I am absolutely overwhelmed every time I read the newspaper. Sometimes I’m lucky enough to just sort of go into a trance while I read it, and then it’s not as depressing. So many things that people do are unexplainable. Irrational. Depraved. I’m no model of perfection; I may even be an anti-example of behavioral traits, but I have no idea what twisted shit goes on in some peoples’ minds.
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I just stared at the screen for a while there, laid down in bed, stared at the wall, and couldn’t put together any coherent thoughts about news or politics or humanity. I know that I often put on this face of cynicism and misanthropy, but at the core of my human crisis is a tragic idealism which paralyzes me. In response to such overwhelming inertia, I do nothing. I can’t help it. I want to change the world. I want to contribute something worthwhile, but I can’t. I can’t write about anything, because I get engulfed with the single-minded thought that nothing I do will be good enough, so I do nothing. I get tired just thinking about writing another shitty book. (And they are shitty. They’re tragically autobiographical, thus essentially worthless to anyone but me.)
I write on this blog. No one reads it. Why would they? I teach in a school where no one listens. (At least most of the time.) And I live in a house where no one appreciates anything I do. So the essential question is why do anything? If what I do is not worthy of a footnote, then what am I doing? I felt more alive sitting on a beach two weeks ago reading a book than I do most days living my “normal” life. How do I change what I’m doing if I don’t know what I want to do? For too long, the answer to that question has been … do nothing. Hope it will get better somehow. What a stupid way to think.
I wonder where people get their hope from. I think mostly they get it from either religion or ignorance. Blind hope or general blindness. I’d like to think that I can change the course of my personal life, but it’s too late to do most of the spontaneous things I want to do. When I do them now, it’s just irresponsible. What an onus to bear. Getting old sucks, especially when you don’t have money to buffer the rocky reality of life.
I had a quarter-life crisis long ago which involved copious amounts of drugs and alcohol, and now I seem to be having a mid-life crisis in which I can’t shed the extraneous baggage which tethers me to the mediocrity of a failed marriage and suffocating debt. Some days I want to swallow a bottle of sleeping pills with a bottle of wine, and the next day I want to dance in the rain simply to celebrate the weather. Like Jimi Hendrix said, “I know what I want, but I just don’t know how to go about getting it.” That sounds about right.
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Another admission: I just spent the last hour wandering around my house and then reading other peoples’ stupid facebook posts. I can’t help it! My ADD is taking over. I am doomed to be a high school teacher with little to no relevance forever. insert sad face here. If you know me, you know that mediocrity will kill me faster than pancreatic cancer would. Someone please volunteer to smother me if I look too boring :)
(Insert positive words of wisdom here.)
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