I am losing it.

—

Too often, those who misunderstand you are also unable to do anything other than mistrust you.

It’s a history lesson.

—

I was reading back through some of my older stuff the other night. Like 2000, and 2002. There are a lot of typos. I didn’t realize just how wildly and haphazardly I sometimes pound on my keys as I write these things.

—

You know those moments that you have, those surreal moments, that you file away in your imagination under “I’m sure I’m gonna remember this moment and the way it smells and tastes and feels for a long time to come, maybe even for years,” and that you then forget by next week?

I had one.

I was parked against the curb on some random Santa Barbara street than ran alongside a thicket containing a loud but otherwise invisible creek. It was dark, maybe eight in the evening. My sunroof was down and it was cold. My seat was back. I was drifting in and out of a worthless, uncomfortable sort of sleep. But anyway, the thing that impressed me so incredibly was the croaking of the frogs somewhere outside my window, alongside the creek, in the cold black of the early evenings.

There must have been ten thousand of them.

And all of them were croaking at once.

—

I am trying not to let hopelessness overtake me.

There is no answer sometimes but to avoid living in the moment.

—

And sometimes you wonder a lot about the people you’ve known over the years that you no longer know. They’re trapped somewhere inside you and never age. You never get closer to them, and you never get more distant (forgetting, as you always do, that you never talk to them anymore and haven’t done in so very long).

—

Work tomorrow.

—

I used to have clocks.

—

For years, on the wall of my room in my parents house, was the word — in giant block letters, scrawled manaically by me on a night that I can’t quite remember, when I was high on I don’t know what —

          FEAR

It’s a strange, hollow, lonely feeling that makes you want to sleep and sleep, preferably somewhere dark and hidden. But there is no respite, nor is there any escape.

All of these lives are this way. Such a waste.

Even if the edges, ebbs, and flows of my present are ill-defined and nebulous, my future is very, very bright. If you’d told me at 15 about where I am career-wise today at 29, I’d have been thrilled.

Already, I:

– Have three college degrees, inlcuding one graduate degree
– Have published five books of my own, and am working on a sixth
– Am working as an editor at a respected publishing house
– Have worked as a weekly columnist with an audience in the tens of thousands
– Am well-positioned to enter a Ph.D. program and get tenure within a decade

I’m in pretty good shape for mid-life, all things considered. Feels good.

The only time women can be happy is when they get to play the victim-hero. There is nothing more amazingly worthwhile in womens’ minds than to have had cancer, “overcome” it, then saved another person from cancer… or to have been raped, “overcome” it, then started a rape center… or had their home burn down, “overcome” it, then joined Habitat for Humanity.

It’s part of our cultural myth about women, the thing we tell them to aspire to. Women should be weak and frail and dumb and helpless enough to be a victim at some point, otherwise they aren’t feminine but masculine. But they must also be curative or act as a caretaker or crative/generative agent, so once they have demonstrated their femininity by getting victimized in some way (and thus feeling that they are worthwhile according to men), they have to them turn it into some kind of mystical, vagina-as-flower-of-creation “heroism” (which makes them feel worthwhile in the eyes of other women). Only through the victim-hero trope do women in our culture feel whole both in the face of masculine and feminine critics.

This is why women never know what they want, especially with regard to things like breakups. If a girl tells a guy to get lost and he does, she’s unhappy; she wanted him gone, but his ability to make a quick departure forces her to face the terrifying, identity-destructive possibility that she wasn’t attractive enough (i.e. feminine enough) to be victimized. She secretly wants him to be so unable to live without her that he calls her night and day crying, stalks her, and eventually rapes her. In spite of the violence of the act, the reinforcement of her femininity is ultimately good for her self worth, since she can then identify herself as irresistibly attractive to men. And of course after such an act, the other important component of the performance is that she can then call the police and become the survivor who protects other women from this monster of a man, thus becoming heroic, generative, and positive to other women. Only by becoming a victim and a hero can she look both men and women in the face without shame.

Make a note, men: either way she’ll be unhappy. She doesn’t want you anymore, but if you just go when she asks you to take a hike, she’s not gonna leave you alone. (Sound familiar, guys?) She’ll keep trying to get back with you until you turn stalker and on her, thus giving her the satisfying victim-hero breakup that she wants. She doesn’t give a damn about your feelings, it’s all about her femininity and her heroism.

As you always suspected, it’s all about her.

I’m apprehensive about today.

I don’t know why, I can’t quite put a finger on it.