it's kind of creepy if i think too hard about it. but what is there really to do when you're trapped in the bowels of a hospital at 3 in the morning, with naught but an internet connection to keep you company?

so i've been getting my tarot cards read online. interestingly, it kind of told me to let go of the past.

which is, sadly, despite it being a good six years since it all went down, something that i mull over during my downtime.

among all the various crushes and half-assed attempts to get into women's pants, there is only one woman who stands out, and she is the one with which i went absolutely nowhere. it was so destined to not happen, and it so impossible for anything to happen at this point.

there is a circle in hell which consists of horny people stuck in the friend zone.

yeah. not that anything really ever happened after things never happened with her. (man, that's a weird sentence.) i like to think of myself (in a masochistic way, because i really don't like, but i say i do) as a born-again virgin.

it'd be funny, except that it's happening to me. (you know what they say, everything is funny as long as it's not happening to you.)

but, yeah, enough wallowing in self-pity. the thing is, the cards told me to let go, and so i'm trying to let go, and that made my heart a lot lighter. i mean, it doesn't really change anything whatsoever. i know i'll be the same chickenshit coward that i've always been when it comes to women. but at least i've stopped lying in bed every night wanting to kill myself.

so here's the creepy part. for whatever crazy-ass reason, i thought about this other woman who i met around the same time, who i've lost touch with completely after college. googling is to little avail.

all of the sudden, my heart yearns.

this is not exactly letting go of the past.

then there's this other woman at work, which is just a disaster, because everyone knows that you should never try to date at work, particularly if the object of your affection is unequal to you in terms of the social hierarchy. (hierarchies. what shit.)

so here i am mentally masturbating as usual. because everyone who knows me knows that i won't do a goddamn thing to save myself. i'm like those stupid pandas who refuse to fuck, thereby dooming the future of their entire species.

i am so doomed. and yet i have this feeling that god or destiny or whatever you want to call it is playing this massive horrible joke on me and is going to allow me to live to be like 93 or something awful like that, alone and forever hopeless.

i must've really pissed someone off in a former life. or they might have misapportioned some karma.

what i wouldn't give for life to have it's own reset button.

Why is it that someone can say certain things, and they don't mean anything near the way I think they mean?

Dear God, here we go again.

I remember sitting on the beach once with my friends. It was one of those bizarre love triangle situations. The guy who is a good friend of mine wasn't there, but, of course, I manage to be the only straight guy in the group, so the women and the gay man get to talking about particulars and favorite positions, and it was really sad and a pathetic—I feel a little shame recounting the situation—but since I was like hopelessly in love with the girl, I couldn't take it.

The whole point of that was that what evolved was a very bizarre conversation that was circumlocuitous (hmmm, that doesn't seem like a real word. Oh well) and vague. I refused to name name, to name situations, and merely gave abstract labels to things. We started talking about "first things" and "second things" and "third things," worse than lawyers, because there were no antecedents, just pronouns.

But the thing that was really bizarre, and heartwarming in a stupid and insane way, was that my friends understood what the hell I was talking about.

I almost wish I could've transcribed the conversation.

So, yeah, I am being deliberately avoidant and vague. I don't like giving names to things. I'm way too superstitious for my own good. I have this animistic belief that to give a name to something makes it become real, and I'm all for keeping my troubles imaginary, thank you very much.

Anyway.

Like if this woman I've been talking to. If what she says had the same meaning to her as the meaning that I would like it to have. Well.

The thing is, I have no problems with the mental side of things. Maybe even the emotional, the psychological. I just don't have any grasp of the physical dimension.

The one insecurity that I have struggled for years to shake is my belief that I am physically repulsive.

Which, comparatively speaking, I know isn't true. For one thing, I know perfectly well that standards of aesthetics are pretty arbitrary. For another, I know plenty of men much more disgusting than I who have no problems with getting some action.

See, this is the sick twisted part of me. On one hand, I'd like to interpret the things she says in a certain way, but on the other hand, I don't want anything to transpire. I know that it will only lead to pain and suffering on all accounts, and it would be best to be avoided.

Trying to avoid pain and suffering is basically trying to avoid life.

How fucking existential.

I have completely pissed away an evening roaming through blogs and xangas. The sun is coming out, and man, do I feel pathetic.

This lifestyle is not conducive to my mental health.

So I've spent the last four or five hours (I forget exactly) jumping from link to link like an ADHDer, just trying to stay awake until the sun comes up. Later tonight, I get to start on this new, mad schedule for two weeks, working 14 hour shifts from 5pm to 7am.

I am just not a night person.

And all I've got for company right now are words.

My fellow poets, weaving their incantations upon the bit-ether.

Derrida just died, how exactly do you deconstruct that?

Especially at this hour, I am apt to ask, "What is real?"

I don't believe in nothing no more.

I even doubt my faithlessness.

But reading all these words, tied skillfully together maybe with meter, or alliteration, or maybe not tied together. Made whole by its disjunctiveness. Adorned with verbal step-offs, like sharp, simple fractures, long bones snapped in two. Hesitant pauses, of trying to extract just the right word. Or those sudden silences, when destiny just sucker punched you in the gut. I start dreaming of all those wizards whom I don't really know. Derrida. Lacan. Heidegger. Nietschze. Foucault. I only understand that it is very similar to magic. Creating worlds out of puffs of air and the vibrations of thin strips of muscle and cartilage. The text can only float in that Godelian non-space of real irreality, irreal reality, whatever any of that means.

What I understand is that there are no hard and fast rules by which one can discern truth, not even in mathematics.

But that is beside the point.

I meditate upon the word—isn't it remarkable that a particular reading of one of the sacred scriptures leads to realizing that the creating force is the Word?

And the twisting definitions, chasing the etymologies to the beginning and back, the palimpest of meanings upon meanings, and there is nothing, nothing. The words are like sonar, pinging the depths of reality, but we will never see it directly, never sense it in any way directly.

And then I wonder about the observer's paradox, about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. If you ping truth with a word, doesn't that change the meaning or displace the context?

You can know where, or you can know how, but never both.

It is 4am and I am officially insane. Sanity has left the building.

So we enter the realm of darkness. The underworld of the night shift, the hours of the graveyard. My loneliness is a palpable presence, a solid mass. Like rotten meat sitting in my stomach. And I'm too tired to vomit it up.

I am angry. While I'm sure there are deep-seated psychological reasons for my ire, I can't pinpoint anything in my consciousness. The mundane activities of daily living are simply beginning to piss me off.

I can't help but feel that, somehow, everything is all wrong.

In other news, I have become good at burning bridges.

As the weeks roll by, the number of unreturned voice mails sitting in my Inbox has swollen, but the number I am receiving these last few days has slowed to a trickle.

It is depressing in a lot of ways, but it reaffirms my belief that no one will really miss me when I'm gone.

The way I'm feeling right now, I would probably go out and kick puppies and beat little children if I weren't so goddamn lazy.

In the light of day, my despair evaporates. with the sun shining, it's hard to imagine the aching sadness, the weight of 10 years of wandering the desert, alone and forsaken, suddenly coming down upon me in the middle of the night, unannounced and unexpected.

Lying awake in the darkness, I am trying to be still, trying to shut off my mind. Instead, I find myself rummaging through my memories, trying to find a single happy moment. An instance of joy that wasn't tainted by profound depression or tragic calamity.

In the last 10 years, the happiest relationship I have ever had is the one that never happened.

You know that something is wrong with you when one of the only high points you can think of in the last 10 years is when someone convinced you not to kill yourself.

But I remember lying besides her. Well not really beside her. I was a good foot, foot and a half away. Listening to her breathe, and knowing that the world was right.

There is something sick, sad, and desperate in this memory. Last night, it was the only thing that made me cease my restless worrying, my crazed anxiety. In this one moment that epitomizes my failures and my Pyrrhic victories when it comes to connecting with people, I am content. This is enough.

Barely. I am truly scavenging for crumbs here.

Long ago and far away, when my path was not yet set, when I still had hope, however faint and flickering, I remember driving the winding road, up the mountains and through the trees. She sat beside me, making sure I didn't fall asleep, commenting idly about how pretty the stars were. All those suns blazing in full glory.

There was also that brief nanosecond—sometimes I wonder if I just imagined it entirely—when she grabbed my hand and pulled me across the street. I don't even remember why we started hurrying, or where we were going, or where we were coming from.

10 years later, that's all I've got. Whatever mad fancies I hallucinated at the time have long ago receded, overtaken by reality.

Whether she remembers these things would matter very little. I would never speak of them to her.

It really is fucked up that these memories are the only things that keep me from death-spiralling into despair and self-destruction.

Oh well. Use whatever you've got, I guess.