October 21, 2020
F.’s birthday. I have two lives: my mind’s life where I think and imagine, and my social life as a father, partner, friend. One does not admit itself to the other. I do everything I can to camouflage myself with bluster about real estate and money.
“What do you do?”
In the past, I demurred and implied through this omission an intriguing secret. These days, I say I’m renovating my house, and I crack Colbert’s joke about SAD’s (stay at home dads).
“My partner has a really good job,” I might say.
How do I under-estimate my social life? I think I can live without people, because I survived eating despair and loneliness, survived on my own flesh, cannibalizing the energy of my youth just to make it through the day, and so claimed honestly – I don’t believe people love each other; I believe they eat each other.
My mind’s life is riven and the default is myself that hides from existence. He watches movies, six in one day, or plays video games for twelve hours and then walks up the block for a couple slices, takes a piss in a bush, and gets back to it: avoiding all awareness, perception, and feeling of existence.
Both sides of this private self exist to defend not from reality, but from my reaction to reality. Entertainment distracts me and ideally I cease to exist. When I write distance and objectification are inherent and therefore I’m freed of whatever I’m writing about. Therapy is not the aim but only a side effect. I try for form and discipline, distance from the fantasist indulgence which has always marked my existence, an honest observation as if myself was someone else, my ego as the landscape of an exploration aimed towards the sky.
