with the überbeings - why would they care about little old uninteresting me when they already have all these wonderful superpowered friends? years to figure out that deep down, everybody is lonely and in need, and that simply being there and offering friendship was usually enough to enter the circle of the chosen ones. not that this is always a good thing to do, as i learned later, again and again.

there were good times, though, and i probably don't think of these quite often enough. at some point i did integrate a group of friends who, it turns out, were all misfits of sorts, and so we got along well together, as well as teenagers with the proverbial raging hormones could in such a situation. and i had fun. i had fun going to school while high on acid - best economics classes ever, if you catch my drift. and i had fun bringing booze to school for my lunch drink. and i had fun squeeking at the top of my voice, something that could have sounded very much like twinkle twinkle little star, only sung by fingernails on a blackboard. a blackboard. in schools nowadays they have white dry erase boards, not the blackboard and chalk of my youth. no more cleaning the board after class, no more coughing in the chalk dust in the corner. it doesn't matter. change is good, and all that. but it's another little sign that i'm entering an older generational thing, that soon i'll be closer to people my parents' age than to kids. i don't know why that bums me out. i've never felt close to kids, even when i was one. and teenagers have scared me for as long as i can remember, and they did when i was one of them and they still do now. well not one teen sitting on the curb, but six or seven of them just hanging out on the sidewalk where i need to pass, sure, i get scared, i feel a twinge in the base of my spine, and my fight or flight response comes right under the surface, ready to issue a red alert battle cry that would shatter their ear drums and bring letters in my mailbox from all those little brats' parents' lawyers. can you sue somebody for an innate reaction of scaring the monster?

it's hard to say who the monster is and why, though. hard to make somebody understand and see your own, just like it's hard to accept somebody else's monster. to you it may be a cute pet, but to them it is evil and powerful. or both perhaps. monsters fascinate me, but i keep that passion on a tight leash. it's too easy for me to get hurt, orbitting around maniacs of various sorts. i do try to protect myself against pain - i can't imagine how much of it i would feel if i didn't protect myself. but i'm no rock, i'm no island, as the song doesn't go. i just choose who has the right and the opportunity to hurt me, and then i reward them when they don't. three strikes, you're out.

i over analyze everything. every fucking little thing. i calculate how much pain you have made me feel, why, and what excuses or exonerating circumstances you could in all fairness use. then i give you another chance, or not. if you could open my skull you'd find huge databases full of eccentric formulas, calculating everything from what's left in the food cupboard to where i left what at any given time, from the smallest gift i've ever been given by anyone to the ever morphing pros and cons to life, the universe and everything. and maybe it's all that data gathering, organising, linking, that leaves me feeling inadequate at most times. because try as i might, i'm not a computer, i'm not a thinking filing machine, not even a tape recorder. and i don't know exactly what the motivation is behind all the data gathering collecting organizing improving sorting. i guess that's how religious people feel: they can't explain why they do what they do and believe what they believe, other than there is something at their core that tells them this is the way for them, and they have little choice in following or not - it is their nature to.

i miss religion sometimes, as one can only miss what he or she has never had. i envy people who have faith. well, sometimes. i envy their ready-made answers where i find none, i envy the rituals they have that make thinking superfluous and yet somehow manage to lessen the hurt. i find religion empty, sure - just a bunch of lyrics and texts pasted together for the sunday gathering, with nobody listening or caring about anything but being there, usually to be seen more than to see. that's unfair - there really are people who believe, and act accordingly. just very few. and they are the ones i envy. while at the same time i have no idea how they manage to suspend their disbelief that much. i just wish for the comforting words, the smell of incense and the sense of community. it's all fake (well, not the incense...), but somehow if you decide to believe, it all makes sense, and you can be comforted and healed and feel the heat from your peers. it's taking that first step though, saying "i know this can only be bullshit but it'll do me good and i will obey and follow and believe", that i'm just unable to do. i wouldn't have made a good soldier, not even in god's army.

i usually get pissed when i open the newspaper. and today again. it drives me nuts when the results of a big freaking scientific study come out, only to tell us what we already know, what common sense has told us for generations after generations. today, for example, in one news source, i learned that cats can suffer from stress. some big european university figured that out. not just that, but sources of feline stress include the arrival of a new family member or tension with another feline or a move. well, i'll be. obviously the researcher who had proposed to study this has never had a cat. i could have told you what he'd find before the first drop of ink was wasted on that proposal! i could even have told you what signs to look for in a stressed cat, and how to help the cat feel better. doesn't take a research assistant to figure it all out. or a research grant. just takes a bit of common sense, something most people seem required to check out before entering academia - or is it before entering any academic institution? sometimes i wonder. get a cat, love the cat, live with the cat, and you'll figure out all that there is to know about their psychology. well, if you listen and pay attention. which obviously most people, pet owners or not, do not devote much time or attention to. devotion is underrated in the world i live in.

second story of the day: scientists, experts in their fields, have realized that if you have a healthy relationship at home, it'll help you deal with stress at work! and that if you are stressed at work, you should get more support at home! well! if only anybody had thought of that before, imagine the cost savings on our health care system! imagine all the heart attacks and ulcers that could have been avoided! and all that time it seemed to us all more logical to opt for stress at home *and* stress at work! see - it's things like these that make me vow never to buy a newspaper again. yet i will, of course. once in a while. once every time i forget why i vowed not to buy another one. once every time i forget how frustrated and upset all those printed words can make me. i over analyze that too, of course. news and my reaction to them. and over analyzing emotions can get tricky. or plain stupid.

in other news, i've always been fascinated by this. one witch had an itch and one witch had a twitch. which witch had the itch and which witch had the twitch? i think it's a valid question. and it makes children's eyes grow big and confused, and i like confusing children.

some days are like a marathon and other are like the 100 meters. yet they last supposedly the same time, and i'm always exhausted at the end. well, when i give days an end. sometimes i can stay up and awake and just stare out the window. other nights i'll spend cleaning the entire appartment. others still i spend playing a computer game while reading a book and watching infomercials on television. but for that i need to be in the mood. my sleep pattern is a little on the fucked up side, but i won't apologize for that. i'm at war with my body, who would rather have a regular schedule and a healthy life style. screw that. i eat what i want whenever and sleep when there's nothing else to do. sleep is a release, a relief, but it's getting there that is difficult. i create my own insomnia by going over the day, and if that's not enough, the week or the month, to find all the things i did wrong, or imperfectly, to mull them over, twist them, turn them, look at them upside down and inside out. it's my personal torture, and i've become addicted to it. but it prevents me from sleeping, creating a dread and a sweaty unbearable feeling of uselessness. what goal this can fulfill, which need of mine this takes care of, i do not know. it is a tradition that has lasted as long as i have on this earth (and can consciously - how i hate that word - recall). it's a nasty relationship, because i loathe the habit but i refuse to stop. an addiction, i said, and that's what it is. i once seriously wished to train my body to sleep as little as possible - not three or four hours a day, but rather seven or eight a week, in one shot, so that i could restrict the insomnia and the torture causing it to once a week. like a sleep diet. i had no success there - my body refused to obey and revolted against this crime against nature, but not before giving me quite a few pleasantly surreal hallucinations and inspirations.