look out for the hydraulic crane

This morning was all about laying in bed and contemplating mortality. Only I had to get up and go to work. Its a hard push-pull kind of a deal, talking yourself out of warm covers on a gray day, made no easier by thoughts of death and sleep being so similar and pleasant and preferable to movement or faking motivation.
It keeps hitting me that I'm a grown up now. Or as close as I am ever likely to get. Its a freakily unfulfilling realization. What in the hell am I supposed to do with that?
I think most of my generation is having the same problem. Or at least I hope so, nothing sucks quite as much as being the only one in the middle of an existential crisis.
Why don't I have things figured out? I thought I'd just go with the flow and things would fall together in some sort of fateful way, but at the moment it feels more like things are falling apart rather than together and I don't think that fate really has anything to do with it.
Most likely it is just because I'm lonely. The person I talk to the most is the one I know is planning to abandon me for bigger brighter better things, and that doesn't really lend itself to too much confidence or admittance.
So that has to be part of it. Here I am alone and likely to stay that way. Really part of me is looking forward to knowing for sure I'm alone. The part after may not be so good, but at the moment a schedule sounds nice.
I looked in on an old boyfriend the other day--online, not in person--and was happy/sad to find him as pitiful and unable to deal with the world as when I left him. Happy because it makes me very sure I made the right decision there and sad because it doesn't look like things are ever going to change for the better for him, and that is always sad.
And I keep remembering that time after I left, and how good it was for me to be alone. And maybe this time will be just as good--cathartic, fulfilling, and I will be alright with it.

what if the mice get to it first?

This sums it up perfectly:

LIFE HAS NO PURPOSE, COMMUNICATION IS IMPOSSIBLE, THE EXISTENCE OF MAN IS ABSURD

Man, why can’t I get words like that? That’s exactly it; what I’ve been feeling in the back of my head for days now, but my attempts at expressing it are so much more amorphous, when I really just needed to come out and say that, and then it would all make sense.

I went to a memorial service on Saturday and it was really good, in that way that something sad and terrible can still be good, because it is about a whole lot of people getting together and remembering and loving someone (even if it is, okay, a whole lot too late for that person to get much out of it, it is nice to know that people care) and I enjoy the community feeling and the commiseration that make you feel like you are part of this group instead of all alone (as we all are, inevitably, at death). Of course it did make me ponder the point of continuing to live at all because (as stated so clearly above): LIFE HAS NO PURPOSE, COMMUNICATION IS IMPOSSIBLE, THE EXISTENCE OF MAN IS ABSURD. Yeah. Good times.

I don’t know how many people would come to my memorial service, if there was one. I know my mother pretty much planned one once (I was in a bad accident, and on the way to the hospital apparently my folks had the necessary talk about the necessary arrangements, but she still won’t tell me the details). Which is nice to know, I guess. At least there is a plan.

A plan generally makes things better I think. I get more done with planning and deadlines. I enjoy a certain amount of structure. If it were not, for instance, for the need to get up and go to work on weekdays, I would most likely have spent today laying in bed listening to Nirvana. Usually my laying-in-bed-questioning-the-futility-of-living music of choice is Tool, but something in me really wants to hear In utero back to back to back for a period of eight or nine hours.

But I don’t have a choice in the matter (or at least I tell myself there is no choice in the matter) I need to get up and go go go like an animated doll: get in the car, drive ever so slowly through snow and slush to work, and sit and type-type-type and think-think-think and make little to-do lists of the things I want done by the end of the week. My lists are always a little mixed up: I have a tendency to run together all the things I want done in work and out of work in one non-prioritized list:

• Make new book display,
• eat fruit for breakfast,
• finish CSE citation guidelines page,
• get to the gym at least three times,
• do some actual collection development and get the slush pile off my computer desk,
• make Christmas cards,
• lose five pounds or grow five inches, your choice.
• Write something you might enjoy reading sometime in the future

And honestly this probably does not fulfill that last one, I am just a rambler and do not really merit re-reading truth be told.

down down down into the cake of eternal glory

Doorways archways, openings. These things give an idea of movement, of natural forward progression that I can almost feel. I will move beyond this: I will get out of this room safely and easily and move into the light space outside that opening.

Only not today. There is a drag on my movement today, a mental pause that precludes movement and may in fact make it impossible.

I don’t want to see anyone, talk to anyone, be with anyone.

I don’t want to have to explain.

I feel so unlovable, so bereft, so alone. You would think I had been abandoned already, only it hasn’t happened yet. Maybe it is the worse for all that: to see and to know that there is a person who claims to love you, only not enough. Not enough to stay, not enough to even make an attempt at keeping in touch at backing up what he says: if he loves me then how can he just be leaving? He can’t prove he loves me because he doesn’t. it’s the only conclusion I can come to. The only way it makes sense.

How do I prove so unworthy? How can I still be alive and be so unloved? What did I do wrong?

I want to cultivate a broad sense of the ridiculous, if only to attempt to keep a flame of humor alive in my skull. The darkness is blinding, isolating. I don’t want to know or speak to anyone. But maybe I can look, maybe image can sustain me.

There is a man outside striding around in the parking lot wearing a tall chef’s hat. It’s a peculiar thing to see, and he looks quite proud, I imagine him listing his credentials in his head as he walks, shoulders squared to some imagined chef’s convention or get together at 10am on a Friday morning.
And this makes me smile. I personally would love to have the nickname “Tripsy McStumble” for my very own some days.

I am, sadly, coming to the realization that I am rather accident prone. I’ve gone decades without knowing this, but it seems that lately whatever it is that can happen in a bad-news-bears fashion, it happens to me: a broken wrist, a fender-bender, a slip on the stairs, a fractured heart and ego, a spilt bowl of batter for cake or banana bread or pancakes. I don’t know how it happens, or why, but it just seems to keep happening to me.

I’m trying not to dwell on it, I really am, but it keeps coming up.

Despair just keeps finding me--I am trying to see the good, the absurd the life around me, but my mind just wants to go back to bed and listen to Tool for the rest of the day.

I really thought I could be more upbeat than this. This is not really turning out the way I had planned at all.

Such is life, as my father would say

I guess it can't all be fun and games, but why does that part have to come first?

Day one. Start at the beginning.

There is no beginning. This is an obvious middle, or even potentially an ending, for some things. But it’s the first day of a new month. That is new, that is beginning-like. So that’s where we are.

I want to get up early but I can’t seem to actually do it. I have this idea that waking early is a morally responsible thing to do, that it is the kind of thing that will eventually turn me into a good person.

I want to be a good person.

But I can’t seem to get up early. My alarm goes off three times and then I lay there and think about how much sick time I have, or think about how much financial responsibility it will take to put me into the independently wealthy category of life.

It is going to take a very long time, and is a depressing thing to think about first thing in the morning.

These are my personal roadblocks. I seem to be totally unmotivated from the get go, from the beginning. This beginning, this first day.

Add to this a need and craving for human comfort and you have someone ready to slide into sloth, to climb under the covers of cozy mediocrity and rest on the laurels of work already done and hide her head in the pillow of self aggrandizement until late afternoon or middle life.

But there is a seed of me, a piece of me, that rebels. That begs for difference, for change, for progress. For writing. And getting up early in the morning.

So I set my alarms, all three, require wakefulness even if I cannot require uprightness first thing in the morning, and I hope that it will engender other things, other changes, other pieces of potential motivation.

I can only hope.

Its November first, and things haven’t changed very much so far. I was late for work this morning, I did not get up early and write or run first thing like I had hoped to do last night, but I am writing now, and I’m out at the desk which is a new something as well.

Little changes, baby steps. Maybe tomorrow I will make it in on time. Maybe tonight I’ll go running.

He’s still coming over tonight. He’s still leaving me in December. He’s still going down to Boston to visit an ex (roommate of mine, old fling of his. She is married. They are friends. We are friends. This should be fine. Why isn’t it fine?) tomorrow. Too much of me is still emotionally tied to him. Too much of what he does still matters, still hurts. I had a fond few minutes the other day, when I had partially gotten over my anger at his sudden need to see her, where I daydreamed that he was going down to see her so they could go ring shopping. So he could say “surprise! I am not really leaving you to go adventuring, instead I have decided I do really care about you and want to spend my life with you!” this is sad and delusional I know, and also is not happening. I do not live in a romantic comedy. Sometimes I may wish I did, but I do not. The best I can hope for is that the movie of my life isn’t a tragedy, as much as I don’t want to get out of bed some days.