for
10/21/2000
"You had to give it to him--he had a plan. And it started to make sense, in a Tyler sort of way. No fear, no distractions; the ability to let that which does not matter truly slide." --Fight Club
1. My Girlfriend and Sex
I've gotten more than any man like me deserves--a second chance at a first love. Why do I care what the woman I love has done with other men? Why did I need to know her almost-sexual history, and in such detail? What does it matter--the gradients of sex, the everything-but-sex, the who did what with her when, and who gave her the ideas. What is sex, and what's not? What does it matter?
That's my singular question; what does it matter? I love her, and last I knew, she loves me. If you wonder why I started out with, "I've gotten more than any man like me deserves..." this is why; I didn't even take this directly to her. Indeed, I've failed to truly get it across here. I almost don't want to leave the next paragraph in.
This relationship is all I've got, coming together on one spot. If I fuck this one up then I'll have confirmed just about all my fears about myself. This isn't a burden, especially on her; it's just the truth. I was a happy and inquisitive kid, and an inhibited and depressed teenager, now what kind of man am I going to be?
People aren't a set of values representing a state; they're vectors, or b-splines, or any of the colorful chimeras that your graphing calculator program demo version has programmed into it. By the time one has finished measuring the current state, the co-ordinates have changed drastically.
2. How I Feel About Myself
After one of many 2AM nights, I woke up this morning over the course of an hour, feeling shitty. I had things to do. I had responsibilities. I didn't deal with any of them. Why? Because I didn't feel able to handle any of it. I didn't feel capable of dragging my lazy ass around.
Now this is wrong. Your feeling of self worth has no right interfering with your ability to get things done, especially since it's volatile enough to be dictated almost always by your physical state. I need not care if I'm "in one of my moods." I'm still just as brilliant. I waste too much of my waking days, and then sleep too little at night.
It's one thing if you're tired; tired is a chemical problem, which will catch up with you. On long nights of working on something, I drink a cup of tea to make me thirsty, and then keep refilling and downing a glass of water. Take note: hydration keeps you alert. I drink water the way some people smoke cigarettes. But this is just a cheat. You can't cheat your sleep mechanism--the unique chemical dance that's done to refresh you in a good night's sleep--you can only distract it. That refreshment, or its lack, is the only exception I draw.
3. People I Don't Know
I always feel slightly stupid out running. Here's this skinny kid, shuttling along on the skinniest legs you've ever seen, right out in public places. Going shirtless on hot days only compounds the problem. I'm from Maine; I expect a kind of solitude when I'm running. There's no solitude in the city.
This is part of why I haven't done anything to get myself back into shape. I could go out running. I could check out the exercise center in the basement of the Kennedy Building. But I haven't. A kind of deep laziness has seeped into my bones, and I want to eviscerate it with a scalpel. Does it have to do with my girlfriend's (now obsolete) inability to exercise, due to a case of mono? Well she's past the danger stage, and her spleen never swelled to begin with. She's solid; she's not exercising, either. Even if this was some kind of sick psychological act of lover sympathy, why aren't I setting an example? Is this all all there is to it?
4. The Space Toast Page
This is why I can say anything here. Even if I'm wrong.
I'll risk being preachy here by counter-balancing it with a self mocking structure of doing it. Ask yourself, sometime, my loyal reader, (No, this isn't the self mocking; the last part was.) what's not important? What will I let truly slide?
You are not your victim.
Touch the Toast