The Neurotic Flotsam

Your pussy lips were perfectly symmetrical, but your asshole was far from the best I’ve ever seen.

The seroquel makes me sluggish, and that chemically-induced sloth is what’s making me depressed.

Your mother would not be proud of you.

My mother is not proud of me.

You miss your mother with all your heart.

I hate my mother and I’ll leave it at that.

The Heart

When I was 16, I tried to kill myself.  It was just adolescent nonsense.

When I was 25, I took to staring at myself in mirrors while holding a pistol to myself. But I never did pull the trigger.

At 26, I overdosed pretty badly. Going into it, I figured my surviving would come down to a coin flip.

Last year, I set-up an overdose perfectly. No coin flip this time and no regrets as I faded into sleep. A freak scenario led to my discovery. I was in a coma for a few days, then the ICU, and then the psych ward. The last time one of my ex-girlfriends saw me was then, while I was still intubated and unconscious.

I take five pills a day now, that can’t be right.

It’s been suggested that contemporary mental illness is just the product of the loss of meaning, ingrained religion, and rootedness. Well, if that’s true, mental illness isn’t going anywhere. Maybe those shrinks should focus on developing a pill that makes you believe in God?

On Mondays, I blame my memory loss on the medication for bipolar.

On Tuesdays, I blame my memory loss on my porn addiction.

On Wednesdays, I blame my memory loss on not wanting to remember.

On Thursdays, I blame my memory loss on the medication for depression.

On Fridays, I blame my memory loss on alcohol.

On Saturdays, I blame my memory loss on every day being the same.

On Sundays, I don’t blame my memory loss on anything. I just accept it and practice “mindfullness” or whatever else it is that smiling friends on YouTube recommend.

It seems unlikely that, if someone is struggling this hard in their late twenties, that they’re going to turn it around.

When I turn 37, will I look back on all of this and laugh like it happened to someone else as I survey my beautiful family and rewarding career? Who could suggest that, I mean, really?

And if that’s not going to happen, what is?

The pills do not help me answer this question. But they do help me forget to ask it as often as I normally would.

In that sense, this Western medication, ironically, lets me “live in the present” with greater ease.

The higher the milligram count, the better I can enjoy the little things: cigarettes, porn, new singles from Beach House. It’s good, to be brought back down to Earth, to relish and be grateful of what I’ve got. The pills, they do help with this.

The Bones

I owe it to a lot of people to not commit suicide. Do you know how mad people get when you go for it—especially if they’ve told you not to? I do; it’s an interesting kind of fury.

People keep telling me, “Life goes on.” They don’t seem to appreciate the extent to which that is precisely the problem. I’ll get over this, I’ll get used to that. The other thing won’t last forever. It’ll be fine—in the long-run. Remember, it’s not the destination, it’s the journey. All that. It’s relentless the way people tell you this stuff. They don’t get it at all. That this is so temporary is not a comfort. That I have no idea who I’ll meet, who I’ll love, or where I’ll work in ten years is not a source of hope. It’s just a reminder that there is nothing permanent. Jesus isn’t walking beside us — much less crying on our behalf. The “progress” and “exceptionalism” our politicians keep talking about simply isn’t playing out before our eyes. It all just keeps going, though. There are those heights of happiness that Robert Frost reminds us don’t last, and between them the much less fleeting bouts of drudgery. I can’t imagine why this all continues, I really can’t.

The Gut

Every day, 163,898 people die. I am well past the 10,000 days mark in age. And I haven’t died on any one of them; it’s unbelievable. I have agonized over why it’s never been me. People with great families and loving spouses die every day. Why is it that I live and they don’t? If anything suggests a God, it’s this. Right? My not dying seems to presuppose that I’m destined for something, right? Like, there has to be a reason for living, it’s just some destiny that’s still years off. Hope it’s soon because fuck right now.

The Head

It’s all meaningless, man. You’ve gotta learn how to make money. Get some money and put it towards life’s greatest pleasures. You’re a smart guy, you got this. Get that bread. Might be hard at first, but that won’t last forever. Imagine it, suddenly you’re flush with cash and you’re doing all that shit rich people can. Focus on the money.

The Cock

But I repeat myself: “Sex, I think, was the first god. Before Zeus and certainly before Jesus, there was just fucking. The French call the orgasm ‘the little death,’ but they have it precisely backwards: orgasming is a little god, a little church, a little spiritual revelation. Must be why all religions hate fucking. Fucking is their most obvious competition; it is the god within each of us.” Go find a seductive sphincter and pray from the tip of your tongue to the base of your ballsack.