loser in new york
self-loathingAnother day in the life: the hair falls out, the shadows lengthen and disappear and rise again, the nausea comes and goes in predictable patterns. How is it possible to live in New York City and feel this lonely? What did I do to deserve this? I never thought I was that weird, but maybe I really am fucked up and retarded on some fundamental level, and others can sense that and give a wide berth. The vibes are probably off. There’s some crazy insane energy I must be channeling right now because it feels as though I’m pissing everyone off. And the poor women in my life, in my blubbering weakness I’ve professed my love to them all and have ruined everything by making it excruciatingly awkward. Or maybe I creeped or weirded them out, God forbid? I don’t think so, I apologized, and it was meant in an earnest-hot-mess sort of way, but who knows what serotonin syndrome and alcohol produced — the memory is a bit fuzzy. What’s worse is I’m probably a pest, a burden, not that fun to be around, and have thoroughly eroded the goodwill of those charitable enough to try and share the weight of this gloomy heart for a little. How scary, to know there is actually nobody really there to catch you. If there was a listicle for most pathetic animals on Earth right now, I’d probably be in the top 100. OK, maybe not that pathetic, but I have a reasonable claim to the top n-tile. I’m a loose cannon, a liability, and need to be put down. There’s a bit on Reddit, probably some Zoomer creative writing exercise, where the protagonist was considering getting chemically castrated. I think maybe I should consider that, since maybe male unhappiness really is some sublimation of libido, and killing it would allow us to reach inner peace at last. What a terrible splintered life - maybe we’re constituted as essentially alienated in the West, like Mr. Lacan said, or maybe the lacuna is a fundamental constant - to bridge it is to touch God, ineffable and impossible. Tension is the motor force, and like strings, we break, and breaking, frayed, we have ends pointed in all different directions, hands smarting from the metal whipping as it becomes undone.
Now that we’ve broken up, and the ghost of her haunts the apartment as we put our items in order, compare notes, quash memories, swallow feelings, and surgically excise the fuzzies, what’s there for me here? Thirty years old, drifting through the city like some sad balloon of a man, making an ass of myself whenever there’s a glimmer of affection and immediately proceeding to crumple into myself and eschew all that would be called a normal life with each failure. It’s not that I really had a plan, I had some ill-formed hope that I’d be able to cobble together an interesting life with like-minded people here, that I’d be able to plug into something that’s good for the soul and stimulating for the mind. So far, nada. Who wants to hang out with some talentless thirty year-old? I’m a good worker bee, I churn out the numbers and charts, check the boxes, make a middling income (not too much, mind you), and still manage to get enough of other’s people unpleasantness and tossed-off shit piled on to me to cuckold me thoroughly and feed a family of three, but do I have that glimmer of potential? That spark of talent? That je ne sais quoi of real-recognize-real, the thunderbolt divine realization when you look at something that you know is just good, in a very unqualified not-work-in-progress sense of the word? How pathetic is it to be asking these questions when the mold has already been set at 30 years of age! And even if it wasn’t, God, I’m too exhausted! My brain isn’t what it was, I’m slower, more burnt out, and don’t know what’s going on anymore, and I’m increasingly unable to keep up with the bare minimum. I live in a pile of trash that grows every day; I hope it suffocates me eventually, God willing, soon.
But maybe, maybe, I was hoping there would be more, and that I’d be able to do a little more if I was able to carve a niche out for myself. So far: no friends, lost girlfriend, I’m just paying rent and consuming and making trash and wasting space and dying a little each day. I really am a plague and blight to the city — it’d be better if there were some native New Yorkers living here in my stead. Instead, I just cloister myself in some diaper-like existence because the world outside is too scary and I’m actually just a big fucking loser. And dating: don’t get me started. What a terrifying concept! Sure I’m good-looking enough, but short, and we live in a eugenics world now, didn’t ya know? I’ve dated plenty, and have had lots of fun, but it does increase the emotional and sexual stakes when there’s not like some endless fountain of potential romances. That’s probably unrealistic, but can you imagine actually going on dates and then having it not work out because of your personality? That would be so much worse, what an indictment it’d be, and my fragile little man-ego can’t handle that right now, so maybe better to tell myself these fictions than risk adding insult to injury.
How are people so well-adjusted and stable, how do they not peel the skin from their fingers off and tear their hair out in random moments of inarticulable insanity? I feel crazy all the time and do think about the cool gun metal against my jaw and how nice it’d be to pull y’know? Death is like an orgasm, Shakespeare and all that, and maybe I’m just sexually frustrated. But SSRIs were supposed to help with that, and I don’t feel sexual, just fucking alone. I’m not sure if I even feel lonely, which I definitely do sometimes, it’s hard to tell through the haze of substances and overwork and deep unhappiness. Sometimes something stirs in the depths - a leviathan - and I realize I feel like crying, and sometimes I do cry, and that must mean I’m sad, right? It’s weird to be this out of touch with my feelings, and intellectually maybe I realize it’s there, but to have such a distance between the thinking brain and feeling heart, what a strange thing to know and realize personally. Maybe we are two separate beings trapped in the same flesh tomb and we are constantly waging battle, dialectics turned inward, and of course eventually outward. There is actually something deeply scary and traumatizing when that leviathan stirs, it probably is that residue of regrets, discarded dreams, slights, abuse, gentle humiliations, but I’m too scared to look closely, so best to just observe its wake as it recedes, thankfully, again.
I’m listening to a lot of Sharon Van Etten. Her album Remind Me Tomorrow is great.
