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Archives November 2005
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Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Scrap Six: Sanskrit

Following instructions was never your most well developed skill. Surely, at some point in your life, succeeding must have been something you did, but any shred of personal honor had long since gone the way of Sanskrit - heavily studied but antiquated and irrelevant. For now, it appeared that your destiny was to live the hollow shell of an intelligent human being - whoring your intellectual capacity for the peanuts they called wages. Strangely, that comforted you.

Your advisor said you were a crusader and always had been. He, of course, advised you against this path. He claimed that, since he met you, he'd seen a change - insisted that you were stubbornly determined not to unleash your potential. (Words like "potential" always brought visions of violence to mind.)

Absentmindedly, you tapped out the world on your keyboard - enjoying its soothing click-clack.

P-O-T-E-N-T-I-A-L

An errant bit of chocolate chip cookie slid between the K and the L as you struck them together accidentally.

Once upon a time, you watched this word glaring back at you from a blue Word Perfect screen and the same suffocating feeling overtook you. Some might have seen this as a reassuring sign of humanity. You, on the other hand, jabbed at the backspace key with your pointer finger and watched the world - and it's implications - disappear.

Feeling far more exhausted than you had in months, you reached fro your lighter and drowned out the nights glow

Thursday, February 02, 2006

Scrap Five: Grief

[unedited raw]

Grief is one of those odd things in your life that can literally feel as though a weight is being dropped into your stomach. What's worse are the inane, everyday and entirely unpredicatable triggers.

As defiantly as you tried to shake any rememants of humanity and weak emotion from your visage, the claws of grief hung firm to your skin and you remained mortal.

Scrap Four: It All Tastes The Same

[unedited raw]

Appetite was something that came to you sporadically and violently in all things. So as you dunked your chopsticks into the pork fried rice of life it seemed only appropriate that you should be engaging in one of your rare social appearances.

Your “friends” weren’t exactly friends, as such. More, they were people who periodically inquired as to your status – not your personal well being, just the things that could be ticked on a census form. Your friends were one of the few aspects of your life that you finally had working properly.

Once monthly you broke your late-night research patterns and, instead of eating your dinner leftover and cold, indulged in the rare and fantastic concept of a hot meal. By the time the evening was over, you always regretted it and swore never to partake again. 20 minutes into the plum wine, egg roll and wonton course you were already scheming ways to get out of next month. They were discussing something inane and you couldn’t bring yourself to focus.

“Did you ever notice that the orange bits don’t taste any different from the green bits?"

Scrap Three: Time

[unedited raw]

You hated digital clocks.

Time, you’d always maintained, should be wiped out by darkness and the backlit LCD clocks of today survived darkness, power outage, flash floods, and, you were reasonably sure, the finger of god. Alas, noise – even the patient, precision ticking of a battery operated wall clock – rung loudly in your ears. Your apartment was, in the evening, one of the quietest places in the city. Only the calm whir of a case fan and the occasional cracking of leather or tinkling of pill bottles obstructed the silence and that was just ask you liked it. The less sleep you got, the more quickly noise, light and activity seemed to over stimulate your synapses.

Scrap Two: Aaron Beck

[un-edited raw]

Fuck it was the story of your life. You read somewhere that, on average, a child’s first words are Mommy, No, Up and Daddy. While you had no actual record of it, you were reasonably convinced that ‘defeatist’ must have been yours. How, then, you ended up in your line of work was one question that would have fascinated Aaron Beck.

Cognative therapy aside, you propped your slightly wilted salad up on the steering wheel and took another slug of coffee.

“Ah, the glamorous life,” you groaned, impaling a piece of arugala on your fork. Six months ago you discovered the keys to survival – shirk duties. Political strategy was one of your only true loves, so when your advisor cornered you in the hallway for what must have been the four-hundred and fifty thousandth time waving a declaration form in your face, a polticial science major seemed to make sense. Well, that and it was one of the check-box options.

Scrap One: Insomnia

[un-edited raw]

There are, in your estimation, at least 40 thousand sleep aids available on the market -from the hippy-dippy homeopathic to the high-class prescription types. As you stared at your kitchen counter, covered from end to end in half-empty pill bottles and silver foil shards, the ever present impulse to simply hit yourself over the head with a frying pan surfaced again.

Somnatrol. Dromias. RevitaSleep. Ambiatol. Melatrol. Serotonin Ex. Nutranetics Liquid Sleep. Seditol. Aluna. Somnex. Lunesta. Trazadone. Calmes Forte. Unisom. Tylenol PM. NyQuil. Benedryl. Imovane. You’d tried them all. Only your fiancé and general phobia of pills prevented you from mixing a cocktail of vodka, gin, and one of everything on the counter if for nothing else than the 30 hours of dreamless, relaxed sleep before your liver failed and your body shut down completely.

If nothing else, the sneaking fear that [G]god might be more than a mass hallucination prevented you from testing the bounds of modern medicine by taking more than one at a time. In all of your misadventures with religion you’d yet to find one that thought suicide was a cheerful Sunday night activity. Well, barring the crazy ones.

Settling on the trendy but effective combination of prescription pain killers and black coffee you downed both 12 oz mug and friendly white pills in a single gulp and padded back into the living room, bumping painfully into the pile of reference material you’d been disregarding.

Most chronic insomniacs watch television – or, at least, that’s what you’d heard. You, however, couldn’t bring yourself to switch it on, despite the late hour and the lack of anything better to distract yourself. Instead, you leaned forward, groping for your jacket pocket.

As cigarette smoke curled, disappearing into the residual neon streetlight, you stretched your legs over the couch cushions, and booted up your connection to the world, blandly anticipating the flood of junk mail and advertising about to burn your retinas. For all the things in life that, upon close inspection, became mundane and disappointing, the internet had yet to fail you. No matter how many hours you sat, chasing the elusive end, it never came. There was always a new stretch of undiscovered information at your fingertips. Tonight, however, even its enigma couldn’t hold your attention.

The distractions came more frequently lately and you found yourself, head thrown back, eyes closed tightly against the moonlight, fighting to drown the amorphous, nameless thoughts that threatened to surface. The well-adjusted might have explored exactly what it was that upset you – what trigger manifested itself in sleeplessness and addiction - but you considered it easier to ignore it until it went away. Taking a deep, despondent breath, you glanced at the unapologetic neon glow of the stereo clock and watched it’s numeric flashing. 4:02.

“Fuck it.”

Scraps Listing

One: Insomnia
Two: Aaron Beck
Three: Time
Four: It All Tastes The Same
Five: Grief
Six: Sanskrit