No, i’m not promoting a shady mid 1990′s porn video. I’m talking about myself actually. I’m having a chaotic, sleepless night and it stems from a range of things. Since I started blogging about eight weeks ago, I’ve realized the gradual evolution of my writing. As time passes, even though I try to maintain the witty, semi-humorous vibe I like to “online-speak” in, I notice that tidbits of my personal life inevitably fall between the lines. Not only tidbits, but large chunks as well. Sometimes, a blog about an outing can evolve completly into a diatribe about loneliness( e.g LTD and the attack of the Superpants!) or it might be more subtle, like dropping the hint that I feel like a loser for doing certain things(e.g Best week Ever!).
I’m not worried about saying these things, because these are true emotions, but nonetheless, one can think of the impact such statements have on unassuming viewers. Right now, I’m not really sure of what to write. I went to Wonderland tonight, in an attempt to keep my “Happy Mondays” vibe going (so much for that!) and I spent most of the evening hanging with two of my friends, Jane and Will, the happy couple. On Thursday nights there are live bands, and I sat on a stool half-awake watching a guy sing into a malfunctioning mike. He resembled a scruffier Keanu Reeves (if there is such a thing) and I was not very impressed. Maybe it was because I was in two places at once. I was genuinely tired, but I didn’t feel like staying in my room. Something had been eating at me the last few days and I couldn’t quite pinpoint it. On Wednesday, when I went to the drum and bass event, something about the environment stirred up feelings of extremely loneliness and separation within me, but i didn’t have an ultimate source, something I could say “yeah, that’s the reason.”
I’m taking an advanced scriptwriting class among my other classes, and I do so much writing I sometimes feel disconnected from the world itself. A classmate and I were talking about this shortly after class and I explained it like, “Sometimes I don’t know where the words end and I begin…”
As weird as that sounds, if you spent ten hours of your day doing school work that requires high mental focus, then spend the next several hours writing, it is almost as if your entire reality is what you write in that moment. When I am REALLY writing, things seem to get blurry, and I don’t feel completely whole. Mind you, this isn’t necessarily a negative thing. Its like being “in the zone”, or “on fire!” in that old NBA Jam video game.
For me, I think the worst thing to happen when i’m in that zone of disconnect is to have something break my mental momentum, and shift all of that powerful energy into another frame of thought. Lately I have mentioned one or two things about my ex-girlfriend, but she isn’t the root cause of whatever it is that i’m feeling. I think like most people, I tend to feel weird, or unappreciated based on my expectations of myself, but its the little, miniscule things that really eat at me after a while.
(these include, but are not limited to: people not replying to my text messages/phone calls, sometimes saying hello in person, not e-mailing me randomly)
I read a Craigslist post with an Aaliyah look alike who sounded like a writer for Maxim magazine. Near the end of the article she said “I’m attracted to white men. What can I say, that’s how i’m built.” In that same frame of thought, I think i’m built to think a little bit past the average, a little bit above the mundane. I’m not some crazy Socrates wannabe, walking around constantly tossing existential questions at random people, or talking dialectically.
I just think… a lot.
I think people who think a lot and don’t have that many people to interact with, either become crazy or very withdrawn. So far I haven’t experienced anything manic, or heard voices, but I have felt withdrawn at times. In the last three years i’ve worked on four scripts, and wrote over seven hundred pages of manuscript, at the same time I’ve designed roughly 37 comic strips for an idea I had called “The Cruft”, worked on a few short stories, did school and somehow didn’t explode in the process. When I think of all these things, I realize I’m not your average joe.
I’m not tooting my horn. I’m thinking its like a guy who is the star basketball player. He can’t be seen in the same way as the others are because he’s “built differently.” He will practice more, or maybe has a tad more aptitude for the game for reasons even he can’t figure. This is how I try to break down certain feelings that happen during my writing disconnect. My scriptwriting teacher said it best. “Writers are lonely people. The only person going into the writer’s room is another writer.”
I winced as I heard these words, but so far its proven to be true. Sure, no one likes to say they are lonely, but let’s say you have a lonely occupation, like writing, or manually masturbating animals for artificial insemination. Sometimes the line between the occupational hazard and actual loneliness blur. Some people would be excited that they have a stack of paper almost totaling a thousand pages that they wrote. I’m not.
I write, that’s what I do. Before the year is over, I plan to add another 150 pages to that stack. This doesn’t particularly excite me. I will be excited should I find an agent, or get a new Ipod for Christmas. Either way, i’ve digressed a bit, but all of this had led me to being sleepless tonight.
I left wonderland with my friends and headed to their place. We spoke for a moment about how funny a text message ring tone I made was, and ate some macaroni. My eyes started to get heavy and I said my goodbyes. Oddly, I ran most of the way home. I was wearing dockers and sneakers, but I felt like jogging. From Wonderland to my house is a good 25-30 minute walk. Tonight, I ran. I wasn’t sweating, or feeling excessively energetic, I actually wanted to test out my shoes which I bought for running. By the time I reached home, I realized that I just wanted to talk to someone. Not someone random, like a priest offering me a banana to come to confession and bare my soul. I wanted to talk to someone who knew me relatively well. The only person I could think of, was my ex-girlfriend.
The sad thing about this situation is that she falls into an aspect of my disconnect. I’ve always found it very hard to simply forget people and their impact on my life. I think it has to do with my memory, which I must say is above average. I remember almost everything about my life, especially the small details. My ability to remember almost everything gives me a huge palette to paint my stories with. Sometimes its a burden, because I wish I was some dense individual who could just forget a bad situation by merely choosing to. But my mind isn’t that simple (as most people’s aren’t). Little things trigger nuances over and over, spiralling and spinning, mostly in my subconscious that lead to eventual stress.
The last time I was unable to sleep was three months ago. This had to do with being really bored during the summer and eating too many carbs at night. Tonight, I couldn’t sleep, because I was thinking about my ex. I wondered if trying to communicate with her would simply bother her to no end, further adding to the complexity of me trying to talk to someone I knew, or would I find a small salvation in talking to her. I have no idea. The few friends I have, I never speak to. It is something I have never done with them. Most people I know, know little or nothing about me. I think its a fear of mine.
Either way, I wrote an EXTREMELY tentative e-mail, chronicling my current situation. I hope we’ll talk. As I write this, I’m not really feeling stressed any more, but I’m probably just tired. DC has a population of millions and in this city I know very few people. Its hard for me to think a girl I loved is somewhere nearby, only a stone’s throw away and I have no contact with her. Its a hard pill to swallow, but people do it everyday. I swallow the pill as well, but tonight, the pill is giving me a stomach ache. Hopefully knowing someone for a few years with very few confrontational moments will help me find a little of what i’m searching for.
Or i’ll just have to start going to the gym again and wishing I had half a brain so I wouldn’t be so aware of everything around me.
