500ml of Beefeater and 96 oz. of Chasing Tail later I’m still sitting here posting banal shit. What does it take to join the circus anymore?

…is what you get when you spend your whole life trying to go it alone, survive more or less, then try to talk about it. My circle of friends has always been small and my successes (and failures) have always been big, as have my habits. Apart from sensing that there’s always room to drop life by yet another octave in order to simulate testosterone more deeply, I have few social or truly creative impulses, and this leads to a state of affairs in which those who know me best don’t believe the extent to which they are truly my best (and only) friends.

And as a converse, they don’t understand the extent to which my vexation must have developed in order for me to cut them off. I do wish people would actually hear what I say and, in a similar vein, let themselves trust both my intentions and the future.

I am tired of talking to others and tired of talking to myself, but I am also tired of silence.

I have just seen my favorite episode of Northern Exposure, “Nothing’s Perfect,” for the first time in probably six years, give or take. It’s on the fourth season DVD. And, in an episode about the impermanence of life and the way in which the passage of time, human agency, and the systematic universe leave us powerless to preserve those things that we most love, they have changed the ending.

Only slightly, it’s true.

But it’s different. I don’t quite know what to do with this new ending, other than to think that the fact of the change is strangely in keeping with the crux of the script.

—

Bizarre moments… love them or hate them, they do tend to occur periodically.

—

I don’t know what I’d do if I were to see Je— today. I don’t know what I’d say to her. I might try to pretend I hadn’t seen her at all. Why? Why should it be so? I don’t get it.

I can’t remember what I’ve done for the new year for the last n+1 years. Apparently it’s not a big holiday for me. I don’t know that I’ve ever done anything really great for the holiday, like say, being in the midst of an urban mob with a significant other screaming at the top of my lungs. My timing was never that good. I’ve done my share of hitting the hooch and passing out too early in a fit of depression, naturally.

—

Regrets can fill your life really, really quickly if you’re not careful. Regrets and little post-it notes with question marks on them—they ask you about all the decisions that excised something (or someone) from your life, or that excised the possibility of something (or someone) from your life.

And your failures. The question marks are also there to ask what might have happened had you routinely studied that extra hour, saved that money instead of spending it, not cocked up in all of the ways that you routinely cock up.

But nothing’s perfect.

Nothing’s perfect.

—

All of the people that I love and have loved: I wish I could see some way to make it work, because I’m lonely and it’s very sad to be lonely after having not been. I don’t understand how people break up. I really don’t. I don’t understand how people that love each other at a deep level can fail to chart a comfortable, common path through quotidia. I just know that ends happen—a lot—even after you’ve been together for years.

But you just can’t reconcile the loss that you feel in retrospect with the tension and trouble that you felt at that moment in your life. Time is not a multidimensional thing; it is ultimately only what happened… that happened.

—

Not novel or deep. But at least honest, tonight. I’m sad about J— and J— and L— and L— and E— and so on and so on. People lost to me, at least in one way or another. Companionship lost to me.

Okay, I’m wallowing, I’ll admit. I’ll go and watch a DVD.