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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.

Here I am, sitting at a 24-hour net cafe, my favourite one, Digital Alliance on Helmcken and Homer so I can pay 2.50 and hour to write when I have a perfectly beautiful Apple powerbook with free internet at home. Why? Cause I work best under the pressure of money, time or other people’s dissaproval. Funny how when I was studying creative writing at university I would sit infront of a blank screen for hours and hours and finally hand in nothing and fail course after course because of what I perceived as my inability to write. Now, I write all the time and find myself thinking about writing all the time. Same with web design. I’ll slave days straight on a site for free but then offer to pay me for it and it’ll take me months. Same with my current reason for being here… I’m more effective a worker when I am paying to work than if someone is paying me to work. I should keep this in mind for when I am getting paid to work. My strategy will simply be to come here and pay 2.50 an hour to work on their machines. The pressure of the money I am losing for every hour I dick around will make me work harder and I can keep the difference on my paycheck.

It always seems to happen that the greatest moments of inspiration to write come at the same moment when I have no pen on me. I also am plagued with a horrible memory for events and emotions. I desperately have to try to remember something that happened even an hour ago. This i can contribute to my few but intense years of drug addiction, and the drug that I chose to be addicted to is, from what I have heard, one of the few drugs that causes permanent brain damage, in particular to memory.

•••

Today I finally committed to doing my laundry. I accumulated almost a full garbage bag. I live in an environment not unlike the old abandoned house that Edward and Brad live in in Fight Club. It’s like camping indoors. We have no stove, let alone a working laundry/dryer. I take my laundry to this little laundromat on the corner of Abbott and Hastings. Right across the street from where there are always 6 or 7 crackheads gathering to buy crack, smoke crack or wait for their next hit or whatever else it is they do standing there. The pleasant old asian man who owns the place knows me well by now. I’m seemingly one of his few patrons who is straight and doesn’t cause him a hastle. Although he speaks limited english and our communication is difficult, we have a good relationship and is people like him that make me really question my racist tendencies towards other members of his race. He let me use the tripple loader cause all the other machines were full as is usually the case at this particular laundromat dispite the inconsistency with the number of people actually in the establishment. I’m guessing, given the local population, most come in, drop off their limited number of clothing articles in a messed up state and go off to score their dope or for some other reason, completely forget about their laundry that they have now left unattended and occupying machines for hours so that people like me have no other option than to be rejected or use the professional Triple Loader. I was quietly reading my book, the sun warming my back through the window when I was distracted from my utopian zen-like state to the bickering between some other patrons. The 6 foot red headed wannnabe biker wearing a west coast choppers shirt and wrap arounds yelling down at a remarkably short elderly couple of Native decent. I only mention the race of the couple because of the context of their dispute – race. It has been a while since I had witnessed a public display of racial intollerance of this magnitude. I know not what spurred this argument for I only started paying attention when I heard Fuck Fuck Fuck enough times for it to be unusual in these parts. I sat at a table in the corner reading, no, pretending to read, my Jerry Stahl book about junkies while I watched people react in junky land. Not wanting to be involved, I kept reading the same paragraph over and over not actually paying any attention to the insuing fight.
On the native defensive the argument consisted of, “Go home you fucking DP!” “I was born here, go back to your fucking country!” “Fucking racist whitee!”
The wannabe biker had now found a common ground with the three other white guys in the place all of whom were doing the crack ballet while they tried hard to load their soiled clothes into the machines. All of them in chorus retorting to the natives crys with racial slanders… “Fucking salmon head!” “Fuck you you fucking teepee head!” “This is my fucking country, I was born here!” “Fucking racist!” “You sold your country for a fucking six-pack!” “Go back to your reserve!”

Blah Blah Blah… it was entertaining at the time…

It’s sunny out, I’m gonna go ride my bike.

Funny how I laugh at myself. When I laugh at myself it is cause I realize how stupid I really am. My laughter is not out of surprise or humour, but nervousness.

God, it makes me cringe. To see something so miserable. Writhing in it’s own filth. As long as I’ve seen it it’s been so angry. So full of hatred. Hatred for itself but that can’t possibly be contained in one vessel, and so spills over in to everything around it….

Once I had to take a shit really bad when I was out in public. I fucking was not going to be afforded the luxury of a comfortable, familiar toilet before the unstopable happened. I ran in to the nearest facility with a toilet – Mr. Lube. I let loose in that toilet and felt sorry for the microbes that were chillin out on the inside of the toilet bowl before their world was awash with a typhoon of soupy shit. Eating nothing a drinking 8 cups of coffee in one day has this affect on the human body. It takes a lot of toilet paper to clean such a mess off one’s ass. This lead to the filling of the bowl with so much paper, so much that soon was apparently too much for this particular Mr. Lube’s 40 year old plumbing. I stood, with my pants around my ankles as the brown swirling water rose up the bowl and an amazing rate. My instincts suddenly screamed at me that this water level was reaching emergency level. I dove behind the toilet and frantically spun the water valve to hault the rising tide. My efforts were in vain. under the toilet seat the water spilled over the rim of the bowl like mom’s chili pot boiling over. Brown water, like the ocean creeping up the beach spread across the floor. Me, throwing paper towels at the head of the traversing beast. Under the door and in to the lobby of the Mr. Lube, the stinky shit did flow.

Why am I telling this story? oh yeah.