FACES OF DEATH: erika's descent into complete insanity

i think i've lost my mind.

nothing is as i thought it was.

i've burned everything. and i'm not even sure what for, anymore.

james' resolve was paper thin, and i've been discussing everything with him since '98.

i question everything. everyone. i feel insane. like my honor is archaic and black and white and out of place in a true 3-d technicolor psychedelic world.

i feel like it is blunt and cartoonish. i feel like i am stuck in a comic book and everything is dissolving around me and it's not real. it's never been real.

and i feel skinless. i feel like this must be insanity. i must be here. this must be like being dead but being a ghost, and haunting, as a human being.

i talk to james and he is a ghost. he is someone else now entirely. and now that there's 6-date girl, all that he said that i built years and years of decision on this "we," it was all a lie.

the biggest waste of time of all.

wasting another's time is a sin to me. a sin to take someone's time from them when there's so little time to live in this world. so little time to just stare at things and think.

and i think i thinked a little TOO much. and i can't make the zebra stripes go back anymore to what they were. ugly truths remain ugly. i can't put smiley faces on lies and not knowing the basics of yourself.

this is why i'll never ever marry.

i don't know who anyone is because neither do they.

what else is there to do?

i feel so alone. i'm scared i'm too far off the deep end to work at some corner store somewhere, or clean  houses.

fuck. what have i done?

but i like where i am. but now i feel like i'm watching a movie of myself and i can't fucking possibly imagine how such a fucking asshole's gonna make it at this age.

how did this become me all the sudden? so dramatic. so MELO dramatic.

and i have to watch. stick around watch how fucking detached i've gotten from giving too much of a damn and being wrong wrong wrong in all my rolls of the dice for all the things that made me wanna live in the first place.

all that honor and code shit, lisa and i were always like that. my pops is like that.

i thought everyone was like that.

fuck. how do you all marry each other knowing it's contingent upon so much fucking impossible FINE print?

cripes. life is complicated enough. why do we have to keep it from being so SIMPLE?

i am insane.

anyhow, let me realize i've fucked up my life and been a pedophile all this time fucking a goddamn child with the backbone of a cereal box quote.

i'm reeling from losing everything EVERYTHING i believed in, and i have no idea how the fuck i'm supposed to exist as i've become now---bizarre, ranting, crazy---and come to anything other than a tenement rotting feet ending?

everything looks like TRON with that creepy grid thing in open space. there's no setting. i have no idea the rules of the world. there are rules under rules and sub-sects and fuck... i thought i could be empathetic but everyone else is operating at crazy breakneck speeds and i'm loping with a limp here.

i'm done with love. honor? what honor. the less i know from now on about everyone else's lives, the better. i just gotta figure out how to take the hits coming up with as much grace as i can muster.

i'll take this time to practice.

please allow me the quiet to sob and rage in silence. i hate having my time wasted. as free as i seem, i feel so enraged at all the EXTRA time wasted when i thought i was doing things by my own free choice.

i had no idea how imprisoned my own decisions were. and i hate feeling regret. it is like cancer. and so i need to find some kind of STORY i can stomach to keep the nausea of more heart breaking disillusionment at bay.

i'm reeling from all the punches to my ego and all that i am, and i'm doing the best i can at being true, graceful, honest---which isn't quite "true" i think somehow, although intuitively, so i can quite explain----but i can't imagine this is all just sport. but it's a lot. it's more than i've ever had to contend with at once, even back in my craziest younger days when i was always in trouble.

this is hard stuff because i'm trying to deal with so many new layers of realities and realizations and i can't quite keep up with all the sudden changes to the world as i've understood and managed within it for most of my sentient life.

but maybe this is all just middle aged talk. fuck, i'm not gonna downgrade these heady years because it seems sacriligious for how intense all this is.

and it's not just me. there's a lot of "hanging out in The Abyss" around these days and i feel like there's a rumbling of energy but it's really still secret, unformed, unfocused, infantile---maybe even still GESTATING---but i feel like something different is coming up.

different sets of magic and rules and energies or something like that. sounds too woo woo for me, trust me. i have NO idea what the fuck is happening in my head these days.

and mirrors and windows and things are just CRASHING everywhere.

it's always been exhausting being the catalyst in others' lives, but to be some kind of "catalyst" in your OWN life is really trippy because it's NOT you. it's some bigger energy working through you and you have to be somehow uhm... i think mentally prepared maybe to handle this stuff.

i'm not the least bit mentally prepared and i don't want any of it. i think i've gone completely mad, the voices who "manage" me are quite loud and distinct in their direction of me and i don't know WHO i am anymore.

i feel like whoever i was, is suddenly just this small spec in the corner of some bigger "conversation" that i'm just apprenticing on even understanding just so i can ask who needs water. i'm just babbling.

i swear i'm insane. but i believe this shit, and yet i don't. the me that is the shmata salesman doesn't see the fucking point. it's all the same whether you name magic or not. but as i think with a lot of magical people, they're the ones who pretend it doesn't even EXIST.

they test you with twinkles in eyes and tricks and teasers. then they tell more. they actually shut up when you give a wrong answer. takes a lot of work to start it all back up.

anyhow, i'm gonna deal with this last flush of my life in private more. i hope. i'm really going to try and just treat james like a retarded child and i told him to keep the crying away from me because i'm dead to it now.

it's a manipulative lie. 5 dates in. god, payback is such a bitch. i know i've done some evil shit and i'm paying for it now. keep it coming. i want a clean fucking slate wherever i land next.

the scary thing is that i don't think you can ever NOT have your head up your ass and live in any semblance of the real world. it's making me insane to see any further between the atoms and i think there's gotta be some kind of edge to the universe because i think beyond a certain point, we're pointlessly, USELESSLY insane.

if you use "insane" to mean you don't fit and can't possibly even step along to society at all.

fuck. what clearer definition to TECHNICAL insanity do you need?

god i so fucked up.

the very thing i feared, being lied to, was once again the ubiquitous AIR that i was even breathing.

you all can have that marriage shit. you all are scared shitless and saying a bunch of lies so you don't have to let go and row your own goddamn boat.

there can't be so many people doing something and so few not understanding it. i know i'm wrong somewhere and missing something.

i got james ALL wrong and all my ideas were shit.

i'm fucking insane and megalomaniacal.

bipolor is so "chicken or the egg" because just LIVING this life and watching out for the gunfire will make anyone skittish and fucked up. but what started first?

i'm not bipolar. or maybe i am by all your definitions. i don't fucking care. call me a lesbian by CHOICE. all these labels hide the truth. this is why i want to hear people who say jews are pussies or niggers should be shot.

it's making me crazy to try and detect real stuff under endless amounts of bullshit upon bullshit.

i almost weep with gratitude when someone's forthcoming. at least i know where not to run when they're burning crosses on my lawn. i wanna know because i didn't know i could grow up to be free and recreate my home situation with my mother, right here in my own fucking home and it looked all so DIFFERENT.

i'm too clever by half just for MYSELF. so i can't spare the time to let anymore illusions get entrenched. they're like roach infestations. i can barely manage with the illusions that got by already.

i'm beat to shit with sadness and despair for anything real and true and solid and honorable in such a tissue thin world, but i already can be glad that i throttled back on how i was living and running all the time.

yeah, everything's gone to shit, but even when it was so fucking "great," i couldn't stand the folks i had to fucking talk to with a smile like i gave a fuck. ew. writers. writers. i'm not gonna say more. i'm floored that james was also all talk.

everyone's talk talk talk...

but i understand. what the FUCK are you supposed to do?

dance.

that's what you do. and you know what? what the fuck do i know? i know nada. nothing. i know less than less than i did before.

i don't even fucking know what reality is anymore.

and i'm supposed to come up with some inane patter to work with people i'm even more alienated from than BEFORE?

this is crazy people, you all. and this is me. i can't swagger out of this realization that i somehow got an ASTOUNDING number of decisions sooooo wrong, it's too amazing for me to even comprehend how bizarrely endless this is all getting.

and i'm not complaining. i'll take whatever i've summoned up. but i just wish i knew if it was like this for everyone? maybe it is. maybe it's like learning about teenage things that no one really talks about, and you have to stumble along and bump into things, hoping to find an answer in a squeeze or a poke.

maybe it's like the orgasm that has an orgasm behind it, it's like there's this abyss and this other level of abyss behind it.

the only people who write about this mystical shit don't actually seem to do anything with it other than go "oh, look, i'm hovering over my body!" or "i can imagine flowers opening up in my kidney." it just seems like there's

oh, i don't know. i'm talking smack. it's all insane ramblings. i don't want to read a writer who's also been here because invariably they went mad and committed suicide or something.

maybe door #3 is best left alone. some mystery, you know? it never hurt anyone, right?

fuckin' mystery and lies. all artifice. in the end i was the fucking milk cow. that's all it all comes down to. "can you pay for me?" / "can you make me hard for an eternity?"

cripes. it's a wonder anyone gets out of bed.

we need hardons just to get retarded so all this seems like it makes any fucking sense.

so james is retarded, i know. but what is unforgivable is KNOWING one truth and wasting another's time by telling them ANOTHER.

it's a form of murder when you live to devour every fucking moment.

now i see why men just stay at home and wanna jerk off until they die.
everybody wants something.
no, no! it's everybody wants something ELSE.

e