The Two Dimensional Garage, Jury Duty, and the Furnace

I continue to not eat.  I don't know why.  Well, I do know why: it's very difficult to do regularly.  In short, it's hard.  That's not a reason.  That doesn't qualify as a reason.  That's an excuse.  It's a reason!  I know it's a reason because I like food.  I like shopping for food.  I like looking at food.  I like cleaning and preparing food.  I simply cannot eat it and I don't know why it is so difficult to get food from in front of me to inside of me.

Eating with people is still so strange and, for the most part, to be avoided.  It's incredibly uncomfortable.  It makes my forearms itch to watch and listen to it.  It's not disgusting, but mechanically it's draining to be around, and then people ask you why you're not eating and it turns into a whole thing and just thinking about it now I want to vomit.  It's difficult to do.  I don't understand it.  I try to do it, the feeding, but even two a day is a break through.  Once is enough.  Get it down and out of the way and forget about it.  Go to bed.  Sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep.  You can't run yourself into trouble if you're asleep.

I'm not sure what.  You can see all of the colors and the sun's light and clouds and birds and it flattens  and smears out to gray.  There are things you have to do.  Things that must be done.  Feeding, washing, resting.  Sometimes it feels like a two dimensional garage.  A plastic play place facsimile of garage where everything is laid out inside white lines.  You get up and everything is numbered in order.  You take this off and put that on, brush this, comb through that, turn knobs here and there, check your fuel gauge, off to work little guy, home, and into bed to lie awake until your brain turns itself off.

There's nothing special.  There's nothing important.  There's nothing pressing.  There's nothing.  The routine is critically important.  The more rigid the better, I used to think.  I'm not so sure.  With familiarity, brutal and starkly lit familiarity, there are fewer opportunities for mistakes, misreadings, miscues, misses.  All of them.  Destructive and damaging misses.  Misses that can affect my relationships with friends or neighbors and strangers.  Fewer opportunities for misses that can lead to depressions and emotional collapses.  Fewer opportunities for problems to arise all across the board, because of something I saw or heard and reacted to or engaged with that later proved to never have existed at all beyond my own eyes.

Brute force coping.  Except even that fails and begins to deteriorate and then you can't be at work and you can't be at home either and you hide from them by sleeping as much as you possibly can and maybe this time when you wake up they'll be gone and they're not and you're quietly terrified and you can't be out of the house for too long, and you can't be awake for too long.  They'll know.  Turn your world into a two dimensional garage and nail the windows shut and paint them black so they can't get inside and they won't be able to tell if anyone is awake at night by candle light.  To be safe and certain.  They'll try to fool you, but you know.  You know what you have to do to live.  It's all laid out by numbers and if something goes missing you know exactly what it is because its outline will be there in its absence.

I've tried for years to understand it.  I say tried, but it is not as though the attempts to understand it have reached their conclusion.  They are ongoing.  It is very difficult to prioritize.  There are many things to complete, and all they all strike me as the same.  Eating or a glass of water are as important as going to work or placing critical phone calls.  As important or as unimportant.  Prioritization has stepped away and I don't know where exactly to.  I want to feel the sensation of hot blood across the surface of my skin.  I am trying to summon the rage that fills and fires the furnace that can push me forward into and through a day or a week.  By the end, there isn't much left.  The weekend or the month's end will be composed of reassembling what is left of the furnace when I have to use it and over use it.  Picking up and bending sections and pieces back into place for having to contain for lengths and lengths of time roiling licks of anger and sheer rage.

I hate myself.  I hate having to force on smiles and eat back tears and shake hands.  I hate that I have so much trouble getting into and keeping jobs.  I'm lucky enough to have a position now that is fairly flexible and accommodating.  I'm afraid of the day the unpredictable nature of my disorder will strike me with no warning with a ferocity and depth of intensity that I.  I just don't want to hurt anyone.  Often I've said my main desire in this life is to be left alone, but that's not because I want to be left alone.

Isolation is the only way.  Every day I know I am going to die alone.  I cannot be married.  I cannot raise children.  I cannot take care of someone else.  I cannot ask someone to help me take care of myself.  I completely understand.  It would not be fair.  Beyond fairness, and the idea that trying to build a home with someone who is afflicted and, for lack of a better word, damaged it would be hazardous on many other levels.  At least isolated there is a very large zone of dead space, neutral space, physically speaking, but isolated there is also a zone of communications that can be closed off and shut down until a time arises when they can be safely used again.  Whatever damage is done is localized and hopefully hidden from those who would be part of relationships tended.  That way when communications and visitations resume they can be pursued with the cues and tips and exchanges of normalcy and proportions near normalcy that govern civil life.

Which brings me to jury duty.  There was the questionaire about all of the reasons why the prosecution or the defense may not want to select you for their trial and I came to the line item of: do you have any mental or physical disabilities that may impair your ability to perform the duties ... to paraphrase.  I don't have a prescription anymore.  That lapsed so long ago I can't remember the specific year.  I don't have paperwork.  I hate saying "what's wrong with me", but I tried to describe, during the interview portion when they ask you about your particular survey answers, what was wrong with me.  It was terribly uncomfortable though they smiled a lot,but it was the evil smile.  Not the understanding smile.  You can't ask everyone to understand.  They won't get it.  If I struggle to grasp it myself, how can I ask someone else to?

Several hours later, we had to sit for all of the interviews even though we knew we weren't going to be selected, I still thought about it.  There are many things I should not be allowed to do and serve on a jury is among them.  It's upsetting.  Feel fractional because you are.  Parts of your mind are missing or maybe it's that there are many more glitches on top of and laced throughout what is supposed to be there, what is standard equipment, and there is no way to clean or tear down and rebuild the system free of them without killing yourself in the process.  Feel and know that you'll never quite be up to par with anyone, as long as you live and know that it probably will not be all that much longer.  Maybe another 30 or so years.  Maybe less.  When you were younger you wanted to die.  Not far removed from then you realize, there's no hurry.  Be patient.  Don't fool yourself.

Or do.  I try to laugh a lot.  The idea is that maybe if I smile and laugh enough it will stick in place and remain.  People will love being around me and I will love being around them because they will love being around me.  Carefully and painstakingly construct it inside your two dimensional garage, piece by piece by piece.   Power it up.  Go through the movements and the timing and conversational spacing.  Practice and memorize so that you can drum up this other self upon demand, slip inside of it and wear it effortlessly and with enough repetitions it will become not only effortless, but a full projection and extension of you to the point that it is you.  Until your body violently rejects it and you blaze apart before your own eyes.  We will see.



///TV on The Radio - "Wear You Out" let me to bed.  please?