The psychological damage is best measured in terms of the impossibility to go without the substance, to have a normal day, to know that what is now happening is a departure from what was and something is tangibly lost; in the distance between words and truth; I am terribly lost in the wilderness right now. I think it’s hard because it’s been about motivation, a subtle nuanced contingent thing; so many people deal with more palpable problems than I labor under; total distance from hobbies, routines, friends, everything, mind being strangled on ledge above dried up riverbed; beyond that it’s stasis, rotting in paucity for no good reason bellowing in incoherence; and this pain has me for a long, long time, gripped by personal visions of future, past in unlucid myopic present slipping away through screens. Total back pain major stiffness slight cold sore on left inside cheek, chapped lips dirty pants painful neck; trapped displaced in world of displacement swimming in sea of images unfriendly to mind that begs for naïveté while punishing all such manifestations. One text per day is too many in this splayed open repose of image and ginny soup. Pained fried mind grasping for concepts arriving only at thinking about thinking about things, sitting on sidelines at the one time event, drowning suffocated by own throat lost in pain. Belief that humans all over are suffering in ways not unlike me but often don’t have material ability to change their circumstances for the better; it’s exhausting to know things probably won’t improve. I wonder how much my base fear/worry/disgust about the present and our future has prompted/exacerbated my substance abuse. I think that plus the technologically granted ability to remove boredom, peace, inner life/monologue (+ the marijuana mind bath shrinking my comfort zone) has created a very difficult to transform feedback loop. I am here again writing about the one topic because it is the only topic because it burst from its context and devoured my entire world like a sordid triumphant dead-so-fast circus lion in revolutionary act of self-determination. But I don’t get to just laze and sit, even though I do laze and sit very often; this tension between my oblivion/repose and the accountabilities of different shapes and colors that populate my life; because of my status I am expected to do a certain amount of successful-looking things, so the urge to keep up appearances and never have the total meltdown that may be the exact existential confrontation necessary for growth is powerful; the problem is that the issue then lingers and the cost / amount upended by the confrontation only balloons. And my weird frequently-rendered-hypocritical ambition and rhetoric, punctured in efficacy by my actual behavior and lifestyle to the point where my words deserve skepticism and I can only just keep talking and talking, building walls of words that then sag and melt and ooze over time very publicly. And the opportunities available to the well-positioned person have not disappeared, they just demand a legacy of preparation and effort that goes far beyond what I’ve been up to. I exist as a raw creature in a maelstrom of change, shattered bits of mirrors creating insane fractal image universe of total access and overwhelming information in soup of mind with so little context, both for individual pieces of information and the act of receiving information in the first place, the gamut of human noises of the world all rendered meaningless distractive sound consumed omnivorously with little discernment. Trembling before machinery not of other skeletons but of minds and now not of minds; silent society world of mute consumeristic spectaclewatchers each going down their unique algorithmic path sagging to fit them perfectly, an unholy personal image of man as a constellation of data points and consumption patterns; total commodification and loss of humanity in the rush for endless wind-howling peaks of profit; I don’t want to try to be the perfect candidate with the best narrative, I don’t want to be being sold something every moment of my life, I don’t want to have a screen, I would like some silence and human peace, the shade under a peach tree and the act of planting a new orchard, the sweet juice running down my chin and view of the crystalline water, warm sun gleaming on tanned hands and no idea how I look because I haven’t been inside to see a mirror all day. I want to run for hours with toes in the sand. Nothing we need as creatures comes from the screens, and the speed with which we have become accustomed to – and increasingly dependent upon / warped and bent by – these tools is terrifying. But I don’t stop my consumption, even while I disappear into the gnashing maw of attempting personhood in our modern atomized society and begin losing the robust support structures that got me to this point of my life, in terms of success and achievement. And I don’t know how to get where I want, especially while remaining so alone in the world; the paradox of needing community then sitting in my room watching TV shows from 1990 illustrates the core problem: I need to turn around and recognize that I am going to start reaping what I sow at some point, and that the painful unrelenting sag will leave me somewhere very different from where I started without the tools necessary to return, left both existentially unhappy as I am now and additionally trapped and limited by logistical/external factors that limit my ability to change things.
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B Writes 