Personal Journal

October 21

October 21:
The opening scenes of Apocalypse Now are how I feel now. Martin Sheen in the dark in the hotel room, in isolation, not knowing whether it is day or night, alone with the self.
I am debating whether to turn my growing frustration, my growing anger, inward, or outward.
There is no place for it to go.
I was reminded of that movie as I walked naked past the mirrored closet door, thinking of breaking the glass. Do not show my myself. Naked.
Some of the hardship is borne of pain again, I had managed it all evening, tried not to take another vicodin. Some of it born of seeing an HBO self-promotion on the TV here.
Seeing things that are moving.
And I am frozen in a stasis where the only motion is possible in my head. Paralyzed in a life here.
I know why the maintenance men I travel with drink, now. Were I to have a bong and some weed, I know I’d spend some time on that, but listen, that would only make the lack of motion the more unbearable.
This
Is
Only
Day
Two
…
Oh shit

Oh shit. I have to find an outlet. I have to find something that can be my thing out here, my way to bond with this existence. I imagine that during the weekend, I will be able to learn my way around, see things, bond. We do 10 hour days, which isn’t altogether unbearable. Indeed, the time goes faster at work than here.
I don’t want to drink, which means I must stay away from my co-travellers. They drink. Nightly. All night until sleep comes to them.
I’m not ready for sleep to come to me, I’m a wick aflame, and I have energy to dissipate.

Some element of control is absent here. I want it back, but I left it in Colorado. Now I remember why I said my evening meal would be so important to me. Someplace to go, someone to talk to. I have no one to talk to.
I wrote e-mails to my Colorado co-workers at 10:15 tonight. That’s how far from occupied I am.

I had sat down here thinking this entry would be far more self-loathing than it has turned out to be, and as I write that line, I find myself wistfully sorrowful that I couldn’t bleed more of myself, and yet happy that there is construction with in me.
I’m not lonely, that’s not a feeling I get very often. I’m bored, surrounded with mirrored images and reflected echoes of myself. Of myself. I don’t like to have to be by myself, but I am not lonely. The cats. The cats absorb the sound of my own thoughts with their tiny little beings. They focus me away from my head.

I shrug my shoulders and shake my head “whatever”
So many more hellish prisons on this earth are people unjustly confined withing, and I forget that I am a lesser man than they. How hyperbole is so unfitting of real lives.
How little of me my god is asking right now, and how uncomfortable it is to be asked to find herein a lesson.
Why did my god bestow upon me such a loud soul?

And to all a good night.


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