This is gonna be some personal writin’ here, so be wary of abrupt topic shifts and totally pointless rambling. For instance: “genius of love” is stuck in my head right now. No clue why. Doesn’t seem that relevant.
I wanted to make some kind of statement about “sustained naivety” but I soon realized that that was just a bullshit phrase coined by my detox-ing brain. I told someone (Michelle, actually, Hey!) that the reason I bum cigarettes from people instead of buying my own is because at least if I get addicted I’ll have a reason to force myself to socialize. She told me I seemed perfectly charming and friendly, which I guess at that moment I was. Actually these past few weeks I’ve been thinking about that, just because I have been sociable and friendly and it’s been an upward trend for some time. It gets weirder because I’ve been hanging out with my ex (way more than I ought’ve) and thinking even more about the dynamic between us that caused me to decide it was a good idea we’re not together (sorta kinda gettin’ over her). It was at a party a while back where she showed up stone tired and at least somewhat fucked up on some drugs and she proceeded to interrupt every conversation I tried to have with another person. I realized later that this sort of thing was a theme throughout the entire time I lived with her and that I’d had a lot of trouble getting out and feeling like I could meet someone or anyone on my own and not be a function of the relationship I was in with her. Well, not entirely the right way to put it, it just felt like I was constantly hanging out with her friends and not really hanging out with my own. Even when I tried to make my friends they soon would meet her and she’d be very sociable and offer to do things and ingratiate herself through hanger-on-ship or bumming or whatever it is that you call it. People do stuff for her and she knows it and I don’t think she entirely understands why, but she is totally fine with taking advantage of that.
I want to try to wrap the ex thing up because that’s not really what I’m here for. My point was that my ex socializes in a totally different way, and for totally different reasons than I do, and having her back in town after I’ve found some ability to feel independent of her as a person has given me a lot of chance to contrast myself. I ain’t here to lie, I got problems. I used to have social phobia something fierce, and even now I list a day spent inside and away from anyone else so that the only talking I hear is myself mumbling to myself as a perfectly cool and okay day. People terrify/ied me because I would basically sit there and imagine them thinking or saying bad things about me before I opened my mouth and then when I did try to say something I would realize that I had nothing to say anyway. I usually have nothing to say. When I’m sitting around and being quiet, that’s because I either have no real opinion on whatever the subject of conversation is or I’m thinking of something else entirely. I don’t know if this comes across very well/often but I’m a very spacey person. I can pay attention and I do pay attention, but if I have any free time at all, I’m usually thinking about something else. I feel like the internet is terrible and enabley for this kind of short-shrifted daydreaming. I spend all my time reading news articles about all manner of things or checking status updates form like three dozen people whose lives I’m only marginally invested in. The problem comes from labeling this behavior, as it’s absolutely not ADHD or any actual illness (drastically over-diagnosed, though, because it features similar patterns) because the problem isn’t paying attention per se, but rather investment into the world around you. I don’t put a lot of investment in. I think this is probably a coping method, especially when you live in an unpleasant situation. Learning how to divest from the situation, especially if you can’t control it, can be one of the few ways to preserve emotional homeostasis.
I’m not really sure where I was going with that one. As you can see, I’m not thoroughly invested in writing this (at least, not as much as I was earlier) and I decided to go on a tangent where I thought about what I just wrote and evaluated it as whether the model fit my recent experiences and sort of translated some emotions into color and all that weird little squiggly brain shit that makes no sense examined rationally but perfect sense metaphorically. Either right brained or left brained thinking, which I don’t really remember which is which (can’t recall the exactitude of emic and etic, either). Sometimes I write song lyrics. I repeat myself often. In reality, of course, this is unacceptable. We must present a coherent, cohesive, comprehensible consciousness, free from free form (well, now I am really dicking around) representations of reality. We delimit expressions of actual brain function patterns to art, because it does not logically fit anywhere else, but most importantly, it only has relevance to the brain that produced the pattern. Like I’ve written before, art is a message, an emotional conveyance from one brain to another. The difference between “good” art and “bad” art, no matter what the ridiculous debate claims, is hinged on how well that emotional message gets conveyed. A “good” song is one that sounds good and presents a emotional message in a way that coheres to the lyrics and creates an outlet for someone to say “This. This is how I feel about this. I cannot say it in words in a way that feels like it truly presents the way I feel about it, but this song sounds just like how I feel.”
So maybe what I’m saying is that thinking artistically makes you a brooding loner? I dunno. I’m not exactly a brooding loner. Actually, I don’t think anyone would tell me so. I am both bad at brooding and bad at the loner part. I used to be more of a brooding loner, but I got kind of sick of it and realized it was stupid because all I did while being a brooding loner was communicate with other people on the internet (abstract way to say I spent most of my time in my underwear posting on and getting banned from internet forums) and feel lonely. Nowadays when I want to brood, I at least do it at bars surrounded by people so I can listen to them talk and feel better. Speaking of bars, I love New Orleans. I love all the scenes, I love/hate that everyone here knows everyone else. I love that there’s something to do pretty much every weekend, even if I’m at least a little bitter about it because I don’t get a whole lot of weekends where I can sit around and feel fat (got yo ice cream, tubbo?). I never want to leave, but I desperately need to get away because I still haven’t been out of the city for a little over a year. I’m worried that when I go back to the Bay Area for Christmas everything is gonna be weird and out of place. I’m worried that there’s not really going to be a bar scene and everyone is going to look at me funny for asking and the drinks are gonna be like bay area expensive and no one is going to be holding any parties and everything will be different from here, basically. I know why! It’s like moving, except I’m only going on a vacation. It just feels kind of like it does when I move because I’m supposed to be going back to a culture that I’m not real familiar with any more. Going to Montana never feels like that because I just go to be with my family and take a lot of naps. Going back to CA, I’m trying to go and meet up with a bunch of people I haven’t seen in a year and do stuff (trader fucking joes) that I can’t do here, except I’m totally used to not being able to do them here, so it’s sort of special.
I just got a new phone in the mail so now I have no more interest in writing this. Gonna activate this motherfucker and then take a shower and dress up to go to Taco Bell. Happy Halloween!
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