The only word I can think of to describe this summer is "disjointed". Everyone is busy with their lives and instead of one continuous experience it all seems as a fractured series of pictures. Some of them are pretty, and some are ugly.
I'm in the process of killing a monster with the aid of another monster. A monster that is less evil, but monstrous nonetheless.
For years and years I fought against the ever-evolving and mutating fiend that was a product of bad genes. Generations and generations of bad behavior gone uncorrected and unmitigated: generations of men that were fighting shapeless wraiths that seemed to come out of the void and they were too proud to say or do anything about it. A long line of nutjobs served their sentences in silence, a string of suicides dotted along the family tree. Who knows where it all started. It no longer matters. And now I'm paying for the silence and the repression. But I am interested in stopping it.
I don't feel guilt or shame for being wretched, like they did. My dad is a collection of exploding nerves, sometimes completely nuts. I see this now. I have surveyed the previous generation and I have seen what damage this genetically contagious aberration has wrought. I have felt what it is to panic for no clear reason at all. This is the nature of the monster that has rested in the deep shadows of my mind. It wasn't until I was completely alienated from all of humanity when I decided to kill this disease with something equally undesirable, but less evil: apathy. Apathy in the form of drugs. Zoloft.
After a few weeks into the medication, I sat on my couch feeling absolutely nothing, and I decided how monstrous that feeling was, and how at the same time it was such a relief to not have to worry about going mad for the moment. I couldn't bear any more of whatever that feeling was that was growing more and more prevalent in my thoughts. That feeling of stark fear and revulsion of life itself.
A friend told me that when I got on this medication everything would be dead. He told me how awful it would be, and that how he himself felt so much better after he got off it. I told him at the time (without knowing whether it was true or not), that I preferred to feel dead, rather than whatever it was that I was feeling. I could say now that it was in fact true. I feel relief. I feel alive in this apathy. And then after the apathy, well, then we rebuild from the ground up. Hopefully.
As for this summer, I have the recurring image of "The Graduate" in my head. It's a good movie. Dustin Hoffman gets out of college and he comes home to his family and is completely alien to them, and completely lost. And I see him floating around in the pool in the backyard, staring into space, completely numb, and I think, ah yes isn't it the truth?
I wasn't worried about where my life was going to go as I was getting to the end of college. But now as I sit here and realize how open-ended it all really is, and how high my expectations for myself really are, well, I don't know. Life is a continuous freakshow.
But while in Montana I did become very drunk with my brother and I convinced him to climb this large hill that was about a mile behind our house on state land. My brother wanted to bring his shotgun, as there were wolves in the valley, but we were drunk and our parents were concerned about this, and so we set out with him carrying a knife in a sheath. The sun was going down and we climbed over a low barbed wire fence, and crossed two ravines and countless shrubbery and eventually made it to the top of this hill, tired and sick as hell. But there was something at the top of the hill. Something intangible but meaningful nevertheless. We decided to climb that hill. And we walked very far and we brought our guitars and a camera. We took our shirts off and climbed to the top like a couple of freaks. We made it. We had the idea and manifested it successfully, and in my intoxication I embraced it all the more. And I suppose that's a good start for a paradigm.
The architecture of my mind has changed drastically this year. It is violent change. But welcoming.
