My thoughts have always been such a hurricane of incoherence that I feel like I am standing in the eye of the storm and trying grasp at ideas as they go whipping past. Such a cruel reality to sit here experiencing all this--the droning voice of Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Jefferson Airplane singing White Rabbit--while smoking my Camel light, the good non-smoker, and debating the usefulness of living at all. At a point in this chaos of insanity that we call life, one is forced to consider whether it is truly all worth while. Do I really want to continue to get butt-fucked by the government, my boss, people who see me as a college drop out and a slacker with no goals? Perhaps I have those goals, and am too lazy to put out the effort to follow status quo in the land of the free where dreams come true. In a land where the American Dream only exists if you follow status quo–where vested interest seems to always hide behind the altruism of the rich. Maybe it doesn’t even hide, but we are blind to it. Or are we even that? Are classes defined by money, or simply the jealousy and hatred of the poor toward the rich? A lazy American who is just “getting by” actually works harder than those money-grubbing slobs at the top. All while I sit here in the after glow of a contact depression after watching a movie about folks strung out on drugs I will never take, pondering the meaningless complexities in life that only even exist in the realities of a select few. Maybe crime is the next American Dream realized. A thought considered and accepted by those who have reached that line, pondered it, and determined that the only way to show up on the other side of the poverty line is to go under and around the law. A sorry conclusion for us law-abiding citizens. Perhaps I, too, will fall into that sorry life of comfort, clinging to the norm of my depression, loneliness and lack of money for anything but bills and food, where I am hanging on by my fingernails to sanity. In this land of dog-eat-dog, what am I? Where am I? I sit here, typing by the light of the computer and blue screen of the TV, doing what? Venting? Lack of coherence, lack of life and love, lack of morals, values, contemplating who’s religion to adopt next to fill that emptiness that just doesn’t seem to go away, because agnosticism isn’t faith, its lack there of. Perhaps life disgusts me, this town disgusts me, and I have put myself in a place where the only way to start over is to pack up my car and live out of it for a while, untill I relocate my heart and my drive to “keep on pluggin’,” that mantra of the optimist who drowned in me so long ago. Why? Because optimism takes to much effort to actually believe in, and reality is too depressing. That leaves pessimism, which is just far enough beyond reality for its horror to be unbelievable. Making, theoretically, everything that happens that doesn’t actually reach that point a pleasant surprise. Why is it, then, that things tend so often to be more surprise and less pleasant, and that I am constantly turning around in life and circling things in red ink that I shouldn’t have done but did anyway, in the hopes that I won’t make that mistake again? If things continue in this manner, I’m going to have to get a new pen. What is it that Janis Joplin said? Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. Behold the glory of teenage-angst replaced by twenty-something angst. And from the looks of it, things aren’t going to get any better. Solitude has never been my salvation. How ironic that my comfort is a cat that isn’t mine and the love of friends so far away. I’m begining to wonder if maturity is just your minds way of saying “ok, you are now ready to handle the knowledge that __ blows, too. Got that? Stay tuned next week for yet more depressing insight as to why your life blows. Good night!” And I wonder why I’m so stressed that my back is one huge knot of anxiety and I can’t sleep at night. I guess insomnia is your body’s way of saying “you only thought I was ready for that.”