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Without Rhyme or Reason

Fri, Feb 23, 2001 01:29PM -0600

Let me just say that the magnitude of my idiocy was revealed to me last Saturday, and I'm just a stark raving nut case at this point.

I just read a passage from Journey to the End of the Night by Celine that completely captures what the hell is wrong with me. If I didn't know any better, I would hope that he would find the cure for this condition by end of the book, but that's about as likely as Morrissey finding happiness.

Very lovingly [she] tried to keep me with her, to dissuade me... "Life can be just as pleasant here.... We won't be unhappy together." And in a sense she was right. "We'll invest our savings... We'll buy a little business... We'll be like other people..." She said that to quiet my scruples. Plans for the future. I agreed with her. I was even rather ashamed of all the trouble she was taking to hold me. I was very fond of her, but I was even fonder of my vice, my mania for running away from everywhere in search of God knows what, driven, I suppose, by stupid pride, by a sense of some sort of superiority.... I crawled back into myself all alone, just delighted to observe that I was even more miserable than before, because I had brought a new kind of distress and something that resembled true feeling into my solitude.

I've been trying unsuccessfully to come up with a good analogy for how I feel. I just come up with stuff that's even less relatable to everyday life. So in the spirit of corporate America, since I can't come up with something good, I'll just release multiple version of something sh-tty. As the people at Firestone, Philip Morris, or Microsoft, might say, more is better.

I seriously feel like I'm dying. I mean, I've said it a lot before, but it's no longer the Cameron Frye, I-can't-think-of-anything-better-to-do kind of dying, where you just sit there feeling miserable and unable to do anything, where lethargy just sits on your chest and you never, ever want to get up. I've been quite familiar with this type for a while.

Yeah, this is definitely different. The urgency of the feeling just appalls me.

I feel like a guy who had gone to the doctor, and the doctor hadn't been able to pinpoint my condition, although he did mention there was a remote chance it was cancer. So I leave, accepting the worst, preparing myself for having to deal with cancer. Months go by, you think you're ready to die slowly, but then the tests finally come out positive, you really do have cancer, and then you realize that you weren't ready to die after all, but it's much, much too late to do anything about it. So you start scrambling frantically for everything around you, trying to remind yourself that you are still alive. Whereas when you weren't sure, all you could think of was dying, now that you are sure, all you want to do is forget. You even start pretending you have a future, and since you're pretending anyway, you might as well imagine the best possible scenario. Because the awesome emptiness of death is just too much for the mind to bear. I don't mean to trivialize the plight of cancer patients in any way. It's really just the first thing that popped into my head.

The other analogy I thought of was a guy who had committed a horrible crime. Timothy McVeigh would be a good example. I bet that after he did it, he knew for a fact that he would fry, and I'm sure he mentally prepared himself for months and months. But when they actually wheel him down the corridor in a gurney, I bet you he'll start struggling, start realizing that deep down inside, all he really wants to do is be alive, even though everything is now against him.

But yeah, this is why I feel like I'm dying. I can't even feel sorry for myself. I'm possessed by this manic energy. But I'm no longer compelled to fix myself. I really feel like it's much too, much too late for that. I just don't want to think of the utter, irrevocable emptiness anymore, that seems to be yawning closer and closer, I don't even dare to imagine what it would be like to fall in. I'm a lot more attached to being alive than I thought I was, but I'm going to die anyway. But that's life, isn't it?

Postscript: I found a perfect song off of The Cure's Disintegration entitled "Untitled" It's pretty short so I might as well reproduce it here, too.

hopelessly drift in the eyes of the ghost again
down on my knees and my hands in the air again
pushing my face in the memory of you again
but i never know if it's real never know how i
wanted to feel never quite said what i wanted
to say to you never quite managed the words to
explain to you never quite knew how to make
them beleivable and now the time has gone
another time undone hopelessly fighting the
devil futility feeling the moster climb deeper
inside of me feeling him gnawing my heart away
hungrily i'll never lose this pain never dream of

I really have to agree with Todd. You miss a lot if you just get the single's collections. I can't believe I claimed to be a Cure fan.

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