Wouldn't your family be proud?

This is what it's like inside the box. The walls are finally visible, I can't run outside of it anymore. That thing I've been looking for, that I've been chasing after is on the other side of this wall and I only realized that I couldn't reach it. I learned that these walls exist because I've finally run into them. This is the limit of what I am capable of in this state. There are no doors. The walls can't be seen by the naive dreamers or the hopeless romantics, they don't have the venom dripped into their eyes yet. There is a ceiling. I can watch the planes go by, watch the leaves blow. And I realize that is what I wish for. To be outside of this, either having some pre-set destination to look forward to, or to just drift aimlessly and let things decide where to take me. What I am here, is standing still, trapped. The only thing I can see the moon, and it's going to kill me. As the full moon wanes, that crescent scythe gets sharper and eventually it's going to fall from the sky and dismember me. Hopefully I'll be asleep so I won't have to notice a thing and that'll be it.

And that's what most people amount to. They realize that their dreams are on the other side of the glass and they can't reach it. They can't chase after it anymore because they're trapped, and all they can do is settle. Make do with what they're comfortable with. To sit inside the box just to watch the moon phase in and out while the planes fly by with the only mental manifesto being “good enough”. The best you can is good enough. And your “good enough” was not.

Your dreams and goals were a farce.

You weren't good enough for them and they were too good for you.

You're not capable.

You're not happy, you're content.

You're a dark soul who won't go outside into the dark because he likes the lights on.

You're a piece of scenery.

You're the one in your family they “had such high hopes for.”

You don't achieve, you settle.

You're no good.

You're a fucking loser.

We all stagnate like cobwebs on the wall, praying to go unnoticed until everybody realizes how much of a pointless sight you are before they dust you off, to sweep you under the rug. But I, we are too tired to move. We are too stuck to move. If our car gets stuck in the mud, we decide we just aren't going to drive to work today. What I can get by with, it's good enough. I wear glasses because I'm nearsighted. The glasses don't help. The only thing the future holds is dread, or it holds nothing. Thankfully tomorrow does not come today. It comes tomorrow, and as long as we can continue living in today we don't have to worry about tomorrow. That horizon, that sudden drop will show up. And we spend every opportunity waiting in fear when it will show up, yet ironically be surprised, woefully unprepared when it does.

The box will torture you. It will work for your needs. You can't hear the people out there, vocalizing their disappointment, their anger, their disgust. But you can watch them, and they're always watching you. Always silently reminding you that you weren't good enough to make it out like the rest of them. Some people learn to ignore it and just be content inside, accepting mediocrity, accepting that this was the best they could do. The rest of us, me, I realize finally here on the onset of my 25^th birthday, that I look around and I've spent most of my strength over the past year attempting to break out after finding out that I'm in here. It's not working anymore. I'm getting tired. I want to go to sleep and just sleep for once. Thought is for the talented. Thought is for the troubled. Thought is not allowed in the box. Those who think in the box will eventually pull the trigger. And if they don't, they just look up at the moon and wait for the thing to finally fall out of the sky. To live in the box is to drone on, to eliminate all thought to ignore the personal Hell you've created for yourself.

It's all your fault, no one else's.

Why are you still blaming other people?

Can't you just accept that you're defective?

That you're broken?

That this is entirely your own doing?

You built this yourself, stop making excuses.

Sit down and accept that this is it for you.

Because you can just be reminded later that at one point you told yourself that this was “good enough.”

Thank Muhammad for politically-correct homogenized semantics.

The other day I was in one of my drug-induced deliriums and from the monotony of working a delightful retail job that was slowly sending my soul into the abyss, and I failed to note what holiday Monday was. When I asked my father, he was angry as expected and said he expected a foreigner to ask that question, not somebody born in this country. It was Veteran's Day, of course. And I say: big fucking whoop to that. Now I'm being completely serious here; what have veterans ever done for me, huh? Fight for this country? Fight for our freedom and the glory of America? Alright, dandy. But why should I care? Stay with me, there's more to this.

I'm a man who has always found the concept of patriotism... peculiar, to say the least. Now with that said, some people are going to assume that there's some anti-American sentiment taking place here, and I would call you mistaken. There's merely animosity. Because in the big picture, absolutely none of this affects the average person. Those people who were over in the Middle East? Do you think they're fighting for a good cause, fighting for our benefit, for our freedom? That the terrorist threat would somehow crawl their way out of whatever cave they're huddled in at the moment and somehow through neglect of us lifting our almighty thumb would manage to find a way to dismantle the American infrastructure, to make sure that you, you and whatever backalley town or minor city you live in, end up threatened and your lives would be altered in any drastic way if these people weren't dying overseas? I mean yes they're dying for what can be perceived as a morally just and righteous cause, but is beneficial to you in any way? Probably not, other than a sense of pride that through whatever collateral damage we're causing policing the world that occasionally something good might come of it.

Now what about the veterans of yesteryear who fought for America when the country was legitimately threatened? Fair enough, they deserve respect for helping preserve the country in a dire time. But let's talk about general patriotism here for a second; I don't believe in it. Not to say that I'm not grateful for being born in this country where I'm given a good opportunity and an honest shot at making something of myself despite my apparent squandering of it at every possible turn because I have time like that to take it for granted. Or do I? Why do people call this the greatest country on Earth? What are they making comparisons to? They're comparing us through our looking glass of other countries. Most of us have lived here for our entire lives, some of us in a single state or only a handful of them. What arrogance does it take for you to say that we're the best when you don't know shit? There could a village tucked away in the darkest jungles of Africa where all the women have magically developed Saccharomyces cerevisiae in their tits and are lactating beer and are willing to have sex with you while their husbands are at work, and then you go to the bar after work where the husbands buy you drinks on the house and then ask you if you want to go home and have a Nyotaimori-styled dinner of barbequed ribs and bacon on their wives before you have sex with the husband the wife of course the wife again, only to go to sleep on a pile of sexy young Indonesian boys even though this is isn't anywhere near Australia but this is my fantasy so fuck off. And if a town like that exists, fuck country loyalty I'm going to Africa because that's the greatest city on Earth and none of your hollow patriotism will change that.

I approach this the same way I approach race and women: by mindless discrimination and hatred by asking one simple question; why are you proud of something you had no hand in determining? You did not choose when and where your dad decided not to pull out. The definition of pride in the positive annotation is a sense of satisfaction or pleasure from an accomplishment, achievement, or qualities/traits that you possess. So while you could technically be proud of being a woman, an American, black, etc... what have you done to earn it? What have you done to deserve it? It was given to you. Now there are loopholes here; you can be proud to be a feminist because that's a conscious effort to embrace particular ideals and philosophies, but you can be a feminist without being a woman. Or hell, when my dad brought up foreigners, I thought to myself “Well fuck, if anything THEY have a right to be patriotic or to say that America kicks ass.” I would believe them more than an American. They're more entitled to their pride because they earned their right to be here, they fought for it, they have somewhere else to actually compare America to in order to draw that conclusion. Most Americans can only reference what they know, which is extremely limited in scope for the most part. That's ironic to say coming from somebody who just made an enormous generalization about pride in nationality who doesn't even know what nationality he is other than “white” and “just enough Native American to get free money from the government but not enough to care about the culture”.

Which also comes back to one of my other points; you can be proud of or fascinated with a culture irregardless of whether or not your heritage has anything to do with it. I'm glad that Spanish people still speak Spanish even though when we're at work I can't understand a fucking thing that they're saying. And not just because Spanish food is delicious, either. They can be proud of their culture simply because it's not in its original context anymore; it's something they have to actively participate in to maintain instead of assimilating like the rest of the mindless beige and peach drones sprouting up in the country. It's not being handed to them anymore. There's a difference between that and race. Being black and proud strikes me as odd because there's little to no impression of actual African culture at this point; it's a subset of American culture, which aside from the police hating the shit out of you and being entitled to use the word “nigga” is by and large remarkably similar to standard American culture.

Of course at this point you can ask what defines American culture, and the fastest way to find out that answer is to attempt to live in another country, like somewhere in Europe, and just see how your mannerisms and personal priorities manage to be different than everyone else. And then you can be proud to be an American when you realize how shitty Britain's food is and how you want to shove some ribs into your facehole while talking about how much better the world is after we've been policing it.

Sometimes I wish I just reproduced by budding.

I've masturbated to some weird shit as of late, have I told you people? And I mean some seriously out-there kind of shit. Any sort of sexual deviant who has some perverse fetish, I feel I must apologize to you. Because at this point, I feel like that there's a good chance that I've probably been there. I might be able to understand. I might be able to understand why some people prefer 2D to 3D. I might be able to understand why lamias and centaurs are a thing for some people. I might be able to understand what makes a pedophile tick, regardless of how horrific it is. I feel like I might be able to understand S and M a bit more. Though I still don't understand why people are into scat or vacuum-packing fetishes, you people are fucking weird. But I might be able to sympathize. Because again, I've probably been there at this point. There isn't a picture on the internet my one-eyed monster hasn't looked at and there isn't an object in the house that hasn't had some rope arched over it at some point. And in whatever position imaginable, to boot. I can tell you that the onset of this discussion began after I had the really bad idea of jerking off while propping my back up against the wall upside down with my ass sticking in the air, and it ended about as poorly as you'd expect it to. I just sat there for a bit in that position in the dim afterglow. Blood rushing to my head. Breathing heavily. Covered in my own semen. Noticing I forgot to take my good work clothes off. “This is no way to live” I muttered to myself. Then I got on my computer at looked at illicit pornography of men and horses and the process of degradation began anew without a fuck given in the world.

Man, all this masturbating feels like a second goddamn job. Every morning and every night my little man goes “HEY MOTHERFUCKER, WE HAVEN'T HAD SOME FUN YET, LET'S CHANGE THAT” and I'm like “NO FOR THE LOVE OF GOD LEAVE ME ALONE” but it won't. I just want to live a normal life and have normal conversations with people, but the entire time I'm talking to a customer at work about where to find the men's shoes the only thing I'm thinking is “I wonder if she's shopping for her husband. I wonder if his feet are small. You know what they say about big and small feet. I might have a shot. I MIGHT HAVE A SHOT, THAT DUDE MIGHT HAVE A TINY PECKER AND I CAN NAIL THIS WOMAN IF MY FEET ARE BIGGER THAN HIS.” And she might not even be that attractive. I'm just desperate. I don't know why, it's not like I truly know the carnal joys of sex since I only had it once in High School and it was FUCKING TERRIBLE. The only thing I recall was me being drunk and her crying and me going “OH JESUS THERE'S BLOOD DID I STICK IT IN THE WRONG HOLE OH GOD I'M GOING LIMP WHAT DO I DO FUCKING HELL” and that's it. I've never had any particular inclination or positive experience with sex, so why the obsession? I find it incredibly peculiar that there are people like me out there who haven't had much or any sex at all in their lives, yet are complete and utter slaves to their throbbing libidos. This isn't just my attempting at rationalizing my inability to get laid, so bear with me there's more to this.

Hell, maybe it's more like a drug addiction. I don't know what that's like, either. I binge-drank for a while in my youth, but I quit that cold turkey. I took a lot of Vicodin just to keep the shakes and growing pains off, but again I just ended up stopping that. Like any good drug addiction, there are visible signs of an addict suffering from a relapse. Sweaty and pale. His hands are no longer soft and delicate from excessive use of lotion (which explains the compliments people give me). His pants look like he's smuggling a ferret in them and he's twitching enough to make you believe it. He has a borderline obsessive fascination with household objects a normal person wouldn't consider would make for good sexual stimulation, like the radiator or toaster. And like every good drug addict, he'll go to more and more excessive lengths to get his fix because normal shit just doesn't cut it anymore at some point. It does nothing for him. He and his penis have to go on a fucking jihad through the anus of the internet just to find an oasis of sexual deviancy that will be enough to quench his thirst before he meanders to the next watering hole. It never stops. He'll either die before he makes it to the next stop or he'll eat his own dick to survive and then he can wonder what the fuck he's doing in the desert before going home and MAKING SOMETHING OF HIMSELF.

You may note the excessive use of the masculine pronoun in this discussion. That is because this is only a man's problem. What? It is, don't give me that bullshit. “Oh, I think about sex a lot too” you women say. No, there's a fucking difference. You women have wants. Men have needs. Women are commuters through sexual perversion, men are hostages. I don't want these thoughts, they're like the asshole children you get in the divorce settlement that you know are lost causes but are stuck raising them anyway as they slowly leech money, happiness, and hope out of your body. It makes perfect sense, because there are a lot of instances of sex or masturbation or sexual perversion where it's a lot like a Las Vegas marriage after a night of binging. Then you relapse into proper judgment and you tell yourself afterwards “Well, it seemed like a good idea when I was horny” as the post-wank shame starts to settle in and you frantically close all the incognito tabs on your internet browser riddled with Thai prostitutes, bestiality and vore while you just sit there. You sit there, and you think about what you've done, and you think about how you'll never be able to have a realistic, healthy, normal sexual relationship with another person because they don't meet your ridiculous standards of having a literal horse's ass while they perpetually lactate beer to compensate for the fact that they probably look like some misbegotten Godless heathen that reminds you of the evils in the world.

Honestly if I could, I would do away with sex entirely in my life. Life would be so much more convenient if I didn't have to have sex. It means that I wouldn't have to worry about being in a committed relationship or that I would be pissing away my hard-earned money on prostitutes.  But I can't stop, regardless of what I do or what happens.  I could cut off both of my arms and I would find a way. And the fact that I can say that is horrifying.  At this point the thought of it repulses me because it's been tainted by so many extremities and factors. It is an impure, horrific, disgusting experience.

Until I get a chance to do it again.

Hate magnet.

So my car's a piece of shit, let's make that clear. It's a 2003 Hyundai Elantra, and if you know anything about cars (I don't), that apparently means that it was constructed from industrial waste and has about a lifespan of a fortnight. I think it's a suitable car for me because it looks like a fairly nice car but it runs like absolute shit, which is a perfect metaphor for the kind of person I am. I remember one particular ordeal where I was driving home at night and the radiator cracked while I was on the highway. It looked like something underneath my hood blew up, and going 70 miles an hour at night while this is happening when my phone just died had me swearing loud enough to be heard over traffic. As of late it was leaking oil underneath the car (another suitable metaphor for myself since I have a hemorrhoid), and after getting it taken in, they fixed the leak but ANOTHER leak showed up because of a faulty oil cap. I don't know if any of this is actually true and if I'm explaining it correctly because again, I don't know anything about cars and a gear nut could be reading this and have his brain melted in a way that nerds would have their brains melted watching an episode of The Big Bang Theory.

So it was taken into the shop again and I still had school this morning. So instead, since my dad's on vacation, I got to take his 1986 Camry to school. My dad's nickname for it is the “ghetto sled.” I don't know if any of you people have seen this car. Go google it, I can wait. Or I can post it here.

Mine looks worse. The windshield is cracked, and the paintjob is completely faded to the point that it looks like matte, which means it's like driving a bigger and even uglier Nintendo DSi. This car is the definition of a death trap. The doors are thin enough that I felt like if I kicked them hard enough that I could get my foot through them. That if it even grazed a big rig, it would be sucked into it and ground up into metal confetti. It feels like driving a sand castle, where the slightest contact with anything means dissintegration. And apparently, I'm not the only person who thought this.

While I drove to school today, I noticed something... odd. People were going around me. I checked the speedometer. “Huh,” I thought. “I'm going the speed limit. Hell, I'm going over it (unless my family's reading this, in which case I'm going the speed limit). Maybe I have a lot of smog coming out the back?” I rolled down my window to check, emphasis on the word “roll” because the car had those cranks that you turn. That is what kind of archaic machinery rests in this car. I never thought that I, that we would become spoiled enough as a technologically-driven culture that I could be capable of missing buttons that rolled the windows up or down. But... there was no smog. People were simply afraid of this car. I mean I couldn't blame them; I go to school in a town filled with rich and entitled white kids. If your car is anything older than a decade, then chances are you came from that fucking ghetto in Oakland and you were going to menace society with your car's sharp edges and flat paint job. I drove a car that was older than most of the people going to my college, by all means I shouldn't even have the money to be going to school if this tin box was the best I could afford. You stuck out, and people were disgusted yet strangely fascinated with you. It would be as if a black man went to Japan; people would be horrified that some Not-Japanese person is roaming the street, but look at him. He's a product of a lost era.

This discrimination didn't stop when I got to school, either. I got to school early, so the parking lot was empty. I wanted to park away a bit from the campus because of my shame that I'm driving this angular death machine, so I got my shit out and went to class. Now usually the parking lot's filled up when I'm going home because of classes later in the day. Around my car, was a perfect U-shape of empty parking spaces. ...nobody wanted to be near my car. Probably due to an insurance liability, but Jesus Christ. Not that I would know if they dinged it anyway, it doesn't have an alarm system. Or doors that worked. The driver's door did not work on the outside. You had to open it from the inside, which meant other doors had to be unlocked, and then you had to open the driver's door from the inside of the car. I cannot begin to explain to you how incriminating this looks in practice. Other people could because of the afformentioned empty parking spaces around me so that God and everybody could see.

Now despite all the shit that I've given this car, I enjoyed driving it to school. For one, there's a reason that this car is still being driven after 27 years, and that's because it actually runs like a fucking champ. What this car looks like on the outside is what my car would look like on the inside; it feels like driving on a baby's ass compared to my car that winces and screams with every bump I hit. And I say that not to imply that I've run over any children before, even though I would wholly admit to doing so otherwise. And secondly, you just feel happy driving this car. Humbled, even. Because it is a hate magnet. Every driver around you turns into an asshole when you drive this because they look down on you and they avoid you like your car contains a virtulent plague. All the hatred and frustration you feel towards people being assholish drivers, any possibility of self-doubt you have about your skills of a driver are out the window because you know it's everybody else's fault for hating the living shit out of you while you drive this car.

Though now that I think about it, that might be a bad thing since I would imagine in the ghetto this would reflect upon everybody until the anger just reached critical mass and they'd all start shooting and killing each other like a bunch of uncivilized niggers. ...actually given the presence and prestige of cars in the ghetto, I think I just might be on to something. I'll get back to you on this.

There's a pun about pulp in here, I know it.

We interrupt your boring lives for a breaking news story; I think my life's gotten more ridiculous since I've been on these meds. I would imagine that this would normalize my mood, which I guess it has. Hasn't done a damn thing for the events occurring in my life, and sometimes I almost want to believe that some of this is just some really awkward trip. I guess after my head ran out of creativity as of late, weird shit's decided to start happening to make the fictionalized life I've developed... look fucking normal. Let me explain.

It's been an odd couple of months or so because things have been normal here. I haven't felt any tension, I've been calm, I've been getting my life together. Things are peaceful. It's quite nice, and I know it's odd for you people to hear the word “nice” in the same sentence and positive context as “my life”, but it's true. But today, today was special. Because it's probably the angriest I've heard my dad in quite a long time. I'm just minding my own business being a recluse in my room and gushing over Anime DVDs because I like dick, and then I hear him yelling. And this is mean yelling. I didn't know what he was prancing on about, but I heard “GET THAT MOTHERFUCKER ON THE PHONE OR I'M GOING TO FIND HIM AND KILL HIM” in several variants and all assortment of charming nuances to his speech. He had the fire in his eyes. Or I would at least assume so, I wasn't leaving my fucking room when he's raging about like a sociopath.

But I was curious what was occurring. She said she had to keep quiet about it or something, I couldn't really tell. She couldn't tell. And my dad was yelling about what that boy made her do, and suddenly my blood started to boil and my protective sibling instincts started to kick in, and I started indulging myself in fantasies in finding this kid and slitting him up the middle with a boxcutter. And that says a lot about me as a person, nothing good I would add. When a 24-year old man is filled with enough of a preoccupying malice that he can direct legitimate, fleshed-out adult hatred towards a high-schooler that he wanted to end the life of in an agonizing manner, it says nothing good. But I listened a bit more, and from what I gathered it sounded like my sister was holding on to something a boy at school wanted her to keep safe. ...uh oh. Oh boy. Oh boy oh boy oh boy that's not a smart thing to do. That is a dark path to go down. And my friends, it is a dark path to go down. I won't say I've went down that path, but I will say it was easy to find people to give it away to when I thought I had too much, and I did at some points. What I'm talking about are energy cards for the Pokemon TCG, because people needed load up 30 or 40 of those motherfuckers into their decks to ever actually have enough energy to make the damn pokemon useful.

Or I might've been talking about drugs, okay I was talking about drugs. But still, the premise is the same.

I mean, this is a big deal. I never would've expected it from her. She's a 15-year old recluse who's on her laptop all day. SHE'S ME WHEN I STILL HAD SHAME LEFT. Granted I was doing all manner of unsavory things when I was 15, I was almost in disbelief that she wouldn't hold onto her integrity. Maybe she was bullied into it. Maybe she was scared and wanted people to think nicely of her for doing these kinds of things for them. Because she's naive and nice and dumb as a post. But I could understand entirely, things like this happen as a kid. You have to nip them in the bud before they become a problem, and giving the kid a stern talking to might set him straight. Which is nice for my father, because as he put it while he was talking to this kid, "I'm a crazy hard-ass Italian, I don't fuck around with people.” And he doesn't, my dad doesn't fuck around with people. My dad has lost jobs for getting into fights with people. One of my more vivid memories of my youth is when my mom is trying to back out of the drive way, he starts smashing in the side of the car door with a bat. If there are pissing contests of “My dad could beat up your dad” occurring, I throw my gloves into the ring with everybody else. I would find his overprotective behavior of his daughter admirable, and his actions appropriately badass if the man didn't put the fear of God into me like he undoubtedly put into this child.

“I'm not going to open the boxes, I don't want to know what kind of shit is in there.” So hold the fuck on, I haven't left my room yet, but we had shit MAILED to us? We had things in boxes mailed to us that she was supposed to hold onto? I mean, I just, I mean, I just... HOW THE FUCK DO YOU GET AWAY WITH THAT? What the fuck were we supposed to do, just let her go “Oh he's using our address to receive shit in the mail, it's okay right?” We don't even know what the fuck is in them. There could be a human foot in one of those boxes that's hollowed out and filled with anthrax, and that would be okay? Or it could be drugs or guns, that's probably more likely right, probably more likely. I overhear him mention that he doesn't believe that they're computer parts. Why the fuck couldn't he have computer parts mailed to his house instead? What are his parents going to do? Are they Korean and were they going to beat the shit out of him for cheaping out and not getting good parts to run Starcraft 2 and Dota 2 at max settings? Who the fuck is buying a lie like that?

So I zone out for a bit, and the whole situation seems to have settled, and I go out there to see what's up, before I can say anything I see them and the boxes are enormous. They're about two to three feet in height about two feet in width. I give them a push. They're heavy. I assumed my sister was meant to intersect them, but I doubt her capabilities to even lift them. These are heavy boxes. These are not computer parts. Now the thing that baffles me is that my house is small. It is a two-bedroom apartment where my sister's bed is in the living room. That is to emphasize how little of space we have here. ...how do YOU think we wouldn't have noticed them? There's no place to hide them. There's no place to hide them. THERE'S NO FUCKING PLACE TO HIDE THEM. WHERE THE FUCK WOULD THEY GO, UP MY FUCKING ASS? AND YOU THINK WE WOULDN'T ASK? THAT WE WOULDN'T QUESTION IT? THAT WE WOULDN'T QUESTION WHY THREE BIG FUCKING BOXES JUST SHOWED THE FUCK UP ON OUR DOORSTEP FROM CHINA AND THAT SHE WANTS TO HOLD THEM FOR A FRIEND?

...I almost don't want to begrudge her for it because that's just so fucking stupid of her. I realized why shit started rolling around in my room, why shit on my shelves start falling off towards my doorway. Because as the conversation between her and my father ensued, the center of gravity... was shifting towards my sister's head in the living room. And we got somebody else that didn't scare the kid to ask what was in there, and we opened them. You know what were in the boxes? You might want to sit down for this. I know I had to. Juicers were in the boxes. Yes, juicers. JUICERS. Big fucking appliances. So my sister and the kid came clean and the kid had apparently been getting this shit from China or warehouses or some shit I don't know and selling them to people. His family didn't like that, so he couldn't have them mailed to his house anymore. So we'd have this shady-ass kid showing up here to pick up his shit so he can go peddle it or sell it or something.

......Is there some sort of underground black market for smuggled kitchen appliances that I don't know about? You know, enough of one that this would seem like an adequate means of income? More maybe the kid was smart and he just found his niche, I don't know. I mean my question is, well, how the fuck would you sell it? You can't just show up on the street at 3am and go “YO NIGGA I GOT WHAT YOUS NEED HEUH, THIS SHIT BE TRIPPIN'. IT EVEN FILTERS OUT ALL DA PULP AND SHIT SO IT GOES DOWN SMOOTH, BITCH,” there has to be a market to sell this kind of shit to.

Instead of beating the shit out of him, I probably would've just told the kid that he would've been better off selling drugs.

Somebody catch me, I think I'm falling.

At this point I think I can safely and proudly say that I am no longer just an internet madman since that insanity is now no longer apparently confined to the information superhighway. That's fucking right, I spent a week in the loony house and I'm all the better for it. And I'll tell you folks something, that shit was a fucking learning experience no matter how you look at it.

Let's start off near the beginning, though. I am a man who gets spectacularly depressed for no apparent reason. It just happens in a seasonal fashion. I am a diagnosed Bipolar II person, which means whenever women now bitch about going on their periods get ridiculously moody and men don't understand, fuck you I understand. And I can argue that mine might even be worse because at least yours stops when your biological clock is up; there's no cure for mine. And at least your erratic moodswings don't (hopefully) make you suicidal. Mine do. I have thought about suicide enough that it's become mundane to me. When I get up in the morning, I think about what I'm going to have for breakfast, how the rest of the day is going to go, and how great it would be if I were dead. And don't give me that look. It's not like I actually considered going through with it, but the thought was always... well, there. It was a big pink elephant in the room that happened to be holding a noose going “I'M GONNA GETCHA EVENTUALLY, YOU LITTLE CUNT,” and I read that in the voice of an 1800s prospector and now you did too.

Now Bipolar is basically moodswings. Bipolar II is basically your moodswings kick your face into the mud and you hate yourself as a person. If I were to liken how it works, it would be like if I dropped a rubber ball off of the roof of a hospital, because we found shit like that fun growing up before we had the internet. We also thought beating each other with sticks was fun, but bear with me there's more to this. Now the ground would be suicidal thoughts and intuitions, and Jimmy's bed on the second floor would be the baseline since he's confined in bed that's a story off the ground, which makes sense because Jimmy doesn't know much of happiness since his legs don't work due to his drunk father accidentally backing over him in his youth and now he has terminal cancer at fifteen, but it works for this metaphor so get off my case. The ball would bounce, but every time the peak would be just a bit lower below Jimmy's view, coming a little bit closer to the ground with each bounce. And as the laws of gravity and God hating children dictate, that ball will eventually stop bouncing and just lie on the ground, and that's when I would've decided that offing myself would probably be a great idea. And I used the ground to depict suicide in this metaphor because Jimmy eventually just jumped out his window and painted the pavement with his cancer-infected brain matter, but fuck him because this story's about me.

I did not want my brain matter over anybody's pavement, nor did I want to confront my problems like a man, so I did the best thing I could do; I went to the hospital and told them I wanted to off myself and they should magic a way into helping me because otherwise I would walk out and jump off the top of the parking garage and leave them with a fantastic lawsuit that would probably cover the funeral costs for my family. Now you're probably wondering “Hey, if you're suicidal, why would you ask for help? Aren't you attention-whoring?” No I'm not, and here's why: people attempt suicide because they want help, they need somebody to catch them before they fall again. They frequently don't have any actual intentions of going through with it, it's just like they're playing mental chicken. That's just what psychology permits. People commit (keyword here) suicide because they no longer want to be alive. If somebody has honest intentions of their life, there's nothing you can do to stop them. It's as easy as going to your local Rite Aid, getting two bottles of sleeping pills, choking them down with liquor, and then going to lie down and float in a reservoir until your senses give in and you sink to the depths and achieve that eternal peace you've always wished for. Killing yourself is remarkably easy, it's a matter of having the stones to do it. Most people don't. I have attempted it before, and I did it without a second thought. And while the voice of logic in my head still told me it was a bad idea, I decided to get help before that voice was stifled by the erratic and rampaging emotions that ever so frequently seized control. I went there voluntarily. Then the Marshall asked me about how we should go about it.

“Well, the easiest way to get you into a clinic immediately would be a 5150.” she said.

“Which is... ?”

“Danger to oneself, others, or gravely disabled. Which means you'll be top priority to go to a psychiatric hospital and under a 72-hour hold.”

“Okay, let's do that.”

“Alright, you'll be under the 72-hour hold, there's no going back now since it's involuntary.” she said. This perplexed me.

“...but I came here by my own volition.” I stated.

“That you did.”

“So it's voluntary.”

“Yes it is.”

“But you just said that a 5150 is an involuntary 72-hour hold.”

“That it is.”

“...so I'm voluntarily admitting myself to a psychiatric hospital involuntarily?”

“So it seems.”

“...I must be fucking crazy.”

“Well, we have two places, you can go to Fremont Hospital.”

“Eh, there's a Taco Bell in Fremont that gave me dysentery once.” I say, as if there's a Taco Bell that didn't. “Where else can I go?”

“John George Psychiatric Pavilion.”

“Sounds fancy, where's that?”

“Close to East Oakland.”

I arrived at Fremont Hospital late Wednesday night. I was checked in by paramedics. Everything on my person was taken from me. This included my shoes of all things. Well, I could've had my shoes if I removed the laces. Having things that I could apparently strangle myself with was a no-no. They asked me several questions about how I was feeling, why I was there, and why in God's good nonexistent name would I have them haul me out there at eleven in the god-damn night. I was apathetic to all of these questions. They honestly didn't mean much to me. I was tired and finally away from my family, so I just wanted to go to sleep. Sleep sounded nice. Sleep always sounded nice.

That's what the suicidal thoughts were tied to; exhaustion. Never an adamant hatred for what God had against me, nor a tremendous sorrow for everything in my life that had gone unsalvageably wrong. Just exhaustion of every and all events. An all-encompassing and nihilistic emptiness, a long-sought silence from all the dogs barking inside my head. The sinister voices in my head that kept me tossing in bed until the sun rose, the meandering psychosis and paranoia that showed up and did whatever it wanted, that I could merely watch ruin my life and leave to have me scramble to scrape up the pieces. It's a lot like being in the backseat of a car being driven by somebody incredibly drunk, where there's nothing you can say to that person to make them stop driving like a fucking nut. So basically Tuesday and Thursday mornings when my mother took me to school.

So while I slept, I had a roommate. That was a different experience, I haven't slept in the same room with somebody else since the last time I had to share a hotel with my family up in Canada. I was paranoid, high-strung, and was terrified for my life because I was completely isolated from everybody I knew, and I had a man who was detained because of a trip on jimson weed spazzing out in his bed every five to ten minutes as my roommate. As would be expected, that first night of sleep wasn't as elegant as I would've wished for. Tomorrow though, I was able to get on meds. Oh boy oh boy, which meant meeting a Psychiatrist assigned to the hospital to keep everybody in check. Fun fact: did you know that in the entire Psychological line of professions that Psychiatrists have the highest rate of depression and suicide? And man I'll tell you, my assigned psychiatrist was no different. He always had that glassy-eyed and perpetually-ill look to his face like he had just gotten done crying. He looked like a Holocaust victim at Auschwitz that found out the porridge that just gave him dysentery was made from his family's ashes by the Hitler Youth. I mean I couldn't blame the guy; he works in a mental hospital where his job is to get a brief look into somebody's miserable life and due to his line of work, his only job is to throw pills at people until they are fixed. There's a good chance that he'll fail, and he'll see them come back to that wretch place again, still fucked up and needing help. Then he'll throw more and hope those work. He can't talk to them; that's what the clinical psychologists, therapists, and social workers do. His job is to listen to how miserable they are, and simply watch as his diagnosis inevitably fails to help these people. I would probably be back there again eventually if I became a Psychiatrist.

There were three floors to the hospital. The first floor is for the normalish people, the people who have had minor psychotic episodes in their life (as if such a thing exists) and are just in need of temporary care. The second floor are for the slightly crazier people, and the third floor is for the people who need to be tied down to their beds, because likely I would assume their meds would cause them to fly so high into the air that they would be dancing among the ethereally departed above the hospital. I was on the second floor, and there were some fucking characters on the second floor. Some of them were the kinds of people who made me feel normal. Who made me—an alcoholic internet terrorist who writes stories about his penis turning into German ducks fornicating—feel normal.

One woman was very nice and worldly; she seemed like a housewife in her late forties. She was technically homeless and was there for setting a grocery cart on fire and they were concerned for her mental health. I honestly couldn't see why, she seemed like somebody who just got arrested and was put here instead of a jail or other correctional facility. But have you ever had that moment? You know that moment where you're talking to somebody who seems completely normal, but then in the middle of the conversation, they just nonchalantly bring something up that makes you realize that something might be slightly off-kilter? When I was talking to this woman, she was talking about earlier events in her life about being a nutritionist, living in Virginia, and how she died a few years ago and was brought back to life by Michael Jackson and that she knew the world was going to end in 2020. I screamed internally “OH MY GOD I'M TALKING TO A CRAZY PERSON” and without changing expression simply replied with a “Huh,” and the conversation continued like I didn't even notice. And she brought it up in conversation so casually, like a past event someone witnessed that was interesting, but instead that incident was that time they saved Christmas with Bob and fought off a bunch of dick-waving vandals who had their donkey show interrupted.

“So how was your day, Lucas?”

“Oh man, I left Ace Hardware and got stuck in traffic, and while I was passing by a movie theater, I saw a dude fucking a dog.”

“Uh... that's fucking weird. Did he get arrested for bestiality?”

“No, because I immediately looked forward and I almost rear-ended a car being driven by a ninja. Also Tommy let me smoke this joint he had, he said it had some weird shit in it called LSD.”

There was another woman who managed to go around screaming hysterically about how her rights were being violated because she couldn't leave of her own volition. She also talked about being possessed by her departed sister named Miss Sally, and frankly I would believe it because I never felt like I was that close to evil. She was the sweetest woman normally, but when she lost it and started screaming, the only thing it served to do was trigger some semblance of PTSD I have and I would go into my room and cover my ears as I teeter back in forth like I'm petering off of a bad trip. Then there was a man who was the most hateful and bitter person I've ever met. He would openly tell people he was conversing with how much he despised them and how much they irritated him while everything he did sought to only benefit himself and to talk about his accomplishments. The best way I could describe the man was that he was Eustice from Courage the Cowardly Dog.

Another interesting character was a man named Miguel. He wasn't a crazy person though. He was just a fucking thug that got lucky dodging prison or a place like John George which was basically a throwaway dumpster for the relapsing nuts that the prison system got tired of dealing with. He tried breaking out. He almost succeeded. He broke down the door out of the containment area to the elevator. He overlooked the fact that the elevators could be merely shut off before he got into one of them, and that there was a stairwell in the opposite direction that he could've tried breaking into. He got moved to the third floor and continued to overlook this fact an additional three times before I assumed he was properly incarcerated and moved to a more suitable facility where he would meet Bubba the prison rapist. I don't think he was mentally unhinged so much as he was god-damn stupid, which doesn't seem like it would be an easy mistake to overlook.

Now, as a writer, I never really understood the magnitude behind the term “The Truth is Stranger Than Fiction” until I began to attempt articulating some of these events in my head. What occurred in that place was the sitcom Scrubs if it took place in a mental care hospital. “Some of this shit is ridiculous, nobody is going to buy this when I leave here. These people are fucking crazy, shit like this isn't a frequent occurrence.” Then I talked to some of them about my life and depressed the Hell out of them and realized “Shit, maybe I do belong here. Maybe this is something that does happen a lot.”

I think the oddest experience there was the fact that being an atheist—or at least somebody who really dislikes how God goes about his business—I met a lot of religious people in there that I conversed with about their faith. Part of me wants to go “Obvious joke about religious people being crazy goes here” but there was one person there who perplexed me quite a lot. She was a heavy-set woman with extremely short hair and a fondness for boots. I would make an obvious dyke joke because I'm an appalling human being, but stay with me because that's not the point. She was a perplexing enigma of a woman who liked to speak in riddles, and part of me initially wanted to say she was pulling pseudo-intellectual shit out of her ass until I talked to her a bit more. I've been sexually assaulted and personally exposed before. Talking to her was a lot like that, except it sort of ended up like those really fucked-up rape fantasies where the victim ended up emotionally broken and enjoying it. I felt like intellectually, I was exposed a great deal about my personal beliefs. It was a metaphorical dance of opposite beliefs that respected each other and felt remarkably at peace with the fact that somebody was very different yet so very similar to the other. Yin and Yang would be a good way to describe it. Hearing this girl go on about how her mother died and how there was some purpose to her life that she was able to adequately interpret through what a jaded cynic like me would interpret as nothing more than stretching coincidences and dumb luck was a bit jarring, because she was aware of it and didn't mind it either. And she was baffled by the fact that I could hold an almost solipsistic and nihilistic viewpoint on life, but simultaneously enjoy the fact that there might not be something more after I'm gone. My suicide was a good reason as to why that belief existed.

“You know, I was really out of it when I tried it eight years ago.” I said. “I came back, though. Did you know what I saw while I was lost? Nothing. No chorus of angels singing, no tunnel with a light at the end, no dastardly inferno and malicious evil, no transcendental ushering into the grandiose ether of reality. It was nothing. Not even calling it darkness would suitably describe and encapsulate the cold silent void that I saw.” And to me, that was nice. For a timid and meek person to be surrounded by raging noise and paranoia his entire life, there was something to me that was utterly beautiful about going to a place that was just silent and utterly devoid of anything else. That's why sleeping there was the best sleep I had in years. I was away from the responsibilities the disappointment the burden my life decided to give to such an unfortunate and ill-suited person like me to handle. When I slept, it was just no thought, just silence.

Life froze while I was in there because when I left that place after five days, everything went back to normal. Except I now was taking happy pills everyday to keep the dogs from barking in my head and I don't have to go to college for the rest of the semester, which seemed like a good decision for my family and I to make had I not made it on my own a month ago by going truant. I figured that maybe this was okay. There's a little bit of change, but not a tremendous amount. At least not yet. I didn't expect to go into that place and leave with everything immediately being hunky-dory. There's still work to be done, and I suppose it's up to me to make a plan for it. It's not like I could rely on God for that.

But If God has a plan for some people, I suppose not all of them will likely be good because the world would be probably be a happier place. Some people are just destined to have the deck stacked against them their entire lives, but instead of being pissed off about it I suppose I've learned to just accept it. Even God is capable of being a dick, but going around with a chip on my shoulder won't do me any good. This is the only life I have, and ending it to stick to the man that I'm not entirely sure exists just because he has it out for me doesn't seem like a safe bet. I can either go to that wonderful void of nothing and say “Well shit I guess he doesn't exist, I think I came here a little too early,” or I'll be in Heaven and God will say “I SAID I WAS GONNA GETCHA, YOU LITTLE CUNT” because he was that pink elephant in the room, and he'll pull a lever and I'll plummet into Hell to do laps in a lake of fire while my Sunday nights are used to act as Satan's personal bitch. Maybe fate has it out for me. The concept of “fate” has always been ridiculous to me. After talking to that woman, it still is. The concept of there being some predetermined destiny for everybody, that's something I think you should be in the crazy house for. Because you can say “well people can change their destiny”, but then at that point I don't count it as destiny because it's not predetermined if you can change it. That's fucking cheating. That doesn't make logical sense to say “There's this concept that this is unchangeable fate for people, but you can change if if you will it.” It's like that bullshit math teachers pull in Elementary School when they say shit like “You can't subtract a bigger number from a smaller number” even though you learn the following year that negative numbers exist.

But maybe I'm going about it wrong. Maybe I shouldn't be thinking logically about something like fate. I guess that's where the concept of faith comes into play, but piss all if I have any of that left. But I guess I don't find it as ridiculous as I did before. I haven't decided if talking to her has changed my life yet. I suppose we'll see as time goes on. Maybe like how I met somebody channeling her dead sister and how another was brought back from the brink by Michael Jackson, maybe this woman was directed by some higher power to change my life. Like Jesus or God, or Thor or Harrison Ford.

I'll do something with myself eventually.

I've hit a wall. I feel like I'm done with this for a while. A hiatus, if you will. I think a lot of you people, you readers have probably gotten the idea that the occurrences in my life haven't exactly been fortunate ones. One of those occurrences have shown up again. Not so much of an occurrence, but the onset of something has shown up. Something that I can't say I can keep under control for much longer. There isn't much I necessarily choose to hide about myself, so this is going here. This is my letter to the public, for all those who care to read to do so. This is largely a letter to myself, as well.

I don't like where my stories are going right now, so I'm stopping. And I just can't bring myself to do it anymore. I can't look at a doc file anymore and say “I like what I see.” I can't look at an incompleted work and force myself to finish it. I look at what I've written lately, and it's gotten out of control. It's going into dark places I can't really look at anymore. I know to some of you they just might strike you as melodramatic or moderately depressing stories, but when I look at them, and I see thoughts, events, idealized situations, projections of bad things I just think I should forget at this point. It's reaching a point where I feel like it's corroding my work, that I am merely a man on a soapbox in an abandoned warehouse near a pier, preaching to an imaginary crowd about—ironically enough—social ostracism and absolute indifference towards the world around one's self. Nobody has cared, and neither have I. Well, that isn't true. I care a little.

Now the big problem with the internet as I've learned to grasp, is that it enables this kind of thought. Most of you people? Probably not going to even read this. The ones that do? Most of you have never even met me, and probably never will. You do not know who I am outside of this place. I am not a person. There is not a living, breathing person on the other side of your monitor, is there? I am merely a screen name. I'm and here for you, and you are here for entertainment. My relevance is tied directly to your outlet for interactivity, nothing more. When you leave your computer, I for all intents and purposes do not exist any longer. You will not carry anything of me or anybody from this place with you. I could be dead tomorrow, and the only difference it will make is a name that is now no longer active. Find somebody else to talk to and IM. Forget inactive name. Continue operation. And I've slowly began to reach the age where I can look at this and go “Is this really okay?”

For people who have always felt small, transparent, or alone most of their lives, the internet seems like an odd play to alleviate those feelings, but we do it out of convenience. I like it, though. Because I want nothing more to just disappear. I want to be irrelevant and not have to worry about being obligated to people. And the internet does a fantastic job of doing that for me. As noted, I can just sign out and disappear, and people would be none the wiser nor would they really honestly care. They never met me or the person outside this place, why would they? But note that this isn't exclusive to the internet. I can go to school, and people talk. But they never think about what that person goes home to. What kind of life they live. How unhappy they are. We simply can't be bothered with that. I think I've made it abundantly clear that I'm just not a very happy person. I don't fundamentally like who I am. So I can come to a place where I don't have to be that. And if I feel like occasionally showing who I am, people don't notice, or they merely look away. I suppose that's what I get for expecting better from people, but I can hardly expect anything from myself so I suppose it's probably karma.

Now I sit here in my room at the crack of dawn, sitting in this chair by myself in complete and utter silence. Well fine, the typing makes noises, at least. Now, the ultimate irony behind all this is that the only people who will read this, already know. And you people are the only ones who are helping me keep my sanity in this midlife crisis of mine. And that's what I'm calling it because I can't realistically see life past 40, so there you go for another morbid thought. The people who should read this, probably won't. It's just a blog on the internet that people hardly read, which functions largely as my archive. The people that should read it for themselves, and the people who I want to read it—for my sake—won't even notice. This entire confession was pointless. Nothing will change. There will be no lifeline or alleviation or counterpoint presented to me. As I sit here creatively bankrupt of any more stories to tell, I'm probably the only person who will notice. And I won't do anything about it.

One of these days I'm going to do something productive with myself, I promise.