for shame

i am so sorely out of practice when it comes to this, i don't even know why i've tried to start blogging again. its been a little over a half a year since i'd shut down this blog, and i'm not certain that i have anything interesting to say now that i've reopened for buisness; re-reading the bulk of my earlier posts, i'm not sure i had anything interesting to say then either. yet lately i've been feeling a desire to post, that if neglected long enough might have graduated into a need. perhaps something worth the effort of words will fall out in the process. in addition, i can imagine that i've lost any readership i might have had due to my hiatus, but that isn't enough to discourage me now either. i'm compelled to blather.

i quit this thang seven months ago because i couldn't read what i was writing without rolling my eyes. who wants to hear someone take their sad excuse for a life and make it sound even sadder? its embarassing. it is the writing equivalent of a half-hearted suicide attempt; you could practically hear the Cure playing in the next room as it whined "i took all the green ones because you wouldn't love me," between fits of shallow breathing.

ugh. ugly. in fact, this blog is festooned with ugly, and the worst part is its all me, in an unavoidable, non-fictional way. and so bloggy, with its bloggyness. when i shut it down it was out of shame. it didn't feel worthy to be read. i didn't want you to know how pathetic i was anymore. i didn't want to wear it on my sleeve so much, like some sloppy emo panzy. i didn't want to give anyone the opportunity to judge me over what i'd written as harshly as i was judging myself. long story short: i wasn't ready to own the fact that i am the poor sap who's signing his name on those pathetic posts.

sigh.
can't escape it now.
i could hide the posts, tuck them away in a drafts folder, or just plain delete them. but there is something manipulative and shady about that. i shouldn't need to hide. honest writing fosters discovery, and i am just hear to learn. there are parts of this blog, just as there are parts of me, that are tough to look at, or sad, or ridiculous, or just plain wrong. so here is a blog full of my failures; what does running from them do? they don't get better until i recognize them for what they are.

albany confession

i've done well with the things i've set out to do.

when i left buffalo with the objective to minimize the distractions of my life, to run from temptations, and toward simplicity, i never really thought it would work as well as i believed that i wanted it to. i imagined that i'd have the loads of extra time to finish at least a half a draft of a novel that had been fermenting in my brain for the last few years, and get to carve a place in the huge family i barely knew.

life with my sisters in schenectady was an epiphany, in a practical, bold-faced sort of way. and as far as writing went, i did about as well as i can realistically expect of myself, which is to say i made inches of headway towards a mark i fell horribly short of.

the other goals? simpicity? the marathon run away from distraction and temptation? i did amazingly well with. when i moved out to the fairytale kingdom of Albany, NY, i got exactly what i wanted. i wanted to leave behind what i was relying on in buffalo to get me through, and strip everything away to find out what i really am and what i'm made of. i was very much afraid of what i had become in buffalo, but i didn't even really have a true sense of what that was until i'd spent some time away.

yet, as the ancients used to say, when the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.

i have to include the caveat that there was one noble goal that i did acheive in the course of the move. i left buffalo a physical wreck, because smoking cigarettes is not as good for you as it looks and binge drinking will swallow you up and puke you out. those are bad habits i seem to have wrestled under control, now. and thank God, because it catches up to you.

now, on to answered prayer:

the reasons i give for wanting to leave are at most only half as noble as they sound: in a nutshell, i abandoned buffalo, and everyone in it, because i didn't want to need anyone, and i didn't want anyone to need me. i didn't want people to get in my way, or hold me back, or let me down. and if that meant not having friends, then so be it. and with a violently selfish shove, i landed myself in Albany, where i even ducked out of responsibility to my family there to remain isolated. i might as well have had an off button. i walk around describing Albany as a bad fit for me, but i think in retrospect, i was a bad fit for it -- i never gave it a fair chance. i arrived only half believing that the party, and the fun, and the good times i had in buffalo somehow wouldn't follow me. but in so often i went out of my way to not make friends or connections. i thought i was trying, but it was really only for the purpose of fending off boredom and loneliness.

in albany i had the anonymity and social disconnectedness i thought i'd craved. and then, somehow, what people thought of me became suddenly important. how's that for a big ball of irony? -- i didn't give a fuck what the people who loved me thought, and now i was grovelling for any kind of validation from new peers who didn't give a fuck about me. well served, poetic justice, well served.

and when Bill died this summer, i know it didn't just happen to me, or for me, but damned if it didn't teach me a timely lesson. i deserted my friends in buffalo in pieces before i actually left, and Bill was probably one of the first victims of my ego. i can't think of anyone who deserved it less; Bill began and ended with the love he had for his friends. i hacked him out of my life with animosity i realized was misplaced only with his sudden death. death is so polarizing and stark. everything jumps into relief, everything is black and white. whatever little things i wanted to take as liberties to end our friendship, i realized were shields for my own guilty part in the matter. it was a really shitty thing to do.

i ran off into the world all empowered and invincible, on my own power, at the cost of what brings actual meaning to life. i've come home now, a little broken by it. it turns out i had no idea what i was doing. i find myself at times looking for this ideal life, and i keep trampling over the real life that i should be living that is right under my nose.


i've discovered a few things, about myself, when the rest is stripped away, and i've had excess time to think about it. i'm a selfish bastard. i still am, and i know it, and its a slow and supercomplicated feat of engineering to rewire all the shitty behavioral circuits. i am a work in retarded progress.

along the rollercoaster ride of self discovery over the past few years, i've uncovered all of these drastically differing parts of myself. the adventures of my colossal ego showed me things i wouldn't normally have seen, but i put more faith in that ego than it could ever handle. what was there to topple it but lightning, or to do away with it but some act of God? leave it to my ego to demand that kind of end; God yawned and i simply choked myself out. i am nobody special. my own pride prepared my downfall. it was self contained, an un-event, and i'm really the only that thinks it was important enough to give a damn.

i enabled myself, and i disabled myself.

i'm not sure where that leaves me. i have weird, unmatching pieces. i guess the next question is what can i make out of that? and how do i do it? i don't know if its a matter of taking the good, and tossing the bad, or just gathering it all and adding a grain of salt.

it probably doesn't matter so much as it does that i learn to value the things i've come to know are more important. i've trapsed off to fulfill some ideal life that may or may not exist, trampling over a real life, the fulfillment of which i've neglected for too long.

for as long as i've been someone who's thought for himself, i've always been concerned with determining what was "important" and pursuing it. at different stages, what is important has been different things; when i was young, it was spirituality, and at other times it has been matters of heart, or virtue, or quality. good enough things i suppose, but i wonder if i hadn't gotten it all wrong from the beginning. did i even know what was important? are those things even close? and if i started from some faulty impression of what was important, and since i've landed so far from that even, how far off am i now?

it makes me wonder if i haven't failed at everything i've set out to do...