I'm relieved that this weekend is coming to a close. Most of Friday and Saturday were spent moving PB's stuff into the new apartment. Last night and today have been spent battling an anxiety-triggered delirium, which has been made worse due to a crippling cold/flu-like sickness. (Good news came yesterday: mom is back home and out of hospital.) In about six weeks I'll be joining PB, and that near-future reality has certainly made me anxious. The last seven years have expired in the same town; transplanting my roots to a foreign town is a jarring experience because I know practically nothing of this place. The street names, the faces, the atmosphere – it's all unsettling because it's all unknown. However, it's not as if I fully integrated myself into the fabric of Bloomington, so, theoretically, leaving it and landing elsewhere shouldn't been too difficult. But it's more than simply learning locations and names. There's a paranoia, a fear that this new place will refuse me, reject me like a transplanted skin graft. Whether it is a party or a new town, I always try to assimilate myself into it – the new and the unknown – but after a few brief moments I realize that it's a useless effort because I'll never achieve the degree of acceptance that I anticipate, that I need. It's strange, because when I do confront someone who won't reject me, who might even accept me, my tendency is to push him or her away. A few times this weekend I have wondered, Just who is this woman I'll be living with in six weeks? Have I made a mistake?
Pardon me, but that skin of unreality is tightening itself around my bones. Sitting in this living room I feel as if I myself am not typing these words. I am witnessing someone else type; I'm a bystander watching a stranger's life unfurl. Unknown motives pulsate him through the strange circus of life. Remember the pale blue dot photo? What the fuck are we doing here? We construct a system of beliefs and, influenced by those strange motives, fabricate an existence. I say fabricate an existence because this, this is not who we are – we are a product of (attempted) assimilation. We've become a system of creatures whose goal seems to be the accumulation of things: artificial moments of cohesion disguised as "real experiences" and wealth (objects, money).
(I ignorantly etched a mark of anger. That anger arises from a deeply rooted frustration that is so old, so primal that I will never be able to uncover and inspect its fossil. It is the same frustration that brought babbling anger to my father's lips. And I don't want to be him, not because I am ashamed of him, which I am not, but because I don't want to consider the terrifying possibility that this life, this sole experience – my experience – is unremarkable. I cannot understand this agonizing paradox: a man who wants to do good, to be good is constantly crippled by his anger and anxiety. "But I'm a good person!" the man, on his knees, pleads as those around him desert him.)
Have I lost you?
xx
