The Obscure

The State of Men, or of Other Things Not in the Least Bit Similiar.

Fucking-A, man. Today has been one of the worst days I have ever experienced. I woke up with a headache, then I went into my room and had a seizure, then I took a bunch of pills and I temporarily felt better. They are wearing off now, so I know I'm pretty well fucked for the rest of the day. I don't want to go to the Emergency Room again, but it seems like one of those days where it is a distinct possibility. But, what is there to do about that? It'll come if it comes, I don't have any control here anymore, not that I ever really did. I'll probably end up going there later, I have two percocets left, I thought I had three, but apparently one was misplaced or I miscounted or something. I can't take another one today, because I got like 8 days left until I get a refill. Fucking doctor. Although I suppose I probably would've run out just as quickly if I was trying to hold myself to three a day, too. Who knows?
I think I'm in trouble, I think I have an aneurism. All of my symptoms have been steadily worsening over the past few months, the seizure thing especially. I guess I am going to a neurologist to see if there is anything diagnosable, and if there isn't, I don't know what the hell I'm going to do. If this thing keeps getting worse, I'm going to be a complete cripple within six months.

I guess that's all I have to say, I'm going to go lie down in my room and hope to god that what I was feeling this morning doesn't come back, but it already feels like it is. We'll see how it goes, I'll probably write more tonight, as to whether or not I went to the Emergency Room. I guess that's all there is to be said about that.

I was watching the episode of "Thomas Beats the Space-Bullies" where Thomas finally ends up beating the Space-Bullies, and I didn't buy it. It's just that, I know I believe in Space-Bullies, I just don't know if I believe in Thomas.

That was something that came into my head while I was trying to sleep. I stayed up a little bit past the time when I could just lie down and let the clonodine knock me out, so I had to take a third one, and now I have to wait a little bit until the third one adds it's power to the power of the first two. Then, I will be able to sleep ok, without thinking about things like Thomas and the Space-Bullies.
Lately, my life has been kind of a weird trip. I feel like I've jack-knifed straight down into the reservoirs of my mind, like my subconscious is kind of taking over. My fore-conscious is taking a powder, I suppose.
It isn't a state of being I'd recommend, you find out a lot about yourself that you probably didn't really want to know. Some of the little things that have nagged at you a bit over the years become obsessions, others do a complete 180 on you and suddenly you don't care about them at all. Those are generally the good things you are supposed to be doing or thinking or saying, your normally conscious mind gives you this little guilt complex, so you get this nagging urge to behave in that sort of manner; but when you are in a more primal state, that shit doesn't really matter much. When you find out what it is that you really care about and what it is that your mind just knows that you should care about, it can leave a bad taste in your mouth. You begin to realize you aren't even the usually relatively nice guy you thought you were, it's just another mask you put on when you go out to do a show. I'm sure everyone has those masks, but nobody really knows how deep it goes, except for the thousands of people who do.

Then again, maybe I'm just depressed. I like to fuck with myself when I'm depressed, to make myself more depressed. It's like poking at a canker sore, you can't really help it.
So who knows, maybe every action isn't just a put-on, maybe I haven't lived my entire life wearing a mask to cover up for the fact that I'm not a nice guy.
But that's how I feel today. Maybe I'll feel differently tomorrow. In fact, I'll probably have forgotten about it entirely.
As I said, it's a weird trip. A weird fucking trip, man--and I don't recommend it.

Is it possible for something to become cliche when it is only one person saying or doing the thing in question? How often must a thing be done before it becomes a cliche? How many people have to do that thing for it to become a cliche? Can it be just one? If I wrote, "But we, who call ourselves Man, with the audacity to walk on two legs..." right now for the fiftieth time, would that be just me? Just the cliche ol' fatalist Johnny Colón, that crazy kid who sometimes fancies himself a writer, who stands constantly on the brink of complete insanity, and always wishes, just a little bit, for the apocalypse?
I suppose it would. I also suppose that that bears little relevance to anything. Just food for my own strange thoughts, I would suppose, for a third time.

I haven't been at all well lately. The pain in my skull has been far worse and far more daunting than usual for the past month or so. It would be kind of a funny twist of fate, if it turned out that somewhere along the line, long after the doctors had given up MRIs and CatScans in disgust, that I had developed an inoperable brain tumor. I probably wouldn't even notice the difference. "I'm having a really bad cluster, lately." I would say. Then, I would be dead. An anti-climactic end to a relatively short but intolerably boring life. I think that should be my epitaph, if I die young. I would like my headstone to read exactly that, "An anti-climactic end to a relatively short but intolerably boring life."
Of course, barring some bizzare accident where I happen to misplace a large quantity of buckshot somewhere inside this annoying head of mine, I doubt I shall die young. I theorize that pretty much everyone who thinks (or hopes) they will die young will generally live longer than those who think they will live long and fruitful lives. Barring, of course, a direct descent into some nasty habit from which roughly 25% escape from alive. Fellows like me don't really have that option though, with younger sisters and nieces and (though I doubt it would affect him much) nephews, to attempt to set a good example for. I say "attempt" because fellows like me who do live under those conditions are invariably terrible at making good on such attempts, so "attempts" are really all they ever amount to. All the advice in the world about the sanctity of life and living to your potential all kind of goes to shit when you drop out of high school and occasionally get caught holding naked blades and fantasizing about killing yourself.
Then again, it is good advice. It's a shame I didn't heed it, a few years back. Hell, I can remember giving Elena that same exact advice when I was in 11th grade and missing sixty percent of my classes and failing eighty percent of them. Perhaps that is why it doesn't seem to be sticking so well. When you have to start off half of the things you say to a younger sibling with the phrase, "I know it's really hypocritical for me to tell you this, but..." you know you are in pretty bad shape.

I am in really bad shape, in so many ways. It doesn't really look that way to me until I take a step back and look at myself from a more objective point of view.
Oh well, I'm going to go to bed. I had no idea what I was going to write when I came out here, and I have no idea of what I did write now that I'm leaving. Regardless, maybe you enjoyed it, or at least didn't hate it. Goodnight ladies and gentlemen.

This is the bit where the crazy kid shoots his mouth off for no good reason.

Right now I am in what my psychopharmagologist calls my "Hypo-Manic" state. It's an extremely annoying state, it can last anywhere from three days to a month. It makes me a little hyperactive, a little OCD, it makes it so that my mind yammers on a hell of a lot more than when I am in my usual, comfortable, "Depressive" state.
I call my depressive state comfortable because it is what I have grown used to. I'll be in it for six to eight months, during which I will grow quite accustomed to hating myself and everything around me, and then I will have this weird spike where suddenly I like things and want to do stuff.
I mean, sure, the depressive state is real bad when it comes to a head, when I am sitting there "contemplating the knife," as I have so tactfully come to call it. It's hard feeling that way, it's hard having to yank the reins out of the hands of your insanity and make yourself give all of your sharp objects to your mother; or to just go and hide them from yourself outside for the night, or leave the whole situation behind altogether and go for a ten-mile walk, or go to someone's house and get drunk (well, that one isn't particularly hard, but it is a better alternative to shoving a knife through your heart). But those real hard nights are few and far between, most of the time you are just floating somewhere, kind of wishing you were dead, fantasizing about crazy car-wrecks where you go out with a bang, spending most of your time thinking about how strange you are, but never taking a step back to examine why it is, exactly, that you are strange in the first place.
You get used to that, that's easy shit. That's just self-loathing, it's nothing. Everybody does it, and I just want to be popular.
But these spikes, these spikes when my brain just yammers on and on like a broken radio set on some staticy AM talk-station with the volume knob turned all the way up--these things fucking suck.
And that's really all I have to say right now, I can't really think straight about anything in particular.

That Son of a Bitch Van Owen!

Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner, talkin' about the man.
This is my third day of not having a job, and I gotta tell you, the lack of stress is really good for the skull. I accidentally stumbled on a medication that helps with almost all of the extra symptoms of my headaches, the nausea and dizziness and blurred vision, it doesn't do much for the shakes, but it helps them some at least.
Soon the "not having any money" factor will set in and I will have to find a new means of employment, I figure I could last a month or more if I live on the cheap (which is tricky business for a guy like me). It kind of sucks though, because I was planning on leaving for California sometime in June, and I no longer have any cash flowing in to fund that excursion; I only have the small amount of cash (which would've been enough to go if I didn't need a new ride) that I ended up with when my job was gone, and I can't really file for unemployment because my boss did offer me a different, though much smaller position, at Veronica's. I made the decision not to accept, which I think she anticipated, but it does make it more like me leaving than like me being fired, so getting unemployment would be tricky business too. I could file for disability, but, as I live with my parents, I'd only get like 175 a month, which wouldn't even pay for car insurance, let alone leaving me off with anything to save up for a car with.
Oh well, I'll just take things as they come. My application to UMass Boston is in, and my transcript is on it's way. I have to do some fresh research and write a paper to this scholarship foundation. My mom said that because of our finances I have to "wow" them. I'm not positive I have the ability to do that, she seems to think I do. I guess I will just do my best and see what happens. We'll burn that bridge when we get to it, as Ryan would say.
The prescription for percocet that my doctor gave me this month was 30 less than last month, which was 30 less than the month before it. I hope it goes up next month as opposed to down, or even staying at 60. 60 is hard to work with, even 90 is hard to work with, but 60 is real hard, if he tries to give me 30 there will be trouble, and the trouble will probably be mostly for me. So far I've been doing ok on 2 perks a day, I only went over on the first day when I was pissed off about it (logical, no?), and on that day I only went over by one. Of course, it has only been three days, and I am out of fenergen. I'll have to call the doctor today and ask if I can have a prescription of the stuff, that's the stuff I stumbled upon. It's actually what the ER lady at Morton hospital pumped me full of when I was having lithium toxicity, I was ticked off enough about not getting any pain relief that I didn't notice it's positive qualities, apparently the lady (I already said she was competent, I just didn't like her) was even more competent than I thought, because she picked a drug that was non-narcotic (and therefore didn't violate her scruples) but still nixed almost all of the symptoms I went there to complain about, all except the pain--which, of course, became secondary when the lithium toxicity was discovered. Smart lady, I still wish she would've just bitten the bullet and give me a shot of morphine, though.
Anyway, I'm done here, my head hurts terribly and, because of the whole "only getting 60 this month" thing, I can't take medication for it for a couple hours. I'll just have to sit pretty until then. G'bye all.

I saw Lon Cheney walkin' with the Queen, doin' the Werewolves in London. I saw Lon Cheney Jr. walkin' with the Queen, gih! Doin' the Werewolves in London.

I don't have anything to write about right now, which can be the worst way to write something most of the time, and the best way other times. This time there is the potential for writing something worth writing, but I doubt I will hit it because I have a complicated morning in front of me.
I have had a strange couple of days, I missed to days of work on account of a terrible headache that I am still feeling the aftershocks of (though I will go to work feeling them, they aren't that bad, comparatively speaking) and yesterday I could've sworn I was getting fired via IM, except then something weird happened in the conversation, so now I don't even know. I'm going to go into work today, if I AM to be fired, it'll all come to a head there.
It's not like I want to be fired, it's just that I know I should be and that I am being held on to because of sympathy. I won't try and decieve myself into thinking that when I am there I am worth it, because I can't do almost all of the shit they do there very well except packaging, and I could train anybody to do that within two days, I just haven't been given proper time to do so. That's one of the reasons why me calling in is so bad, I think. I don't really know.

Yesterday I had a day that was unlike any other day I've had in a very long time. You see, right now I am abdicating all psych meds because they almost killed me and because every now and then I decide I hate medications and stop taking them, usually to my detriment. So yesterday, around 1 o'clock, I am suddenly reminded of why I sought out psych meds to begin with. I won't describe how, but it was pretty bad, I almost went to the emergency room so I wouldn't do anything terrible, but then I just took some sleeping pills and ate some pizza and conked out pretty early; I feel much better this morning, such is the life of a nutcase.
I'm listening to the one AC/DC album I have, which is Back in Black, and I am wishing fervently that I had more AC/DC albums. It's not that I don't love Back in Black, but the earlier ones were better, before Brian Johnson (I think that's his name, I got it wrong on like a daily fucking basis when Tim and I were in this big AC/DC kick like four years ago).
My how time flies, one day you're all alone, just delivering your papers, with a couple of friends you see at church and one friend you hang out and drink with a lot (and a girl who you hang out with who wants to have sex with you but you are both infatuated and terrified of her so you never do it. Aren't I a manly man? Cut me some slack, I was like twelve.) At night you always contemplate the knife and never sleep. The next day I have a little group of friends who all like good music, all like video games, and all like reading (Tim was a slight anomaly, he liked watching us play most video games and beating the Utter SHIT out of some very strangely grouped ones. He's the Mario Master, and you give him the controls to Driver and he can do some crazy stuff, but then some games others would find as easy as hell, nothin' happens! It's really strange, I think it has something to do with the height and/or size of the main character's head. He also liked reading only half of a book, I think he did guesswork on the other half, we never really figured out his technique, but he could philosophize with the best of us, and the rest of us, which is good. We were just the rest, there was no best. Moving on!) and you guys have some fun fucking times and make jokes that would set a catholic priest's hair on fire and you crack up for hours at a time every time you meet and everything is cool.
Next day, you're back by yourself, contemplating the knife. The next day you've wasted that chance you had and now you have to make a new one out of the scraps of the old one. The next day you barely ever see your friends, and it's your own fault. The next day you've once again fallen into complete and utter self-loathing and isolation.
Yeah, my how time flies, how much changes but still remains the same. That's why I've got to get the fuck out of here. My back-up car plan isn't going to work, I know that now, I'm thinking of just getting a quick job done on my truck so that it's legal enough to pass and then just fucking leaving, fuck money. It'll work itself out or I'll starve to death, I don't care either way. I'll buy my smokes on the cheap and eat Ramen every day, that's less than 5 dollars a day to live off of.
But, who the hell knows? Maybe something cool'll happen, like one of those manuscripts I'm "working on" might get published, and then I'd have a reason to go, to write more and get published more, and I'd have way more bread than I had predicted. Who knows what could happen in a couple months?
Nothing will if I don't get the ball rolling. Off to work, tonight--to Write!

The only one who could ever reach me was the son of a preacher man.

I've had that song stuck in my head since the first time I saw Pulp Fiction in full about a week or two ago, along with "I'm a mushroom-cloud layin' muthafucka, muthafucka."
But the Son of a Preacher Man, now that, I believe, is a prime example of everything I could ever love about soul music. It's got those horns, it's got that boiling Memphis guitar, and it's got Etta James. Sounds like a cocktail of delicious soul music to me, and it is. I think I'm going to try to track down that album.
I have every song I enjoy that I have downloaded enqueued right now and shuffling, so after "Son of a Preacher Man" comes "Hell" by the Squirrel Nut Zippers. Not 40 year old soul, but damn good shit nonetheless.

The problem with my sleeping pills, besides the facts that one of the symptoms of withdrawal is almost certainly dying, is that when I fall asleep on them, I wake up the next morning after almost exactly eight hours on the dot. Now, I had a headache last night, so I went to sleep as early as possible because I have no painkillers, and I wake up at 4:45 without the ability to get back to sleep, no matter how much lazing about I do. I wish it was like that when I have friends over. Maybe friends make me sleepy. Actually, it's probably the klonopin I take so they don't see me with the shakes that makes me sleepy. I don't like anyone seeing me with the shakes, I don't think anyone besides my immediate family has ever seen them going strong, I usually manage to catch them with sedatives before anyone else does.
But see, I wake up at quarter of five, and this son of a bitch who lives inside my head already starts fucking around with me. First he starts pulling on my nerve lines so I get those horrible pangs of head-pain, and then he starts filling my mind with philisophical junk that I had thought I had forgotten about, THEN he starts on with how pointless life is and how badly I fucked mine up and, most of all, how I should do all within my power not to let Lena fuck up her life as I did mine. As it is, mine is reparable. But there is only so bad you can fuck up and still be able to pull it back together, some people get lucky and can fuck up all life long and then after a decade or two of horrible debauchery, multiple failings (or not tryings), and a few too many drugs they can suddenly turn into normal, full-functioning people again. My family is riddled with people like those, which is why I think I have a chance, now that I have already fucked up and don't plan on fucking up more than I already have (as long as this son of a bitch in my head doesn't have any more damn plans for me). But I do intend to do all within my power to keep Lena from ever having to think the words, "Where do I go to from here?"
Those are some terrible motherfucking words sometimes, man. You sit there on your couch, your couch where you have spent so many hours feeling cool on, and suddenly realize that you've fucked up, all of those dreams you used to have can't happen now, you'll never be a physicist (that's what I actually wanted to be, a physicist. I could've done it too, I think I still hold two school records for best dumb projects in P.O.T.) you'll never be a successful writer, you'll never learn Russian enough to work in a museum transcribing Solzhenitsyn, everything you used to think about while skipping school and (funny way to ruin your life) burying your mind in books, is dead, and you think to yourself, "Fuck me, man. Where do I go to from here?"
There is no direct answer to that question, not for even any one person. The road of life is long and confusing, and there is a hell of a lot of dogshit on that road, and there is a hell of a lot of fuzz on that road just waiting to pull you aside and make you stagnate. Everyone has to walk through the shit and the traps of the road themselves, take a little help from their friends on the way, if they can. My way, as far as I can tell, is to travel, and write. After that, I don't know shit about it man. That's a fucking footstep in the eighty more years during which I am going to be forced to walk this hard fucking road. A goddamn footstep.
But it is a step nonetheless, I am taking one. Thank god for the first time in my life I'm taking one. But I refuse to sit by and watch my younger sister, my better, sit back on that fucking couch without doing what shit she can, she still has a chance to get through this part of life without fucking everything up. Everyone fucks up some of a highschool, that's pretty much a fact, but she is smarter than I am, and far more clever than I am, maybe not more creative than I am (unless there is some drug involved) but that's because she's all about numbers and shit. I'm not going to sit and see another one of my betters flush themselves down the fucking toilet of life.

What got me talking about that? This son of a bitch in my head did it, man. Stephen King once wrote, "You go through your whole life with some fucker in your head, fucking up your life, and fucking with your mind. The trick is to catch that little son of a bitch, put him on a fucking wheel, and make the fucker work for you."
Maybe I'll be able to pull that off someday.
Jungle Boogie, child.

Additions, not for the first time.

I am quite insane. That is something I came to terms with a long time ago, but the full effect of this doesn't really hit you until you have some time to yourself to think about it. Of course, there is only so mad I can be, if I know that I am mad. But we are all mad here, here we all hear demons who trouble us in our sleep, here there is always the Other Man, here we hear sounds that aren't there, we see things that don't exist, and we know things that we know aren't true.
Yes, it's quite a trip to be insane. A bit of a drag sometimes, but it really is a trip. It has it's upsides and it's downsides. You can sit there and listen to music and feel that the music is coming out of your mind, that you are the main character in a movie and this is the background music of this particular scene. You can sit on your roof smoking cigarettes and contemplate the innocence of the rest of the world, and how much you differ from that world, and sometimes it may not bother you. Sometimes you can enjoy it.
But you can't keep a girl if you're insane, you can't hold a job if you're insane, substances have far too much attraction if you're insane, the strange things you have to do to keep yourself comfortable are overwhelming if you're insane, the strange things you are compelled to do whether you'd like to or not, those are another aspect of insanity that is very disagreeable.
Yeah, we are all mad here. Here we all quote scripture while sucking down ash, here we all work for miminum wage while writing private dissertations on classic literature that will never see the light of day. Here we believe that the couse of our entire lives are determind by the equilibrium of the universe. Here we occasionally crave to take a man's life, here we always crave to take our own.
Once I was a person, I remember it vaguely. Once I was a person who could function in society like any other person. Now, as Man has been torn out of nature, as God has been torn out of time and space, I have been torn out of society to create a society of my own; and like all societies created by madmen, it is just themselves, their insanities and their inanities that exist within the walls of this society. Co-existence is beyond me. Hell, fucking existence itself is beyond me.
Oh yes, oh yes, we are all mad here. And when we remember that fact, we grow madder still. I'm going to go have a cigarette.

Revelations.

The lithium is now completely out of my system, taking away the small bit of sanity it brought, and leaving behind the headaches I went on it in an attempt to stop.
My body has shut down on me, almost completely. I am writing now because... now that I am feeling those demons again, it seems like I have no choice.
I took my clonodine at about nine, I don't know what time it will hit me fully; so this post will be kind of a race against my biological clock.
It has been a bitch of a day, man. A real strange one. I'm not even going to get into it here or describe it here because the story is too long and because some of the persons involved would probably not like my take on it. Let it just be known that it has been a very rough day in the Colón household.

I think I may have to call in sick tomorrow, if I still feel this way tomorrow morning, which is very probable. These headaches seem to wax and wane, when they are shining in all their horrible blinding glory, it is a thing to behold: a Man, utterly crippled, unable to even walk without a stick or talk without taking enough sedatives to kill an ox to steady his shaking and his stutter. Yet, even when I am free of that particular torment, I am still being set down upon by the wieght of the headache that wanes. You see, it only wanes so much, it decreases to a certain point and then it stops. That point where it stops would be a normal persons migraine.
In this way, I am a cripple. There are many other ways in which I am not, and I dig that. But there is only so long a man can stand only looking at the sky through sunglasses, there is only so long a man can stand his mind and body being shut down by something neither he nor his doctors can even comprehend. I wonder, when will my meter run out? When will this body that has been decaying for so long finally give up and die? Will it be by my own hand? It is possible, though unlikely. Another man's hand? Less possible, less likely. Perhaps eventually I will just give up and surrender my will to live, as a love-bird does when it's parter dies. I would like that, to make a decision to go quietly into that good night.
But now is quite obviously not my time, I gave up my will to live long ago, and yet here I am, still alive, and still kicking, when I can move my legs, at least.
I didn't have anything to say when I started this post. I didn't say anything in the post, pardon any spelling or grammatical errors, as I am on clonodine wth a headache. I think I shall end it the same way I began, by saying essentially nothing.