Category: Philosophicaliness

Sure, Let Me Debase Myself And Lie Down In This Puddle So You Can Walk Over Me My Dear.

This is going to be another post about my relationship issues. If you don’t like those kind of posts, feel free to go somewhere else. You know what, fuck you. This is my fucking blog, and I’ll blog whatever the fuck I want.

So basically I had a really shitty day today. I found out that not only had the short sale on my house fallen through, but that today was auction day. In other words, I found out exactly too late to do anything about it. Even if I could have done anything about it. So I am no longer a home owner. In fairness, I hadn’t lived there in two years anyway. The worst part about it is the major hit my credit rating is going to take. Foreclosures stay on for ten years, not seven. My ex wife fucked me pretty good on this one. She did it intentionally, I’m sure, but the best part of the whole thing is where she says it’s my fault. No, I’m not kidding. She refused to find any kind of work whatsoever, or to support herself or her children in any way whatsoever, stopped paying the mortgage, and made sure the house went to foreclosure. And it’s my fault. You seriously can’t make this shit up.

Add to that the fact that she wants to move out of district so that she can move somewhere she can afford to. The unbelievable injustice of the fact that a father who wanted his children and was perfectly capable of supporting them and could have easily kept them in the good school district in which they live lost them to a mother who refuses to support herself or her children in any way shape or form and cannot afford to keep them in the school district, but wants to move them to a poorer school district. Somehow she has been determined to be the better parent. Again, you can’t make this shit up. If somebody put this in a book it would be deemed implausible. But yet, it happened.

And just for good measure, I found out my copay for my therapist is so high that I can’t afford it. So not only am I dealing with a ridiculous divorce, an insane financial situation as a result, and a difficult breakup with my ex girlfriend, but I can’t even afford therapy anymore. At times like this I start to wonder if there is a god, because if there is, she hates me. It seems implausible that all of this could happen to one, basically good person. Yet, it did.

So moving on, my ex girlfriend and I are occasionally talking again. Yesterday she had some crap happen, so being the good friend that I am, I stopped what I was doing and made time to listen. Because that’s what I do. It actually wasn’t all that convenient for me to do so, but I did anyway. And not just because some part of me still hopes that I can salvage a relationship out of this. I would do this for pretty much any friend.

Then today all of this happens, and I need someone to talk to. Guess how many people were available for me? Yep. Nobody. Not even my therapist, because… well… fuck you republicans and your fucked up privatized health care. This system only works for the wealthy. Fuck you. And if you’re not wealthy and support these fuckers, fuck you too. You’re fucking me as well as yourself, and that makes you a fucking moron. Fuck you.

So I’m thinking tonight, because, well, the only person I have to talk to is myself. So if you say I’m crazy for talking to myself, fuck you. You weren’t here for me either, fuck wad. And I realize something: that was my whole relationship with her. She would get frequent headaches, I would rush over there and give her a long backrub. Number of backrubs received: 0. Even my ex wife had a better record than that. Every time she had something going on, I would patiently sit there and listen to her. When I felt the need to unload about  something, I got some variation of “shit or get off the pot”. If I got irritated about that, her feelings got hurt.

And then I think “Exactly what about this relationship am I missing?” It was a little one sided. Actually it was a lot one sided. Yet, I still miss her and would probably go back if I could. Fucking why? What about this woman am I missing? Why am I so drawn to her? These are questions I can’t answer. My only guess is that there was more to it than that for me. She was at least an intellectual equal, and probably an intellectual superior. She had her own career and life. She was independent and strong. She made a difference in peoples lives. She was good at what she does. And something about her is magic. Her voice, her mannerisms, everything. I can’t explain it. Basically it’s not a good relationship for me. I know this intellectually. My heart will catch up eventually, I just have to be strong for now. That’s the real trick though. I’m not strong.

Anyway, just random thoughts. I had nobody to share this with, so of course it goes out to the world  on my blog. I suppose it’s all part of learning to be alone. Being alone sucks ass, by the way.

The Question I Never Got A Chance To Ask.

I was despondent for days, weeks, months. I was alternately angry, dejected, and confused. I believed every lie you told me wholeheartedly. I trusted you and gave you my heart unconditionally and without reserve, and you tossed it aside like a dirty rag without looking back. And up until about 20 minutes ago, at the slightest word, the merest mention that you would want to start again, to spend even the smallest amount of time with me, I would have gladly thrown my pride to the wind and followed you around like a stupid puppy. Because I’m just that fucking pathetic.

But I’m not stupid. I won’t vie with your other ex for your attention. He wins. Congratulate him for me. I no longer want to see you. I no longer want to hear your voice lie to me. I no longer want to know about the trivial interactions between you and your cats. Why, you wonder, the sudden change? I’ll tell you. Because fuck you.

Oooh, I HATE that guy…

I’ve been reading a book called Quiet about the introverted/extroverted personality types. My ex girlfriend had recently read it and described it to me, and the topic interested me. Anybody who gets to know me intimately knows I’m an introvert, but it’s not always obvious to everybody. I’m certainly not the “Hi how ya doin lemme kiss your baby” type of extrovert, but I try to not be too soft spoken at work. Maybe it’s more obvious than I think. When I told my ex girlfriend that I was an introvert, her response was “Duh!”.

What’s most interesting though, is that I’m getting a better handle on exactly what kind of introvert I am. It’s not all good news. The most recent chapter revealed to me that I’m the kind of introvert who adjusts to social situations based on cues. I get my ideas about how to behave and interact with others based on cues I receive from them. In other words, I’m a different person to each person I interact with. Kind of like that salt monster from the early Star Trek episode. Put me in a room with too many people and I don’t know who the fuck to be. This is one of the reasons I have this blog and my twitter account, it’s about the only time I really get to be the real me, however pathetic that might be.

I found myself in orchestra rehearsal the other night being the extrovert. Socializing with this person, then with that person. To be honest, I hate socializing. I’m not half bad at it when I have to be though. I can be quite animated and entertaining when the situation calls for it.

I have to wonder if this is a factor in my string of failed relationships. It’s certainly something to bring up with the therapist. This personality type can be viewed by others as deceptive and deceitful. I really don’t see myself that way, but I have to wonder if that’s how my personality type comes off. It’s really more about trying to fit in and not do social faux pas. A basic fear of rejection. An extreme fear of rejection. And I take it hard when I am rejected, like my recent break up. This could be a factor in why I stayed in a marriage that was obviously broken for almost the entire duration for far longer than I should have. Long enough to have two kids, and for those kids to grow up to be big enough to be damaged by the ensuing brutal divorce.

I’ve noticed a trend recently: people don’t seek me out. Let me try to explain that more. If I don’t try to start some kind of interaction with my friends, the interaction tends to not happen. It reminds me a little of the game The Sims. In the game, if you don’t constantly call up your friends, the relationship atrophies and they stop being your friend. However, in the game if you don’t call your friends for a while, they’ll call you and say “what the fuck, dude?” In real life that second part doesn’t seem to happen with me. The relationship still atrophies, but it seems like if I’m the only one interested in preventing that. If I don’t call for a while, nobody calls me.

This worries me a little. Is there something in my personality that repulses people? Is it this quirk of adjusting my personality to each person? Does this drive people off? Am I really that guy? The guy nobody really wants to hang out with but is willing to put up with so that they don’t come off as a jerk? Introspection never goes well for me. I keep coming up with this kind of crap.

I would really like to know, though, why this seems to be the case. There seems to be some basic flaw in my personality that makes people like me ok but not really want to be around me more than they have to. I don’t know what it is yet, or how to fix it. I need to fix it though, or I’ll never have a successful relationship. I don’t count my ex as a successful relationship. She was wasn’t in it for any kind of interest in me, she was in it because she could live off of me without having to have a life of her own. She still does. Thank you, state of Kansas.

Anyway, no great revelations in this post, just questions that I don’t have answers for yet. Maybe I’ll have some in the weeks to come.

It’s Wabbit Season!

I started therapy yesterday.

Let’s face it, I’m fucknuts. I was watching Looney Toons with my kids earlier, and we watched Rabbit Fire. That’s the one where Daffy and Bugs go back and forth with the “rabbit season” “duck season” bit. It’s hilarious, and I’m reminded of the time during an improv group when I basically did that scene by myself. There was one guy who ended up playing Elmer Fudd, and my spastic self played both Daffy and Bugs. He was a bit shy, and didn’t seem to know what the fuck to make of me. I think I scared him a little, but the end result is it was fucking hilarious. I was awesome.

Was.

I remember the guy who did that. The guy I was back then. 17 years of bad marriage will fuck you up, and that guy is gone now, and I can’t get him back. I know, I would be a different person now even if I hadn’t married the batshit crazy church lady, but I think there would be more of that guy left.

I’ve thoroughly trashed three relationships since the end of my marriage. Well, in fairness to myself I had a little help trashing them, but still… I can’t seem to pull off a successful relationship. Maybe I’m not dating the right people, but I was absolutely sure the last one was right. I’m still having trouble reconciling it a month later. I should be past it by now, one would think. But I have a fuckload of baggage, and I think I didn’t realize just how much until yesterday.

The therapist seemed to catch on immediately just how much the cult fucked me up. This is something that I don’t think anybody else ever has understood about me. These people did more damage in the couple of years they had me than my wife did in 17. I’m still dealing with it in many ways. On the other hand, had it not been for the cult I might have never examined my own belief systems, and realized that the whole thing is bullshit. I suppose I should thank them for that. But fuck if I will.

Most people seem to blow the whole cult experience off as trivial, except for one or two other people I know who went through the same thing. It’s not like we talk about it though. Former cult members don’t have conventions. We don’t chat on facebook about it. “Hey, remember that time that the one kid crashed his car because he was so tired from sleep deprivation and almost died? Yeah, good times!” There are exactly 0 people that I’ve been able to talk to about this over the last decade. My ex didn’t go through the exit conversion the same way I did. In fact, I’m not sure she ever went through it at all. She’s been looking for a replacement for the cult for the last decade, and I’m pretty sure she finally found one.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is I think this is going to be good for me in the long term. I may not be able to save my last relationship, but maybe I can make the next one not crash so badly. I’ve already realized about myself that my dating experience pretty much consists of my teenage years, a couple of years in my 20s, and the last year. I haven’t had a lot of time to figure this shit out. My marriage was pretty much fucking awful for most of it, so I don’t have a lot of experience in how a good relationship works. I do know that I really wanted the last one to. But first I have to straighten out some shit in my head.

I may not be that guy from 20 years ago anymore, but maybe I can be someone else just as good.

Atheism+: What the F*** is it???

During one of my frequent twitter rants that I’ve come to be known for, I ran across a tag that kept coming up in the tweets of others that I follow: AtheismPlus. I was intrigued. I started asking around, doing searches, and eventually ran across a blog post by Richard Carrier with seems to have started the whole movement. I believe it was this one: http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/2207/. Feel free to read it for yourself. It’s ok, I’ll wait.

Did you read it? It’s ok, I’ll wait, I don’t mind, you should go read it first. It’s not the last blog post link I’m going to send you to. Go ahead.

Ok, I’ll take your word for it. So my take on it was: Hm, sounds like they’re taking Humanism and rebranding it as AtheismPlus. But there’s more to it than that. The whole idea seems to be about taking these people and saying we don’t want these other people so we’re going to have a new movement that’s just the people who believe what we like.

Don’t get me wrong, the beliefs they espouse are good ones, and I could easily join the AtheismPlus movement without cognitive dissonance. Richard Carrier is also a writer and speaker that I greatly respect. I saw him at Skepticon IV last year, and really liked his talks. But what bothered me is this: this is exactly what happened to religion. I don’t mean Hindus vs. Muslims vs. Christians vs. Mormons, but Lutherans vs. Baptists vs. Methodists vs. [about 600 other denominations here]. I don’t think this is going to work out the way they want it to. If the atheist movement goes down this path of splintering into smaller and smaller groups, the atheist movement as we know it will falter and die. We are more effective now than we have ever been because we are united, and the religious can no longer ignore us. If we become a bunch of small denominations of atheism, they can ignore us again.

Not to mention the fact that when you add a belief system to atheism, you take one of the more ridiculous arguments of the theists, that atheism is just another religion, and make it suddenly true. I kinda have a problem with that. Humanism starts out with the precept that it’s a belief system, and atheism is one of the ideas that it is based on, but it doesn’t try to rebrand atheism. It’s something else entirely. I consider myself to be a humanist, even though I’m not very involved with them.

So, basically I said all this shit, and a shitstorm came back at me. One side coopted me as an ally, another side told me I just didn’t get it. I managed to avoid some of the hatefulness that seems to be going around out there, but it still freaked me the fuck out.

Many well known personas whom I normally respect in the atheism movement seem to be into this and promoting it. A handful of others seem to be opposing it. Apparently I’m supposed to hate Thunderf00t now. Fuck that.

A brilliant, well thought out blog post by someone I consider a twitter friend is here on the subject: http://evolutionchild.com/2012/08/25/a-take-me-to-your-leader/

You didn’t read that, go back and read it now. It’s one of the best posts on the topic I’ve seen yet, and largely sums up how I feel as well. I’ll wait.

I was a little freaked out by all of this, and I don’t like where it’s going, but it seems to be happening all the same. So here’s my final say on the matter. Please don’t come to me with any more AtheismPlus crap after this.

I quit.

I want out of the atheism movement all together. I am not going to pick “sides”. I am not going to pick a denomination of atheism. That’s bullshit. I was on my own before I found the atheism movement, and I can be on my own again. Atheism was already rather disorganized before this and now I apparently have to pick a new denomination. Fuck no. I’m the Cowboy. That’s what I am, and that’s all I need to be. I’m an atheist, I’m a liberal (well, not exactly but just roll with me here a minute), I’m a musician, I’m a lover, I’m a writer, I’m a geek. I’ll watch you guys from a distance and see where things go before I decide if I want back in.

Introspection

Today I pushed my boundaries.

Every few years or so I seem to go through some kind of change. The best way to describe it is that the answer to the question “Who am I?” changes. I couldn’t tell you what they all are, but I remember a few. A significant one was the one that led me to leave the cult. Another one happened a mere year later when I finally shed Christianity. Yet another happened in May of 2007. That’s the year this blog was created. Another in June of 2008 while I was in Minnesota. The most recent one was November of 2010. I filed for divorce the next month.

Now we come to August 2012. I’ve had a small handful of relationships since being kicked out of my house, ending with the most recent one. I gave her my heart. I couldn’t tell you exactly why I did. Phrases that I put no merit in like “soul mate” and “meant to be” come to mind, but the fact of the matter is I think she and I were a good match. Possible the best match I’ve ever had. We just… clicked. If I could describe my dream woman, a completely made up woman who embodies all of the traits I find attractive, she damn near hits them all.

Then it all went to shit.

Whaaa? Trouble in paradise? How can it be? You two were meant for each other!

No we weren’t. To quote Tim Minchin “If I didn’t have you I’d probably have somebody else.” Relationships start with physical attraction amplified by pheromones and from that point on they take an assload of work. I think that last part is where we ran in to trouble.

So I find myself suddenly single, emotionally hurt, and a bit bewildered. It’s moments like this when you do your best thinking.

I realized that I’m not ready for relationships yet. I got out of a nearly two decade long marriage a year and a half ago. It officially ended less than two months ago. I’ve been dealing with nearly constant insanity from my ex and the court system of the great state of Kansas for what seems like a bajillion years now, while helping my children deprogram themselves and realize that crazy extremist fundamentalist Christianity isn’t the only choice they can make, and trying to reinvent my entire life all at the same time.

It might not have been the best time to decide to invest a lot of time and energy into a relationship.

So the past several days have involved a significant reexamination of my life. I came to a few realizations.

  • Being single fucking rocks, even at 41.
  • Casual dating with no commitment is ok.
  • Friends with benefits doesn’t work. It just doesn’t.
  • I don’t know who the fuck I am.

Oh I know, I exude mucho confidence here and all aspire to even be a shadow of my cool, but the truth is, I haven’t had much time to figure out who I am after the last change. But I do know this: I feel dead inside.

Every day I get up, go to work, and spend the better part of my day in a felt covered box dealing with somebody else’s problems. At the end of that, I might get a little time to myself, or I might have my kids. There’s not much time left for me at the end of that and what little I had I was giving away. It seemed like a good idea at the time…

So today I got up, put on my hiking shoes, went to a local park, and got myself lost. Really lost. This is a big park, and practically nobody else was there. I’m woefully out of shape and I had one bottle of water.

The point was, I was not guaranteed of making it back alive. Sure, the odds were in my favor, but there’s that chance that I might not. That was the key. I pushed myself past my endurance point and found out I had more, so I kept going. I finally reached the end of my endurance again, and found out I had yet more, so I kept going.

By the time I found my way back to where my car was a few hours later, I was drenched with sweat (it’s over 100 degrees here with Kansas humidity), exhausted, thirsty, and a smidge on the loopy side. My legs were so worn out I could barely walk. A few hours may not sound like much to some of you, but I went from completely sedentary to hiking maniac pretty much today. I had no endurance level, and I pushed the fuck out of it anyway.

AND IT FELT FUCKING AWESOME!!!

I mean it did and it didn’t, but pushing myself  so far past what I thought I could do gave me a feeling of being truly alive. I found myself laughing and the smallest things and just enjoying being alive.

Later I grabbed an old friend (“old” being a relative term since she’s 10 years younger than me and I’ve known her less than a year) and went back out at night to see the universe. It was awesome. It gave me a feeling of being connected with the universe. It’s awesome when you can look up at the sky, see a lot of stars (even in Kansas City they’re hard to see without getting out of town), and know not only what they actually are, but that your perception of them is really looking backwards in time to several different points time simultaneously. One may be 100 years ago, another only 4, another 6 billion. And every atom that makes up my body, every atom that makes up yours, every atom that makes up every thing on earth that we see was forged in a star like that. Not only that, but the star it was forged in died. It died so that I could be here. And it died over 4.5 billion years ago.

SCIENCE FUCKING ROCKS, BITCHES!

I’m still kind of figuring out where this is going, but I think this could be the most interesting change yet.

Hey girl-who-I-was-dating-when-I-was-a-teenager, remember that time you ripped my heart out and stomped on it and crushed my will to live? Ah, good times…

The divorce is final, and me and my children have been officially buttfucked by the state of Kansas. What, you were expecting something else? There’s one upside to this whole fucking mess, my kids are going back to school. I can’t pretend I don’t have mixed feelings about this… School is a brutal place. Bullies abound, many teachers are jaded, some just suck, and the religious fucktards are out in force trying to destroy what little value the public school system has left. But until America starts taking education seriously and starts fixing the schools and giving it adequate funding, it’s the best option I’ve got. Homeschooling by a religious fucktard with a high school education is just not an option.

So now I find myself a single guy at 41 with a tiny apartment and six cats. Where did the six cats come from? I got sort of blindsided there. I adopted a stray cat who was hanging around my apartment. She turned out to be pregnant. Now I have six cats to get shots for, and spay and neuter. This while I’m struggling to find money to eat on. The good times just keep coming.

So I find myself back in the dating world. I’ve actually been there for a little bit. I’ve been through one girlfriend, another… I don’t know what the fuck that one was… and finally settled on what I thought was a fairly normal relationship.

I’m pretty easy to keep. I don’t have very many rules. I was thinking about this (online via Twitter) and I think they boil down to the following:

  1. Don’t be batshit crazy.
  2. Don’t be controlling.
  3. Don’t violate my trust.
  4. Don’t blow me off.
1. Don’t be batshit crazy.

You would think this one would be pretty simple, but my wife of 17 years couldn’t seem to get the swing of this one. To this day I don’t think she recognizes anything she’s done as in any way shape or form abnormal. I gave up trying to explain it to her years ago. In hindsight, I should have filed for divorce at the same time, but I waited another 7 years or so. My bad.

Everybody has crazy. Everybody. I have more than my fair share. Many of us recognize our own crazy and try to keep it in check. Mentally I think of it as having a mask I show to the outside world. I have a face everybody gets to see. It looks fairly normal, geeky, intelligent, and frequently a bit grumpy. I have the mask I show here. It’s filtered mainly to outrage about religious fucktards and right wing nutjobs trying to fuck us all over. Sometimes I let a little of my spiritual musings out here. Not as much lately. Dr. Cowboy is a mask. I’m anonymous for a reason. It’s also a persona. Don’t take it personally, I have a persona for everybody. The only person who knows what it’s really like in my head is me. I keep hoping I’ll find somebody who wants to find out what it’s like in here, but realistically, not gonna happen.

2. Don’t be controlling.

The ex also had an issue with this, and this rule is largely because of her. She has a spider like need to have this web of control over everything in her life. I’m guessing it has something to do with her dad leaving the family. Daddy issues. I think a lot of that came out at me. I tried to be supportive and helpful for years, but I finally had to give up. The crazy just got too thick and it was affecting my kids. Still is now, but I can no longer do anything about it. Actually I couldn’t do anything about it before, but at least now I have the legal backing to get my kids in school. That was about my only win.

My wife also exerted control over who my friends could and couldn’t be. I was a pussy and let her. I lost many good friends over the years. So earlier this year when a friend needed help and my girlfriend at the time had a problem with it, the relationship more or less ended. There were other factors, but that was a big one.

3. Don’t violate my trust.

This has happened twice so far since being separated. I won’t go into details, but it’s a big deal breaker for me. If I’m with you I will trust you to the ends of the Earth (figuratively speaking) until you give me a good reason not to. Revealing personal details you were privy to that others weren’t is a biggie. Twice now it’s happened and twice now it ended relationships. My ex did it in smaller ways, and for many years I let it go. I can’t do that anymore. I haven’t been cheated on that I’m aware of, at least not for 20 years or so, but if it happened, that would fall under this rule. Cowboy don’t play that game either.

4. Don’t blow me off.

This one was almost an afterthought. The situation I find myself in is largely because of this. My current girlfriend hasn’t—to the best of my knowledge—violated rules 1, 2, or 3. That’s why I’ve spent the last three weeks or so feeling really frustrated. The relationship started out really great, nothing held back, we were good together. Something changed along the way. I think it’s largely a result of a friend who violated my trust, but I can’t be sure. At any rate, that ended the friendship, but the damage is done.

I reached the point that despite how I felt about my girlfriend, despite the fact that I’ve known her for 11 years and been attracted to her on both a physical and intellectual level for that entire time, besides the fact that she seems to be in almost every way my perfect woman, I was ready to end it. Then she finally talked to me. I found out that there was damage as a result of my friend’s violation of my trust. Understandable, completely. But now she wants to be “casual” and “see where it goes”. What? What the fuck? What the fuck does that even mean?

I’ve been out of the dating game for a long, long time, so I get confused on terminology these days. If I were to hazard a guess, I would think that means that  we’re now no longer in a relationship, but we can go on dates occasionally, but we’re not exclusive. Exclusive implies relationship to me. Casual implies not a relationship. I put the question out in the twitterverse and the twitterverse seems to agree with me: my relationship is basically over.

But I went on a date with her last night. See, this confuses me. If she wants a bud, that’s fine, but let’s call it what it is. I’ll stop hoping for any kind of intimacy. I can look elsewhere. If we’re dating casually, then it’s largely the same as buds except I can hope for sex.

If I can’t date other people, then it’s a relationship. Relationships have rules. I don’t know what any of them are anymore, and it’s still frustrating the fuck out of me, and I can’t seem to nail her down on what her definition of our relationship is, other than we’re “dating casually” and “seeing where it goes”. Well whoop de fucking do. That’s a fucking cop out. That’s “I’m not really committed to making anything work, and if I get tired of you or find something I like better in that moment I’m gone.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that attitude, except it’s not for me. I’m 41, I’m at least halfway through my life, and I have less time left to live than I’ve already lived. My health is already going downhill, and I’ve fucked up the first half of my life pretty good. I’d like to get the second half right, and fucking around like that doesn’t seem like the way to do it. But then again… it’s HER…

I’m going to try to nail her down on some definitions later today, and hopefully find out if I’m free to look around or not. But for the record, I don’t really want to look around. I would like things to go back to how they were before, when we were in love. Yes, love. Or at least something that felt a lot like love. Then again, maybe I don’t really know what the hell love is. Look who I stayed married for almost 2 decades?

The Great Big Gig in the Sky

And if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes…

I look out of my window, and everything is in grey. I look for things I once I once enjoyed and I’m not interested. I wander around looking for something to fill the void, but there’s nothing, I just walk back and forth. Eventually I just sit down, and stare. Everything went sideways, everything I had made was destroyed. Everything I had hoped for was dashed. Everything I loved was taken.

There’s someone in my head but it’s not me.

The voice in my head tells me the hard truth. It’s not the world, it’s not them, it’s not her, it’s not him, it’s not supernatural. It’s me. It was always me.

Got amazing powers of observation…

Slowly I realize the lies I’ve been told. Lies I’ve told myself. Lies others have told me. Lies woven into the very fabric of society. Lies built into the nature of reality. In a brittle, desperate moment of clarity, I see through them all. No darling, I’m not. I can’t do anything. I can’t even do something. I break everything. That’s what I do. I think it might be what we all do. But I do have a talent: I fuck things up.

You shout and no one seems to hear.

I feel that desperate feeling deep down inside, that feeling “I need someone to know me. I need someone to understand me. I need someone to see all the way to the bottom of this cesspit of a psyche I have and know and understand what’s driven me my whole life, and what I truly need at the end of it all.”

And I got a strong urge to fly, but I got nowhere to fly to…

This is the danger moment. This is that moment when some turn to religion to fill this desperate emptiness inside. There’s a ready made solution to an age old human weakness, an imaginary friend who loves you, understands you, is always there for you, protects you, and will never hurt you.

The Lunatic is my head…

But no thanks darling, I’ve already got an imaginary friend. The difference between me and you is that I know he’s imaginary. Mine says some mean things, but not as mean as yours my dear. Mine doesn’t take those I love from me, but he will smack me out of my rut sometimes and set me straight. Fix me. It hurts sometimes, but he knows how to fix me, darling. He’s the only one who does.

I don’t need no arms around me…

I’m not alone in my weakness, the need to have someone understand me. The fact that I know when I’m gone, that this consciousness, this being whom I know more closely than any other, will someday be irretrievably lost wears on me. It makes me desperate for someone else to know what it’s like to be me. But you hurt me darling, you have to go now. You won’t make it to the bottom. Nobody has yet, only me.

And I don’t need no drugs to calm me.

So close… so close… so close… but it’s gone now. Floating away on a spring breeze, into the sky, never to be found again. I was so close…

Don’t think I need anything at all…

And now it turns out I was laying here the whole time, staring at the ceiling. Was it real? Was it all my head? Did any of that really happen to me at all, or was it someone else? Was there someone else driving the bus while rode shotgun? What is here and now is painfully clear, but what was and what could have been grows fuzzy and dim. I reach for the bottle in the drawer.

You rearrange me ‘till I’m sane…

And finally he comes again. He shouts this time. You idiot. You fucking moron. What did you think would happen? Why do you do this to yourself over and over and over? Did you really not see it coming? That was not for you. This is, darling, this is. My head leans back, and the pain begins. Such lovely, deep pain. I finally feel real, and the clarity returns.