11:48 p.m. - 2004-04-05
DAWN
Friday nights are the worst, really. Looking off into the denizen of every weekend, I am never sure if I can stand another transition, another prolonged stint of uninterrupted exposure to myself.
For most of my life, I’ve glorified self-sustainability, romanticized isolation, and was constantly surrendering to self-abnegation in the throes of food, water, air, love, people, sex, clothes, and happiness.
Friday nights, I overeat. Friday nights, I watch TV. I take long drives on a mathematical curve, traveling its incurvation with exactness. I reach the nadir of my emotional capacity, the exact opposite of my climax, and I retrace the curve back, exactly reversing my direction of motion.
Approximately, late Friday afternoon is when I begin the gradation downward, counting how few days I have left until the week is over, ending at the same point every-single-week: I haven’t been touched in seven days.
This Friday would be different. I would divert myself with a three hour movie, a long drive, and, in conclusion, a shower. Immediately upon my Friday night proposal, my brain reacted by flooding the inners of itself with deleterious and debilitating chemical compounds, in my head, again. I panicked: the theatre is too farawayitsrainingtalkingblushingtheticketcountersuicidecarstopstopSTOP. I got into my car, drove to the theatre, became embarrassed, and drove home. Instead of attending a movie, I went to Wal-Mart, its large collection of assailable merchandise the equivalent of watching a film, viewing colors and form in motion being operant to both forms of entertainment.
As soon as I enter the Wal-Mart, my eyes no longer feel like common similes, such as windows or camera shutters, they feel like gaping orifices. I begin to feel as assailable as the merchandise positioned on the shelves. I enter with my eyes fixed on the above security camera, making a mockery of myself, as is its job.
I returned to my car with a pair of gardening pruners, a flash light, gloves, and a beef steak tomato plant. I finished listening to "This American Life," which was a particularly good episode, drove home, and began to renovate my expanding garden.
I am manic about my garden, school work, essays, correspondence, family, dog, writing, work, everything.
I remember when the week long absence of a flashing red light on my answering machine meant suicide.
That was three years ago. Everything has disappeared since then. Life is no longer generous with its frenetic paced ideas and conversations, unremittingly fueling my mania. Now, its just me: this shiny, smooth, white surface between the top of my head and my feet. I guess I've located the self within the human nervous system. Because of this, in an indirect way, I garden at two in the morning.
I guess this is the ancient wheel of suffering, or something better.
