Category Archives: Life

I want to catch something that I might be ashamed of.

(Oh dear.)

Reckless, angsty drunken post alert!!

Ah. I’ve just been down the Espy with my cousin. We saw a band. Frustratingly we couldn’t establish what they were called but they were great. They were kind of like a folksier, nerdier, less angry version of System of a Down. They had a Bez-esque useless member who stood around for the duration of the set in a t-shirt saying ‘Sam’, looking comically kind of bemused and lost, sipping a beer, occasionally pretending to take calls on his phone. He was superb. He reminded me somewhat of my parent’s neurotic stunned mullet of a dog, who is also called Sam (mental note: post about Sam the neurotic stunned mullet of a dog.) We made extended eye contact several times. I think although he was only pretending to look bemused and lost for performance art purposes, whilst I was genuinely feeling quite bemused and lost, we forged a point of connection, since he was doing it up on stage in front of quite a lot of people and probably appreciated having a genuinely bemused and lost person to connect with as a reference point.

It was great in general.

I never, ever go out to gigs and things like that these days. I don’t really have any friends, you see. He said tragically. It’s terrible.

I really had fun tonight. But my god. I’m twenty-eight. I never go out any more. I don’t really have any friends. I worry that my social skills have completely atrophyed through disuse. I sometimes go days at a time without speaking to anyone.

I have to find ways of turning this situation around. I’m missing my life. It’s just sort of swhooshing by and I’m standing there looking on with this kind of bemused expression, like Sam the bemused stunned mullet of a fifth wheel.

I always thought one day I’d be dancing and laughing and finally living, and hear Morrissey’s voice in my head, and think of him kindly. I kind of got there too, sort of, ish, for a while there. I actually had that moment. But now I’ve retreated back into reclusion again.

It’s so not good.

I feel like such an indadmissable freak.

I’d love to go out more. But I’m just so afraid of people.

(And I’m so drunk. I really shouldn’t be posting this.)

(But.. it’s important! I want to live, goddamn it!

I want to love!

Etectera!)

Wrong as I know it is, though, I need help. Ultimately in social contexts the charity and goodwill of others can only take one so far. One must be self-sufficient. I know this. I do; I rooly trooly do. But I need some fucking mentoring. I’ve become a complete fucking recluse.

I can’t promise to be wildly entertaining company; I can’t promise not to become tiresomely maudlin and self-piteous and pathetic once drunk. But I know that you would like me, if only you could see me etc. and I need to get out more. I’m a potentially perfectly good person who is just going completely to waste.

There must be ways to become a person who has a proper life. Who goes out, and socializes, and stuff.

There must be.

There must be.

I had such a good night tonight. It was fun. I was drunk. I danced. I flirted with strangers. I felt alive. I must go out more.

I am a socially retarded reclusive freakboy with no friends and I am too old to be feeling this unsure of myself.

SOMETHING MUST BE DONE.

I really shouldn’t post this really.

*throws caution to the wind, posts it anyway*

I throw it open to the floor: When you want to live, how do you start? Where do you go? Who do you need to know?

I have regressed to an awkward 16-year-old. I can’t believe it; but that is where I’m at.

Help me out here people.

Tonight is the last night of my Canberra sojurn. The folks are moving to Geneva in a few months; I might not be back here again for years.

I don’t know what to say. I was going to blog the whole thing but I don’t know what sort of spin to put on it. It’s been cathartic in some ways and banal in others. It brought me back to the place I was in when I moved in November to some degree, which was horrible.

It was sad and strange and made me glad I don’t live here anymore.

Taken quite a few pictures; ‘spect I’ll post some of them when I get back.

I just had a really lovely conversation with my Dad, which is worth mentioning.

Since I’m not gonna be a student any more (at least not right now – unless I think of something better to do in the interim, I’ll give it another go next year) the question arises: what will I do with myself?

On a practical level I’ll have to defer. The March 31 deadline is fast approaching.

Then, since I won’t be eligible for Austudy any more, I’ll have to get another job. I have some reserves and one casual job (which is so cruddy I’m disinclined to talk about it, even here). But that only nets me about $300 a fortnight, not nearly enough to live on. A separate post about that may be in order, I think.

First, though, I’m going home to Canberra for a visit. I haven’t been back since I moved in November, and it will be interesting to see what it feels like to go ‘home’. Also, marking this turning point with a temporary change of setting seems like the thing to do.

On a more fundamental level, what I’m going to do is FUCKING RELAX. I haven’t really been able to relax in so long. I’ve missed it so much.

If necessary, I’ll worry about practical problems as and when they emerge. But I’ve resolved to STOP worrying constantly – about the past, the future, other people, about my lack of an Identity, about the State Of My Life etc etc blah blabbity blah BLAH. To stop taking everything so excrutiatingly seriously all the time – and try enjoy just being alive as much as I can.

I’m going to keep going to the gym regularly, and learning to drive, which I started doing a few weeks ago.

I’m going to continue persuing my involvement in Neurocam, and blogging about it.

I’m going to photos with the unwanted old digital camera my sister gave me the other day.

I’m going to read books and watch movies.

I’d previously not felt as though I had time to do those last two things. I’ve been reading a bit, but at a farcically slow rate (I’m currently less that halfway through “The Magus”, which I picked up on the 15th of Feb), because of an inability to concentrate on anything so trivial as reading a book. Prior to starting school, it was because I was constantly distracted by a nagging voice in my head saying “Why are you WASTING VALUABLE TIME reading this trivial book (slash-taking this trivial bath-slash-talking to this trivial person-slash-doing this trivial grocery shopping-slash-[insert whatever I was doing here]) – YOU HAVE TO FIGURE OUT WHAT TO DO ABOUT YOUR LIFE!!” Since I started school it’s been all the uni work I should have been doing that’s distracted me instead. And when I was studying, it was all the other studying I wasn’t doing that distracted me. God it’s been horrible.

Since my epiphany, I’ve recognised this mindset for the entirely malevolent influence that it is. These sorts of thoughts may still emerge from time to time, but I feel at liberty now to tell them to fuck off. It’s incredibly liberating. I’ll be able to just, y’know, enjoy reading a book. It’s gonna be great.

A lot of my reading and movie watching, will probably revolve rediscovering material that I’ve previously loved or found important, and seeing what it means to me now, if anything.

I’m going to have fun being in the moment and doing what I want to do – but hopefully, in the process, discovering a new way (or new ways) to be. That sounds so pretentious. I’ve become very pretentious.

And, finally, I’m going to blog about all of this. This blog will be a document of my active development of a new self. Although it will serve as an outlet for reflection and the autopsying of old selves as well – in a more tangible, contained, and hopefully productive a way than just going over things in my head endlessly endlessly endlessly, as I’d been doing previously and torturously and most unproductively.

The blogging may involve a certain amount of autobiographical digging over the past, self-anal-isis and introspection, and also classically bloglike day-to-day banality about food and domestica and assorted trifles. I make no apologies for this. I hope to attract some readers – this is, after all, another reaching-out-to-the-world exercise – but I won’t be writing with the objective of pleasing an audience. Any audience who may happen to read this: consider yourself warned.

I reserve the right to change my mind about anything I may say here, and to contradict myself as much as I feel like.