mahiwaga

What sucks is that I can’t do this vacation thing at all. I can’t fucking relax. It’s like all of the sudden all the thoughts and feelings I’ve been avoiding for the past ten years or so have come out to attack me.

It’s all clear to me now. I really have been burying myself in my work. When I’m busy, I don’t have to think about how the rest of my life sucks, and how I’m lonely, and how I’m fat and getting old and how horrifically in debt I am.

I had hoped that this one organizing principle, the fact that I like my work, would be enough to get my ass in gear, to fix up the rest of my life. But it isn’t happening.

So here I am twiddling my thumbs, freaking out about God knows what, but not having anywhere to go. I mean, sure, I could just hop in my car and drive up and down California, but where will that really get me?

I’m all over the place.

I can’t even organize my thoughts.

How the hell am I suppose to make order out of the chaos that is my life?

Originally posted on Messages in a Klein Bottle

Maybe I have a problem. I like to joke that no one really leaves Berkeley without a substance problem.

This is the first time I have been injured after getting horrifically drunk. (Somehow I managed to avoid giving homage to the porcelain god.)

One, there is a 2.5 cm diameter ugly purple bruise on my right bicep. Two, I think I may have broken my left thumb. There is a huge bruise over the thenar muscles and there is also brusing on the dorsal side, and I can’t hyperextend at the MCP without terrible, incapacitating pain.

It’s probably just badly sprained (although I’m of course being a hypochondriac and wonder if I didn’t lacerate the radial artery somehow—at least it’s not a snuffbox injury)

I should just get a splint.

Instead, I’m probably just going to wait a year or two when it doesn’t heal and all my hand muscles have atrophied.

At least I can still type.

What I’m not so sure is if I can still play guitar.

Anyway, the thing that is a little scary is that I don’t remember how I sustained these injuries. Sure, there was this unexplicable urge to go running up the hill, and most likely I fell and slammed my hand on the concrete, but the etiology of the bruise over my bicep escapes me.

Bleh, this beta version of Blogger is eating my posts. This sucks.

But my apartment is a shambles. There is basically trash everywhere, my living room is a massive tangle of wires and cords. I’m completely paralyzed by all this.

This is not a viable existence.

I also wonder if there is a chance I’m manic, or at least hypomanic. You know how one of those cardinal symptoms of mania is going on massive shopping sprees. I guess the only thing that keeps me from admitting to suffering from bipolar disorder is the fact that I never seem to be happy. Sure, I do have those nights where I can’t sleep at all because there are way too many thoughts in my head, and despite not sleeping, I wake up at the normal hour, or maybe even earlier.

I guess that’s what’s different this time.

My brain is totally spinning. Like a million and one ideas are racing in and out, half-formed, barely explicated.

Is this what it feels to go totally insane?

Originally posted on Messages in a Klein Bottle

Let’s see if Blogger eats my post again.

I am obsessed with Muse’s new album Black Holes and Revelations, particularly the song “Starlight.”

Muse reminds me of a strange cross between Radiohead and Queen. Thom Yorke meets Freddy Mercury. Muse’s front man captures Yorke’s angst ridden fever-pitch, but the epic dynamics of the instrumentation recall Queen at its campiest. Some tracks make me think immediately of Queen’s rendition of the Flash Gordon soundtrack, with Ming the Merciless glaring down at me.

But “Starlight”—as cheesy and pop-commercial as it is—wonderfully evokes the existential torment of unrequited love. Here I am in a spaceship, chasing the evanescent light left behind by a woman who is forever beyond my reach. Who says astrophysics and romance don’t mix?

And the final “I just wanted to hold…” is kind of haunting, an unfinished thought perhaps extinguished by anoxia, as the on-board oxygen supply runs out. And yet somehow I don’t find this song depressing at all.

I was driving down the freeway feeling like all-out crap, and then I dialed up “Starlight” on my iPod and sang along, all but shouting the lyrics, and I felt a lot better.

So what if I die all alone in the midst of the interstellar vacuum, trillions of miles away from anyone who ever cared about me, never catching up with the brilliant, beautiful woman of my dreams? I suspect it won’t ever happen anyway, at least I learn to travel faster than light.

Originally posted on Messages in a Klein Bottle