The good times are killing me

I should be editing my theses so that I can turn them in tomorrow.

Instead I am procrastinating by going fucking crazy.

I feel like my insides have been carved out to make room for more space. Needlessly more efficient in one sense. My eyes are itchy. They won’t stay dry.

I feel like a song by the Presidents of the United States of America.

Lump lingered last in line for brains
And the ones she got were sorta rotten and insane
Small things so sad that birds could land
Is lump fast asleep or rockin’ out with the band

I mean really, what the fuck?

Kitty on my foot and I want to touch it.

I repeat; what the fuck?

Every time this happens I can feel it coming. I spent as much of yesterday as was humanly possible alone in my room, studiously copying J.D. Salinger in his cowardice. Sometimes I need days off. I can’t bear to be around other people. Or do anything productive.

I mentioned to one of my closest friends today that I was looking forward to therapy tomorrow because of all of the things from my past that I’ve been reliving this week. He laughed at me and said, “We have such tough lives, you and I.”

That man is a fucking genius.

And that was the essence of the matter. My life is the only compelling argument that can be made for an ‘intelligent designer’. I am cushy and coddled by all of life’s eccentricities. I am probably the luckiest motherfucker ever to have been conceived.

And yet.

Sometimes it takes me a while to shake it all off. It reminds me of when I used to pole vault. Because nearly everything does. Every now and again, especially when you are as inconsistent a person as I am, you have a terrible vault. You’ll end up gasping for breath staring up at the sky covered in bruises and scrapes laying on the ground somewhere surprisingly far from where you meant to land. And it’ll take you a while to get back in. In high school I helped coach the new kids. Every time one of them would have a truly disastrous fall we would tell them, “Okay, now you’re a real pole vaulter.” In the end, you knew who were the best vaulters, not necessarily from how high they could vault, but from how quickly they could brush themselves off and get back on the runway.

I remember days when I would fall every time. I was getting on a stiffer pole or something and every fucking time I jumped the pole would spit me back out onto the runway as if I’d just slapped its mama. And every fucking time I would pick myself back up, sometimes bleeding, sometimes bruised, and get back behind the pole until the coach told me to stop.

It’s much easier to throw yourself twelve feet into the air over and over again without knowing if you’ll land on the mats after having fallen a few times than it is to throw yourself back into life after having fallen a few times. When you fall in pole vault it makes you angry and excited and you need to keep going until you get it right. What the fuck is right in life? Pole vault is so much less ambiguous than other things. Questions like, “were you doing the right thing?” boil down to, “are you bleeding?” Very easy to tell.

I want to punch the world in the face. I’d give up my easy-ass life if everyone I came into contact with could have an easier life. Why doesn’t life work like that?