The Obscure

I have grown to live and to love under a shadow of despair...

Ah, always one for the melodrama, is that Johnny Colón. That line is an excerpt from something awful I wrote a long time ago, but then, everything I write is awful, and it all seems to contain lines like that, doesn't it? That is a saddening thought.
My younger sister is back in school, she was thinking of dropping out, but didn't (thank god!) I still maintain hope that she'll graduate the normal way, not like the rest of we Colóns. Well, I think my dad graduated normally. Oh yeah, I remember, it was something like this: he had full credit in everything but phys-ed, and he needed it in order to graduate, but the teachers liked him so they gave him full phys-ed credit and graduated him after he carried a puerto rican flag in a single school parade. Something like that.
My sister is taking a class called "The History of Jazz," and it is being taught by Mr. Anzovino. Mr. A, what do you say? I wish they had that class when I was in school. Not only that, but she'll get extra credit if I take her to jazz shows. Mr. A really is the only music teacher I would think qualified for that kind of class, if anything he is over-qualified. I think that he knows that her having me as a brother will make it kind of fun for her, which is a thing she desperately needs if she is to make it through the year. School is no fun if you don't have any fun.
Now me, when I was in school, I had to make my own fun. Or make fun of others. We didn't have any fun classes (except computer science, that was fun, but that was just because the Doc was a mad mathematical genius, it would be impossible to not have fun in one of his classes if you liked computers at all). So anyway, I just had to skip classes and go to extra lunches (and play far too much hacky-sack) and essentially treat the school like a playground just to endure the fact that I had to attend. And here Elena gets some cool courses I would have killed for, and she's barely even seen a classroom in the past two years!
I tell you, it's a crying shame. I always miss things by the closest of shaves. Then again, there is the very large possibility that the class actually did exist, but I, in my haste to flout authority and have fun running around with my mismatched group of hyper-intelligent friends, accidentally ignored it. A very large possiblity, indeed.

Tomorrow is the day I get my painkillers refilled, which is something like a holiday around here. I am hoping the Doc (the Md kind, not the mad math kind) will give me a demerol shot, I've certainly been feeling reliably miserable enough every day so that I can count on requiring one, but who knows what the future holds? I'll find out in something like nine hours. Goodnight, nightingales and such.

Piercing my heart is a golden dagger, that is God.
Piercing God's heart is a golden needle. That is me.

The doom-criers have landed on the barren soil of my mind, things spin out of human control and we await that doom. When it will come, only God, the Devil, and the dead know. It is not that final doom, spoken of in hushed tones in that good book we christians like to call "The Good Book," but it is a doom nonetheless.

I spoke in my last post of being terribly aware of my own existence, the pointlessness of it, the meaningless of my life. This awareness has grown, rather than lessened, over the short course of time between that post and this. My hatred for our species has doubled, my own self-loathing has, if anything, trebled. There isn't any honour in being a child of the mind; but it seems there is precious little honour in anything nowadays.
Tonight my awareness has reached some sort of culmination, if it goes any further I do believe I will end up very dead soon thereafter. My best idea to solve the problem was to get drunk. Standing up, falling down drunk; drunk so that I could skip hours of time, one moment lying in the backseat of some girl's car, and the next, sitting on the stoop with someone I do not know, telling them all about how Socrates had everything wrong and thinking (in my drunken stupor) that they were listening or did, in fact, actually care.
My second solution (seeing as I lack alcohol, girls with cars, and innocent victims upon which I would spout all of my backward philosophy--but mainly the alcohol, had to get drunk without any vino, boyo) is to stay up late, read way too many books so that I have the thoughts of others crowding my mind instead of my own thoughts, which are growing dark and frightening, and to smoke enough cigarettes to give the family that lives next-door emphysema from the second-hand smoke. It's ok, though, the guy who lives next-door has cost my parents several thousand dollars and is about to cost them several thousand more. He has it coming, I will spare the children.
My third solution is to eat a bullet. There isn't really more to that one because it is kind of a Final Solution (reference to mass-killings, ain't I clever?)
But I think it is the second that will be getting my attentions tonight, just like the night before, and the night before, and so on into infinity. Except for the occasional bout of luck whereupon I do manage to get drunk around girls with cars and wayward philosophers, my life really is that dull. I suppose it's the dullness that gets to you, and it is the lithium I am going back on (keep your fingers crossed, that I don't die from it!) that is bringing my frustrations out, but who gives a damn, really? In a couple of weeks all of the emotions I haven't expressed in the past year or so will have poured out of me (onto my close friends and my family, unfortunately) and then I will be a regular (if slightly depressed) ol' crazy backward philosopher--and I'll be in college then, so I'll be perfectly normal. Angsty and full of too many unsupported words. I'll fit right in.

I smoke two joints in the morning
I smoke two joints at night
I smoke two joints in the afternoon
'Cause it makes me feel alright.
I smoke two joints, in time of peace
And two in time of war.
I smoke two joints before I smoke two joints,
and then I smoke two more.

Goodnight television, goodnight light. Goodnight all that other bullshit that guy wrote that one time.
I was observing to my mother (because, as previously mentioned, I have made myself to much of a shut-in to observe anything to anybody outside of my immediate family) earlier today that this world we live in is composed of lines and strings. There are lines that we do not cross, and there are strings that hold us where we stand. Then there are those people who decide that they do not want to acknowledge those lines, or who have the luxury of not being tied down by any strings. Those people are free, free from the confines of our society, free to do as they please, go where they please, with who they please. I once thought that perhaps one day I would be freed from my cage of social lines and strings, but it appears that every time I get a glimpse of freedom, another line or string stretches out from the horrible glutinous mass, that monster we call "Civilization."
Tonight is a night unlike any other night. Why? I do not know. I am fully aware of things I hadn't even contemplated until tonight. Horribly aware. I can see into the distance, I can peer through time and space; and what I see there terrifies me. I long to die, to pass beyond that final thin veil, but what would await me on the other side? Shadow and flame.
I am insane. The fact that I can recognize my own insanity shows that I am not quite insane enough yet to act upon the insane impulses that crowd my every thought and emotion, but I am a madman nonetheless. I hate with a fire, I would vomit down the throats of mankind, had I the proper stomache contents to give each one their due. I love with a horrible, clinging love that will not release me, despite my enormous hatred of myself and, being brutally honest, pretty much everything else.
I have never had any good fortune without a little bad fortune mixed in, and the good fortunes I have had have been few and far between.

Yes, tonight I am aware, terribly aware. That is the curse of mankind, to be aware of our own existence. If only we could learn to be ignorant of it, to live out our lives like a worker bee: short, and meaningless. Instead we must be aware of the fact that our lives are indeed short and meaningless but it is our lot to endure them and know them for what they are. Tonight I am terribly aware of my pointless life, tonight I wish to end it.
But unfortunately for all considered, I am a coward. I will sleep tonight and dream my troubled dreams, and tomorrow I will wish that I could have overcome that cowardice and put a bullet down my throat when I had the chance.
It would seem, my friends and brethren, that ignorance truly is bliss, and that this bliss is denied to even the best of us. Therefore, I can never hope to obtain it, for I am among the least of us, scraped up from the dregs of the human masses and slapped together in a horribly mishappen body afflicted with illnesses that (according to medical science) don't exist. My cowardice keeps me from peace, so I cannot say I am sorry I don't have the will to cut my throat or eat a bullet or swallow all the pills in my cabinet, because although my vile hatred touches upon all things, it is myself that I hate the most.
Fuck eternity.

Strangeness in the dark.

I am finding myself thinking thoughs unthinkable, if that is in any way possible for anyone to understand, which I highly doubt.
I am unutterably bored. There is nothing I can do about it, however, having lived the life of a total shut-in for as long as I have now.
I feel like I have that emotional concussion swelling inside my skull again, but I cannot figure out any coherent way to let the pressure out. Let me please introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste. Right now I feel like my brain is numb, like my mind has lost all of the potency it once had (which, as you assuredly know, was not much to begin with). It feels like I've suddenly had anchors strapped onto the bottom of my every thought.
They struggle in the briny deep
Those things that are my mind's to keep.
Though they struggle hard, they yet shall drown
With no would-be rescuer to be found.

Bats in the belfry. Belfrey? Who cares. However it is spelt, I don't know what is so wrong with bats being there; but then one must wonder why a bat would be inclined to be there in the first place.
I found my broken heart, and sent it
To the person who might mend it
But when it was returned, by post
I found the mender was a ghost
No mended heart to be found
Without the care of my love around
Dead and gone, or as good as such
I find her absence works as much
As the death of she or I
Still I mourn it, by and by.

Dunno what that means, as I said, my brain is pretty well scrambled today.
I don't really have much that I can say, though my mind is filled to the brim with thoughts, none of them I can articulate. So I will leave now, good-day to you all.

It was a pale grey morning, even the sky looked as if it felt like crying...

Those are the kinds of flowery words I can never pull off right except by accident. It just so happens, that this morning I awoke with those words in my head, and they do seem to match the day nicely, so I figured I would put them to some use; because, after all, if we don't use the gifts of words we sometimes recieve, we will eventuall degenerate to the level of dumb animals. Not that I don't think a lot of humans are dumber than some of the animals I know, or that the occasional quadruped will be far cleverer than us all, but I am not the one to make these judgements. as far as I know, I'm smarter than most animals and would like to remain that way. Whether this is actually true or not, remains to be seen.

Many hours later and much further run over by madness...

It is very late, and four times out of five my fingers don't hit the keys I am aiming for, nevertheless I felt the urge to come here, and unload some of the heavy burdens of my mind until such time as I choose to pick them up again.
I want music, but it is quarter of two in the AM and I think playing music just now would be rather rude. I want percocet, but then I always want that, which isn't really an encouraging thought, but at least I am not sending them up my nose. If there is one thing you can say about me, it's that I know when I am addicted and I know how to get within an inch of destroying my life through that addiction and never cross that line. It appears there are lines everywhere, if you know where to look, and that there are no lines at all, if you look at it from another place. Too unfortunately for the majority of mankind, we choose to acknowledge the lines, and recognize those that don't as madman, bewe accurate on that count or no.
Out of time and out of mind, one should never feel that way about himself, yet I do. Unneccessary to the process, a cog that has no place to fit into the machine, a man worthless not only to himself, but to the rest of poor, pitiable mankind as well.
Soon now, soon, I may find myself eating a nice, rare, hunk of lead. Goodbye Johnny, goodbye johnny's unthinkable incessant pain, goodbye sanity of most of my family (or at least, goodbye to another portion of it.) I wonder what would happen, if I did take that final hideous step in a long succession of hideous steps that have led me to this one. Would I go to heaven? I don't know, I'm not sure I believe in it, there is too much hell and not enough heaven on this earth to thoroughly convince me of it's existence. Hell, now, there is a belief that is impossible to ignore. If you spend your life being utterly miserable and hating yourself and humanity with your every waking breath, then it would just fit that pattern of human existence that once you die, you get to spend an enternity in a worse situation. Then again, I am not so bad a guy, I shouldn't go to hell. At least I think I shouldn't, maybe. And I suppose it stands to reason that if there is an actual hell than somewhere in some time or place, there is an actual heaven; difficult to believe, I know, but I am being as logical as one can when discussing these things.
Oh well, it won't be tonight, at any rate, so I have some time left to ponder the meaning of my existence before I cook myself up a hot lead sandwich; and who knows, between now and then, there may crop up something to live for!