Back from another

mephedrone-fueled all-nighter after having my heart stomped on by this girl for the very last time. Sometimes I wonder how I let myself get to this point. I mean, I’m a pretty proud and independent person and I’ve always been quite strong but somehow… well I guess that’s all part of life experience. You know, when life just throws shit at you out of nowhere. Kind of makes you feel like God or whatever the fuck you’d like to call it is laughing at you, like I’m part of this crappy Ben Stiller comedy where nothing ever goes right for the movie’s protagonist. I wonder if I’ll even remember this feeling, this experience, 10-15 years from now. Sometimes I feel like I’ll never remember anything… I just don’t understand how this girl chased after me for months and then when I finally realize I like her I hit a huge brick wall. Now I’m left with a comedown and a sharp pain in my stomach that kind of feels like I’m the dumbest person on earth. Sitting here, drinking a beer at 11:25am, I feel like I can finally see the humor in being young and stupid. So full of insignificant misery; aren’t I just the picture-perfect image of ordinary suburban youthful angst? Thinking back on last night, all that alcohol, the shitty drugs, the vacant romances, it all just seems so pathetic and at the same time so beautiful. Not sure why, but there is something really beautiful about feeling wretched. It’s just so disheartening when I realize how absolutely vapid all of this is. Here I am whining about an entirely unoriginal experience that, let’s face it, we’ll probably all go through eventually. I guess that doesn’t detach from its importance. Every once in a while you need to be reminded of the fact that being alive can really fucking suck. Especially when living a privileged life. You know, the kind where your parents pay for you to pretend to learn but really mostly just get fucked up somewhere they don’t have to see it. Especially the kind where you’re lucky enough to treat people who care about you like crap. I think back about all the people I led on, not intentionally but inadvertently and, to be honest, with some knowledge of what I was doing. I’ve been in her position plenty of times. It isn’t really cruel intentions but more like ignorance, inexperience. Mostly though, it’s fear. Not of hurting someone else but of facing that pain, looking them in the face as you rip them to shreds, and it is entirely selfish. You cover it up with a sort of helplessness, an artificial concern for their emotional well-being that can mask your own absolute carelessness. In a drug-induced, unusually honest conversation, a friend of mine confided in me that he thinks he will never find anyone. He’s acceded to what he believes is his unavoidable eternal loneliness. This guy is amazing, he’s intelligent and funny and interesting. But somehow I can almost see that happening. I can see him middle-aged, drowning in books and self-hatred. How come I’ve never felt this way? How am I so fucking sure of myself? You know that moment when you realize that no one sees you the way you see yourself? It shatters your whole support system, breaks that shell of pride and presumption and that’s when you feel truly naked. It’s scary.

I’ve been trying out this new thing where I try to find beauty in horrible things, you know, like in death and heartbreak and also torture, disease, starvation. It just sounds so perfect, as if I’ve figured out some painless way of sailing through life with all its horrors. I used to think that art is just a way of exuding beauty out of ordinary life, bringing it to the surface for us to, in part, marvel at it in awe, but mostly pat ourselves on the back under the illusion that we are somehow its creators. I suppose that I still do. Art seems to me, sometimes, to be man’s attempt at playing God. I can’t help but think that there’s nothing more pure than one’s very own perception. To find beauty in experience, to be led by it in every fleeting thought, is what art attempts to capture. And so, as I step back and see myself, still sipping that lukewarm beer in a filthy dorm room dirtied further by rejection and self-doubt, I can’t help but (almost) smile. Suddenly it all seems so silly, my throbbing headache, that insistent nausea, the mephedrone crusted in my nostrils, shame… Silly and absolutely perfect.