turning the corner and turning back again
self-loathingParticularly fuzzy and muddled right now, I’m back from a flurry of dates that were a welcome distraction from myself. The tinge of blue has set in, though, with the two drinks, and I’m listening to Townes Van Zandt, nursing beige idle s-word ideation. There is a certain truth and Žižekian force of paradoxical loneliness that sets in with these outings and tentative connections. It’s good, fun, but also, almost grimly sad sometimes. How did we get so different, alone, set in our stubborn circuits of routine? Why are the bridges so wide and the height so dizzying? Each little sortie out of the heart maybe has been rewarded less and less, so we trust inertia over impulse, and familiar with our loneliness. It’s not that there hasn’t been connection, but there is a weariness I encounter dating some of these women, specifically those who aren’t just a few years out of college. Are we all just succubi hoping to suck this youth out of each new generation and replenish our sordid sorry hearts? Vampires whose true Real is built on this quasi-Epsteinian blood-sucking as we churn out new naiveté even as it knows it is soon due in the abattoir. I don’t blame them, what a tiresome and sad game to play in the casino of love and thrills and oh-so-much-to-do in the city. Anyway, it’s not that I’m any better jealously guarding my bitterness, even though it spills out from time to time.
I suppose the real thing that’s making me sad is finding out I’ve probably ruined my friendship with the two gals I mentioned before – friends from a previous job p— to whom I manically intimated some weird cathected sexual desire during a low weak and sorry period, recently out of a breakup and under the grips of 3x the normal antidepressant dosage and serotonin syndrome symptoms abound. What’s worse is I didn’t even want it, and objectively it doesn’t even make sense why I did such a thing; there are so many beautiful and interesting women in New York and it’s not like these two were even particularly kindred spirits (OK, that’s a bit of a lie, one maybe more than the other, but still). There was a terrible Dostoevskyian recklessness that must’ve overcome me, knowing what a fucking psycho thing it would be to tell two friends in the same night that I’m attracted to them, but in the most psychotic way possible: I told one that I’m drawn to both of them and have no idea how to choose — so pathetically grubbily PRESUMPTIVE when I knew full well that there was no interest, which of course, doubled the shock, and told the other God knows wha — that they’re beautiful and probably insinuated that I think they’re totally into me and that I just am not available right now because I’m fresh off the heels of a breakup. If there was a grab-bag for most ill-advised and stupid things to say to two girls who are close friends, that would probably be it.
This is all besides the point; I feel bad because I got the mess that I wanted and am now regretting the decision. Deep down, I wanted to burn it all down, and now that I’ve burned it down, I’m having second thoughts. There was an uneasiness anyway, they were younger and made me feel uneasy and insecure about how I was spending my time as a now-30-year-old, they were bright-eyed and into things that I’d become cynical and tired about (and is it too world-weary and misogynistic to think that this game of virtue is the game of the rich and upper-bourgeois and attractive-enough girls who could afford a little downward mobility knowing they could secure a well-heeled mate?); it was essentially a goodbye, maybe, to my “political” era, and I sought the tools to sever the thread in the crudest way possible. This is all post-rationalization, though, I wanted to fuck them, one of them in particular, but it wasn’t closely held at all, it was just lost puppy-dog libido that probably came on too strong. And so, I’m tying myself into this Gordian knot and crucifying myself, dragging myself against this mental grater while seeking for some way to make amends. But that ship has sailed, despite illusory notions that it hadn’t, and that’s that. I worry about my reputation and whether I said something truly terrible, which, in the grand scheme of idiotic things I probably didn’t, but I also worry about doing right by people, not being hated, and my reputation and those years I did spend (and lost so quickly) building those relationships. Again, this is just a psychosis and serves as another vector of self-loathing, because I was just unhappy with one foot stuck in that world and now with both feet out I’m terrified. Where to next? I’m not asking the real questions, which isn’t whether I can repair this situation and whether they hate me with a passion and what I did or didn’t say; it’s whether I know how to move forward. The answer is: I don’t.
So I guess I can go through this revolving door of dates, work, striving to get my bearings here as people come and go and grow old and go on to other things as you become just a blurred reflection in some passing rainy car window. How do you build roots and a community when your first step was an uprooting and burning down? Damn fool that I am, the forest has been cleared and I’m now contemplating which seeds to plant. At some point I will have to stop burning down and uprooting or I will have nothing, and that is precisely the anxiety. Nothing has stuck, there is always some paroxysm that shakes and seizes me by the back of my eyelids and unleashes some frenzy of discontent and collateral damage, and I wonder if this is just my fate. The medication hasn’t helped, either, and while it blinders me like some horse and keeps me trudging forward, it doesn’t work on the irascible and querulous soul. So this horse will keep on trudging, without direction or certainty.
Some classic mournful Townes Van Zandt.