if we’re being honest, I don’t even know what I’m doing on a daily basis. I care about the sub. I really do. I care about the people there. and then I look at myself and wonder. talking with myself constantly. questions and questions and answers and answers and they change every day. I’ll go get a pack of cigarettes and see someone I know and I don’t know if I’m going to engage in an enthusiastic conversation with them or be so overwhelmed by this anxious feeling of failure that I can’t feel my legs and rush to the car. I sit upstairs with grandpa and maybe I’ll try to explain something incredible to him, or maybe I’ll end up defending my stepdad to him because he’s certain my stepdad is trying to steal his farm one day and praising my stepdad the next, or maybe I’ll end up trying to convince him that the doctors aren’t trying to kill him by having him take a new medication after he’s had two mini strokes in a single year and they tell him the top of his heart isn’t working. maybe I’ll sit there in silence while he tells me again how Kenny and Bob and Tom were always stealing gas out of his grain trucks, always stealing bicycles from his farm, always trying to get the bank to take the farm and give it to them. I’ve heard that same story at least ten times since saturday. and then I’ll watch him take twenty different vitamins and supplements that he pays hundreds for from florida, but refuse to take a small 5mg pill that he only needs to take for one month so they can see if his heart will improve. and then comment on how I should eat more onions because they’ll cure my depression, get angry at me for not eating chicken that’s sat in our fridge for three weeks, accuse me of stealing his laxative powder, get upset that I sleep during the day and am awake at night and am happier that way than I ever have been sleeping at night and being awake all day, and finally he’ll buy another bag of some fruit or vegetable that we already have rotting in the fridge. he’ll eat one, and then forget about them no matter how much I remind him that we have them.
sit and wonder if that’s what life is going to be for me, 83 years old and still angry about stuff that happened in my 20s, paranoid that everyone wants to steal or take from me.
I bought a driveway alarm and set it up in the garage for him because he’s certain that a neighbor is stealing gas from his truck since he swears he used to get better gas mileage. that alarm will go off if so much as a dust particle floats in front of it. hasn’t gone off once since installation. I assume he’ll start accusing me of stealing his gas next, when I have my own vehicle with my own gas.
so is that what I’ll be in sixty years? an old man that hates everyone, even the people that take care of him, so bitter at the world he won’t even take care of himself because that just gives more money to the doctor he believes wants to kill him?
so I want to find more positivity in life, in myself, in others. but maybe I don’t know how to go about achieving such a thing. is that paranoia and hatred already seeping into me, to the point that I can’t find positivity and happiness unless I’m surrounded by anonymous strangers who will never see me?
well, that sounds really defeatist, like I’m feeling sorry for myself, making a pity party out of the whole thing. surely it’s achievable, surely I don’t need to be such a whiny fuck about everything. yet I try, and fail, over and over again at doing great things in my life. my music sucks. my writing is a big fan of itself. now I’m starting a youtube channel to explore pop culture in a comical way, but that’s been done so much it’s fucking nauseating to think another unoriginal prick is going to put more inane tripe on the web to take up space that could be used for something marvelous.
but that’s self-defeating again. that’s exactly what’s preventing me from being and finding positivity.
and if it fails, I can always get a real job somewhere. though, I’ve ended up having a breakdown within a year or so at every job I’ve had since college, resulting in a suicide attempt, loss of insurance, loss of medications and therapy. so am I just not fit to work in a place of pressure? well, hell, I can barely take the pressure of being an internet moderator without going on a long, pompous spiel jumping up its own ass and placing far more importance on myself than anything else. so how can I be expected to take the pressure of even the simplest jobs, like a work-from-home job for a fortune 500 company where everyone is so relaxed the concept of office drama is nonexistent, without freaking the fuck out just over six months later and entering a downward spiral that culminates in spending a weekend trying to make myself bleed out in a hotel bathroom?
and so I don’t no what I think about rhetoric or the point to all of this. in ten minutes I won’t even know what I think about this conversation because I’ll have analyzed it a hundred times over in every possible negative way I could to figure out why you hate me even when you haven’t said a single damned thing to make me thing you hate me.