My Whole Expanse I Cannot See…

it’s really getting difficult to totally fucking suck at everything.

So, I’m back from the hospital, again. I didn’t explain it clearly, but I was in the hospital all last weekend until Monday evening with a nasty stomach virus. I felt good when I got home, but for whatever reason, I started coughing and by Tuesday evening I was back in the hospital with respiratory issues. I would rather break each finger individually than have trouble breathing. At some point, no machine or medicine is going to keep me breathing, so I always get nervous when breathing feels difficult.

At any rate, I’m out and feel better. I’m trying to decide what to do today, whether to stay in or drag myself out. I’m not exactly sure. For a moment I thought about going to see Death Race or Star Wars: The Clone Wars, but life is too fucking short. There has to be something else. Life is bigger.

For a very long time, he felt as if he didn’t quite fit his life. Somewhere along the way he fell through the dusty and cliche looking-glass, he ended up in a familiar place that just felt wrong. It was difficult for him to see exactly what made the world feel so strange, perhaps he was afraid to look too closely. Afraid to pick at a world that might shatter and become something worse. Still, he knew enough to know that things just weren’t right, not for him. In all of his travels, no matter how grand or exciting, there was a heaviness in his chest, a haze in his head. He felt a longing to be somewhere else almost every waking minute, but he couldn’t particularly say where. He felt alone in every crowd. He slept little, sleep doesn’t easily find one so ill-contented. He was the happiest dour fellow around, he filled the dark with showy false light. For a long time he wandered, lost in melancholy, not really knowing how to begin what he eventually began.

Okay, I’m sick of writing about being lonely and unhappy, lost. It’s SO EASY to be lonely and unhappy, you just have to lie down and wait for it. Breathing is more difficult. This always becomes so clear in the hospital, when I’m always half-afraid I won’t get to leave again. So, here I am in the hospital, looking past my MacBook out on to the shitty skyline of Tampa and I don’t want to be here. Right now, and really for the first time, I know exactly where I want to be. I’ve known in a broad sense for a few years, but honestly, getting there could seem just as frightening as not getting there. I found that place of contentment and lost that loneliness, but I fucked up twice.  I let things scare me off. I regret letting that happen. I let life feel overwhelming without trying hard enough to steer things right. Not anymore. Not if I have anything to do with it. What I want is not always easy, but looking out this window with a needle in my neck, knowing everything I know at this moment, I’m really not afraid of the rest that scared me so. I’m writing this to the most important person in my life. I love you, more than anyone I’ve ever met. I’ll say it here, I’ll say it to you, I’ll say it anywhere. I don’t care. I was definitely afraid to be with you and not be with you, both at different times, but not anymore. I’m not afraid to say I want you, you’re everything I ever wanted to find. I want to write during the day and fall asleep at night with your head on my shoulder. I want us to have our own family. You’re my Rushmore.

I wish hadn’t been so afraid when I was and I wish I were braver right now. Of course, these are not brilliant or unique wishes, they are wishes made by flawed men. Nevertheless, I add my words to theirs. I’m back in the hospital with lots of time to think.

So, I’m starting this week a bit of a hole, as I spent the weekend in the hospital with a wicked stomach bug. It was an unpleasant experience, that much is certain. As silly as it may be, whenever I do have to go in, a part of me wonders if I I’ll get out again. Apparently, I did! This time they gave my body something it didn’t enjoy, and I swelled to three times my normal size. My head was so puffed I couldn’t move my face. I’m certain Tiny Elvis would have made note of me. I’m finally out, back to my usual body-mass, a little tired, but ready to get things done.

So, Thursday I went to see The Wackness and it was pretty good. It wasn’t the best movie I’ve ever seen, but it sparked quite a bit of thinking in me. It’s about Luke Shapiro, a kid just out of high school, selling pot in New York City during the summer of 1994. One of his clients is a psychiatrist, doctor Squires, they trade pot for therapy. Luke also happens to be crazy about the good doctor’s step daughter. I’m not really here to review the movie, except that I did like it overall and I’m glad I saw it, despite the following really unfortunate line, “I see the dopeness in everything, and you just see the wackness.” Still, as bad as that line is, it struck me as true.

I’ve been there, I’ve lived that line so many times. I’ve tried over and over to convince someone that things will work out and life can be something great, but they don’t really buy it. They see problems, obstacles, endless disaster. Trying to talk someone out of that is fucking exhausting. It wears you out until you start to buy it yourself. I should have told her how I felt, rather than hide it. I was just always afraid of losing her, of not being what she needed. 

I actually went into the movie pretty down on myself, like I was kind of a fuck up immature failure. I’ve been fighting that idea for awhile, fighting it and losing. Then, sitting in that dark theater, analyzing that movie and myself, I slowly started feeling better. A big theme was self-medicating through pain; drinking, drugs, sex, whatever. Anything to escape the shit that life can definitely bring. I liked drugs to escape, and when I drank it was less to permanently escape than take a temporary vacation from things that scared me. Either way, being numb isn’t the answer for me. It’s anyone’s choice, but it’s not the one I’m making. Being numb only prolongs a bad situation. I quit the drinking not because people told me to, or to please anyone. I quit because I realized it took the fight out of me and I can’t afford not to fight.

I’ve also realized that I’ve spent too much time fighting the wrong things and feeling bad because I haven’t been winning quickly enough. The life that I want isn’t crazy, or wrong and it’s definitely not impossible, but I felt like a failure because I’m not there yet, I’ve stumbled. Lately I have felt really bad, probably worse than when I got home from the hospital in ’07. About a month ago I got the idea that I was failing and felt that it was entirely my fault. I’ve been really down about it, lately crying about it if I thought about the last few weeks too much. I’m not proud of this, but I have to write about it anyway. I’d sob and say to myself, “Wow, you fucker. Look at yourself. What are you doing? You totally fucked things up.” Watching that movie and thinking about something a friend said, I realized that I’ve done so much to change my life in the last three years and it’s okay to stumble so long as I’m honest. I’m not a failure until I quit trying to have what I want. Three years ago I couldn’t sit in the van by myself without having a massive panic attack. I couldn’t go to a club, or a concert without freaking out. I didn’t leave the house without someone from my family. I’ve changed all of that and more. I’m 27 trying to do things my brother did at 18, but he was expected to do them. He just had to pack some bags and go. I wasn’t necessarily discouraged, but I wasn’t encouraged either. Nobody expected me to have or even want a different life. That I’d want a lover, my own space. Yet, that is exactly what I want and I have been rearranging my entire life to have it, and I’m doing so with a deck that is stacked against me. The idea that I’m too slow or a failure just isn’t right. I started 2007 in a coma, spent months in the hospital. I lost the ability to talk, not gradually like everything else, but abruptly and totally unexpectedly. I lived all my personal nightmares. I’ve had to make so many adjustments, but I make them. I know people who would have handled what I’ve handled far worse than me. I haven’t quit, I’m not going to quit, but I no longer feel afraid to make mistakes and be honest. 

The Wackness didn’t change my life, but it started a train of thought that ended in a good place.

So, here I am, watching Olympic boxing after 3 AM. I’d never normally watch boxing, but since it’s “Olympic boxing” I feel compelled. It’s better than Goddamned Nick at Night. I haven’t slept since fucking May, which doesn’t really make me, oh, what’s the phrase? At ease? Contentedly at peace? Something like that. I’m thinking about my limits lately. Like, how much… trauma? unwanted-change? anguish? can I take before I chuck it all in and start wearing sweat-pants all fucking day? I’m kidding, but I’m serious too. We all have limits, physical, spiritual, emotional, everything has a ceiling. A person hits their physical limit and they die. A person hits their emotional limit and they start crying for absolutely no reason, they quit talking to people. Maybe they want to die. Everybody has the potential to break beyond repair, we all have Rubicons to cross.

Where are my ceilings, my Rubicons? I don’t know, I really don’t. I feel like I’ve seen them, taken a visit to say, “hi!” It’s frightening sometimes, to see my limits. I don’t know sometimes if I’m getting weaker or stronger. It’s difficult to know. I suppose a person doesn’t honestly know their limits until they’re bleeding in the bathtub. Still, if I sit back and look inside, there’s something in me that won’t quit without one Hell of a fight. I just worry sometimes that it’s round twelve and that part of me is behind on the score-card. I don’t aim to lose, I don’t intend to go down, but sometimes, when I’m alone in my head, I wonder if my aims and wants matter. Every fight has a loser, I don’t want it to be me.

So, I’ve taken on the services of a lawyer. I could pretend to say that I’ve hired a lawyer to handle financial and estate planning, naming medical surrogates, various practical things. However, really, I’m mostly just really looking forward to coldly saying the phrase, “you’ll be hearing from my lawyer…” I also imagine I’ll get to go around killing people, my lawyer being there to dispose of the bodies and what-not. I’ll also consider getting into starting a sex farm for sex hookers.

It seems that John Travolta and I are very close to being close personal friends. That’s right, we share the same dentist, Doctor Jonathan J. Bromboz. I had no idea when I woke up this morning that fortune would shine upon me so vividly. The very tools that had polished John Travolta’s pearly whites were sterilized and perhaps used to make my smile so bright today. Really, one could even say that in a sense, I practically French kissed Vincent Vega. Okay, I will say it, I practically French kissed Vincent Vega. Yes…

Back in the day, when I breathed through a mask and talked, I had a very unique laugh. When something was really funny I’d laugh without a sound, save for a hissing rush of air blowing out of my mouth. That was it. Now, however, with the Passy-Muir valve, my laugh is something completely different. Apparently, my natural spontaneous laugh is an eerie self-perpetuating, maniacal chuckle that, to put it plainly, sounds very much like Heath Ledger’s Joker. I’m not trying to sound that way, it’s not an affectation. I genuinely sound like the Joker, his conversational chuckle that starts, builds and eerily trails off.

Just listen to the beginning of this video… that is how I laugh.