3-26-08 Why I have trouble decorating.

My least favorite room when I was growing up was my own, my bedroom. It had blue and white tile floors that were always cold, a single, thin blue rug in the center of the floor beside the bed which was also blue, a pale, rickety wooden desk along one wall and a set of industrial-style metal shelves laden with various toys and games along another. The lights were fluorescent and flickered when they came on, illuminating the white and blue with a pale greenish-yellow light. The walls that were not sheet rock were bricks (painted white, natch), while the only window in the room had bars on the outside and curtains inside with cowboys on them that I hated with a sort of unconscious, lethargic fury until I moved out to go to college at the age of 18.

1-30-08 "It just keeps getting worse!"

The panic rises higher and higher as the phone calls from numbers I know I don't want to talk to increases. The actions I take seem to make the problems more profound, and more intractable. I talk to Katie and know that I am dreadfully, horribly boring in my anxiety, and feel ashamed of how ineffectual I am being, and yet seem completely unable to stop it.

I once lived in utter squalor, in a run-down, disgusting apartment off-campus, doing drugs and getting poorer and poorer, and even though I'm clean, all I can think right now is, "it's coming for me again, and this time I won't escape."

1-23-08 L'esprit de l'escalier and the power of music

A woman on the bus looks askance at me after I accidentally brush her with my backpack to make room in the crowded aisle. I apologize, but I should have said, "Why don't you just go to work and beat up a co-worker for fun like you usually do instead of giving me attitude for trying to be courteous in a crowded city, ya bitch!"

The music on the Weather Channel today was the guitar solo from "Shine on You Crazy Diamond", which not only sorta made my day for some reason, but totally gave the lie to yesterdays post. I listened to my beloved iPod on random, and the good Lord saw fit to give me a slew of awesome tunes all in a row, including the Dambuilders, Mountain Goats, Wu Tang, Brad Paisley (feat. George Jones), Prince, and a bunch of others that also made me ridiculously happy, and helped to (hopefully) put the last nail in the coffin of this mood I've been carrying around like a sack of shit for the past three days or so.

1-22-08 Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, start all over again

A brief gale of depression and ennui derailed me from my goal, but I return, humbled, and requesting your indulgence.

I turn on the Weather Channel in the morning as I eat breakfast, and the music they play over the highs and lows for cities across the U.S. is soothing and innocuous, like elevator music. It is practically void of emotional or intellectual content, like a government report or the whirring of a ceiling fan.

A fight seems to break out on the platform as I ride the train to work, a scuffling of feet and angry voices, but as the train pulls away, the two men are walking along, smiling, shoulder to shoulder as they walk, talking like New Yorkers often talk, i.e. loudly and aggressively.

12-25-07 melancholy christmas

A good christmas, but I feel very melancholy. I tried to avoid telling Katie about it but I think she just felt I was shutting her out. When I get in a mood like this there's nothing to be done, unfortunately, so I'd rather just not splash any of the shit I carry around in my bucket.

I found some poems I wrote in high school that somehow managed to avoid the fire I lit for them when I was in college, and they sounded about like how you'd think poems written by a 17 year old depressive would sound.

12-15-07 - Golden Flow Orange Juice

Walking home in the rain from the cast party for Christmas Carol, all the suffering of the last couple of months dissipates into a feeling of gentle, clear calm. The rain is freezing, I'm cold and wet, but it doesn't feel bad because I have no opinion about these circumstances. I wonder if this is what "enlightened" people feel like all the time, and what most people would give to have this unforced openness.

A truck with the phrase "Golden Flow Orange Juice - Like You Grew Up With!" rolls past on the otherwise deserted street and I smile to myself, both because of the phrase's aptness to the moment, and because it sounds like a sexual act involving pee.