my brain hurts

i spent so much time this weekend in deep thought/emotion/conversation and alcohol, i think i did permanent damage to my psyche. i’ve been questioning so much of everything lately, and having to explain the questions i ask, and frame a defense around them is something that has really stretched the bounds of my reality. i met some cool people. i saw some people i already knew were cool. i had fantastic food, and more than one amazing laugh after another. i had a sleepless day, and a collapse that caused injury because i was so exhausted i didn’t move for six hours. i am no closer to the answers burning me, and, perhaps, even a little more confounded by the patterning.

there is so much flux that has sprung itself on me over the years during the waning weeks of may, and the birthing weeks of june.

everything came apart like an origami pattern friday night. perhaps that is why i was so willing to go along with the flow of a random conversation that was so deep with a group of people i didn’t know – i felt like i saw the last decade of my life unfurl like a banner in the breeze. one of the hallmarks of insanity, so it is described, is the regular occurance of ideas that come from “outside” your own consciousness. i begin to wonder if perhaps expanding one’s consciousness through meticulous self-examination, and engrossing one’s self in the soup that is manhattan might not have a very similar net effect. i try to ride the patterns, do things that are incongruent to my character, then do things incongruent to that. this has extended to the point of even allowing myself to be photographed, despite my disdain for it, simply so that i am not an absolute in any major way. how do you remain the core of a steadfast individual in the wash of the tides of the world around you? i must keep myself rooted, but not too much – sublimate the obstinance, but not surrender it, lest i am swallowed whole.

constant flux within structured order is the only way the pattern is going to be made visible. it is the only way it has become evident before.

i saw , back from california friday night. i hung out with and , soon to be back in california. i was at ‘s place, surrounded by good cheer and people who were all looking to have a good time.

the fragmentary flash points that shape our reality – the liquid chain of temporal nodes that brought me to that time and place – the odds of it crush my consciousness like a cinder block to a grape. i know through a college friend of his, who i worked with at my last job. the anniversary of ben’s death is in a few weeks. i found out about it right after i got back from he annual maine trip i usually go on. i would like to think that i would have ended up better than aquaintences with and the slew of other people i have met through him. i hope i would have. i will not be going to maine this year. my life is haunted by the ghosts of departed friends. i don’t even have it that bad really – what is a little suicide here and there, when there are folks in iraq right now who will never walk again, and everything they know is now a mortar-shell hole in the ground?

if only the awareness was dulled. i wish i could fuzz things out a little, not notice the edges as much. i wonder if that is my blood calling to me – the siren murmurings of my chemically dependent fore bearers. how many times should you forgive life? is seven times seventy matthew’s guide to survival, not salvation? is 490 a significant enough occurance of unexplainable phenomena to have it alter the shuddering path of your life in a direction other than the one it seems to be heading it? i’ve done some of the math btw , the odds make the state lotto look like a pretty funny punchline in a bad monty python skit.

i have known as long as any of the few old-school friends i still associate with. half the people at his party that i knew, i knew through him. and i met through connections here on lj, which i would never have even gotten into if it were not for my ex. ironic that what has perpetuated so many of my life’s connections today was something that helped provide some serious nails for the coffin that was eventually that relationship. my life, socially, was a missed web page away from being an abortion, despite the duration and bonds i have with some of the elder roots which subsume it to this day.

it is all chains of interconnected possibility. one thing different here or there – one missed phone call, or one party skipped. things would be so different. _i_ would be so different. it happens all the time, passive or active. tom’s specter burbles at me now when i try to sleep. despite my anonymous efforts on his behalf, i do not think his son will find solace under his roof. the fact that i even know enough of that story to be bothered by it is insane.

when i stare out across the plains of infinity, and contemplate all the fractional ‘ifs’ that could be, might be, and are, in other temporal pockets of reality, the insignificance of the continuum i am sliding down becomes most depressing. egotistical relativism and super sensory “life in the moment” therapy are just escape hatches. my atheism in the face of all this malarkey is white hot hubris, but i refuse to abandon it.

i look down the long barrel of my reality’s framework (as i picture it in my head) and part of me has screamed itself voiceless at the futility. the other half is constantly locking obstinate horns with the day-to-day, refusing to submit until the last phlegmy rattle slips out.

i need my vacation, like the brain needs blood.

but as once said:
“the brain doesn’t really need blood, it just needs to be kept wet. pass me another beer.”

i just wish i were drinking. that scares me too.