Today

It's March 21st. I'm at least 225 pounds.
I will never miss a day of exercise again. I will never order a pizza for myself again. No more soda.
I don't want to be fat anymore.

Here is what I want in my life: direction. Motivation. A goal. I want to apply myself to something, and make progress towards it. I want to write. I want to be athletic. I want to make friends. I want to be funnier. I want to sing. I want to be educated, I want to speak in Latin, I want to play the guitar, I want to help people in dire straits, I want to help people fix failing relationships, I want to be a fantastic lover and a good listener, I want to wake up every day and get things done. I want to do it all. This is my goal.
And step one is not going to college, or getting a job, or some event in the future that will open the doors to let me do all of those things.
Those doors are locked until I fix what is wrong with me. That malaise that says "You have put in some effort, now take a break." That seeping sin that tells me lethargy is a replacement for action. Every iota of me that doesn't do because doing is HARD.
I can't live like this anymore. Or if that's not true, I won't live like this anymore. The first step is doing something.
The second step is doing something else after I do that. The third step is doing another thing once that step is done.
Apply to more colleges, write more things, labor towards goals even though labor is labor and there's no instant gratification.
Be a better man. Stop waiting.

In AA, this phenomenon is known as "the amazing recuperative power of the ego". When people first decide to get sober, it's never during a high-point in their lives. It usually follows something catastrophic, like an arrest, a breakup or losing your family, a health crisis, etc.. It's a time of abject demoralization, when the reality of the situation is at it's starkest.

This is a crucial time for recovery, because the ego has basically been crushed by alcoholism and the alcoholic has no choice but to accept that he is completely hopeless. People in this state are ready for a fundamental change, which is required for long-term sobriety for real alcoholics. It's sometimes referred to as a "moment of clarity" (Pulp Fiction fans are familiar with the term). But it's called a "moment" for a reason. It is like a window that will shut unless something is done to keep it open long enough to climb through.

The ego is tremendously resilient and will bounce back will alarming speed. At first, this seems like a good thing. You start feeling better, getting your self confidence back, then - bam - along with it comes that tenacious old belief that you can handle a drink or two, and you're right back where you started. The vicious cycle. To anyone on the outside looking in, it's inexplicable. You appear to have lost your mind, and in a sense you have. That's the insanity of alcoholism.

Remember this.

`

Sometimes I look through the photo albums of strangers. I see the highlights of other lives, the moments captured at the height of euphoria. I see the stretches of happy times, the trips, the visits, the special days that spread their glow through the rest of the year. But to me, there is no rest of the year. I skip from high point to high point, oblivious to subtext, unknowing of the hard times between those peaks. I look on, and I want to live their lives, see what it's like being someone else, wallow in the exotic expanse of another's existence. It's the same feeling I get after I finish reading a long book, that strange trickle of foreign thoughts that brush against my own. I can never dig into them, explore them, heed my passing whim, and so I never realize how unlike reality my view of their life is.

dreams

In this dismal morning hour, as my left leg throbs with a twisted muscle, I find myself thinking back to high school. This isn't all that uncommon for me; I have been having dreams about high school lately. Not the time spent there, but the place itself, the atmosphere it had for me.
High school has ended, a long time ago for me. And yet in the three years since it left, I haven't found a way to replace it. I can't recapture the camaraderie that spending six hours a day in the same building created between my friends and I. I find myself thinking back to that time, and trying to remember who I was back then, how I acted; trying to re-assemble the pieces of a broken time that wouldn't be relevant to my life anymore anyway, just because it's a touchstone of familiarity and confidence to me. That structure I leaned on is gone, and I have been endlessly stumbling without it.
Even the internet is no refuge for me anymore. I find myself thinking that I used to be funnier, more popular, more relevant. It's that attention whore part of myself, the person inside of me that wants to have a witty comment for every occasion.
But I can't do it anymore, if I ever could. I spent five months writing an article for Cracked.com because I didn't think I was funny enough to finish it. I still don't, really. I find my own feeble attempts at jokes forced and out of touch. Considering how important being funny is to me, it's not a good sign that I don't find myself all that funny anymore.
All of my problems loop back to that same trend; reaching into the past to recreate a person who isn't there anymore. That sense of humor was so well-trained and sharp because it was what I used as a substitute for actually interacting with people.
At the same time, though, I find myself lost without that barrier. I've lost that edge that let me interact with people unselfconsciously, and without that I flounder. So I stand at a precipice; do I try and recreate that bladed humor that made me feel like a funny person, or do I abandon everything that has given me shape and self-worth and try to make friends like a normal person? Both options scare me; the first because I don't know if I can, the second because I don't know if I can, and I don't know if I'll be any good at it, and I don't know how in the first place.

So here are my inner thoughts on virtual paper, whoever actually checks this anymore. It helped me to at least get the primordial mess that has been in my head out onto something less viscous.

``

Here in Rhode Island, I usually have a desk light on, facing the wall. If I don't, I start to feel like I'm back in New York, sitting at the computer. I actually find myself reaching down to my right side from time to time, trying to turn on a light that's hundreds of miles away. I find it a little odd, since I actually have a different monitor now, and a different chair, and different speakers. But those changes are purely cosmetic, it seems. That setting is imprinted in me, and whenever I enter similar circumstances it revives itself.

3

Having this compendium of my writing from the past three years or so is interesting to me. I can read what I wrote way back when, and know that I feel differently now, and yet not know exactly when the change that lead to that happened.

2

For posterity, here is the idea I will never flesh out that spawned the entry below this.

A 26 year old failed musician is working at a faceless retail outlet. Stuff happens, he lands in another world- standard fantasy fare. The entire beginning is mostly to establish an outsider's perspective to give an artificial emotional tint to wherever he ends up, and to lend a more unique air to his newfound abilities- if he was a native, it would be an entirely different flavor than someone coming from another land.
This allows his adaptation to his new world to provide a natural character arc that doesn't require an artificial force prodding him into discoveries about himself; he stumbles into new parts of himself brought to the fore by situations he has never encountered before. Basically, this origin feels best to me because I want an alien feel to my setting, not a familiar one.
At any rate, the main idea behind this character is that he stumbles into political intrigue that, for some reason, wants to make use of him. He opposes this, other things happen, and so on. What makes him special, besides his status as an outsider, is in this world he has an innate connection to music. When he hears music playing, or plays music himself, he is able to take the emotional "feel" of the music and create effects in the physical world with it.
Where it goes from there is fairly cliche', mostly because I don't have a proper characterization for my unnamed protagonist in mind, or a real setting.
Basically I just thought of the music thing in the car and thought it would be a neat idea for a book.

1

The first step in confronting a lack of desire to write is to start writing something. This is to get the creative juices flowing, and more importantly, to make it so that NOT writing requires some sort of exertion, rather than the other way around. If you are as lazy and difficult to motivate as me, this is an important thing.

I often have ideas for novels that I would like to write. I plot them out in my head, create a concept and a main character, maybe start thinking of a setting.. and then that little spark of creative passion for the idea snuffs out, and I'm left with a "that would have been neat." I have a lot of those, self-contained pieces of my imagination, strung together by a common thread of neglect. I wanted to write "failure", but that implies I tried in the first place.
In reality, I never started, because starting would leave me open to failure. The best way to be a fabulous writer with unlimited potential is to never write anything at all; your fabulous ideas and masterful prose remains safely in your head, where you can coo about how epoch-shaking and magnificent it is.

Another problem I have is that the act of writing something that takes more than one sitting is such an unfathomable level of commitment to me that just thinking about it is incredibly daunting. I am not the best at patience.
This has been a conflict within me for a long, long time. Ever since I was little, I wanted to write a novel. The urge to express myself artistically is very strong- I want to learn to play the guitar, I want to write a novel, I want to sing, I want learn to dance- but all of those aspirations are crushed by the simple fact that I lack the drive, and the patience, to learn how to do any of them.
That, ultimately, is the biggest reason I don't write novels. I don't know how. An awareness of the craft, what should be in them, how things should go- none of these are any help for the actual act of creation, they are only guideposts for those who have started to move. I never leave the gate.

╚

I think one of the reasons I haven't updated this in a long time is because of the nature of writing. When I first started writing this, I knew no one was reading it- I acted like people were, because of I am often a performer at heart. But the knowledge was there that I was unobserved, unnoticed.

When people eventually did start reading it- all two or three of them- I was not particularly bothered by it. They were my friends, people I knew, but they were also people I kept distant from me. A common thread running through my friendships is one of distance- with people I was close to by location, I was distant emotionally. I shared little of myself. It was only with those that I was distant to that I could open up, knowing in the back of my mind that it was a different kind of friendship- one without all the trappings of physical friendship. It was controlled, it was free of demands. It was, I think, ultimately impersonal. I was sharing of myself, but only because I knew I was safe, because I knew that I would never have to confront these people in reality.

When I write now, it is present in the back of my mind that someone who crosses the boundary between these two realms exists, and is going to read this. It makes it more difficult, because I have to stop myself from wondering what she will think, stop myself from tailoring it to what would make me look good. It adds another layer to the process, one that I have little experience in dealing with.

I realize all of my sparse entries have been revolving around Marina, but it seems unavoidable to me- things have changed for me, in profound ways. I have had to reexamine my past dealings with people, because now I have a new frame of reference for them, because I have been forced to realize how distant I have been with people, how pointlessly mysterious and closed off. I have changed in ways I have not even begun to realize, simply because doing so seems so natural and right. It is only because my barriers have lowered themselves on their own for this one person that I realize they are there at all, and that has been something I have been coming to terms with.

Having this kind of self-reflection happen is confusing, daunting, and rather scary at times. How do you make judgment calls about things when the rules you used to make those calls are changing, with or without your knowledge? And quantifying the things that are changing is a struggle as well. The only real tool I have is comparing with what goes on now with my vague, most likely warped memories of how things were- and it gets worse when you have to use those quantifications to guide yourself, because how can you know what is actually the right path?

And at the same time as I am writing this, I am wondering what I should leave out, what I should stop myself from writing because trying to explain it would be too hard, or something I am not ready to do, or because I am afraid of the pointlessness of my devoutly meta ramblings being exposed as "just talking for the sake of talking." New layers have been added to something I always did for the sake of doing, and it has been intimidating.

But I find myself doing it anyway, because it is strangely liberating to write. It feels like a kind of false invulnerability: you know it really is not, but you act as though it is, you say things in the open that might not belong there, or are unimportant in the big picture but are being treated as important. It feels like self-aggrandizement of my own mind, talking myself up as complicated and richly textured, when really I am just experiencing what other people have experienced, will experience. But doing it is like stretching a muscle you use only rarely, giving something a voice it usually never has- and in doing it, you surprise yourself from time to time. Or, at least I do. I find myself writing out things casually that I have never thought, but grasp my situation perfectly. They may not be important realizations, but the true value is in finding them showing up on their own.