it's amazing to be stuck in a maze you made up in your own mind.

 Hey.

So you came here a year ago or more now.  After years of me asking for a visit.  I thought it went well.

My goal was to try to get some answers and to try to know my father.

I don't have any friends.  Rachel is the only person in my life precious to me.  Autism and a 141 iq made me to strange to be close too for normal people.  Too strange to fit into life at all really.  That's a different problem.

All I wanted was to talk once in a while on the phone.  But you made it seem like I was asking for a kidney.  I can accept that maybe you have an anxiety disorder and being on the phone freaks you out.  If that is the case,  write.  

It could also be any number of things.  You could be an asshole.  You could have no empathy or love for your only son. You could have a profound sense of shame and guilt wrapped up in the idea of me, making talking to me feel like confronting a vengeful ghost. 

I don't know.  I can't know. Only YOU can know. 

But we ARE dying.  We ARE in decline. We are sinking under the the weight of time, same as everyone else, and it will run out for us.  Roxanne calls me and begs for forgiveness constantly.  I can't talk to her. She is an extremist who believes in things I find abhorrent.   I have tried.  I have given her many chances.

Same as I have you.

But those chances,  like time, are not infinite. 

You can express yourself here if that makes it easier.  Pretend you are writing to no one at all.  A journal entry with no intention to send it anywhere.

Think about the arc of your life, your remaining time, and how you feel about it.

I think about it often.  Just a few days ago in fact. I woke up sobbing uncontrollably.  I revisited the thought and cried again.   

When I think about my life, and what's left of it, I am wracked with pain, sadness, sorrow, because by surviving as long as I have the gift that remains now is that I have to live while my heroes die.  I have to watch them die. My pets.  My partner.  My idols.  Myself.

I have to watch it all slowly disincorporate and be starkly aware of the process.

You see, my head is too heavy.  The evolutionary boon I was given is not actually a Halo, it is a noose.

What a special kind of curse to be acutely aware and attuned to such a degree that I can see the everything flowing at all times.  That the entire picture is visible to me and I am humbled and crushed by the privilege.

I wish I was stupid.  Honestly I do.  A simpleton, a double digit iq.  To live and die happy and unaware would be poetry for me now. 

Instead I have this corrosive gift.  That words and ideas flow through me constantly, and that to survive my own insight I must be in therapy for life. That I must anesthetize myself constantly to withstand it all.

I hope you are well, and I hope you never see the way that I do.

-E

happy 46th old man.

 So, improbably, i am still alive.

That's right. At some point, in the past, i was up late, as i often am, as 3 am closed in around me and i thought.

"hmm. This is around when i was born. Maybe i should think about my life a bit in this rare moment of lucidity."

And here i am. Still indulging in this farcical ritual.

A few things have changed.

I am 46 now. I started this over 20 years ago.

I used to have a glass of whiskey and johnny lee hooker playing as i thought, grew pensive and let myself wander into the blues where i was born.

Now, i have a mug of fancy rooibos, bought from an old italian man in uptown, at a strange and fantastical little tea shop that i never noticed before. It demanded I KNOCK ON THE DOOR, before a slowly approaching silver haired man gingerly approached, rhapsodized about teas and not teas, italian cinema and french politics and sent me on my way with a joking, "Van fo napoly" And old italian curse my grandmother used.

Most things are still the same.

I am Alive, PREPOSTOROUSLY. Even though i should have been dead a half a dozen times or more, i am still here.

Half of my charm is my utter refusal to die. I experience these dark moments, suicidal ideation, and i close my eyes in those moments, and always seem to stubbornly emerge from them.

I tried medication.

it failed.

I tried therapy.

It barely scratched the surface.

I generally horrified the professional i engaged with. The image of those gaping mouths as i discussed my childhood, the violence, the beating, the bullying, the near death experiences, the crushing poverty, the lack of friends, family, father, mother, leading to the same question every time,

"How the hell did you come out like this?"

That is one hell of a question right?

Truth is, i don't know why i fight to survive so hard.

I got sad, and sought help in as many ways as i could think of, and forever.

I tried to meet people, make friends, and failed, over and over and over, as only an autistic mensa member really could.

Just too alien, too strange, to0 intense, too verbose, too blunt, too rude, too much.

"Can you just be LESS, you?"

No. As it turns out, i can't. I sure tried though.

Medication didn't seem to make a dent at all. I felt ill, i felt slowed down, i felt a lack of appetite but i was still miserable.

Shrinks didn't help much. They told me what i had was known as depressive realism. I was depressed, because it made SENSE to be depressed given my circumstances. Trapped in a world that was not for me, with no resources, no allies, no future, no hope.

A death sentence really.

Don't we all have one?

So when that didn't work, i read.

and read. and read, and read more.

I read about zen. I read about religions. I read about stoics, nihilists, existentialists, absurdists, reductionists, everything i could think of.

There Had To Be A Solution

SOMEWHERE.

HAD TO BE.

And i was determined to find it.

i found something. Something in all those forbidden texts. In all that occult knowledge.

I found kinship.

I found my peers.

Afflicted men, like myself. plumbing the depths of the universe for answers, and in their absence, CREATING NEW ONES.

So singular in the pursuit of meaning that they sought it until the library of the body shut the lights off.

It was how i felt SEEN. There were others, throughout history, that struggled with this problem like i did.

So i DID the shadow work. I ripped out old wires and wrote diagrams about it, schematics about the best ways to put down new ones.

I fought death in my own hands.

I cried, wept and struggled. I walked the streets at 1 am. I bought a coffee pot at 2 am from walmart after i broke mine, struggling to fill in in a rented shitty apartment with my arm in a sling.

"It serves you right to suffer, serves you right to be alone."

Sure it did johnny. But i think i've earned my freedom.

I tried to fix every goddamn part of me.

My sadness. My anger. My resentment.

The Father shaped hole in my heart. The black swirling void where meaning and love should reside where instead, dread remained.

The father didn't want me. Even after the shadow work. Even after reaching out. Even after a visit after 30 year.

As quickly as he appeared he vanished,

A ghost, a wisp of grey smoke.

The friends were always ethereal. Artifacts of my loud, freakish presentation. When you are young, that attracts people.

I was bright, brilliant, fascinating, mesmerising.

Then they have kids. Careers, families, colonoscopies,

and suddenly i'm not a good fit. The guy who still wonders, the guy who still reads, the guy who still trying to know everything, is just a bit to strange to know as a bonafide grown up.

Still here though.

Strong too.

Survived surgeries. Survived myself. Survived a life designed to crush, and you know what?

I think i'm fucking killing it.

She loves me still.

And i keep getting up.

I keep lifting the weight. I keep digging in, shovel after shovel,

I push the stone, wake up, and don't ask WHY so much anymore,

I just get started.

I just start pushing.

To everyone that helped me grow, that gave me that love and that joy when we were young,

I love you.

To the me, that keeps fighting, keeps trying, keeps smiling,

I love you too.

This can all end in a blink.

What you do with your time is yours.

Keep giving a shit.

Keep trying.

Try.