Feel Bad, Inc.
My people are crazy. I know this, and in many ways I actually prefer it. The problem is that when you live full-time in crazytown, it’s way too easy to forget that’s where you stay. Your world gets all inverted, and crazy seems normal, and super-crazy only seems mildly odd. You start to question your own way of being, in relation to the madness, and then you feel badly about yourself because all of your sense-making and logic gleans no positive response in crazytown.
A friend of mine mentioned that she was frustrated this weekend, because no one she was talking to seemed to be making any sense. And I reminded her that our friends are usually pretty drunk and half of them are also high whenever we speak to them. And we’re usually drinking too. It’s not like we’re at a meeting of the rational-thought society, exactly. And that’s without even taking the crazy into account. And the crazy is in full fucking effect. We’ve got your anti-social, your socially awkward, your bi-polar, your raging alcoholics, your compulsive liars, your irritating braggarts, your garden-variety misfit/loners, your megalomaniacs, your mixed-message giving fuckwits, and a whole other assortment of emotionally stunted nutbags.
And I am not complaining about this shit, because it usually doesn’t get boring. We’ve got the artists, the muscians, the people who throw the good parties, the people who act out in ways that boggle the imagination. We’ve got the storytellers, the attention-seekers, the sexually promiscuous adventurers. We’ve got the people who do the things I want to talk about the next day.
We don’t have the stay-at-home moms who sit on facebook at 10 p.m. talking about how they’re going to bed after they’re done baking tomorrow’s casserole and wiping their drippy progeny’s noses. We don’t have guys who spend all weekend rearranging their toolsheds and rating their top five breakfast cereals. And honestly, that is usually the way I prefer it.
But then again, there’s a point where I am standing in the street at 2 a.m. next to a trash can, and the very last of my friends has abandoned me to the clutches of a fucking weird-ass known psycho stalker who is trying to chat me up while wearing a helmet for no reason I can ascertain, and I realize that I may need to orient my life somewhat differently. That, you know, perhaps this isn’t exactly the result that I was looking for from my evening. That my people are crazy and entertaining, but they can also be unreliable. That there’s got to be some balance between keeping ourselves entertained, and this helmet-wearing freak-a-tron who is now somehow purring, right out loud. That a life with some reliability and some constancy might not be all bad.
And there’s also the realization that throwing your own small supply of sanity into the crazytown well, and wrangling with the same issues and nonsense for months on end without getting anywhere, that’s a recipe for feeling bad. I do love an unwinnable war, and to tackle some giant projects, but I tend to lose sight of the basic underpinnings of our social circle. We’re all fucking nuts. We’re in our late 30s and early 40s and we’re all apparently totally incapable of maintaining successful adult relationships. We don’t know how to act with ourselves and with each other. Somehow 2+2=magenta cornflakes in our world. And it’s addictive, and it’s exciting, and it’s something to play with and look at and talk about and it exhilarates me, but it exhausts me even more. It leaves me feeling empty and broken and disoriented. It makes me question myself, when I am not quite sure that’s whose way of being I should be questioning. It is not making me happy.
I just need a break. I need a time-out. I need to not be in this same place. I think that the all-access pass into my world is about to expire for some motherfuckers, and I think that’s a good thing. I am just too tired.
Life. It’s such a fucking bunch of histrionic bullshit and seems to require way more navigational skills than I have acquired in my journey thus far.
Now, where’s my helmet?
Filed under: anti-socialism, friends o' mine, out and about | Comments (6)6 Responses to “Feel Bad, Inc.”
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Myself and My Woman(TM) are going for an 8 day cruise in August. Not exactly my sort of thing (especially since I developed the allergy to sunlight – not heat, just the light *Rolls eyes*) but the advantage of being on a ship far away means that there is no easy way for me to access the Internet to check on emails, no way I can do any work and nothing to worry about in the Real World. So I will be forced to actually have a proper, relaxing holiday. Oh yeah, I plan to try out lots of cocktails in the bar too.
Finally, let it be known here in case I do not come back – I am toying with the idea of getting a photo of myself standing on the rails at the front of the ship with my hands raised shouting “I’m king of the world!” like on Titanic. Therefore, if I am reported lost at sea in august, it is probably my own fault.
Seriously SBG – get your holiday time in the next month or so and get far away from everything so that you HAVE to take a proper holiday.
And Dim, I think it’s time to put some fangs on your avatar.
And yes, I do really, really need to get away. I am actually looking forward to 13 hours on the road as much as I am anything else. I love a good road trip.
You’d think your request for the boat is now so common that they’d have something to lash you to the boat with, so you don’t fall overboard.