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I remember that place. I almost didn’t care. I was getting what I needed. I didn’t know what I could have had. You reminded me of that place. I was so lonely cause no one was willing to open up. We all had our fists up. None of us wanted to be vulnerable to the same daggers that we used on everyone around us. Isolation was the key to our existence. Atleast you always have yourself. Atleast you can always depend on Number One. Until you can’t. Loyalty was nothing. Friendships were lies. I used you. You used me. Isn’t that how we all get what we need? You may disagree. I remember clearly. I know you know as well. I know you feel alone. I know you felt not so alone with me.

I don’t compromise anymore. I don’t have to. I’m never alone. I’m rarely lonely. I have people who would honestly die for me. And I would die for them. Our souls connect on levels and depths I couldn’t have comprehended.

Put all your walls up. Don’t let anyone know you. Pretend to be someone you’re not. Don’t share. Don’ t talk about your feelings. Talk behind my back. keep eachother in our delusion. If anyone gets to know you then they can verify that you are nothing you know you want to be.

Kayso, talked things through with her. Actually I flailed around her living room, flapping my arms like a lunatic through spurts of dialogue – the ramblings of my cyclic thoughts that had been plaguing me. I said a lot of things that I regretted saying right after I said them. Truths, the kind you usually hold back for fear of retaliation. I just let them come out with her. I don’t censor, like this blog. I just say whatever I feel inspired to say. It just flows. The weird thing is, no matter how harsh the things I say, how scared I am to say them, the worst reaction she ever makes is a shocked face. The shocked face particular to her that I have grown so accustomed to. I love that about her. I am never scared to say anything. I know she understands me cause she understands me enough to give me allowances. Fear slips away and we get closer. Slept in her bed last night, comfortably. I woke up from a dream and felt I was still in one. I opened my eyes and at the back of her head. It took me a moment to understand who I was lying next to, in the delirious fog that accompanies dreams. I was happy when I saw it was her. It felt real.

I miss having a home. I miss living in a place that has windows and central heating. I miss the feeling of breeze and birds chirping when I’m waking up. I miss having carpet in my bedroom. I miss having a clean shower. A clean bathroom. A bathroom with tiles. I miss having a kitchen. A stove. I miss the pasta we used to make at Char’s house. The kind when we’d make the sauce from scratch.

I empty a can of STAGG Chili in to a tupperware bowl and microwave it. This artificial meal is the closest thing to a meal I’ve made myself in months. I miss the ability to cook for myself. I feel disconnected from the lifestyles of every one else I know. No one lives the way I do…. Even other artist types, ones who work all day in “studios”. They all live in normal apartments dressed up to look like studios. They all have the conveniences that would never make them miss living in Yaletown, yet they have a “studio” so they can be called “artists”. My studio? My studio is a fucking gutted commercial space on hastings that barely has running hot water with my bed in the middle of it. It’s easy to feel like a junky without even shooting junk. yet, it’s easy to be grateful. Everyday I walk out on to a street of people who don’t even have the luxury of a door they can lock themselves in with. People who want more than anything what I so easily take for granted – the fact that I am free from the drugs which still run their lives. And that is all I really should give a fuck about. All I have to pray for and be thankful for.

Fucking Blogger just nuked my last attempt at a post… Let me try to reconstruct what I was saying:

I’m getting asked a lot lately if I’m depressed. I don’t really know, to tell you the truth. I don’t really honestly know what depression looks like. All I know is that I have next to zero motivation to do anything when I’m awake. I really enjoy lying in my bed, dreaming and sleeping. Last night I slept 14 hours. The night before, 12. The night before that, 11. If it was because of the weather it might be understandable for me, but it has been sunny. usually the weather is the only thing that would keep me i bed so long. What keeps me in bed for so long now is that I’m just not really too stoked to wake up and face yet another day, day after day. I hate having to think about what the day will bring. All the thought, concern and effort that goes in to a day.

I just don’t even know what is wrong with me. Or if there is anything wrong with me. I’m thinking of getting a meaningless job – like a taxi driver, just so i can have some reason to get up. Cause making art apparently isn’t enough to wake me up at a reasonable hour. Writing seems to be enough to keep me up late.

Whenever I feel fucked I just tell myself that this day will pass. I try to not get anxious about the lack of activity and substance in my daily life. I try to tell myself that I am only three months sober. That when I am 4 years sober or 9 years sober my life will be so much better than I can even imagine right now so I just shouldn’t even worry. That I should just be taking it easy. Fuck, I just try hard to resist the urge sometimes that tells me getting high right now is the way out, that inhaling chemical vapours is the solution to my “problem” with my indecisiveness about life.

She told me that there is medication for people like me. I was shocked that her suggested solution to my issues was more drugs. Getting off drugs is the whole fucking reason I am going through all this shit int he first place, and not bailing out, like I always do. So then why the fuck would I go back on drugs? Even if you call them “meds” instead of “dope”. Same fucking difference. Oh, and incase you were wondering, I stopped taking Zyban.

I hang on in the nighttime to this last sliver of the day because it seems to be the only time of the day when I realize I’m alive enough to take part in my life. It is now when it hits me, the realization of all the days I have wasted and the pain felt for all the days which I will waste here on as I stumble onward blind. Blind as when I wake up tomorrow again to meet again with myself tomorrow night for this night time recompense.
Fuck this. And I go back to sleep.

So my friend and I are addicted to video games. Well, to say video games implies something in the realm of Nintendo and Genesis. No, I’m talking about computer games. We just call it “killing shit” cause that’s what we do. We go and spend 2-4 hours a day sitting at computers beside each other playing cooperative LAN games of Battlefield: Vietnam. I like flying the helicopters. They are hard to fly and I enjoy the challenge of trying to fly them and blow up the VietCong’s tanks and avoid enemy RPG fire at the same time. Besides being asleep this is the only thing I really look forward to these days – killing shit.

It’s friday night and the heart of this small city is throbbing and bleeding it’s vile fluids all over my doorstep. I just want to be asleep, but for some reason I can’t make myself go and lie down and forfit this useless day. I don’t feel depressed, but i show symptoms of it.

I want to sit still and read. I want to sit still and listen to music. I want to write. I want to write songs like I’ve always wanted to do. I want to play music with other people more. I want to make more art. I want to cut a new stencil. I want to work on the art for the show next weekend.

But every morning when I wake up I just roll over and go back to sleep and stay in bed until I realize that I have to get up at some point. I rise from my 8-12 hour slumber and face the same day over and over. Atleast I don’t use drugs anymore. Atleast I don’t smoke anymore. These are my two claims to fame. Fuck that. I don’t function at all till I get coffee at Blake’s and a rice krispy square at the Cambie Bakery & General Store. Every morning without fail. I have no time commitments. I can take as long as I want to do anything. I start calling people frantically at around this time. Or I take on some other meaningless activity to avoid the draw of my bed which sucks me luck a tractor beam back to it’s comfort. Sometimes I give in and nap till the evening. Or I dick around, playing computer games or riding my BMX around downtown. Then I feel like shit and unfulfilled, so I go to a meeting. After the meeting I am hungry again and get more coffee. Then before I know it it’s 1am and I’m wondering why and when my days started evaporating in to a meaningless blur. I then go play more video games or go to her house. Either way, it seems to fulfill the same selfish need – to not think, to escape from my own dwindling sense of reality. I need to get a fucking life.

and i just feel like by being honest with myself to admit that I actually do miss you is some how compromising my position… that it’s gonna end up being used against me… or that i’m gonna fuck something up that is good.

You hardly speak around that kind of stuff but that feels okay for me… I just sometimes think to myself “OH! why did you say that!” after I say show any affection towards you.

I think I would rather that you know that I adore you and for it not to work out than for it to work out and me never tell you that I actually really adore you.

Made a new style sheet for my blog last night. I love CSS. Maybe more impressive – all hexidecimal colours I picked off the top of my head, from memory. I can sing the rainbow… sing the rainbow… sing the rainbow tooo.

Net cafes are the pusher in my ever straightening life. All in all, this is the cheapest addiction I’ve ever had.

I was riding the number 7 from my parents house back down town. We were getting in to Kits when I heard my name and looked up to see Rory Johnston, my first friend in high school. He stayed my friend for about a year – as long as it took me to realize the only thing we have in common is a vague likeness in appearance. I immediately recognised him. He looks exactly the same as when we graduated. He talks the same. If there’s one thing I hate more than total loneliness and despair it is awkward small talk -“catch-up” as some people call it. I honestly pretended to seem interested in his discription of his lame ass life as he unfolded it to me… He lives at home still, went to UBC engineering straight out of high school but got booted cause he stopped going to class. Then Australia for a year – how fucking cliche, I think I’m gonna barf. Now he’s taking economics at Langara. In grade 12, when I thought my next five years would be like Rory’s actual life, that was enough to make me get addicted to hard drugs in a quick hury. Poor blokes like Rory never get that chance of redemption. They have to live through it. Then it was my turn… What am I up to? “I make art,” I said. I listended to the words as they were coming out of my mouth. I immediately felt the way Rory probably felt about it. That my life sounds about as insignificant and meaningless as a resident in a retirement home. I tried to cover my tracks… “I started getting in to the Vancouver Art Scene about a year and a half ago and have been showing in a few gallery’s… Yeah, it’s good!” I said, as if I was saying it was good to convince myself more than him. I couldn’t believe I had actually just said “the Vancouver Art Scene” in a sentence and was serious about it. How fucking pretencious of me. I hated myself more as I continued to speak. As he listened he kept doing that fake yawn thing that people do when they are socially nervous. I kept telling myself ego-boosting thoughts… like, “well, atleast i’m not still living at home,” and “well, atleast I’ve had a vicious drug addiction and managed to stay off drugs for sometime… every once in a while…” and the lame consolation prize thought of “well, atleast my friends think I’m cool.” Thankfully our conversation died after our social obligations to share about each other’s current lives. I went back to readin my book and otherwise ignoring the world around me. Yes, I’m a professional at that on drugs or clean. It’s my mode of survival. I wondered when I would feel like “making something with my life”. And by this I mean, doing something with my life that I would feel proud to boast to ex-friends from high school slogging through the intellectual jerk circle that is university. Sometime I want to be proud that I am studying some really intellectual topics in a respected school. Political Science. Philosophy. Pscyhology. I still get impressed looks when I tell people I did that for a year at Uni. Whatever. I will go back someday. Someday I know the urge will be stronger thatn my current urge… To neglect my guilt-driven feelings of obligation to go to school just so i can fit in with what everyone else my age is doing. I feel justified to myself. Sitting here, writing, about to play Counter-Strike, then off to paint things on walls downtown that make people amazed and intrigued. I feel great about what I’m doing with myself. I feel ahead of myself. Of what I could be. Of what I very easily could be if I stop thinking what I’m doing is exactly what I’m supposed to be doing.