I haven't kept a journal in years.
I have, off and on, written very brief posts about what's been going on in my life. I have never really been good at keeping up a regular journal. I used to have a LiveJournal. Stopped using it, though.
I have been in a very dark place for the past week, and this post is an attempt to get myself out of my funk.
A week ago, I found out that someone very dear to me died.
In case anyone reads this some day, I want to explain myself somewhat, before I reveal who died.
I have been alone, largely, in my time in the Army. I've been in 4 years, and I've been abandoned almost that entire time. I sent my family about $30,000 before they disowned me, and I had an on-again off-again relationship with a disparaging woman. I was utterly alone, and I was alienated from my coworkers because of a mixture of favoritism by the boss where I worked. That boss and I had to maintain a professional distance, however, to avoid that favoritism marring his otherwise perfect record.
The only regularly heard, friendly voices in my world for 3 years, were the gentlemen of the Giant Bomb video game review website.
I had friends that I lost contact with frequently, due to the Operational Tempo of my unit, combined with my sparse connection to postal services and the internet.
It is nearly impossible to explain how lonely and sad my life was during that time. A lot of that isolation was due to me sending so much money to my presently estranged family. That was a personal choice.
Due to my stubbornness and lifestyle, I literally slept on the floor of an apartment for a year, with nothing to my name but a book of sudoku, and the voices of the Bombcast.
I recognize the irrationality of my mourning, but the death of Ryan Davis has been the most crushing event in my life since the death of my father nearly ten years ago.
The past week, I've been doing a lot of thinking. I've been trying to put things in perspective. I've been trying to talk myself out of mourning, really.
It hasn't worked.
And so I started wallowing in my self-pity and misery. I've been catching up on how my high school peers have been doing. I looked for my estranged mother and brother a bit on the internet and concluded that they are living with Linda, most likely.
I was ignored by my mother after I reached out to her twice, after years of her sucking me financially dry. She then sent a passive aggressive email to me last Christmas. Completely insincere.
And the past 24 hours, I've been comparing myself a lot.
Coulda Shoulda Woulda.
That stinking thinking has gotten me only further stuck in the mire of my own pity.
My concentration is shot. I'm flitting from thing to thing, hoping to run from familiarity, from feeling.
All I'm doing is wasting time.
My life is marked, punctuated, by epochs of sadness. That is something I've learned to live with. I've learned how to hide it. Remarkably well, in fact. I turned it into a game. I get ever more bombastic and gregarious when I'm not feeling well.
I pride myself in people seeing me as a human-puppy, essentially. Care-free, and always air-headedly content.
What a terrible coping tool. I carry my island, my fortress of icey solitude, with me, wherever I go.
I cling to songs. I revel in periodic love affairs with music. They are almost fetishistic totems dotting the landscape of my feelings. They grow to be lodestones of memories.
Happy memories sometimes, but they are typically murky bogs of self-doubt and -hatred.
Get through this wretched post, please. Don't give up. Hopefully, it goes somewhere.
I have been listening to Anais Mitchell's "Hadestown" LP, and more specifically, the "Wait For Me" song.
That is the fetishistic totem for my mourning.
I feel like I have passed some event horizon of terror.
I can't sleep. I can't focus. I am thinking pretty dark stuff.
I don't want to wallow in the wading pool of dejection and petulance for too long.
Boys focus on problems, men focus on solutions, right?
Ryan Davis was a voice in my head for so long. He was with me, for years. He consoled me with humor, and the fact that he never stopped talking. I'd listen to him in a dark, cacophonous house, filled only with spiders as living accompaniment. I'd get hazed at work, I'd be tired, and I'd be walking and running 10-20 miles every day, and I'd be getting 6 hours of sleep, at most, a night.
And you know what was the guttering candle, holding the dark at bay?
The Bombcast.
I am proud to consider those men to have been as close to companions during long years of abuse, war, and destitution, as anyone else has been in my life.
I accept that the companionship was as close to intimacy as, say, my relationship with my binkey from childhood.
The world lost an amazing person when Ryan Davis died. I didn't know him well, and he didn't even know I existed. But that's not the point. He was a consolation, to me.
I will miss him.
So, what?
What will I do with myself?
How do I fix my mourning?
I wrote a book when Dad died. I think I'm going to start writing again.
I have, off and on, written very brief posts about what's been going on in my life. I have never really been good at keeping up a regular journal. I used to have a LiveJournal. Stopped using it, though.
I have been in a very dark place for the past week, and this post is an attempt to get myself out of my funk.
A week ago, I found out that someone very dear to me died.
In case anyone reads this some day, I want to explain myself somewhat, before I reveal who died.
I have been alone, largely, in my time in the Army. I've been in 4 years, and I've been abandoned almost that entire time. I sent my family about $30,000 before they disowned me, and I had an on-again off-again relationship with a disparaging woman. I was utterly alone, and I was alienated from my coworkers because of a mixture of favoritism by the boss where I worked. That boss and I had to maintain a professional distance, however, to avoid that favoritism marring his otherwise perfect record.
The only regularly heard, friendly voices in my world for 3 years, were the gentlemen of the Giant Bomb video game review website.
I had friends that I lost contact with frequently, due to the Operational Tempo of my unit, combined with my sparse connection to postal services and the internet.
It is nearly impossible to explain how lonely and sad my life was during that time. A lot of that isolation was due to me sending so much money to my presently estranged family. That was a personal choice.
Due to my stubbornness and lifestyle, I literally slept on the floor of an apartment for a year, with nothing to my name but a book of sudoku, and the voices of the Bombcast.
I recognize the irrationality of my mourning, but the death of Ryan Davis has been the most crushing event in my life since the death of my father nearly ten years ago.
The past week, I've been doing a lot of thinking. I've been trying to put things in perspective. I've been trying to talk myself out of mourning, really.
It hasn't worked.
And so I started wallowing in my self-pity and misery. I've been catching up on how my high school peers have been doing. I looked for my estranged mother and brother a bit on the internet and concluded that they are living with Linda, most likely.
I was ignored by my mother after I reached out to her twice, after years of her sucking me financially dry. She then sent a passive aggressive email to me last Christmas. Completely insincere.
And the past 24 hours, I've been comparing myself a lot.
Coulda Shoulda Woulda.
That stinking thinking has gotten me only further stuck in the mire of my own pity.
My concentration is shot. I'm flitting from thing to thing, hoping to run from familiarity, from feeling.
All I'm doing is wasting time.
My life is marked, punctuated, by epochs of sadness. That is something I've learned to live with. I've learned how to hide it. Remarkably well, in fact. I turned it into a game. I get ever more bombastic and gregarious when I'm not feeling well.
I pride myself in people seeing me as a human-puppy, essentially. Care-free, and always air-headedly content.
What a terrible coping tool. I carry my island, my fortress of icey solitude, with me, wherever I go.
I cling to songs. I revel in periodic love affairs with music. They are almost fetishistic totems dotting the landscape of my feelings. They grow to be lodestones of memories.
Happy memories sometimes, but they are typically murky bogs of self-doubt and -hatred.
Get through this wretched post, please. Don't give up. Hopefully, it goes somewhere.
I have been listening to Anais Mitchell's "Hadestown" LP, and more specifically, the "Wait For Me" song.
That is the fetishistic totem for my mourning.
I feel like I have passed some event horizon of terror.
I can't sleep. I can't focus. I am thinking pretty dark stuff.
I don't want to wallow in the wading pool of dejection and petulance for too long.
Boys focus on problems, men focus on solutions, right?
Ryan Davis was a voice in my head for so long. He was with me, for years. He consoled me with humor, and the fact that he never stopped talking. I'd listen to him in a dark, cacophonous house, filled only with spiders as living accompaniment. I'd get hazed at work, I'd be tired, and I'd be walking and running 10-20 miles every day, and I'd be getting 6 hours of sleep, at most, a night.
And you know what was the guttering candle, holding the dark at bay?
The Bombcast.
I am proud to consider those men to have been as close to companions during long years of abuse, war, and destitution, as anyone else has been in my life.
I accept that the companionship was as close to intimacy as, say, my relationship with my binkey from childhood.
The world lost an amazing person when Ryan Davis died. I didn't know him well, and he didn't even know I existed. But that's not the point. He was a consolation, to me.
I will miss him.
So, what?
What will I do with myself?
How do I fix my mourning?
I wrote a book when Dad died. I think I'm going to start writing again.
