Personal Journal

The Insidiousnous of Internal Dialogue

It hurts so much to read a great writer’s work.
I think I’m two years beyond the Persecutor’s grasp, but he’s got his final redoubt, and it’s closer to my soul, where I don’t live very often anymore. I’ve sold my soul for fascist efficiency and long periods of induced numbness. AdrianaCB’s writing always makes me hurt, though.
Distracting thoughts tell me it’s lunch time, that I’m at work, and there’s an exit door from my brain at the back of this cubicle. It leads to a river of numbness upon which I can float away, and somewhere in the stream, forget that there is someplace else I'’ rather travel, into my own soul.
Such wires and walls line the road that it would be a thousand times easier to take a quick way out of this canyon. Down there, somewhere, is an I that is tabled, asleep, in stasis. Words come to me sometimes, and I have to choose whether to get out of their way, or to listen to them, and to make record of them. I don’t think I’m so much a writer as I am mentally deranged, possessed of this schizophrenia but gifted enough to navigate my life as though we different people were the crew of a ship. We’re in unison, and so my fractured self doesn’t have to appear fractured to the outside, we just sail on, and whichever officer of the watch needs to lead, to interact, will do so. And the reports will be shared among the crew belowdecks.
I am also a self. Dedicated now, after 20 years, to recognizing that the whole crazy fucking crew needs to listen to me for a change. Not bury me in the morphine drip of video games and television. I’m afraid of being my self because I’m afraid of not being good enough. The ship’s crew could just carry on, carry me through 70 some odd years until God called me home, and maybe in the next life, I’d learn something useful to give me courage to live my own life. All of them want to know, “What did we do wrong? Isn’t this what you asked of us?” And I did. It’s not their fault. It’s not your fault. I changed my mind. I decided I wanted to live for myself.
But maybe you’re not strong enough
I’m probably not, but I’ll have to practice to get better at it. An answer that most of them are comfortable to live with.
I don’t know where they go, but they go, and I’m back writing by myself and left with the reckoning to do. Jesus, all I did was read someone’s journal, why is that so threatening?
The Persecutor has no body, he’s just a bleached white skull existing on the dimsension of blackness. The contrast is quite striking, and how, without flesh, he manages to convey facial expressions, is rahter curious.
Are you strong enough to face your own failure, he asks? Do you really believe that you can accept your own inferiority; wouldn’t it be easier to just never try, and never know.
Look, P, once upon a time you told meyou existed to protect my integrity, now how can you stand there and justify asking me to turn back on a journey of self discovery and self improvement in the name of being authentic?
Listen, first off, I lie to suit my ulterior purpose, the same as you. Second, maybe I know something you don’t. Maybe I know you’re not AdrianaCB, and I’m frightened at the thought of what you’re going to do when you come to that realization yourself.

There’s a long pause where I think about that, and there’s no real answer and no predictable outcome.
Look, I’m doing this with the hope of impressing myself – that means you, the sailors on the ship, and maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll get some sort of completely internal validation from God that what I’ve done is good. There’s no doubt that if I’m the dolt you might assert that I’ll be able to impress myself with my own writing, right? So what harm is there?

The conversation ends, I find myself back in my chair. My head floats and my blood flows with some intoxicating vibration that tells me I’m dizzy. What the hell … what the hell… I don’t have anything to lose.


It is never too late to be what you might have been. -- George Eliot
Courage to start and willingness to keep everlasting at it are the requisites for success. -- Alonzo Newton Benn