Don’t freak out.
This is a fictional piece. Nothing I’m writing actually happened, it’s just a distillation of thought, feeling, and intuition. This is writing. This is the way that it works. Dickens didn’t know Oliver Twist, and I don’t know what I’m saying either. I’m just making it up.
Now that that’s out of the way: Everything I have to say is true.
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The pillow is breathing at me. Something about the way I fuzz my eyes out and hold it in the bottom of my vision makes it do this. It’s a battered yellow beauty, with a lion’s-mane fringe, and I’ve got my foot propped up on it. The coffee table is hard on my heels.
The pillow stops breathing long enough for me to get some writing done – or, rather, taking my eyes off it to write makes it stop. Two drinks doesn’t seem enough to account for inanimate respiration. I found an old bottle of Remy Martin cognac today, and applied it to a little egg-shaped liqueur glass I dug out of the back of the bar. Don’t know when I’ve used it before; it still has newsprint on it.
I couldn’t do less with my life if I tried, and I won’t. I’m far too lazy to try to do less. This is exactly as little and exactly as much as I’m prepared to do. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be doing it.
Either one would make me happier. Achievement or complete dissipation. They both seem fine, but I don’t have the stamina for them. I’m a Middle-of-the-Road, like most. It’s the easiest thing there is to be, and easy is all I know how to do well. Everyone knows that greatness takes talent — but really spectacular sinning takes talent, too.
A joke I used to toss off was that I’d never loved a woman as much as I loved a drink. When I’m drunk that bit of cheap wit makes me feel like Oscar Wilde, but it’s probably not true. Maybe. The truth is that I have never been allowed to hold anything that I’ve ever really loved.
That’s not true, that’s the drink talking. I’ve had more since I started. It’s pretty good cognac.
You can’t talk your way into being a better person. You can’t talk yourself into talent. You have to have it, or earn it. My talents lie in small and stupid directions, interesting only to me; and I’m not going to ever earn it. I have a sneaky hope in the back of my brain that someone will one day see me drinking a beer quickly, spouting out truly trivial trivia, making biscuits, and they will use their power to elevate that to the level of fame and art. Many people have that fantasy, but many people are better at more interesting things than I am. I’m worse at less interesting things, and that’s the wrong ride on the life spiral.
It really is very good cognac.
Being alone is never easy. It’s just easier than being with other people. You’ll never be able to give yourself as much as you ask for, but you’ll never want to give yourself less. You may strive for less; you may even think you deserve less, but you’ll never want less for yourself than you want. With other people…well, the math is more complicated. And yet, when you’re with other people, as much as you want to be alone, it’s never as much as you want to be with other people when you actually are alone.
I say you and I mean me. It’s an assumption. It’s probably wrong.
The thing about my friends is that they’ve taught me more about being a human being than I’ve ever learned from actually being one. I keep looking for someone who’s less worthwhile than me to be friends with, but no dice. Some come close: they should try harder.
Something seems wrong here. Something seems untrue; self-serving. That’s probably okay, though. It’s probably okay to just want people to tell you that you’re okay, that you’re not as bad as you think you are. Don’t, though. I’m not, and I am. Besides: This is just fiction.

Poor Little Me 4

Other people must sleep well. They must, because the world keeps functioning with some kind of steady rightness.

I don’t sleep well.  Or, that is to say, not since a time before my memory of any sleep I have ever had. My memory of my past life is not very good. That may seem like a dramatically fictional statement, but what I mean by it is for more pedestrian. I simply have never had a very good memory for my own life. From what I can tell, it is hardly unusual for people to have foggy memories of their childhood. However, even at a young age I distinctly recall being unable to remember anything from a few years before. Even now, I feel my college years begin to slip away from me, just as I felt high slip away in college.

The earliest that I remember being obsessed with how poorly I slept was middle school. Even then, the memory is a palimpsest; a story told to a person told to a person, although the person was always me. You begin to buy your own fictions.

It never stopped. I know many people have trouble sleeping as teenagers, but it never stopped. I wake up tired every morning. I have woken up tired every morning since the beginning of time, as I reckon it. When I do wake up. When I haven’t been up all night.

Drinking helps.

For anyone who doesn’t know, the inability to sleep well is not principally horrific because it makes you tired. Its central horror is that it turns every day into wondering when you will get to sleep again. Spending your time waiting for the next time you will be asleep is a select kind of hell. Being unable to give a complete shit about the life around you because you can’t wait to be unconscious again saps what I can only imagine is a great deal of pleasure out of life. We reserve a special pity for those in comas, caught in a kind of limbo between life and death…but I spend my waking life dreaming of that limbo.

I can’t take satisfying naps. I can only fall asleep in the middle of the day for obscene periods of time that leave me feeling painful and unrefreshed.

The cliche bemoans us spending a third of our life asleep. Given the option in times of unemployment, I have spend as much as half the day (really, as much as two-thirds of the day) in bed, indulging in fitful and disappointing orgasms of sleep.

I don’t dream of a better waking life — indeed, I rarely dream. I daydream of a dark and dreamless sleeping life. Not death. Death scares me appropriately. Sleep is defined by waking, as everything is by its opposite. Really all I want is to wake up one day and feel satisfied. But isn’t that the goal of it all? Satisfaction?

If I haven’t been satisfied by anything else at this point, I can’t really ask it of sleep.

Poor Little Me: 3

I miss every girl that I’ve ever known. I genuinely do. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about most of the women that I’ve known in my life.

 Most women that I have ever met silently accuse me of being a misogynist — some of them loudly. I’m not. I’m just an asshole. Except for my sexual attraction to them (which is, at best, lethargic most of the time) I treat women exactly like men. The problem is 1) I don’t treat most men I meet very well, and 2) at this point I’m not sure that most women want to be treated exactly like men. I think maybe they want to be treated equally, but differently; and I don’t know what that differently is. Or something. Or not. I don’t know.

 But none of that is to say that I deserve any sympathy on that point. I’m still a lumpy crap of a person with a very-likely dysfunctional brain.  Which is what, deep down, I think that most people with an alcohol or drug problem think of themselves: that they’re missing something in the chemistry of their souls they can supplement with something else. But unlike them, I’m pretty sure that I probably can.

 Sitting at home I find myself pulling two, three beers from the refrigerator and bringing them into the other room with me. The reason for this is that I now drink a bottle of beer so quickly that if I only bring out one, I will be constantly running in and out to get another. Even with three beers, I can finish all of them before the last turns warm. Lukewarm even. Hell, it’s nearly ice cold. 

Given the chance, given the challenge, I think I would do almost anything for my friends. I’m so bothered by visions of my funeral where nobody comes, that I’m tempted to draw up a will stipulating that all of my money go toward food, alcohol, and travel money for anyone who wants to come. But, then again, what’s the point? I didn’t buy anyone’s love in life. In general, I’m closer to a dog than a human sometimes; eager to please to the point of annoyance, content with the scraps of human affection, but not to be trusted as part of the family.

 After typing that last part, I realize it’s not fair, accurate, or particularly true. The thing about the dog, anyway. 

Every time I talk to someone I really like I’m painfully aware of how inadequate I am to be their friend. When I hug someone I do so with a steady grip and my eyes closed, because I love so much to be close to another person. Every time I sit down to write, I know how unimportant what I have to say is. Every time I get on stage I feel almost paralyzed by the mediocrity which wafts off of me. Even walking down the street, I feel like an outsider and an outcast, with this one exception: I’m not that special. But you knew that.

Things that are bothering me right now:

Hey chain coffee place, I’ve been going to you for years, and when I order a medium coffee, I don’t think I should have to go through the (albeit objectively uncomplicated, but nonetheless unnecessary) extra step of telling you I want it to be hot. You don’t have to ask if I want hot or cold coffee. Hot coffee is the default; it has always been the default, and it always will be the default. I don’t care how popular your new line of cold coffee drinks is. I don’t care how blazingly hot it is outside, or how seemingly outrageous it is that I want to drink a piping-hot cup of coffee while the souls of my shoes are melting off on the asphalt. The onus for categorical specificity lies squarely on the shoulders of the iced-coffee drinkers. And the best part is: they know it! I promise, coffee attendee, that no one who wants an iced coffee will ever walk up to you and say, “Medium coffee, please!” and expect you to know that they want it cold. The will say, “Medium iced coffee, please!” Because they know what they are…they know what they are. All I’m saying is, let’s have some mutual respect. I don’t make you go through the extra step of putting ice in my coffee, don’t make me go through the extra step of telling you I want it hot.

Hey people who play Trivial Pursuit (classic blue-box genus edition) at the local charmingly-divey bar with the extensive board game selection (i.e. Guthries.) Please learn to put the answer cards back into the card shoe in the correct manner. Have a little dignity. Now, some of you may not have grown up playing Trivial Pursuit as frequently and competitively as I did, and I’m not expecting you to either agree with, or understand this particular pet peeve, but that isn’t going to stop me from demanding it. Notice, if you will, that the question cards which accompany a Trivial Pursuit set have two distinct side. One side has six color-coded questions which stretch the full length of the card. The other side has six answers. The answer side has a blue bar covering approx. 1/3 of the card, inscribed with the word “Genus.” What, one asks, is the purpose of this blue bar? It is so, when the card is properly inserted into the question shoe, the blue bar is the only visible part of the answer card to stick up over the lip of the shoe, and not the answers to the questions. Also, this leaves the question side situated in such a way that when the shoe is placed in front of a questioner, he may pull a card out to ask a question directly, without have to turn or contort the card to read it. I would like it know that until now, I have been single-handedly responsible for the organization and maintenance of the TP cards at Guthries, but no more. I expect you all to pitch in.