Ugh, so much of the shit I’ve written in here is utterly cringe bananas.

Like, holy Jesus beaver fuck.

You know…. beavers could have saved Jesus, when you think about it. Gnawed that shit down.

But back to the poopy dumpster fire that is the assorted collection of posts about which I am viscerally embarrassed….

About which I audibly and visibly cringe….

I am sorry, future beneficiaries of posterity, for the number of posts that read as if they spewed forth from my posterior.

These are mostly, as I once called them, posts about “abominable relationship shit”; myriad cliches from which my instincts unmercifully did not shy away; countless spelling and grammar errors as I gradually increased the discipline with which I approached such skills; factually incorrect statements about my childhood and teenage lives that were occasionally employed to dramatize uncommonly difficult experiences, the extremity of which I had not yet figured out the words to properly convey; the sheer volume of poetic effluent that is relentlessly mediocre or worse; the fact that so many posts were exercises in technical experimentation that were not written with an audience in mind; the habit of deeply cryptic writing that starts to appear in the later years; and god, have I mentioned how acutely mortifying the whiny relationship posts are?!

Ditch the spikes

You’re only impaling yourself

And avail yourself of the might

That it takes to stand up

And be proud and prevail

When life knocks you down

And you flail — blaze trails

That take you beyond the

Provincially stale confines

Of your culture and time

And discover the fountain

Of your original mind

Squanderer

Believing just hard enough

To lie yourself across the finish line

And collapse into truth

Immediately…….

Like speeding toward a wall

Painted like the highway

By wishful thinking

enervation has evaporated

and accumulated into

cumulus clouds

of verve

Interview tomorrow

We will see

I have a good chance

To get it

Even though I’m slightly concerned

About the pay being less

Than at WSECU

By a dollar

Or two

Stop

Being

A

Wretch

Complacency is BORING.

My grandpa, from a comment he left on one of my posts

I am complacent. It’s time to jump into the unknown and challenge myself.

After how wretchedly miserable and terrifying the end of spring and bulk of summer were, I needed time to recuperate.

The hospital was like this major reset button. My grandpa dying, too.

It completely overshadowed losing a job and a girlfriend.

I regained my mental and physical health after a few weeks, then continues to stay in stasis just to…. decompress. But also, to avoid doing things that scare me.

There has been this fear of going through the dance of a job without a girlfriend, but now that that’s less painful, and that I have regular socializing set up in my life, the fear has noticeably abated.

It’s so tempting to eat the junk food as far as life choices go. And I’ve been bouncing through the snack aisle since I got out of the hospital.

But that is on the verge of changing as I feel more and more of a hunger for the healthful foods I’ve been avoiding. The things my life existentially needs.

I need self-sufficiency. And I need forward momentum.

I need a job and a path toward a career, which very likely means school.

The unknown might look like the blackness of space, but it’s filled with possibility and promise.

The initial discomfort of that kind of change is a polar plunge, but you get out on the other side and find yourself better off.

And there are other complacencies, too. One of which is a kind of chronic pain of the spirit. I’m working on that one and making progress, and I’m determined to sustain that effort and persist.

Because right now, the way I’m living is fucking BORING and dispiriting.

I languish in torpidity

As the season of vim grows dim

And I hate myself so much

For not conjuring Spring

From within; or achieving

A healthy equilibrium

fuck it sucks so much that grandpa’s gone

it keeps randomly slapping me in the feels

every time i remember it, which is often

you don’t realize how deeply woven into your life your closest family members are until they’re gone

one thing i keep feeling is this sense that there’s just such a rich trove of experiences i had with him

like, i keep remembering all these little things i never really thought about

and getting this sense of awe at his ubiquity in my life’s tapestry

fuck, i miss him

I still can’t get over the extreme contrast between how I feel now and how I felt at the end of July.

I’m…. normal. Not depressed.

I just read through the messages with Aunt Margaret and Uncle Chris that led to me getting hospitalized, and god damn I was mortally fucking terrified.

I was in so much pain. Abject suffering suffused every corner of my spirit and body.

I genuinely feared I was going to die. And I almost did. I really, truly almost did.

And yet I’ve gone from the most harrowing experience of my entire life to a healthy buoyancy in less than two months.

Fuck, it’s surprising how quickly you can bounce back from the deepest depths.

I have trouble casually grasping the magnitude of what happened. Like, it’s hard to believe that the memory of something so colossally horrendous lies inside of me.

I can’t wrap my head around it — it’s too big. But when I visit it, I get glimpses of the extremity of anguish that enveloped me.

There’s something sacrosanct about that experience. A kind of solemn reverence.

And the contours it left in my psyche will forever serve as a memorial.