Gaze Deep Into My Navel And Despair...

How am I supposed to grow up?

I want to grow up.  I really do.  No, more than that, I need to.  I need to grow the fuck up.  I'm almost forty years old, but I still see myself as if I were twenty-five.  That might sound appealing on some level, at first; "young at heart" and all that.  And maybe it would be, if that's what I wanted for myself.  But it isn't.  I want to grow up.  I need to grow up, because I can't keep living like I'm twenty-five.  I'm not twenty-five anymore.  I can't eat like a twenty-five year-old anymore.  I can't move like a twenty-five year-old anymore.  I can't party like a twenty-five year-old anymore.  Fuck, I can't even sleep like a twenty-five year-old anymore.  It all hurts me now in a way that it never did, and I can feel myself breaking down at an astonishing rate, as if the force of Entropy inside me were being fed by some radioaction of chemical combustion.  Accelerated Decrepitude.  But on the other hand, trying to live within my almost-forty means, while still feeling like a twenty-five year-old inside, is so monumentally depressing that I can't even fucking bother; I always just end up feeling like I already have one foot in the grave.

A twenty-five year-old trapped in a forty year-old body.  How incredibly pathetic.  How incredibly modern.  How incredibly privileged.

But how am I supposed to grow up?  I don't know.  My observations tell me that for most people, this happens as a natural side-effect of breeding.  That creating a child shifts all perspectives, and forces the new parent into a maturity that cannot be achieved through any other means.  That makes sense to me.  I can understand that.

But I'm never going to have any children.  So what am I supposed to do?  How am I supposed to force myself to achieve a state that, for most people, requires quite possibly the single most life-altering event they will ever experience in order to achieve?

Sometimes I think, maybe I don't actually need to grow up?  If I don't have any children, then what do I need to grow up for?  Why do I feel this need anyways?  I can only assume it is because I reflexively compare my life to the model my parents set for me.  When I look at myself, and try to judge whether I'm doing well or not, I compare it to the life they lived.  And I always feel myself coming up short.

They went to college.  They got degrees.  They worked hard.  (My father still works harder than almost anyone else I know, and while my mother never worked as hard as he did, she still inarguably worked harder than I do now.)  They bore and raised children.  They owned houses, with yards and multiple floors and everything.

But I dropped out of college.  I have no degrees, and probably never will.  Yeah, I have a career that doesn't leave me wanting to kill myself, but I still hate it, just because it's work, and I hate work of any kind; I hate being forced to sell myself every day in order to sustain myself.  I don't own a house.  I own an absurdly tiny condo that I hate and will never be able to sell for as much as I paid for it.  I am almost certain I will end up having to live in that tiny little box for the rest of my life, watching it deteriorate around me, with me - and that thought terrifies me on a regular basis.

And even these modest achievements - a well-paying job that I can sort of do well and tolerate, and a tiny little condo I'm trapped in like a prison cell - even these barely note-worthy accomplishments I never actually earned; I didn't work hard to achieve these things.  I got this job because some well-meaning middle-aged women that I worked with took pity on me, and talked to their bosses, and told them they knew this kid they thought would do well as a programmer.  And they were right - I am a good programmer.  At least, I'm alright.  But again, not because I try to be, or because I studied or worked hard or went to school or anything else.  I just have a natural talent for logic and pattern recognition and symbology, and so I am a naturally decent programmer.  I could be a great programmer if I wanted to be; if I tried to be and put forth the effort.  But I don't.  Because I don't care.  I only want to put forth the minimum amount of effort to get by, and save the rest for indulging in my life's pleasures.

And it's a similar story with my "home."  I didn't work hard and save money every day so that I could eventually put a down payment on my dream home.  My grandfather died, and since my mother (his daughter) was already dead herself, the portion of his life's wealth that should have been hers (and he had worked hard all his life to achieve that wealth) came to me instead.  And I used all of that money to buy the apartment I had been living in for almost a decade at that point.  The biggest, most "adult" accomplishment of my life - becoming a home-owner - and it only happened because I was in a position to profit off of the deaths of two of my close family members.  And so it has never felt like an accomplishment to me.  It feels like blood money.

(It's true that I performed magick to get the job and the money and the apartment, but even taking the assumption that my magick worked doesn't help the situation any.  Magick is a short-cut.  It's easy compared to actually working hard to learn or to save money.  And it's fun to do, and for that reason alone I wanted to do it, whether it worked or not.  So even assuming that I came by these things through sorcery, it still doesn't feel like an accomplishment to me.  It still doesn't feel like I really earned them.  It feels like I cheated.)

And I will almost certainly never see that much money again in my lifetime.  I can barely maintain a savings of more than a couple of thousand dollars at a time.  I live paycheck-to-paycheck, even with my fairly significant salary.  I've always been that way.  If I have money, I want to spend it on making myself feel good right now, and I can't seem to deny myself comfort or happiness in the present, in order to save it for some undefined future.  As I've written here before, I feel like the Grasshopper, fiddling away as the first snow begins to fall.

But why do I determine the value of my life by comparing it to my parents'?  They were completely different people, living in a completely different time.  And who wanted completely different things from their life than I want from mine.  And I know this.  But I still can't shake this feeling that I am somehow failing at life, because I seem to remember my parents being so much better off in their twenties than I am in my thirties; or will be in my forties.  I just want to be happy, like anyone else.  But I constantly and consistently feel that the things that make me happy aren't good for me.  That they are self-indulgent, or immature, or masturbatory.  That I am a bad person for living my life the way that I do.  But trying to live my life any other way always leaves me just as miserable, if only in a different way.

I just want to spend my life relaxing in the bathhouse, playing games, reading, writing, watching TV and movies, sleeping, eating, drinking and getting high, and punctuating the whole thing with the occasional orgasm.  That is really all I want from life.

And I feel like a worthless waste of a human being for feeling that way.  I hate myself for feeling that way.  But even so, I have no idea how to change it; I have no idea how to want anything else.

Okay, sure, I want other things.  Bigger things.  I want to have a big house with a yard and a basement and an attic.  I want to be able to support myself through writing, or some other form of creative expression.  (If only I could make a living playing games!)  I want a sense of accomplishment.  I want to feel like my life mattered, in any way.  I want to feel a sense of confidence that when I'm gone, I will have made some mark on the world that is all my own; that I will leave behind something more than a pile of carbon dust.  I do want all of these things.  But when I think about them, and I envision the monumental amount of work it would take to even try to achieve any of them - with no guarantee of success! - I lose any hope I may have had about ever actually achieving them.

Because I know that I will never do that work.  I just don't have it in me.  Achieving anything of any real significance requires a single-minded devotion that I just don't have.  Have never had.

Because deep-down, I don't want to be great.  All I really want is to be comfortable.  And I guess I am.  So I should be happy, then, right?  Then why do I feel this way?  I just wish I could learn to be happy with what I have, instead of hating myself for not being able to be great.

I guess what it all really comes down to is this:  I feel lazy, and I hate myself for being lazy, but I don't know how to make myself be anything else.  And I hate myself for that, too.

+          +          +

Or maybe I'm just depressed because winter is coming, and I'm all out of drugs, and I can feel both of these things gnawing at my bones.

Making Excuses...

I haven't written in a long time.  Long enough that it is beginning to weigh on me.

I've been busy.  I haven't had much time to write.

But I have had time.

And when I've had the time, I haven't had the energy.

And when I've had the energy, and the time, I haven't had the desire.

And when I've had the desire, and the energy, and the time, I haven't been inspired.

And when all my stars have finally aligned in the heavens of my birth, and I have found myself inspired, and with a desire to write, and the energy to do it, and the time to do it in - I haven't had the tools at hand.

It's happened several times while I was driving.  It's happened in the sauna, and the steam room.  It's happened late at night, just as I'm falling asleep.  It's happened while I was rushing to get ready in the morning, late for work.  It's happened in meetings.  It's happened on the toilet.

I've tried to write without keyboard or pen, but I've yet to meet any measure of success.  The process is completely different.  My mind must then be constantly pre-occupied with remembering and reciting and memorizing whatever I've written to that point, while simultaneously trying to determine what comes next.

But when I have a keyboard - or paper and pen in a pinch - I can focus entirely on feeling out the next line; all I have to do is express.

What I realize as I observe this, is that making it up in my head is simply not my style.

But it's all I've got right now.  And I am clogging up.

Three-hundred Fifty-one...

Only two weeks left.

Two weeks from today, I will drink a beer.  A Guinness.  In a bottle.  And then I will have a glass of whiskey.  Eagle Rare bourbon, my favorite.  On the rocks, in my favorite glass tumbler.  And who knows what else after that.

I can't tell what I'm feeling.  Something like excitement, but not quite.  Almost anxiety, but not exactly.  Anticipation?  Fear?  Some jumbled soup of them all, most likely.

I want it so badly.  I've never wanted a drink this much in my entire life.  I want a drink right now more than I ever, ever wanted a drink when I actually was drinking.

I feel so proud of myself for actually accomplishing this.

I feel guilty for feeling this way, and I try to suppress it, reminding myself that I haven't actually accomplished anything yet.  I have two weeks left to go.  I can feel proud then.  And celebrate with a drink.

I'm so scared that something bad is going to happen.  That I'm going to go off the deep end and lose control in some way that I never have before.  That I'm going to end up in another of those deep chemical depressions.  That I'm going to lose all of my creativity and desire to express myself.  That I'm going to lose the ability to write poetry.  Or worse, that I'm going to lose the ability to enjoy writing.  I'm scared of some other bad result that I haven't even thought of.

I'm scared of the fact that I don't know what's going to happen.

But I have to find out.

I have to know if I can handle it or not.

I have to find out how else the last year has changed me.

Raging Election...

(With apologies to everyone at The Colbert Report, from whom I blatantly stole the title for today's post.)

Wow.  Okay, so, yeah, I didn't see that coming last night, to be honest.  I'm so used to getting shellacked in these elections that I fully expected to be facing a Romney presidency this morning.  But not only did we re-elect Obama, but for the first time in my entire life, every single person or issue I voted for actually won.  And then to find out that Democrats and progressive issues won over and over again all across the country?  I'm just kind of stunned, honestly.

Last night, Maryland became the first state to uphold same-sex marriage with a voter referendum.  How fabulous is that?  So did Maine.  And Washington state looks like it's going to follow.  And speaking of Washington state, they legalized marijuana there last night.  They didn't just decriminalize it, they legalized it; for recreational use.  And so did Colorado.  Wow!

I was fully prepared to be seriously depressed today.  Now I don't quite know what to do with myself.

If you have any suggestions for ways I could spend my day not being depressed, please leave a comment below, and I will take it under consideration.  Thank you, and Gods Bless America.



Quick note about updates:  We're super-swamped at work with another tight deadline, and another series of endless snags delaying the whole process (yesterday was a clusterfuck on a scale that I have never witnessed here in fifteen years), and so I've been working more long hours again.  But this time, there's the added complication that I've been off-site for a lot of it, and so away from my computer.  And at home, we've got a couple of big projects to finish up in the next couple of weeks, as well, and so that's eating up a big chunk of what little free time I have left.  I actually have about a half a dozen posts started already that I've been wanting to get out there, but I just haven't had a chance to finish them yet.  Soon, soon.

Just wanted you to know that I'm still here, and I haven't given up or anything.  Just a tad too much on my plate at the moment.  Busy, busy Backson will be Back Soon.

When We Fall...

It's amazing how quickly you can fall back out of shape.

Just a few weeks of not working out (one week at the AGM, one week recovering from being sick, one week having all free time and energy eaten up by work, etc.) and suddenly I feel like I'm back to square one.  I know it's not that simple, and experience tells me that I will actually bounce back into form a lot quicker than it took to get into shape in the first place - but, still, this morning was... kinda scary, if I'm honest.

I thought I was taking it light.  Not even considering the weights at this point, since I'm just trying to get back into the swing of things after such a long absence.  Just figured I'd do my usual fifteen minutes on the elliptical (with a five minute cool-down afterwards) that I start every workout with.  Maybe I'd push it to twenty minutes, if I was feeling up to it.  That is really not much at all; I used to do thirty to forty-five minutes on the elliptical, before I started incorporating the weights into my routine.

But this fifteen minutes was hard.  Much more difficult than I expected.  I was really pushing myself with everything I had just to get through it.  But I did it; I made it through the whole thing, and was relieved to reach the cool-down afterwards.  (No way was I going to try for twenty!)  But as soon as I slowed my pace, I knew something was wrong.  My heart was racing much more than I'm used to.  And I could feel my pulse in my head.  I was having a hard time catching my breath, and I was starting to get dizzy.

Pretty immediately, I climbed down off the machine, and went and sat down on the floor with my back to the wall.  I held my water bottle (which, thankfully, I fill with ice-water before every workout) all around my neck, to cool down the blood in my carotid artery, going to my brain.  I tried to breath slow and deep and even, and waited for the dizziness to pass.  Which it did after just a couple of minutes.

Now, admittedly, I was having a hard time getting a decent reading off the heart-rate monitor on that machine.  (For the whole workout it had been giving me all these low-ball readings that I knew could not possibly be correct, and that made me mistrustful of the other readings that seemed like they could possibly be reasonable.  And then at the end, after not giving me a reading higher then 155bpm for the entire workout, it suddenly gave me a reading of 180bpm, which is way into my red zone, and much higher than I would ever usually let myself get to.  So, was that an anomalous reading, like all the low-balls?  Or was that the first true reading I'd gotten all workout?)  But, still, just a matter of a few weeks ago this was my warm-up, for crying out loud.  And it just floored me!  Literally!

So, obvious lesson-learned is that I need to take it easy, and start slower.  At the same time, my little brother and his girlfriend just challenged me to a contest to see who could be the first one to lose fifteen pounds.  And that's definitely a motivator.  But I have to remember to be careful.  I'm not twenty-five anymore.

And I won't be able to gloat if I'm dead.

One Hundred...

I've got a ton of work to do, and I'm already ridiculously behind, and I have to leave early today to get to my counseling appointment and then rush home for a condo board meeting and it's not like I have a computer at home to post from right now anyways, so this is my 100th post since I started this blog, and I have absolutely nothing worthwhile to post about, nor any time in which to do it.

Fabulous.

Letting Go With The Flow...

Still really tired.  Still no energy or motivation.

At least I made it to work today.  Never made it to the gym, though.

Tomorrow's going to be a long day.  I have a lot of work to do, and I have to leave early to make my addiction therapy session.  And then I have a condo board meeting when I get home.

I'm trying not to worry about things I can't control.  I'm trying not to think about it.  I'm trying to just keep my head down and barrel forward and get it over and done with.

And I'm trying to follow Rule #32.  I'll be home with Her in just an hour or so.  I know I'll be able to find something in that to feel good about.


ADDENDUM:  what's the Brightside here?  I need to find the Brightside.

Down The Energy Drain...

I'm worried that I might've fucked things up for myself.

Ever since Walpurgisnacht, I've felt different.  Little to no energy, or drive.  No desire to do any of the things I've been getting so much joy and satisfaction out of recently:  I don't want to do my mathematics lessons, I don't want to meditate, I don't want to work out, I don't want to read, I don't want to clean the house or run errands, I don't want to write in this blog, and so on.  All I've wanted to do is watch TV, play video games, and sleep.  And get high.  My desire to get high has been a lot stronger since that night.  I guess that's to be expected.  But I honestly didn't expect such a drastic change in the rest of my personality, though.  I guess that was pretty naive of me.

It's not just that I've felt differently since then.  It's that I've felt exactly the way I usually feel when I'm using.  The sleeping all the time, and the lack of drive to do anything productive that requires energy, are exactly how I usually feel when I'm using.  In fact, I'm only realizing it now, but it all comes down to energy.  When I'm using, I'm always tired, so anything that requires an expenditure of energy seems like too much work.  So I end up not wanting to do anything that seems at all like work, and all I want to do is sit around and stimulate myself with TV and video games, and the occasional bath.  But when I'm sober, I have a lot more energy, and so I can do all these things I want to do, and they feel almost effortless, and in the end I still have energy to spare.  So, right now, I'm suffering from the same lack of energy and drive that I get when I'm using, but I don't even have the pleasure of using to offset the crappiness of feeling like a useless slug.

I'm really worried about this.  I mean, on one hand, I've been through this before.  On the other hand, this was exactly what I was trying to avoid.  I know that I can change my behavior, I can stop fucking around and go back to doing all the healthy and productive things I was doing before Walpurgisnacht.  So, it's not my actions that I'm worried about.  (Those just make me feel stupid and weak.)  No, my big fear is that even if I start doing all those healthy, productive things again, I won't feel the same way about them anymore.

I'm worried that I won't feel excited about them anymore.  That I won't find the same joy in them anymore.  That they'll just continue to feel like work, like something I have to do because I know I'm supposed to, instead of just being the things I want to do, the way they used to be.  I'm worried that I won't get my energy back.  I'm worried that I fucked myself up permanently.  I'm worried that they'll never feel effortless that way again. 

I'm worried that I'm going through this now, and a lot sooner than I anticipated.

I'm really worried, and I feel really ashamed, but I don't think there's any point in allowing myself to feel either of those things.  If given the opportunity to do things differently, I wouldn't.  I'd still celebrate Walpurgisnacht in the same way, because that experience taught me valuable lessons I wouldn't have learned any other way.  Including this lesson here.  I need to know what all the negative and unpleasant consequences of using again are, in order to keep me from using next time.  If I didn't know - if I wondered, "what would happen if I just had a little?" - then I'm more likely to give in to that temptation.  But now I know the price I will have to pay if I do that, and that's a big deterrent.

And I don't think there's any point in worrying about it, either.  Not yet, anyways.  Maybe I'll be able to get that energy and that enthusiasm for these productive activities back again.  Maybe I won't.  But the only way to determine that will be to get up and do them, and keep doing them for a while.  Then see how I feel in a couple of weeks.  Then deal with whatever I'm feeling then.  But there's no point in worrying about it now, because there's no way to know what to expect.  It could go either way.

Still, I can't shake the feeling that I've lost something really special.  And that I won't ever find it again.  And I keep finding myself feeling really sad about that.

But, for now, I'm just going to try not to think about that.  I don't see that I have much choice.

Just get up, and do the work.

And keep doing it.

And hope it stops feeling like work.