Creation, Destruction, Creation, Destruction....
I seem to have this habit of taking the things that I have made most important in my life, placing them in the upturned palm of my left hand, and bringing my right hand down upon them with as much force as I can muster. The results vary greatly, depending on what thing it is I'm smashing, but whether it's ketchup (a very important part of my life, which produces a wet slap when pressed between palms) or Bridget (almost as important as ketchup, though she only loses patience with me when I squash her), the result of this practice is almost always regret.
I realize that Suite 3100, my contibution especially, has steered away from the realm of personal and serious life-drama. If I posted for no reason other than to inform the world of my naive and uninformed forays into human interaction, then I'd be better off just finding friends with faces I can see. I think any consistent readers know that I post a certain part of myself--a part which I have specifically allocated for this purpose--that is no more representative of who I am than a splat of ketchup is representative of the plant it came from; perhaps the color is the same, and the lycopene content remains formidable, but the differences surely outnumber the similarities. So, that being said, I steer, self-consciously, towards the blinding sun of personal and serious life-drama. Save our ship, the captain has gone mad.
They tell me I'm quieter than before. I spent a good deal of my winter break with Bridget, who asked me, again and again, why I seemed to refuse to converse in a deep and meaningful manner. In the face of such conversations, I only got quiet. When pressed for an answer only slightly, I said that I didn't know why I was being so quiet. When pressed somewhat harder, I found myself asking, bitterly, what all there was to talk about. A conversation seems like an organic thing; something that needs two people to progress, but only one to exist. It seemed, to me, that I was expected to dredge up a conversation out of the ether, and for what? To entertain? Was my physical presence not enough to reassure her that I was at her disposal?
It's the same problem we've been having for years. I pull the strings and I work the jaws, my fingers so far inside that not even she knows that she's being worked. I do this for days, weeks, months sometimes, until my little fingers start to cramp up. I get tired of the puppet show, the displays of magic, the stand-up routine, so I reclaim my hands and sit down for a while. It's as though nobody knows how to make interesting words of their own, honestly. All the little wooden jaws go slack, and the little puppet eyes all turn towards the exhausted string-puller.
I'm resting, for God's sake. Silence, or relative silence, is a legitimate form of rest. I regret that my active state and my resting state are so different from each other that all the people who care about me blow a coronary when I decide to have a little time off. It's unfortunate, I know, but it's just the way I'm set up.
I would do well to figure out what it is about me that makes people so readily expose their puppet anuses to me, beckoning to be stretched by my forearm. Too many of the people I find myself intimate with turn to jelly when I lay down for a rest. Chickens, with their fucking heads cut off. As though panicked clucking serves to console me.
Sometimes I just wish those uncertain of what to do would just shut up instead of flooding the world with their frightened sputum.
And yet, I say all of the above, while I've spent the majority of my hours, this semester, alone and lonely in my room, muttering curses at my suitemates and anyone who comes close enough for me to smell their fear. It seems that I can't stand to be a real person with real relationships, yet I spend all my time craving them. I'm lost, a disgusting mess of contradictory wants and needs and self-interest.
I keep hoping that all of this will just go away, and I'll go back to being normal and social and happy and entertaining and enjoying it, but I can't even get the first layer of cards to stand up for more than a few days at a time.
Maybe something will change by my birthday. I'd like to end this second decade on a good note.
-Alan
I realize that Suite 3100, my contibution especially, has steered away from the realm of personal and serious life-drama. If I posted for no reason other than to inform the world of my naive and uninformed forays into human interaction, then I'd be better off just finding friends with faces I can see. I think any consistent readers know that I post a certain part of myself--a part which I have specifically allocated for this purpose--that is no more representative of who I am than a splat of ketchup is representative of the plant it came from; perhaps the color is the same, and the lycopene content remains formidable, but the differences surely outnumber the similarities. So, that being said, I steer, self-consciously, towards the blinding sun of personal and serious life-drama. Save our ship, the captain has gone mad.
They tell me I'm quieter than before. I spent a good deal of my winter break with Bridget, who asked me, again and again, why I seemed to refuse to converse in a deep and meaningful manner. In the face of such conversations, I only got quiet. When pressed for an answer only slightly, I said that I didn't know why I was being so quiet. When pressed somewhat harder, I found myself asking, bitterly, what all there was to talk about. A conversation seems like an organic thing; something that needs two people to progress, but only one to exist. It seemed, to me, that I was expected to dredge up a conversation out of the ether, and for what? To entertain? Was my physical presence not enough to reassure her that I was at her disposal?
It's the same problem we've been having for years. I pull the strings and I work the jaws, my fingers so far inside that not even she knows that she's being worked. I do this for days, weeks, months sometimes, until my little fingers start to cramp up. I get tired of the puppet show, the displays of magic, the stand-up routine, so I reclaim my hands and sit down for a while. It's as though nobody knows how to make interesting words of their own, honestly. All the little wooden jaws go slack, and the little puppet eyes all turn towards the exhausted string-puller.
I'm resting, for God's sake. Silence, or relative silence, is a legitimate form of rest. I regret that my active state and my resting state are so different from each other that all the people who care about me blow a coronary when I decide to have a little time off. It's unfortunate, I know, but it's just the way I'm set up.
I would do well to figure out what it is about me that makes people so readily expose their puppet anuses to me, beckoning to be stretched by my forearm. Too many of the people I find myself intimate with turn to jelly when I lay down for a rest. Chickens, with their fucking heads cut off. As though panicked clucking serves to console me.
Sometimes I just wish those uncertain of what to do would just shut up instead of flooding the world with their frightened sputum.
And yet, I say all of the above, while I've spent the majority of my hours, this semester, alone and lonely in my room, muttering curses at my suitemates and anyone who comes close enough for me to smell their fear. It seems that I can't stand to be a real person with real relationships, yet I spend all my time craving them. I'm lost, a disgusting mess of contradictory wants and needs and self-interest.
I keep hoping that all of this will just go away, and I'll go back to being normal and social and happy and entertaining and enjoying it, but I can't even get the first layer of cards to stand up for more than a few days at a time.
Maybe something will change by my birthday. I'd like to end this second decade on a good note.
-Alan
posted by Alan Orlanski at 4:43 PM
1 Comments:
well spoken dude
everything thats made me happy these last five months is starting to slip. now I'm scrambling to get it back
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