10:02 p.m. - 2004-03-26
flow of traffic
I haven’t decided what I want to do with this journal. My past journals consist of an innumerable collection of spiral notebooks accounting my anxiety, caloric intakes, heart palpitations, and sleep times. All of these were accounted with the exactness and the emotional vacancy of a shoebox full of receipts, kept for some distant appraisal of assets that is never actualized. I have a difficult time writing in journals, either public or private, haphazardly constructed or written in with a specific impetus. When I tried to write something personal in a public forum, the whole writing process was that of a painful gestation; inclusive to an extraction of emotion, followed by a reinsertion of a refined and processed emotional product that I felt comfortable sharing. I felt it necessary to obfuscate my life so that, not only would my audience have only the vaguest idea of who I am, but it was a means of convincing myself of the picaresque and magical quality my life had. These qualities were only fully realized when written on paper, they were never enacted in my real life.
Unfortunately, I have years of records of my life that do not actually resemble my life.
The proclivities of writing strictly about my life, in an objective and determined way, is that I don’t have one. My life has always been an accessory to a pursuant, whether it be an obsession, an addiction, academia, or a piece of writing. I live in abject conditions; I have never had a real, meaningful, or lasting interpersonal relationship with a person. I have never experienced romantic love, and most importantly, I’ve only experienced emotions outside of myself by being a third party to someone else’s trauma. I have never been entangled or enthralled in a romantic situation in which the emotions of another person were so potent, so penetrable that they permeated the environment of my own heart or brain. Essentially, in the story of my life, I am not a three dimensional character, but simply a cog in a life machine.
My life is not enclosed in the conjunction of circumstances I’ve been in, the people I’ve met, and the emotions I’ve felt. They are in the conjunction of circumstances, the people I’ve met, and the emotions I’ve felt through a separate, unempirical world, enclosed in the cardboard shelters of mead notebooks. I portray the things that I cannot live.
I suffer from debilitating anxiety, impenetrable obsessions and compulsions, and a holistic neurosis that seems to be intrinsic to my personality. This makes me an isolate, this makes me crazy, and this makes me apart. I am terrified that I am so profoundly alone that I will never be able to integrate anyone into my life ever again. This is completely probable. I react to this fear by isolating myself further, and elaborating my efforts of creating a life by doing so outside of myself. I live inside of something maintainable, stultified by a page and my discretion.
The last four years of my life have revolved around myself, the planetary orbiters of which being Self Deprivation, Intense Boredom, Loneliness, Addiction, Self -Hatred, and Hopelessness. Each journal is a vestige of each planet:
October, 2003
Went to the gas station and watched digital cable at home. At 2:00 am, while listening to the objective and particular voices of the BBC, I stopped at a red light. Traffic flowed. I shut my eyes and, in a counteractive movement, thought about opening my foot, putting pressure on the gas, letting myself go. Roll into the open flow of traffic, and just die.
I don’t know if I am incapable of telling the truth in a journal. Mostly, I think I’m always searching for something truer than truth itself.
