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[axiomandidiom-blog]

>m-m-m-my corona

holy shit fam it’s weird as fuck out there. how y’all living? I’m doing fine. I’m doing just fine.

Let me catch you up:

I fixed my >tired problem, after a solid year of gaslighting from doctors (as if I needed more reason to hate them), when a doc who lives out near my parents (i.e. the sticks) decided to try me out on something on spec to see if it worked and holy shit it worked and I’ve been taking it every day since.

This came at the end of a 3 month period of fmla at work, during which I did not get paid and mostly just felt awful, but occasionally enjoyed some interesting commercial substances.

So that happened. Uhh, what else. Oh! I came to some conclusions about my life. The one that comes to mind is that I don’t like being touched because of my time in hospitals, where people come at you with a smile and a needle and say nice things and then hurt you (as if I needed one more goddamn reason to hate fucking doctors).

I fell briefly in love (!!!!) with a new girl at work who turned out to be in a committed, long-term lesbian relationship (LMFAO). This was an experience that was strange for a few reasons: first, the last time something like that had happened was so long ago (see my post on functional memory) that I had begun to doubt it would happen again, or even that it had happened at all; second, that it felt bad but it was a good bad, it was a tension that I sort of liked and was exciting and while I was pretty busted up about it I wasn’t, like, destroyed or anything, and I think that’s probably because I wasn’t in any kind of actual relationship with her; third, and I apologize for this, was that she is a person of color, and while I have always harbored some amount of attraction to brown people, she is of a particular persuasion that I’ve never felt attracted to before; fourth, that I was fucking ready to cosplay as peter gabriel in shock the monkey at dragon con in order to impress her, which is fucking wild (I still have most of the pieces assembled, and while there ain’t gonna be no con this year (more on this in a bit) I will definitely still pursue this costume--also it involves “clown white” makeup, which is good if I need to get jokerfied in the future (more on this as well, sit tight fam)); fifth, that the nature of my fantasies about her at the time weren’t sexual (ok, they weren’t all or even mostly sexual), it was more like I was imagining us cooking dinner or watching tv or shit, weird domestic shit I can’t even fucking fathom, and would have thought impossible to fathom just a few months ago.

Anyway I still love this girl but it isn’t like a pining romantic love, it’s more like I think she’s cool and I want to hear what she has to say and I want her to talk to me, which is how I feel about my friends so I guess I consider her my friend, and I hope she at least comes to think of me that way.

Also, I considered quitting my job, because they wanted me to work on Sundays occasionally, i.e. work either 7 or 11 days in a row depending on the weekend situation at work and I don’t fuck with that shit. Now I’m glad I didn’t because lmao it turns out the entire world is on fucking fire holy fuck it’s so bad out there.

Meanwhile I’m holed up in a bunker at an undisclosed location and it’s honestly the motherfucking dream. I spend all my time cooking and playing video games and doing little chores here and there and I feel so fucking relaxed and good I can’t even explain it, and I feel guilty as hell because everyone out there in the world is feeling the fire and I’m just coasting. I’m even still getting paid and I still have my insurance wtf is going on I don’t want to look at it too hard in case it stops being true.

Before all the ‘rona shit I was only working 30 hours per week on doctor’s orders and let me tell you it was fucking paradise. I never want to go back to 40 hours a week, FUCK YOU CAPITALISM.

Oh and I moved out of my apartment, because it doesn’t make sense to live there any more what with the state of the world in complete fucking shambles.

I feel so strange because on some level I felt this shit coming. Like it’s a weird validation of my inner doomerism that’s hard to describe but all I feel is smug, like I knew better than everyone even if I was shaky on the details of the nature of the coming crisis.

Anyway it’s May 2020 so I feel like I’m going to look back on this and wonder how I could have been so naive but I wanted a record of how good I feel.

Like shit is just absolutely tits up out there. There’s no more cons, there’s no more movies, politics is upside-down and backwards, people are in the streets complaining about haircuts while other people are being sacrificed to the blood altar of the money god, these things are happening literally simultaneously.

I’m more or less completely converted to socialist ideology, and anyone not converted is going to earn my utmost scrutiny, because if this shit doesn’t convince you that we were all participating in a shared delusion while vampires sucked the vitality our bodies and the wealth from our society than I don’t know what to tell you, you’ve gone full ostrich and I can’t imagine what it could possibly take to pull your head out of the sand.

Shit’s coming, y’all. After the ‘rona I mean. Things will get worse before they get better. But I have my clown white and I have an old military jacket and if I gotta become secret ginger revolutionary man then I’m down with it, because, and this is important, there can be no growth without the fire.

hold on fam, keep it together, one day we’ll be ok again.

[axiomandidiom-blog]

>wearing a jacket made of meat

I’m a millennial. I like Ghostbusters like I like The Strokes. I have never paid $20 for avocado toast but I do like avocados and I do like toast and I imagine based on those two factors I’m in the target market for that product. I have a tumblr where I complain about my life. QED

Tomorrow I go back to work. I’ve been out for like 8 days. This has been my yearly vacation. I did not:

Buy a car, clean my room, drive into the mountains to look at the leaves, write every day, clean the fridge, find a new job, meet my future wife, win the lottery

I did: play a lot of video games, write some, eat at a bunch of places I love, see my friends all the time, help my parents with some stuff

So, I’d say it went ok.

I also ran two experiments on myself. Experiment one was to stop taking one of my drugs, to see if it’s the cause of my mystery affliction. Results are pending. The only difference I’ve noticed is that I have a headache every goddamn day if I don’t take this drug. Frowny face. I will continue with this experiment until I give up on it due to having headaches at work, so, likely within the next few days.

I also got a massage, to see if another human could squeeze the tired/sore/weak/stretching feeling out of my body with their hands. They could not. It was real nice though. Would recommend.

I have in general felt extremely somnolent for the last three weeks, which feels like an additional piece to mystery affliction more than it feels like anything else.

I am writing all of this because I’m trying to take stock of things. Sometimes I feel really down on myself because I don’t feel like I can accomplish things I want to do/that I think someone like me should be doing. And, with 8 days of vacation behind me, I can honestly say that my body is a pile of garbage and that with no other obvious stresses I feel like crap all the time. Just all the time. That’s my baseline: crap.

This is kind of a bummer.

I wonder if it requires a readjustment on my part. I tend to think of myself in comparison to other people I see (I think this is normal primate behavior). But given this reassessment I don’t think that’s fair.

My worry is that if I’m more equitable with myself in terms of the way I feel and what I think I’m capable of that I’ll shortchange myself. Like, and this is a bit hyperbolic, you never see the news interview of the lady/dude in the wheelchair who just did something amazing and the news lady/dude asks person in wheelchair how they were able to accomplish that amazing feat and the wheelchair person says “I was honest with myself about what’s possible and came to the conclusion that I should adjust my expectations of myself given the reality of my situation.”

They say, in not so many words, “the world fed me inputs which might reasonably lead to the conclusion that I was less than, that what I wanted wasn’t possible, that I wasn’t capable; and I took those inputs and decided fuck the inputs, I do what I want.”

I want to be like that and I don’t think I’m like that right now.

I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t know how to get more caffeine into my body than I’m already doing. I don’t know how to jolt myself out of my sense of decrepitude. I don’t know how to take those inputs and tell them to go fuck themselves. 

I want to be better than I am. I want to be better than I think I am capable of being.

[axiomandidiom-blog]

Better make it soon before your break my heart

There’s a new person at my job. I have a job, btw. It’s a pretty chill job, I work at a library and nobody really wants too much of me, and there are some pretty rigid scripts for how to interact with people and that’s what I need to keep from being an awkward fuck.

So this new person replaced the previous person and she’s bossu. By bossu I mean she’s got a library sciences degree and she gets paid the money. I don’t get paid the money. I just don’t. It’s fine though, I mean, fuck money am I right? Haha yeah I’m right fuck money.

This new bossu, though, she’s my age. She’s like a month older than me and she’s doing something she went to school for, that she likes and is good at, and I’m like hold up bitch. Like hold the fuck up. You’re my age and if you’re getting paid doing a career thing then what the fuck am I doing?

So I need to get a new job. And by get a new job I mean I need to do the thing I’m good at that I went to school for, which is writing. Which means I need to fucking write all the time now. And that sucks because writing cuts really deep into my video game time. Like how am I supposed to get to 600 if I don’t do all my dailies and weeklies because I’m writing shit?

I told this to my friend P and P was all “This is good axiom this is an opportunity to reassess your priorities and work towards new goals” and I was like “thanks dad, but stfu pls I can’t take the realness of what you just told me”

But having had sufficient distance and time to think about it the motherfucker is right. P is pretty smart like that. P and E are the voices on my shoulders these days and it’s a good idea to listen to them.

So here’s the plan:

On wednesdays, fridays, the saturdays I have off and sundays I will write until I have 500 words, and longer if I’m on a roll. I will take my computer with me to work and on my way home I’ll stop at a coffee shop and chill my shit there.

that’s it. It’s not a very complex plan.

PS thanks zoloft you’re as good and as bad as I remember.

[axiomandidiom-blog]

Being 30

This is what is different when you turn 30 years old.

People can no longer tell you what to do. This is a fucking fact. If I do something that happens to benefit you, I did it because I wanted to, because doing it benefits me, or because I’m bored. It was not because I had to. I don’t take no shit, if you fuck with me I’ll just fucking leave.

You don’t have to brush your hair any more. You can just let it be wild af. You also don’t have to shave, because nobody fucking cares.

You realize that you are yourself, and that when other people want you to be something else what they’re actually telling you is that they don’t like you and that’s fine, it’s ok if people don’t like you but you don’t have to fuck with those people, like, at all. 

You stop wishing for things to just sort of magically happen. There are no more mountains on the horizon, it’s just a flat plain ending in the ocean of your death. You can see how straight the road is as it descends gently to the horizon.

[axiomandidiom-blog]

This will be on the final exam

Solve for x:

Life is a maze. At the start of the maze, [__x__] is there to keep you from loitering at the entrance. Down the maze’s twisting corridors there are pit traps (at the bottom of which you will find [__x__]) and tiny holes which shoot darts dipped in [__x__]. At each of the maze’s many dead ends you will find [__x__]. As you traverse the maze, a minotaur of [__x__] stalks your progress. At the end of the maze, [__x__] awaits you as your final prize.

a.) pain

b.) shame

c.) fear

d.) garbage

[axiomandidiom-blog]

>memory

I have a functional memory of about 2 and a half months.

I ran an experiment with myself, RE: >tired. I kept track of when I first started feeling bad and then I waited until I couldn’t remember what feeling good felt like. And the answer is two and a half months.

That means that there’s no amount of good or bad that will ever really matter for more than two and a half months. This is good because, in theory, if I started feeling good again tomorrow, in two and a half months I wouldn’t remember the bad feelings that I’m having right now.

This is bad because if I started feeling good tomorrow, then went back to feeling bad the next day, in two and a half months and two days I wouldn’t remember the good feeling. And I don’t have good feelings. I just don’t.

It’s been over a year since I’ve written anything. Like well over a year. And I’m so far beyond remembering what writing was like that all I have are the stories I told myself about what it was like or how it felt. They don’t mean anything any more because I can’t really remember writing, I just remember remembering writing. Or, more like, I remember remembering remembering remembering remembering writing.

If I ever write again it’ll be by complete cosmic accident. It’ll be like discovering some fundamental universal process by virtue of a few incredible coincidences, then getting in a car wreck and losing my memory of ever working on trying to understand that fundamental universal process, and discovering it again by a completely different set of equally improbable circumstances.

Fuck me that makes no sense. Goddamn it. Where’s words when you need them?

Whatever. Here’s to accidents.

[axiomandidiom-blog]

>trash

trash trash trash trash trash trash trash trash trash trash trash trash trash trash trash trash trash trash trash trash trash trash trash trash

[axiomandidiom-blog]

>inside

if there was ever anything inside me but poison and rot it’s long sloughed away. i used to write things. i used to make marks against paper that pleased me, things that made me smile when remembered, things people would tell me made them smile too, things that were true. they came from a place not quite inside me. they came from a place next to me, above and behind me, like a water tower with spigot i could twist whenever i wanted to drench myself in cool clean newness. but now the tower is dry. now when i turn the spigot i get only filth

i can’t even write this right

this isn’t even what i mean

it’s close to what i mean but it’s wrong. i can’t get it out. this is the trash, not the water

if the faucet is dry there’s no point. it’s the only thing that matters to me

it’s the only thing that matters to me and without it i’m lost an pointless and a waste.

all that’s left is waste

[axiomandidiom-blog]

>tired

Three months.

Three months it’s been like this.

April 24th or thereabouts I woke up feeling like I usually do; stiff, like I need to stretch, get the blood moving a bit. I stretched, slo-mo kicking the air and twisting my ribcage, rolling my shoulders in their sockets and reaching to nothing.

I did that because it usually helps. Usually I experience relief from the stiffness, muscled fatigue or weakness or however you want to call it. Then I go about my day.

That day it didn’t work. Huh, I thought. How odd.

Lots of odd things happen to me with respect to the way my body feels. I typically ignore them until they go away. Usually it’s a few days, a week at most.

This didn’t go away.

A day of feeling this way was an annoyance. A week was tedious, two was a drag, three was downright unbearable. A month was torture.

It’s been three months.

My doctors don’t know what it is. They’ve drawn plenty of blood. I’ve missed about a week of work all told. I’d have missed more but I discovered after the first day out (a few days into this experience) that sleeping doesn’t help. I don’t feel any better if I stay in my bed all day or if I go to work. The feeling won’t go away. It won’t go away. It won’t go away. It won’t go away.

On Monday I will tell my boss that I have to start investigating this with greater effort. I will need to take off many more days of work to go to doctors whenever they will see me soonest. I’m out of sick time so I will need to use my annual leave. After that I will need to take a medical leave of absence.

I don’t care what it is any more. I don’t care if it’s diabetes, or if it’s psychosomatic, or if it’s fucking cancer or some shit. I want to know what it is and I want to know how to get rid of it and if I can’t get rid of it I want to know that so I can choke on a bullet because I can’t be like this any more. I can’t. I just can’t.

This seems like a good time to say that I don’t trust my doctors, or any doctors really. I came to the conclusion that doctors, and my time in the hospital, are why I don’t trust people, and why I don’t like to be touched. Doctors smile, and are friendly, and tell you they want to help you, and all they do is hurt you. They talk to you like they’re your friend and then they stick you. That’s the important bit: the stick comes after the smile, after the friendly talking, after the reassuring touch.

Now when people smile at me, when they talk to me like they’re my friend, after they give me a reassuring touch, I brace for the stick. I recoil. I try and cover myself, hide my vulnerable places.

Fuck doctors.

I can feel myself sliding into decrepitude. I can feel myself getting weaker, feel my muscles atrophy from disuse. I’m gaining weight. I’m not taking care of myself. I get scragglier and scragglier, my clothes are wrinkled, I don’t shave, I limp about because it’s easier than trying to fully move the muscles in my legs.

What’s the point of writing this? What’s the point of moving? Of eating? Of sleeping? Of taking the drugs I have to take? What am I working towards? Why am I still here? May I be excused? Can I go? Is that all?

This seems like a good time to say that I’m turning thirty in September. That makes it 9 years since the last time I had sex or kissed someone, with no end to the drought in sight. I wish I never had, because then I might still want it. But I’ve had it and I don’t want it.

Let me tell you what I do want: I want a social life. I’ve had that before and I still want it. That’s how I can tell I don’t want the other thing; because without friends I feel lost and hopeless, and without a partner I feel like myself.

[axiomandidiom-blog]

>Ooooh la la lala la la lalala

I despair of ever writing again. I’ve forgotten how. I’ve lost the drive and the will to write or create. Reading hasn’t helped. Sitting down to write hasn’t helped. Caffeine hasn’t helped (caffeine hasn’t ever helped anyone do anything except take a shit in the morning).

I despair of finding a partner. I haven’t looked really, so I don’t think it’s based on that. It’s more that I’ve convinced myself so thoroughly that I’m unwanted and unlovable that this has become my reality.

I despair of feeling good. I spent three days in the hospital and I’m still upset about it. I don’t like being powerless and having no volition, but I don’t like feeling like my decisions, and my mistakes, are my own, either. I hate being poked and prodded, I hate being hurt, I hate being woken up in the night, I hate having to be careful about how I move my body because I’m tethered to machines.

I’m seeing a therapist who seems to know how to get me to talk about what’s bothering me, but it isn’t making me feel better.

I’m left contemplating what to do with myself. Right now I’m able to exist only. Perhaps my problem is expecting to do more than exist.

I can see myself working at my current job for a while longer, basically for as long as I can project myself forward (which is not very far). That’s good I guess. That’s pressure off.

I would like to give up eating meat because cooking meat makes me nervous. I think it would be cheaper, too. If I can find a way to feed myself that is cheap and healthy I would prefer that to the way I currently live, which is expensive and unhealthy. It’s possible that by saving more money I would start to feel like the future exists. It seems unlikely, but it’s possible.

I can’t decide if feeling like the future doesn’t exist is the result of depression or adhd. It’s probably both. It seems also like the consequence of feeling so bad in the present, that if I will myself to project my current feelings into the future, well, I don’t want to live like that. I don’t want to have lived the time between now and the future with my current bad feelings.

Being in the hospital again also drew a sharper line between the things I like and want that are bad and the things I don’t like and didn’t want that were done to me. It’s possible this is pareidolia or confabulation, or just rationalization after the fact. It’s possible that since they’re both feelbads they live in the same feelbad place in my brain and it’s hard to tell between them.

I can’t imagine what would make me feel better. Thinking about possible scenarios only results in my own mind coming up with reasons why those things wouldn’t make me happy or make me feel better. Example: a spouse would make you feel better. Response: No it wouldn’t, you don’t like other people and people don’t like you, spending any time with someone makes you hate them and vise versa, you are messy and disgusting and your personal habits and lifestyle would make anyone hate you. Etc etc etc

I hate everything and everything feels the same way about me.

[axiomandidiom-blog]

more >lying

One day I will feel better. One day I will be happy. One day I will write a book, and someone will publish it and it will be modestly successful and I will get a deal to write another one on spec. One day I will get over this shit streak my life has been on. One day I will wake up in the morning and I will be happy to be awake. One day I will stop having problems with memory and executive function. One day I will get married, but first, I will go on a date. One day I will stop experiencing sexual dysfunction. One day I will be good at managing my money. One day I will find a solution to the problems in my life that I can’t solve, than nobody can solve, that people keep suggesting solutions for that don’t work. One day I will invent a time machine and go back in time and tell myself not to go to college, and then I will go further back and tell myself not to bother with what they wanted me to bother with because here I am at the other side and my life isn’t good, it isn’t better, it hasn’t been worth it and it will never be worth it, and then I will go back and tell myself not to get sick for all the good it will do, and then I will go further back and tell little kid me that hiding from people in order to keep them off your back isn’t the same as having their approval, or solving your problems, and that it’s okay to like the things you like and to tell people that you like them, and that it’s okay that you’ll grow up and get to be my age and not know how anything works and be horrible at everything and feel every day like everything is worthless and decaying and that nothing good will come of the despair and drudgery, and then I’ll go further back in time and push myself in front of a train. One day I’ll have the guts to tell someone, consequences be damned, the things I can’t tell anyone, and it’ll be okay, and the person I tell will hug me and tell me I’m okay and they’re glad I’m alive and they’re glad they know me. One day I’ll tell a therapist I have s_______ i_______ and that therapist will throw on the emergency break and will send me to a place where they’ll fix what’s wrong with my brain and then I’ll be better and I’ll go back to my old life and laugh, and love myself. One day my teeth will be nice. One day I’ll be alive because I want to be alive and not because dying would be inconvenient and unpleasant to the people I know. One day I’ll stop feeling like I’m only here because of a curse someone gave me, and that because of the curse I owe it to that person to continue existing even though I don’t want to, even though I don’t want this shit and I never wanted it and by now the suffering has accumulated in my mind so much that I’ve begun to resent the tether the curse represents to this ugly existence. One day all of that will be gone from my mind and I’ll feel like the person I wish I was and sometimes my mind will stray back to now and to the years that have lead me to this place and this time and this state of mind and I’ll sigh, but it won’t be a bitter sigh, it’ll just be exhalation, the release of the breath from the body, and after that I will be gone and there will be no more days to wait for, no more good things to lie to myself about to keep me chained here, and that will be a good day, and someone will be upset about it because they will not know what I was giving up, they will not know what I was losing, they will only see what they would give up, what they would lose, and they will think “for him it must also have been this way, and this is therefore a tragedy” and they will not understand that I’d just had enough, that I’d sampled the goods and found them lacking, found their quality to be below my standards, and that I won’t be hurting, I won’t be angry, I won’t regret and I won’t wish, I won’t be anything at all.

[axiomandidiom-blog]

I saw the eclipse today

I have a pervasive feeling that I am alone and that I do not belong here. I have to remember (learn) that these feelings are just feelings, that they come from inside me and that they aren’t the result of stimuli or the rational reaction to events in the world or the actions of other people. They’re feelings. Other people don’t act a certain way and then I feel alienated. I feel alienated and then I perceive the actions of others in a way that reinforces that.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel alone. Or scared.

Or when somebody I love or respect says something to me that lets me know that they’re not me, because nobody is me but me, then that isn’t the person trying to make me feel scared and alone (even though it makes me feel scared and alone) but the other person trying to tell me that they feel a certain way and that they want me to help them feel less alone (even if it seems like they want to feel alone or to make me feel alone).

And when I get home from being in the car with someone for 19 hours and the last hour and a half of that were spent trying not to shout over each other about their differences that I should chock it up to being in the car with them for 19 hours and not malice.

All I can say is that I enjoyed what I did today, with the exception of the traffic that might fairly and accurately have be described as having accidentally transposed onto our reality from the most damned and god-forsaken of all hells.

And that I am glad that I am not involved with the person I spent time with, because if I was, it would be very hard to go to bed with them (ever again). It will not, however, be hard to play Destiny 2 with them.

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

[axiomandidiom-blog]

>lying

Tell me I'm okay. Tell me that it's alright that I can't write, that I'm still worthy of the air I breathe even if I never make anything. Tell me that money is just money and it doesn't matter. Tell me that you like my hair even when I don't wash it. Tell me that you like my freckles. Tell me that you like my eyes. Tell me that you think I'm smart, that you think I'm patient and kind. Tell me that it's alright if I don't remember to do everything. Tell me that you don't mind reminding me to do things. Tell me that you'll teach me how to cook food. Tell me that lost potential isn't the same thing as lost value. Tell me that success isn't about children, or marriage, or money, or respect, or creation, or impact. Tell me that if I was gone people would miss me. Tell me that I have value. Tell me that it's okay if I forget as long as I apologize, as long as I'm there to put it right. Tell me that I'm good at listening, that I'm good at understanding, that being near me makes you happy, that I make you feel good. Tell me that my actions make me a good person. Tell me that my thoughts don't make me a monster. Tell me that my intentions are true. Tell me that I'm lovable, that I'm beautiful, that I'm a good friend, that I don't hurt you, that I don't make you want to scream or cry or die. Tell me that I'm important. Tell me that you're listening to me. Tell me that you notice me. Tell me that my teeth are okay. Tell me that you like the way I'm put together. Tell me that I deserve to get what I want. Tell me that you won't get tired of me. Tell me that you won't leave me. Tell me that you're happy with me. Tell me that I work hard. Tell me that what I do is amazing. Tell me that you trust me. Tell me that you believe me. Tell me that you don't regret any of it. Tell me that you want me with you. Tell me that before you met me you wished for me. Tell me that you're glad I'm here.

[axiomandidiom-blog]

>spirituality

Here's how I feel about spirituality. I was raised a Methodist, but I don't really think of God or Jesus as being real, in the same way that I don't think about Kanye West as being real. I've never seen Kanye West. I hear about him a lot, yes. All of that's secondhand knowledge, though. I have no actual proof of his existence. I have records indicating his deeds, but for all I know that could be an elaborate ruse.

The difference, of course, is that there aren't people on TV who say they're God or Jesus; at least, not with the same kind of frequency I see people who are supposedly Kanye West.

And look, Kanye West has nothing to do with my life, and I have nothing to do with his. If I met him, I might be a little starstruck, but I don't have any reason to treat him differently than I treat anyone else, or even any cause to notice him at all. All he would be good for is later saying to my friends “oh hey I ran into Kanye West at the Whole Foods,” and they'd be like “lolwut.”

I feel like if I met Jesus or God it wouldn't be that different. Well, Jesus wouldn't be all that different. I'd be all “oh hey you're Jesus, aren't you?” and he'd be like “yeah, that's what they tell me,” and I'd struggle for a second trying to come up with something to say that would let Jesus know I was hip to some of his deeper cuts, maybe to give him the impression that I was cool because I knew something cool that Jesus had done that people don't talk about much (who the fuck knows what that would even be, they've been talking about Jesus for 2,000 years and the man hasn't put out any new material in forever). The point is, I'd want to give him the impression that, yeah, I get it I guess. I mean, the man did the best with what he was given. It's like he had much of a choice, but by all accounts he performed admirably. Also I'd ask if he fucked Mary Magdalene, because I feel like that would put some stuff in perspective for me.

God, yeah, God would be different. I'd get pretty pissed at God pretty fast. Like, I'd try to start the same way. I'd say “hey God redwoods are really awesome,” and then I'd just lose my shit. I'd say “hey, also, by the way, while we're talking about your work, that is, things for which hold direct and final responsibility, what in the fuck were you thinking with humans.”

Because there's no excuse. There's none. We're still fucking paying for the fact that Noah had his head on straight. Because if he'd been a fucker like the rest of us God would have just started over and all the rest of the shitty human behavior since then wouldn't stand in stark relief to that one tiny decision to let Noah keep his life and his family.

Now, I don't actually believe any of that happened. I mean there's evidence that the Noah myth is connected to some earlier myths about floods which may have had some basis in a historic event, but that's not what I'm saying. I have full knowledge and understanding that most, if not all, of the events of the bible are not literally true, and therefore can only be figuratively true. This is known, khaleesi. I'm willing to nod and smile when confronted by someone who believes that Jesus and his buddies performed miracles but either 1.) that never happened or 2.) God has given up on us, or fucked off. The result is the same.

That's not what I liked about church, either. I liked the pretty windows, I liked the music (as long as it was older than 80 years, newer stuff gives me the heebie-jeebies, dunno why; without the weight of history and tradition it just seems insincere and hollow. At some point I came to the conclusion that that's a reflection less on the quality of the music and more on the content, and I would be creeped out by the older stuff too if it wasn't old), I liked the semi-reliable cast of characters in the congregation, and I adored the building the church was in.

Tangent, here: I have dreams about this building. And in the dreams I think to myself “wow this is some crazy-ass nonsense Inception architecture, this can surely only exist thanks to my awesome imagination” and then I wake up and I realize I'm dreaming about the actual building. I don't think you, dear reader, would find it as baffling as me. You might just think it quirky. But for me it's this endless puzzle. It was full of secret places and hidden, forgotten stuff. I loved it. I should go back, just to wander around; I don't because I don't want people to recognize me.

And I guess I like the youth group, too. I mean, I know I did. I just don't like thinking about it because that's where I met, and became friends with, my ex. Yeah, my stupid ex, who I should forget about, or “get over,” as if there's more getting over to do than coming to the conclusion that romantic relationships aren't for me.

Actually thinking about it, the youth group and her, makes me really upset. And in the stupid human brain mechanics way that's probably poisoned how I feel about church and God and shit. But only a little. It's only like a tint.

Because I never felt anything in church. I mean, I agreed with the minister about stuff. I liked being in a room of people doing the same thing. But the God thing seemed so ancillary. It was a word, an idea, that didn't hold and meaning or relevance. To borrow a phrase from a film, I was like a child who wandered into the middle of a movie and wanted to know what was going on. And I assume that other people derive meaning from church. I assume they feel something when they go to church, because if they didn't, why do they fucking go. It's not like it's convenient or fun. And I can't imagine the church has existed for so goddamn long on the strength of what adjunct enjoyment I derive from it. My feelings are more like the admiration of a museum patron: passive, and fleeting.

Conclusion drawn: I am defective. Except that I don't feel it like I do with other parts of my life about which I have drawn the same conclusion. I don't feel a nagging loss, or a gnawing inadequacy. Actually, I just kind of feel smug about it. People talk about spirituality and I kind of just shrug and hear Buggs Bunny say “what a maroon.”

This has led me to describe myself, in a highly ironic way, as a spiritually dead person. This is my kind of shitty way of saying to someone “I cannot connect with you about this. I neither understand it nor do I wish to understand it. I have no experience in common with you with regards to this subject. Please talk about something else.”

I bring this up, and this is the point I guess, because I want to learn how to meditate, because I keep reading about how it's good practice for people with adhd and depression. But I can't find anything to read about it that doesn't swerve into spiritual shit. It's just such a turn off for me. I can't really accept it into my thoughts because it just seems so insincere and unctuous. Is there anything about meditation for me? Something where I can just say “okay skip the shit about the spirit or the soul or whatever,and I just want to know about breathing right and noticing my body and changing my thoughts.”

Does that exist? Can I have the one without the other? I mean when it comes to churches, I can just go to a church and look around at the building without taking part in the service. I can appreciate running into Jesus or Yeezy at the Whole Foods without losing my shit at them because God didn't kill us all in the flood. I feel like if I just had someone who was willing to cater to me a bit I could get at least some of the benefits without the part that I find distasteful. Fuck yeah that's close-minded. I don't care.

[axiomandidiom-blog]

>the not-so-great attractor

I’ve been bad.

When I got a new shrink who wrote me a script for Vyvanse I was supposed to ask him to refill my other meds.

I did not do that.

I have not taken two of them in a while. Things are... losing their precious, precarious balance. I was unsatisfied with the balance. I guess I want to see if I’m satisfied with the imbalance. I’m also just tired of being a goddamn robot.

But that’s not what I want to talk about really. I want to talk about some gooey stuff. Well, I’ll get to the gooey stuff. I mean sex and other humans, mostly, though the “other humans” bit is a little presumptuous tbph.

One of the previous drugs I was on was an ssri and really destroyed my libido. That was okay, in some ways, and not okay in some other ways. It was okay because I wasn’t particularly focused on that which vexes all men (not the sea, not sums, not the dichotomy of good an evil, not even women, because there are plenty of dudes who don’t swing that way. I mean the essential and eternal war between a man and his own genitals). I am, or have been, somewhat whimsical in my ideas about attraction in other people. I used to say, and this was mostly true, that I could tell I was attracted to someone because when I thought about them later I imagined the scene with Def Leppard playing in the background. Mostly Photograph, but sometimes Rocket or Rock On.

That stopped happening sometime around 2010-2011. So did the other, more conventional markers of attraction, infatuation, whatever you want to call it. I never daydreamed about women, didn’t get crushes, didn’t give people a second glance when walking down the street. And not just that; I forgot what it was like to do and feel those things. I started looking at my peers and trying to figure out what was driving them (I mean, beyond the obvious. see: man’s war with genitals). I saw the outside evidence of people acting out mating rituals and the pursuit of sexual contact (chief subject: my roommate) and could no longer place myself in their shoes in order to try and understand what they were doing or going through.

This was pretty alienating, actually. I imagine it must be something like what an asexual individual experiences; and to some degree I considered myself a de facto asexual for a while. I just didn’t get it.

I’m explaining this like it was simple and that’s the error of narrative and I recognize that. But it wasn’t simple at all. At the time I had no idea of why this change had occurred. I had been on the ssri for like two years by the time I started experiencing this and I ruled it out as an explanation. I have only now come to believe the ssri was to blame because I stopped taking it and some of this stuff is starting to come back, slowly.

But it wasn’t simple because it was wrapped up in a bunch of other stuff. Like: my experience with my ex of so many years ago at this point. I felt like I had touched a hot pan and burned myself, and not only did I not want to touch the pan again and be more careful, or touch the pan again and fuck getting burned because the reward was so much better, or even I realize this is going to burn be but holy fuck I’m so lonely; but I didn’t want to ever touch any pans again, because that shit is stupid, that’s like breaking your leg after jumping off a bridge and getting right back up to jump, I’d rather just microwave my food. The microwave, in this illustration, is a metaphor for masturbation. In case that wasn’t clear. Also I’m still pretty sure being in a relationship is like jumping off a bridge. But more on that later.

I described it this way to two psych professionals, and got two widely different answers. One said “that’s dumb you’re being dumb” and the other said “I don’t think that’s irrational given your circumstances.” So, um, jury on that is still out.

Also I had gained a bunch of weight in the years since. And though I’m no longer a teenager I still have some seriously fucking terrible skin. Like, omg why can’t I just not have acne all the time what am I doing wrong (the answer: I haven’t spoken to a dermatologist in many years). Also, I’m generally pretty uncomfortable with affection and attention. My best explanation for that is that I think I’m horrible and I don’t want to infect other people with my horrible (see >poison).

I’m sort of a miserable specimen, then, in my estimation. And coiled up in that is a deeply held belief that some things are not for me. I will never have some things. That’s just the way of the universe: I will never be a supreme court justice. I will never be asian, middle eastern, or black. That’s okay. There are some other things that I probably won’t ever be, like out-of-my-mind rich or successful, or adventurous, or athletic, or fun at parties. And I’ve made the leap, perhaps appropriate and perhaps not appropriate, to some other stuff that makes people look at me weird when I tell them, like, I don’t think I’ll ever be married. I don’t think I’ll ever have kids, I don’t think I’ll ever be a homeowner, I don’t think I’ll live much longer than 50, if that. And some people want those things and have always wanted them and think I’m strange for not wanting them or believing that they are out of my reach. And I think they’re weird for not understanding (and why should they, I guess) that those aren’t a part of my life, and aren’t my desires or goals.

Or weren’t.

I still don’t think I’ll be a homeowner. I get that it’s an investment and blah blah blah it just doesn’t make sense to me, and I can’t imagine making enough money to actually pay for that.

I’m still pretty sure I’m gonna die before I get particularly old. Unless there’s some kind of super revolution in the kind of healthcare that I require, and I’m not holding my breath about that.

And I’m afraid of kids. I’m afraid of them for two reasons. One of which I will share here, the other of which I’m definitely too afraid to share, ever, with anyone, for any reason, which may or may not be the result of some things that happened to someone who may have been me. plausible deniability

I’m afraid of screwing kids up. And that’s a futile fear, because kids will be screwed up no matter what anyone does. But I’m really, really, constantly angry about the course of my life. I think sometimes there’s an alternate universe where there’s an axiom who’s a doctor of memetics, and who publishes papers about the dissemination and transformation in quanta of thought across networks of people (which I find incredibly interesting), and I know I will never be that person because nobody figured out what was wrong with me while there was still a chance to divert course.

Nobody figured out that I was hiding from everyone all the time. Can’t blame them for that, because I was good at it. But my nerves were too raw. I was so anxious and terrified of my world as a child that I walked around in a fog. It was a fog I put there to separate myself from my own experience. Events in my life taught me that I could hide in the fog, even when I couldn’t hide from what was happening to me in real time, and at least I’d be mentally protected, even if I wasn’t physically protected. And my whole life kind of grew up around the hiding. I have two older siblings and they got into lots of trouble as teenagers. That’s what teenagers are fucking supposed to be doing. But I knew that I could just not do those things I saw my siblings doing, because I saw the consequences of them, and in so doing avoid those consequences. Because I was fucking scared of that shit.

And nobody took me aside and put their hand on my shoulder and said “hey kid, go do bad things. The whole world is set up to try and prevent you from doing things they think are bad, and all of the systems of all the different organizations and hierarchies which you are a part of all want to keep you from doing those things, and that’s the most horrible, selfish thing a group of people can do to an individual, especially if that individual is young and doesn’t have the capacity to reject the group. I think many teenagers go through a time when they’re really shitty to people like their parents because they’re testing the boundaries of their world, and have come to realize that some of what other people have told them to do or not to do “for their own good” wasn’t for the teenager’s own good, it was for the good of the person giving the order.

And I never did that. I was very concerned with maintaining the appearance of being “good” because that meant that people left me alone. And I wanted to be left alone because existing under scrutiny was too horrible. I didn’t want people to see me, and I didn’t want people to know how not-together I was.

I still hide from people. I’m not sure how capable I am of connecting to other humans on an emotional level I am. None of my friendships are like that, even my really close friendships that have lasted for years.

It’s a dangerous thing to say to some kids that the world isn’t going to end if you spend a night in jail, or fail a class, or sneak out in the middle of the night to get stoned, or ask out a close friend and get rejected. But it was what someone should have said to me. Not because I wish I had done those things. But because I want to think I wouldn’t have been so afraid of everything if I had done some of it. I want to believe that I would be better able to make my own decisions now if I had actually experienced the consequences of behavior directly and not vicariously.

Some non-zero amount of bitching about my childhood is a result of a desire to be a different person. And I want to be a different person. That leads me to the other big thing I wish someone had noticed, or found out, or helped with.

And that’s ADHD. I would say I can’t believe I got all the way through school and fucking graduated with undiagnosed ADHD, except that it was so fucking unbelievably awful that I still feel horrible about the whole experience. I still regret it. I still can’t think of myself as having accomplished anything because it feels more like I survived years of torture than it feels like I worked and received recompense for that work. I think about being in school and I just want to cry. I’m so, so angry about it, and to know now that the difference between being able to function academically and being a hopeless, perpetual fuckup hemorrhaging money that didn’t exist was a once-daily pill makes me want to curl up and fucking die.

That’s a feeling that’s exacerbated by what I brought up in my previous post (>writing). I feel like I can’t write the way I used to. And yeah, duh, I’m writing now, and that’s not what I mean. I’m just shitting out thoughts as they come, I’m not composing anything, and I’m able to do that because I’m taking a drug that flips the lightswitch on the “pay attention lmao” part of my brain on for 13 hours at a time. And writing is one of the very few things about my life I feel like makes me worthwhile as a human. And by worthwhile I mean worth keeping around. And if I can’t do it the whole college experience, which I already conceive of a waste, was even more pointless than it was before. And that makes me feel pretty bad.

What was this post about?

Oh, right.

So I don’t like myself. I don’t think I’m a good person, or valuable. And I feel like those are some important factors when it comes to courtship. And I used to be on this drug that killed my libido, so I was okay with ignoring that. But now... I don’t know why this feels like an illicit admission (maybe because it’s so contrary to where my head has been at for so many years)... I kind of want it. The intimacy. Closeness. Sharing. That kind of stuff. Oh, and sex I guess. But I can do without that, and have for some time. I’m holding out for my ten-year anniversary, so I can write a book called “the ten year drought.” idk what that book would be about but it seems like a good title.

Some of this is a reaction to my newly switched-on brain, I think. Where before I’ve just been confronted by alienation when I thought about being close to other people, I dunno, it seems both possible and desirable now. And because none of my close friendships are built on any kind of emotional connection, I don’t have that in my life. And combined with my awakened libido, it seems like, well, why the hell shouldn’t I try and find that sort of connection with a romantic partner? And maybe it’s been so long that I don’t remember what it feels like to burn myself on the stove any more, and it seems like that might be fun, you know, to burn the fuck out of my hand now and again.

SPEAKING OF AWAKENED LIBIDOS, this is when I’m going to talk about the gooey stuff. I told you it was coming (ayy).

You might be forgiven for assuming that when I considered myself de facto asexual, that meant I abstained from self-manipulation. But no. Lord, no. Instead, it just became a chore.

Let my try and explain. Turning off the red neon sex light in my head didn’t stop the other physiological consequences of orgasm or lack thereof. For those readers who are not men, you may not be aware (or may not have put two-and-two together) that semen doesn’t just go nowhere if it doesn’t, uh, get used. There is, I think, some point (look I’m not a scientist) where after a while of infrequent emissions the little foreman down there in the prostate tells the factory workers at the testes to quit making so much product it’s not going anywhere, but fuck me if I know when that is. Because until that point it’s gotta go somewhere. It’s gotta go somewhere. If I were to cease, uh, disposing of it in a regular fashion, on my own schedule and terms, it would find its own damn way of releasing. Usually this happens during a dream of some kind. There are some problems with this:

1.) mess. You must now wash your sheets and bedclothes. Good job.

2.) disruption to sleep for the above reason. Sleep is important to me. More important before the stimulants, I guess, because I wake up 4-5 times a night anyway now.

3.) disturbing dreams. Sometimes they’re fun disturbing. Most of the time they aren’t. What amateur dream theory I understand is from my meager reading of Freud and that guy was full of shit about a lot of stuff, but this makes sense so I still believe it an will repeat it here: your id, aka the triforce of power, just wants release from tension. Which is not to say it doesn’t want tension. I wants the tension, and the release. Which, according to Freud, is why people have dreams about death; the lead up and then the death itself is the ultimate tension and release fantasy your brain can construct. And the penultimate tension/release is sex. Duh. But the id isn’t picky. Id doesn’t believe in rules or norms or values or anything like that. Id just wants its release. And, honestly, if whatever strange brew it cooks up in the dark recesses of your skull upset your conscious, rational mind (your ego, the triforce of courage), well, fine, cause that makes the tension (and thus the release) stronger, and because fuck your ego, id hates that guy.

4.) As actual, physical releases go (i.e. not psychological, as discussed above) this is a pretty garbage one. Look, not every orgasm is going to be good, But this one is fucking soaked in shame and disappointment. And fuck if I know if this is what it’s like for other people, but I get just a little lucid at the end of a wet dream. Like, there’s a QTE segment, where shit slows down, and I can let the sequence play out or I can press ‘a’ to try and prevent it from occurring. Hint: pressing a does not work. But I don’t know that when I’m fucking asleep. So I press ‘a’ like a fucking idiot and ruin my own shame-dream orgasm and end up with sticky sheets anyway. This is not fun. No part of this is fun.

Now, I think I’ve mentioned here before, I have problems with dreams anyway. Every few months (and I always think, well, surely this is the last time, I must now be free of them) I have a dream about my ex. And if I time this wrong, the dream gets weird and sexual. A dream about my ex is guaranteed to fuck up my day at least a little, and a sex dream about my ex is just throwing my whole week away. Thanks id, you little shit.

So, that’s a reason not to do things that way.

There are some others. For one, having an orgasm feels pretty good, at least if you do it right. And at various times in my life I’ve been starved of good feelings. That the orgasm is free and readily available (for the most part) is what leads it to being such an addictive drug. And afterwards, a man (I have somewhat independently verified this with others of my sex) has some beneficial psychological effects; it’s also a way to regulate your hormones, and relieve stress and anxiety. And let me get this in here, when a man does without orgasm, at least in my experience, reality warps to compensate. Like, suddenly, day 3+ of no orgasm, skirts get shorter. They just do. Suddenly women are tying back their hair, and their shirts just don’t cover anything anymore. And everybody is wearing leggings. And suddenly people are smiling at you and blushing and they smell good and their eyelashes are so damn long.

AND I HATE THIS PART. THE TENSION IS UNBEARABLE. It’s unbearable, maybe, because of what I’ve written above--that I have internalized the belief that some things are not for me. And maybe, actually I’m pretty sure, that this is why men chase women. Because, unless they are doing what I do, the whole damn world is fluttering eyelashes and jorts. And they can’t fucking think about anything else. Hence, the war. Because either you do something about it or life is a sex-crazed fever dream.

This is how I feel about desire. It feels like affliction. I know that’s messed up. I know I’m messed up.

And when I was taking that ssri, I wasn’t attracted to people, even when this happened. Skirts didn’t get shorter. Skin wasn’t suddenly everywhere. I just felt awful. It just felt like I was in the hallway in Inception and the van was turning over and over. It was like what eating is like now that I take a stimulant; you know you’re hungry because you’re being mean to everyone and everything everyone says to you feels like a personal slight. And so you go get some food because you need to eat and it just looks like dogshit and it smells like dogshit and you put it in your mouth and you chew and you’re mad about it and you feel like a fucking chimp in a tophat dancing for a vaudeville audience. It sucks. It’s not cool.

But back to what I was saying about regulating one’s orgasms. I know that if you are a woman, the rules and boundaries are different, but men have a limited number of orgasms available to them in a given time period. See the little foreman and the factory workers.

Given this I don’t think it’s unreasonable to conclude that frequent (this I will leave to the imagination), managed orgasms are good policy.

Good policy, as anyone familiar with governments will well understand, has a way of becoming bad practice when it intersects with the real world. And in this case, the reality of the situation is porn.

I’ll delve into this some other time but for now let it be said that porn is horrible. And It isn’t necessary, in the strictest sense. But I found it expedient in my former circumstances; i.e. perpetually single and with a poor libido. Masturbating, as I have said above, became a chore. As in, “well now it’s X:XX o’clock and I guess I should get down to business,” even while I was also thinking “I really don’t want to do this, this is gross, I am gross.”

And while in another person that might be enough to stop the whole process, not with me. I dunno why. Sue me. Typing it out makes it seem like it was something I could just choose not to do, and sometimes I did, but most of the time I didn’t.

Now, porn is a bottomless endeavor. I had a professor who I always thought was kind of a shithead talk about porn, for men at least, as being an expression of the fantasy that any woman is available to a man.

This is problematic for a bunch of reasons, but I didn’t invent the primate brain, I just have one, and it doesn’t really do what I want it to most of the time. Or like ever.

So one does not find a quantum of pornography and decide that, yep, that’s that, this is all I need. Again, we’re talking about that fucker id (and I think here there’s even less basis for Freud’s model of personality but fuck it I’m on a roll and also not particularly educated) and he doesn’t care about your rules. He just wants more. And again, id doesn’t want just the mere release, id wants tension before the release. Id wants the lead up as much as the actual orgasm, if not more (as they tend to inform each other; this is true as far as I can tell for both men and women but I’m not an expert). So the male experience of pornography (this I have also somewhat independently verified) is one of seeking and evaluating. This is, as far as I can tell, what tabbed browsing was invented for. One looks, and looks, and looks (it is about 90% visual) for something that has that certain spark to it. There is no describing the spark. Whatever you have found either suits or it doesn’t. I’m sure if Freud were here with me he’d have something to say about what people look for and why but that guy is fucking dead so fuck him. There is a great deal of quite automatic selection that goes on.

Yes, after the fact, one may find and describe patterns to the searching. Without descending too far into the vulgar universe of pornography and its associated vernacular, I’ll try and give some examples. I am attracted to faces that have robust lower lips, dark hair, and perhaps a gap in the teeth. I don’t know why. I just do. It’s just what I like. Those are things I think are fairly specific to me; I know my friends like other things in their faces.

And now that I’ve found some nice video of a dark-haired, gap-toothed, robust-lipped girl folding her laundry and pairing her socks, I’m good right? Wrong. Depending on the strength of the suitability of this video, it might remain useful (i.e. functional i.e. qualified for release) for like three or four uses, and then one day I’ll look at it and the evaluative bit of my id will say “nope lol” and I’ll skip over it. Sometimes, and this too is common, in months or years following, I might remember (by association) this video of the sock-pairing and check it out again, and it might have regained some of its suitability. And this is the mystery of the brain. I can’t explain why something regains its power this way.

But I know pretty well why it loses it, and that’s the goddamn dopamine circuit in the brain. There are a few qualities of the primate brain that I think are truly evil, in the sense that they are the genesis of evil behavior--not callousness, not antisocial action, not violence, evil, evil in the sense of wrong action which the brain does not recognize as wrong action--and they are, in no particular order, rationalization to reduce cognitive dissonance, pattern recognition, and the diminishing returns of the reward circuit. If you look at those and think, “gee axiom those are the reasons humans have been able to do anything at all,” then congrats, you’ve managed to realize what the Buddha meant when he said that existence is suffering, and that it is a man’s own mind, and not his enemy or his foe, which lures him to evil ways. I wonder if it’s worth it sometimes. We should have stayed in the trees, maybe. We sure as shit shouldn’t have invented the internet.

But I digress. What I’m saying here is that the reward circuit and the amorality of the id is what drives the obsessive searching involved in pornography. It’s why the addict, and I guess I’m an addict, spends so much time looking relative to the time spent using. Watching people have sex tricks our monkey brain, and the monkey brain gets tired of the same things day in and day out, particularly when the pleasing release of brain chemicals is so dramatic.

The ease of obtaining the pleasing brain chemicals (once a man gets to my age, he is likely to be quite practiced at obtaining an orgasm in one way or another) and the swiftness with which a quantum of pornography becomes tarnished with regards to suitability lead the consumer of pornography down greater and greater rabbit holes seeking stimulation. And, if the user is paying attention, he will find that this isn’t at all necessary. But, and I can’t speak for anyone else here, I know I’m never paying attention when I masturbate. Thinking ruins the experience. RUINS IT. Thinking leads me to analyze what I’m watching and there’s nothing more boner-killing to me than thinking about the clashing figures I’m watching as people. And yes, that’s horrible. And yes, that means I should stop. Because if I object to what I’m seeing morally, then I should, should apply that to my actions in consuming that media. BUT I DON’T AND I DON’T KNOW ANYONE WHO DOES THAT, EVER, ABOUT ANYTHING, INCLUDING BUT CERTAINLY NOT LIMITED TO THE CONSUMPTION OF PORN.

And that’s why humans are garbage.

When I say that it isn’t at all necessary what I mean is that the entire exercise of pornography is extraneous. Pornography is not required for orgasm. It’s just expedient. It’s just easy. It’s just what men, and me, have learned to do because it feels good, it’s pleasing, and it’s (in the sense outlined above RE: regulation) necessary to living.

And here’s the problem with all of that: there’s no alternative. I mean, okay, there is. There’s a bunch. Like, I could just use my imagination. But that’s like saying “dude you could just think about a story, reading is for idiots,” and to that I say, well, yeah, I could. But if it’s just me, if there’s nobody else, then the story I come up with has no purpose. It has no boundaries. There is no reason to present narrative challenges or to think about word selection because it isn’t a story if it’s in my head, it’s just feelings, it’s just ideas, it’s amorphous and ephemeral. It’s the same as anything else; it’s even the same as an orgasm in the greater sense. Yeah you can do it yourself. But it’s way, way nicer for someone to do it for you.

But the niceness of it is an illusion. It’s a total illusion. Because I can achieve, and have achieved, many an orgasm without the assistance of another person. And, at the moment, at least, it’s not like it’s hard to do that, at all. More on this in a second.

But for me, and for people who for one reason or another have this in common with me, the most simple, occam’s razorish approach--to go find another person to do this stuff with--seems, or is, completely unattainable, because of whatever real or imagined physical or emotional problems we perceive within ourselves.

And because nobody taught me this shit. Nobody. When my parents talked to me about sex, they were like “hey axiom let me tell you about sex” and I was like “I mean, if it’ll make you feel better,” and they were all “when two people love each other blah blah blah,” and I was like “kay whatevs,” and in my mind I was thinking “this love thing is not for you, this sex thing is not for you, this world is not for you” because that’s how I feel about everything good or nice, especially the good or nice things that have the potential to be horrible and damaging.

And there was no class in school where the teacher said “look axiom, here’s the thing about orgasms and hormones and the way it makes your body feel and the way you’re going to want to act,” and there was no teacher who said “this is a safe and healthy way to approach being with another person, and this is a safe and healthy way to approach being with yourself.”

And I sure as shit never experienced a setting where someone said “these things you feel don’t make you a monster,” and even if they had, I wouldn’t believe them, because rape exists, and because abusive relationships exist, and because people fight and get divorced and are shitty to each other. Instead, all I feel is shame. I feel ashamed about sex, I feel ashamed about orgasms, I feel ashamed the other parts of me, and all I want to do is conceal them. This is perhaps more unique to me, specifically; see >writing again, and perhaps for that matter every post on this goddamn shitfest of a tumblr. AND NONE OF THAT STOPS ME FROM WANTING IT.

So I’m driven, I think like many people are, to conceal my behavior about sex and masturbation and orgasms. And because it’s hidden, it gets thrown into a pile with a bunch of other hidden things, and that’s why pornography is so awful, why it’s so predatory and nefarious, because it’s hiding there where you can only find it if you’re hiding, and because nobody is looking, or rather, everyone is pretending not to look, then it becomes evil. There is no regulation of pornography (well, except for laws about ages of consent and whatnot), there is structure in place to teach me how to use it responsibly, and there is no structure in place to teach people how to make it responsibly, either. It’s just a hole where damaged, hurting people get thrown into, and there’s sadists down there waiting to continue to damage and hurt you, and to keep you from leaving. And yeah, there’s money there, and that’s part of the problem, but it wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn’t so vile and exploitative. It’s possible, and I say this as a truly brainwashed capitalist, to make money and still do the right thing. It is possible. It just isn’t possible to make as much money as you would if you were doing the wrong thing. And nobody makes that choice. It’s not even a choice, really.

This is what’s been eating me up about orgasms, at least while I was taking the ssri. But I stopped. And now, not only is my libido recovering, but, uh, the... how to put this delicately (as if I’ve been delicate so far)... nerve connections in my genitalia, which previously (because of the ssri) took a lot of precise stimulation to coax into orgasm, now do so essentially instantly. I got no idea how long this will last.

None of my previous habits work or make sense. A lot of the above is predicated on there being a build up. Mr. Id likes his tension and release, like I said. The more tension, the stronger the release.

And look, alright, spoilers or whatever, this is going to be graphic. But I used to be able to get hard and keep it that way for a while without achieving orgasm. I’ll try and illustrate: lets say masturbating is like riding a bike down a hill into a lake. After years of frustration on this ssri, wherein I would get on the bike and ride down the hill part way and then have to stop because of a flat tire, then looking wistfully at the lake at the bottom and being angry at myself for not knowing how to perform basic bike maintenance, I not only figured out how to make it all the way down the hill (under rather specific circumstances; like, the bike needs to follow this path, and there needs to be some music, and I’ve got to choose a hill that has enough clover or whatever) I got good at, once I’d neared the lake at the bottom, veering away from the lake and riding up to the top again. True, the lake at the bottom was the eventual goal, but the sensation of the wind as I rode down the hill were also nice, and nice enough themselves that I would get on my bike just to ride downhill sometimes, over and over again, and only splash in the lake when I had something else I needed to do.

This is what the (>smut) post is about, really. There was a lot of hill riding there and not any splashing, and, as mentioned above, this really twisted my perception of reality around. Really, really badly.

And when I say years of frustration above, well, I’ll just tell you what I mean. I first started taking an ssri (not the one I ended up with by they all act pretty similarly) I was dating my ex. And I was like 19, and there was not a lot of splashing going on for me. There was, I hope, for her. And we certainly did a lot of bike riding, in various configurations. But, I dunno. It felt bad not to splash. Like, really bad. For both of us, I think. I felt like I was broken. And she felt like I wasn’t into her. And neither of us knew how to talk about it or to fix it. I’m not going to say that’s what happened to us. I know it isn’t. But it didn’t help. It hurt, a lot.

But now I don’t ride down the hill. I splash, yes, but it happens as soon as I get on the bike. It’s like I’m 14 and I’ve never ridden a bike before (lol 14, axiom? you never rode a bike until you were 14?) and I get on the bike and I push down on a pedal and I fucking crash and burn right there at the top of the hill, and the sprinklers turn on and I’m lying there in a heap getting sprinkled. It sucks. Well, it sucks in the sense that I’m used to enjoying the ride down the hill, sometimes over and over again. And I’m used to splashing into the lake when I’m done.

But there ain’t no hill no more. And there ain’t no lake.

The upside is that I’m done in like 15 minutes, even when I really don’t want to be. And MAYBE THAT’S WHAT’S NORMAL. I don’t mean the, uh, sensitivity, or my sense of balance or whatever I’m supposed to be comparing things with in my over-labored, pointless bike-riding metaphor. I mean maybe it’s normal to want to go for a ride and get a little wet, and then be done with it pretty quick and move on to something else.

I want, I want to be able to do this. I want it not to feel deeply unsatisfying, because even though riding around on the hill over and over again and splashing into the lake is satisfying it’s full of such dreadful moral problems and it’s a waste of my motherfucking time and it isn’t necessary and, honestly, I should just find someone who wants to ride a tandem bike with me, and even if I crash real quick, maybe that someone won’t mind and will keep riding with me for a while until both of us get to the lake at the bottom.

I just don’t think that will happen to me. I just don’t think it’s real or possible for me.

And I don’t know what the fuck to do with all my time that I used to spend riding. I’d say “well axiom you can write now :^)” but all I can seem to write is unfocused, rambling nonsense like this here blog post.

FUCK ME (PLEASE FUCK ME) I HATE THIS (THIS IS WHAT I AM) I DON’T WANT TO BE ALONE (I NEVER WANT TO BE WITH ANYONE AGAIN)

Stop the ride I want to get off.

[axiomandidiom-blog]

>drinking

I’ve never been drunk. I never will be drunk because I’ll never drink. Drinking is bad, I know that. I know that if I was a drink I wouldn’t want somebody to drink me. I say that like I’ve never been a drink, and I have. I have been a drink, and nobody drank me, and I’m thankful for that in the sense that I’m thankful I’ve never been struck by lightning. I don’t really know what being struck by lightning would be like, I just have a general idea that it would be shitty, and hurt. But I want to get hurt sometimes. I dunno why. Not because of the attention. I hate attention. I just think that sometimes being hurt is right. But the difference here is being struck by lightning doesn’t make you shoot lightning at people, Snake Eater aside.

But I think about drinking. And I don’t know why I think about it. I wish I wouldn’t. I know it wouldn’t make me feel good. I know it would make me want to die, probably. To say nothing of the bottle I’d leave behind. And there’d be other consequences, too. Like if I really drank, other parts of my life would fall apart.

So why do I want to drink? Why do I seek out information on drinking, why do I consume media related to drinking? Why do these things attract me? It’s not like I’ve ever drank anything.

I mean, okay, I’ve had champagne. I had champagne once. It was bitter and bubbly and left a taste I liked. And then when I wasn’t drinking it I felt really shitty. Like, for years I felt shitty. And so now I don’t want to drink champagne.

But I want to drink... beer, I guess. ABV doesn’t matter, as long as it’s over a certain threshold. And I think about drinking when I see beer, like when people bring their beer into my place of work where I can look at it. And I’m like, You can’t look at the beer, because they’ll know. They’ll know that about you. And nobody can know that about you because it’s bad to drink beer. But that’s all I think about it. I don’t think, What about the beer, axiom? How does the beer feel about you drinking it? These people don’t drink their beer, they know they aren’t supposed to drink it, everybody knows that. They feel it. They look at beer and they skim right over it. They go straight to their scotch and their vodka.

And we all agree, me included, that scotch and vodka are okay. But I don’t want them. I think about vodka and scotch and I guess I just see that I’d have to engage with them, that I’d have to put in the work to get something out of it. And maybe (I’m just spitballing here I don’t know how I feel I’ve never drank vodka or scotch (or beer) so I don’t understand what or why) I know that vodka won’t be scared of me, and scotch won’t do what I ask (is that really why?? I’m disgusting) or maybe I just know vodka and scotch are okay and that’s why I don’t want them, because I’m not okay, and okay things aren’t for me.

And I might be giving myself too much credit. Maybe it isn’t about how I feel about drinking. Maybe it’s just the drink. Maybe it isn’t my brain doing the drinking, but my mouth. And I can’t control what my mouth wants, except that it wants beer and I can’t give it beer. And I hope (I wish) that maybe I’ll have some vodka by accident one day (or scotch, look; I don’t know) and I’ll discover that it isn’t about the mouth so much. I mean, the mouth can enjoy the vodka too, independent of whether it’s vodka, but the part of the vodka that’s vodka is what’s important. And then I’ll be okay. I mean, I hope I’ll be okay, or be distracted enough that I won’t be obsessing about beer or whatever. As long as I never get any beer, that is.

I can’t tell if it’s worth pursuing the idea of vodka in a beer bottle. I mean, it wouldn’t be a beer bottle. It would be, like, kind of similar to a beer bottle. Similar enough that I can be okay with vodka, but not a terrible person because of the beer.

And look, I still think about champagne. And I think, you know? I didn’t really like that. I didn’t really like drinking that, it didn’t taste good, it didn’t feel good. I mean, it did taste good and feel good. But it wasn’t so profound that the hangover, or whatever you want to call it, was worth it. It didn’t feel worth it. It didn’t feel good to feel so awful. And I kind of just assume that vodka (or, hey, scotch for that matter) would feel awful too. And I just can’t make myself do it like other people do (or they don’t make themselves, because vodka is what they want, they don’t want beer because they’re not messed up like I am).

None of this was about me. I’m talking about a friend. I’m talking about a character in a story. I’m talking about nothing. Forget it.

[axiomandidiom-blog]

>writing

Writing is hard now and it makes me want to cry.

It wasn’t easy before. I don’t mean to make it sound like it was easy to write. It was hard as fuck. But... It worked somehow. If I could make the circumstances right I could sink into a cloud of words and string them together with rhythm and sound in a way that, even if the content wasn’t what I wanted or the piece needed, at least had some value. It left me with a bunch of unused sentences, but that’s alright; I have documents full of that kind of thing, there for me to use if I want to.

But I can’t do that any more. The only thing that’s changed is Vyvanse, and so that’s what I’m blaming. But I hate everything I’ve written lately. I hate hate hate hate hate it. And it makes me feel useless and valueless and awful. It’s like--before, I was a shitter and didn’t have anything together in my life but at least I could sort of justify my own continued existence by the thought that maybe I could write something one day that other people might read and enjoy and then that would be okay, like that work would somehow make up for all the bullshit elsewhere.

And maybe some stuff in my life is a little better these days. I remember to do things, I have bills in line and I’m more cognizant of money (if not better at managing it); and I can go to work and do my job and come home and do stuff still.

But I can’t justify it any more. I can’t think “well, I’m a scrub but at least I might publish something one day” because I don’t think that any more.

And I get that other people have to justify themselves in other ways, but I’ve fallen back on the writing thing as that which confers value onto my existence for so long that without it I’m defaulting to “my existence has no value” and that’s not a good feeling.

If I can’t write I don’t know why I’m doing any of this any more. I don’t know why I have a job if I can’t write. I don’t know why I buy food and eat it if I can’t write. I don’t know how to interact with other humans if I can’t write. What am I doing here? 

It feels strange. I’m not confronted with the soul-crushing failure that I’ve been confronted with in my day-to-day living with adhd. I’m not failing at the little stuff, at least, I don’t think I am. When I forget, I remember sooner and with more time to fix my mistakes.

But who fucking cares?

I don’t know why I feel like I need to justify myself. Actually, that’s not true. I do. It’s because of the kidney transplant.

I feel like I owe it to my dad to be a success. Like Dragonheart or something. Fuck that’s a shit movie. But I’m the kid who gets half of the dragon’s heart and so it’s up to me to not be a shithead; but I am a shithead and some day dennis quaid is gonna come kill me and it’s gonna be sad because my shit life wasn’t worth what that majestic dragon’s life was worth.

Man I shouldn’t have seen that as a kid because now that I type it that’s exactly how I feel.

But that is how I feel.

I keep doing stuff because other people want me to, or I feel like they want or expect me to. And by stuff I mean “making decisions and living my life.” And no, the answer isn’t “live for yourself asshole,” because if it were up to me I wouldn’t be alive. I’d have let me die when I was in fifth grade; because things before then weren’t great but things after then have definitely been poisoned for me, and I regret all of it.

I just feel so pointless, and doubly so without writing. Is it worth being a fuckup? This is the problem with results-oriented thinking; it’ll only be worth the fuckup if I publish something that feels great, and if I don’t feel great about it then it won’t have been worth it; and if I don’t do it at all it’ll be just another node in the narrative of fucking up.

Is this why people have kids? To make them feel like their lives matter? I don’t want to have kids because I don’t like who I am and I didn’t like being a kid. I just feel like a big ball of mistakes that I don’t know how to fix and nobody else knew what to do with.

Mr. beerbelly beerbelly, get these mutts away from me: you know, I don’t find this stuff amusing any more.