going to the movies alone
Hey! I hope you are all well today. It’s getting warmer I think.
Content warning for mentions of physical abuse, gore, homophobia (f-slur), and porn.
It’s been cold. Really, really cold. I could barely step outside for two days. I felt the breeze in my bedroom. The kind of cold you don’t escape from. Hot showers make the cold colder. In my solitude I found nothing. I hate the heat, but I miss the summer. I’m sure you understand.
Take from this what you will. I am always ten seconds from going absolutely insane. I hate texting, I really do, but it's necessary. I can’t maintain the kinds of 21st century relationships I desire without participating in 21st century communication. If I send a text and you don’t respond in an hour, I assume I’ve scared you away. Can you imagine this kind of stress in the times before the internet? I would be writing letters every fifteen minutes. Modern problems caused by modern solutions. I’m not an old soul, we all are.
I look around and I think maybe none of this is happening. I’m sick of diagnoses. Tell me who I am one more time. My head is above water, I promise. The problem: Ockham’s razor is telling me I don’t exist. Ockham was a theologian, that’s something most people forget. Everything is constantly falling away from me. I’d say I’m left picking up the pieces because that sounds nice, but I’m not picking up anything and there are no pieces. It’s all just somewhere between liquid and gas.
If I could create heaven I would make nothing. I’m tired of all of this and I’m guessing you are too.
I want to find the origins of this. The discomfort, the falling away, grasping, all of that.
In middle school I had very few friends. On the weekends, my mom would drop me off at the movie theater and I’d watch two or three movies alone. At night, I would call internet friends on Skype and make electronic music on my laptop. I had a few friends who I’d hang out with on occasion, but they were weird and off putting, or too feminine, or intellectually disabled, something that made them different in a way that isolated them in middle school. I was an obsessive, depressed kid who hit puberty way too early. I was aggressive sometimes and often cruel. What friends I had, I had because they tolerated me and I tolerated them. There was this group of guys and a few girls who would frequent the country club I was a part of who I aspired to be just like. They played golf better than me, tennis better than me, got girls better than me, talked better than me, were funnier, more charming, taller, thinner, and much more sufferable than I was. I was a second-string friend to them at best. If I invited them over to my house, I had to bribe them with stolen beer, weed, or cigarettes to get them to spend more than an hour with me. I was rarely invited to their houses, parties, or rounds of golf unless someone else dropped out. I used to compose these long, alarming text messages detailing my depression and how I felt unloved and unwanted and send them around to these people in hopes of gaining their true friendship. I was delusional.
Back a few years. Before I started at the Christian school I ended up graduating from, I went to a different private school near the airport. The school was originally a military academy and some aspects of the original vision remained: a strict dress code, compulsory short haircuts, rampant sexism, sexualization of children, and a social hierarchy based exclusively off of violence of all forms. At this school, I learned what it meant to be a man. I had to be appealing to girls, physically strong, and funny but also cruel and uncaring. I had several friends from first through sixth grade at this school, but I never felt content. My friends were weirdos. They talked too much about Legos and comic books and Dragon Ball Z and Pewdiepie. They draped their wrists and talked like girls about things boys shouldn’t be too into.
I was accepted to an extent by the cool kids because I gave them homework answers and taught them Spanish and reading and math when our teachers inevitably failed to address their various learning differences. They accepted me also because I was physically strong. I hit puberty when I was ten years old, years before any of my classmates, and I started developing toned muscles before anyone else. I was never fast, but I could beat anyone in arm wrestles, pushup contests, or fights. In sixth grade, I got tired of being associated with the weird kids and wanted to be initiated into the cool group. I never told my old friends, the nice, but somewhat strange kids with lumpy bodies and skinny wrists, that they were too annoying for me. I realized that my way into the cool group was through violence. I was undoubtedly the smartest kid in my class, but that could only get me so far in a culture of violence, machismo, and protosexual dominance. I had a firm abdomen in a time when all other boys had soft, doughy stomachs. My almost abs were a point of fascination for many of the popular boys who would get in a line and punch me in the gut while I flexed my muscles. I took it like a man, one after another, punching me as hard as they could and then laughing and gawking in amazement of my steadfastness and pain tolerance. I looked those boys in the eyes and I got something sexual out of that I promise. The way they were touching me. They never touched me any other way. I was so lucky to get hit. It got so bad that I would come home from school with my stomach blue and green with bruises. I wouldn’t take off my shirt except in private for weeks at a time. Shirts and skins, I’d go to the bathroom and hide. A few times, a boy would hit me and I would collapse and throw up in the courtyard. Teachers watched and did nothing about it. These boys were more powerful than any teacher because the boys were violent and the teachers were underpaid.
It went like this for most of the year until my parents pulled me out of that school and sent me to a Christian school where I was held back a grade and spent three years friendless, watching porn and gore on the internet, making electronic music on my laptop, and jerking off nonstop. I still got decent grades, but this new school was far more academically challenging and competitive in a new way that I wasn’t used to. I established myself as the older, edgier, and dominant boy who was uninterested in girls, grades, or anything but violence, electronic music, and contact sports. I didn’t know I was gay, but I definitely watched gay porn. I especially liked watching guys wrestle and then fuck. I loved videos of straight friends “going gay” or teachers fucking their students, all fantasies I hoped would actualize on accident. I wasn’t sure who I was, but I was sure I didn’t want to be me. Most of the friends I made from ages twelve to fourteen, I made because they too were lonely and confused. Those were the only things we had in common. I used to steal my brother’s Hanukkah cash from his sock drawer and buy overpriced food, drugs, and other shit from this one guy. We became some kind of friends from this and eventually I’d send him videos of beheadings and he’d call me a faggot and that was friendship. I was okay with being the sideshow so long as people didn’t fuck with me and it worked for a while. High school came and I made real friends and spent the next four years trying to explain my past to a group of people who were raised on Harry Potter and Plants vs. Zombies, not cartel beheadings and hardcore gay porn. When I close my eyes I still see it.
I want to trace back this insecurity. I can’t tell if my friends love me or are too scared to tell me the truth. I need a year of silence. I need a year of nothing to make up for all the noise, violence, grief, horrors we call “trauma” and try to forget about. If I can find the origin of all of this, maybe I can kill it at the source. I don’t believe this, but it is easier to believe in fantasy than reality. Truth, like history, is impossible. I can write forever and never come any closer to explaining a single thought of mine. It’s not because I’m some anomalous, mysterious writer guy, but because our thoughts are not meant to be explained. They’re something wholly different from all of this. You can’t just take dirt and make gold, that’s alchemy, and like alchemy, we believe in it because it’s easier than believing in the truth. Dirt is dirt and gold is gold. I think I’m drawn to writers like Céline and Dostoevsky and Dalton Trumbo because of the almost comic desperation of their characters in the face of the horrors of the world. I’m somewhere like there, but I’m not a character and my desperation is only desperate. I can’t make more of this, so I write and I scream into microphones because I can at least try.
I can tell I’m tolerated. I’m tolerable. I know that much because it is empirically provable. I must be doing something right. I like my friends and some of them stick around, so they must like something about me. But, I feel like at any moment, everyone will leave me. I say things because they come to mind and sometimes people are uncomfortable by my mind. There’s nothing I can do about that. I clearly don’t pick up on “cues” the way I am supposed to and I don’t really care. I’ve decided that sometimes things are uncomfortable. I’m tired of people diagnosing me with being me. Shut the fuck up, I’m trying my best. I don’t hate myself, because that would require an acknowledgment of my selfhood and that would take division which I hate. I do it in my head to fall asleep at night. 252 divided by 6. 42 divided by 7. 7 divided by nothing.
A girl came over a few nights ago. We made out, but she felt like a dead body. I stopped and looked at her and laughed because that’s what happens when I’m confronted by death while hooking up with a girl I met on Tinder. She said she didn’t like the crosses and paintings of Jesus in my room. We didn’t have sex, she mostly just talked about popular artists I know nothing about and I laughed and pulled her closer hoping to feel some sort of warmth. No matter how naked we were, how tightly we squeezed, I felt no sense of intimacy at all from any of it. I was as “communicative” as one could possibly be during a sexual encounter. I did all the “right” things according to modern conceptions of healthy sex, but what was missing was presence. After she left, I felt hollow in the way the gore I used to watch every night made me feel. A hollowness that only comes from the reminder of your mortality. It’s a kind of centering caused by terrible, terrible things. It’s beautiful in that it guts you like a fish. I spent the rest of the night cold and awake. My eyes glazed over. When we die, our bodies let out one last breath. We call this the “death rattle”. Why do mice go into mouse traps?
There’s something in the air. I’m not a political guy, but I hope the world ends soon. I’m going to the pharmacist to ask them to put me to sleep. I feel awake all the time. I haven’t felt tired in years. I yawn by default. Can you imagine being awake for years?