TITHONUS' DIARY!!


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sometimes I take a great notion
2004-01-31 - 11:17 p.m.

Sometimes I have a bad feeling.

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Right now I think I hate people. No, forget that. I hate people. I hate them. I'm angry at the world for being so fucking ugly and nasty and brutal. I want to be alone but I'm sick to death of my own company. I want to be around other people but mostly they just make it worse. I don't like to see other people's greediness. I am disgusted by how disinterested... I don't know what it is exactly. See, I know that these unpleasant feelings I have right now aren't justified. I know it's not right or fair to hate strangers the way I do right now. But I do. I hate them. I go out into the street and almost immediately I feel claustrophobic.

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I was telling someone about this a little while ago and she told me that, when Joni Mitchell was writing the songs that made up the album "Blue", she was so repulsed by the ugliness of people's souls that she had to shut herself away from everyone... she felt this overpowering urge just to lock herself up and hide... it's hard to believe in one way but it seems almost obvious in another. Songs like "The Last Time I Saw Richard" are so full of the horror of what this life could be... maybe I'm wrong to try to fix myself, I'm wrong to try to cheer myself up, try to keep my chin up, try to tell myself that "the sun'll come out, tomorrow!" and just keep trying... maybe I need to give in. I mean, what am I giving in to, if not the reality of who and what I am?

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Lighthouse left me a note asking me to teach her how to be her true self, and I realised it must sometimes seem like I am here in this diary "dispensing wisdom", trying to teach something about how to live. But it's not like that at all; I don't know how to live. I don't know how to cope with life, and this diary is really just the... a part of the process that I go through trying to work something out, trying to work myself into a position where I feel that life is bearable, liveable. I'm not a good person, not a wise person, not possessed of any special insight. All I have is the dark light of my unhappiness to try to find a way to live here in valley... in the valley of the shadow of death. The bible is full of so much beautiful poetry. I love poetry and music... and sex. God, why is it so painful to admit that? I think because I have to admit that I'm human once I admit to wanting sex. With the other things... I can paint myself in an otherworldly light, tell myself I'm like Van Gogh in that song by Don McLean, you know, too beautiful for this ugly world... but when I think about sex then it's apparent, it's immediately apparent that I am part of this ugly world, I am just like all the other greedy lazy stupid selfish ignorant fools who are trying to make something out of this life... There's this great bit in this song by Dan Bern, "Wasteland", where he sings something like "I watched while everyone I knew tried to be watched in a film or on a stage or listened to on a record or read about in a book or a magazine because they thought that that way maybe they'd get a little love out of this life..." and it's so sad... you know, I know so much about the structure of how alienation works but when I'm stuck in it I'm as bad as anyone else, worse. I know how it works but that doesn't make me immune. Lust, and here I mean not just sexual lust but lust in general, lust is desire for the thing that's going to make you feel happy again. You know, we get into these nostalgic modes, "those were the days my friend, we thought they'd never end, we'd sing and dance, forever and a day..." we think, back then I was happy and I'm not happy now and it's because I don't have X. And you start thinking about all the ways that you can get that thing, get it back so that you can go back to the way things were... you want to be thin again or you want to be back with your ex or you want to be rich again or have the kind of prestige and respect you used to have or sex or you want to be part of the in-crowd or you want to have that wonderful warm feeling of being part of a group of friends who all love each other... and of course you can never go back. Heraclitus; "You can never go down to the same river twice". When I'm fantasizing about sex then I'm thinking back to the way I felt on one particular night... when I felt healed, my soul was at ease and I was happy and at home in the world, in a gentle place... "music that gentlier on the spirit lies/ than tired eyelids on tired eyes". But that's not the reality of most of my experiences of sex... sex has been awful, sometimes, sometimes it's been full of shame and doubt and self-hatred... what I want isn't to be fucking someone but to be feeling that feeling, that home-at-last feeling, when I am at peace with my soul, not fighting for answers... but I think the reason my soul steers me in the direction of sex is because it wants me to realise that I can only come home by recognising what I really am... it's because thinking of sex connects me with all those aspects of my humanity that I try to hide from that it steers me that way. You know, the people we feel most disgusted by and most hateful toward are the people we are not allowing ourselves to realise we are jealous of. When I curse people inwardly for being vapid it's because I wish I could let myself be vapid for once... I wish I could relax. I want to be what I am.

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Losing coherence. This is probably too long. Too long for what? This is for me.

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I... I wish my best friend would come back from Japan. I can talk to people about these things but it's never quite what I need.

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I have another romantic prospect vaguely in prospect. I think on some unconscious level this is what I most want; a relationship that hasn't quite materialised yet. I don't want to actually go all the way and actually have a real relationship with someone because that would... involve all those horrible compromised feelings, all that negotiation, all that fighting for a little tiny bit of the solitude I want... but I want to hope for something. I see people holding each other and casually kissing for just a second, or nibbling at each other's ears, or laughing at something stupid and it tugs at my heart because I know what that's like... that constant, gentle reassurance that someone knows you're there and cares. Not the needy, grasping, desperate demands for proof of love and more and better proof, but just that gentle touch that says that you... you're part of something. Thich Nhat Hanh says, if you can see how you're part of the world through even one little leaf, one little drop of water, then you can feel like you're part of the whole thing... you only need that tiny little point of connection. But without it you're... "starving in some deep mystery/ like a man who is sure what is true".

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I think writing all this has made me feel a little better.

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"I saw her standing on her front porch

Just a-twirling her baton

Me and her went for a ride, sir

And ten innocent people died

From the town of Lincoln, Nebraska

With a sawn-off .410 on my lap

Through to the badlands of Wyoming

I killed everything that crossed our path

I can't say that I am sorry

For the things that we done

At least for a little while, sir

Me and her, we had us some fun" - Bruce Springsteen


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