The Obscure

Suddenly I turned around and she was standin’ there
With silver bracelets on her wrists, and flowers in her hair
She walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns.
Come in, she said,
I’ll give you shelter from the storm.

It is a funny thing, looking back on life. It is strange to see how the horror of the moment does nothing to take away from the beauty of the whole.
I have lived my life in imaginary misery, in my head every smile I see is concealing unbearable scorn and distaste for me. This feeling has turned me into a strangely shy person around people who I do not know very well, but my shyness is not the usual strain. I become very loud and absurd around new people. I constantly try to mask my social ineptitude and self-loathing with an obnoxious and unapologetically vulgar sense of humour. This is a very self-defeating illusion, as the people who I am trying to fool into thinking me normal oft label me as an annoying and coarse person, unenlightened and unintelligent.
Then there comes people who do not know me well, but have heard people like my sister or my close friends and family talk about me in the past. I do not know how they really feel about me, unfortunately a lot of them end up in a position of power over me, be it through age or circumstance, so my normal defense of making a jackass out of myself does not suffice. Instead I become a very respectful and obedient person, rarely speaking and smirking politely at all of their jokes.
I feel this has gotten me labeled as somewhat of an idiot savant. “Yeah, that Johnny is a bit soft in the head, but he sure is a whiz with ‘dem letters!”
Yet, despite all my neurosis and inscrutable paranoia, I am blessed with these occasional introspective mental binges that do not stop until I have uncovered some enormous truth about myself that I had been previously unaware of. I am happy to say that this happened to me this morning while I was at work.
Now, this is not to say that I am a lackadaisical employee, far from it in fact. Mine is the kind of mindless paid turmoil that allows one to move at a quick and efficient pace and still draw on less than %1 of one’s mental abilities. Thus leaving the rest of the mind to roam free in the universe it has created for itself unhindered, at least until a co-worker comes in and questions why one keeps on pausing to jot down strange and wholly delirious prose on the back of one’s baking to-do list.
To make a lengthy story slightly more bearable, the conclusion I came to after my sojourn into the dark, abysmal cavern of my only-slightly-conscious is that despite my chronic emotional dumbassery I do actually have a lot to be thankful for in my life. I mean, I have a wonderful gal, and physically I am not all-together unappealing; I seem to “do ok with the ladies.” There is that whole intelligence thing that my parents insist that I have while berating me for my lack of scholarly interest, that is pretty cool; and I got some friends, that’s pretty cool too, a lot of people don’t have that. And I get to draw, if I couldn’t draw (if I literally couldn’t draw, we’re not talking talent here, folks, because I think we can all agree that I don’t have any of THAT) I would probably kill myself. And… uh… that’s about it, I think.

My only problem with these days filled with philosophical self-examination is that I always come to pretty much the same conclusion, so it never really does me any good; I guess it’s just a reminder or something. Praise be to Allah that it came when it did.
Seriously though, it would take a far more formidable math student than I to count the amount of “epiphany about the worth of life” posts I have written. There is a phrase my mom called me once, and I think it will summarize what I am and why I write the things I do pretty succinctly. She said that I am, “emotionally labile.”
I think that makes perfect sense.
Anyway, have a good afternoon, ye sexy ladies and clean-shaven boys in blue.