Walking in Very Small Circles
2003-04-18 � 8:10 a.m.

Pacing.

I'm being made uncomfortable by about seven different things at the same time right now.

The attention paid me.

The lack of attention paid me.

My failures.

My meager successes.

My ever more nebulous desires — the more I try to nail them down the wispier they become.

The ache in the small of my back from my bad posture.

My utter worthlessness as a human being when measured by the only measuring device I possess: my own estimation.

So I'm pacing.

There's not much room here, in this chamber where I sleep on those rare times that I do. It's full of stuff, this stuff of plastic and metal and paper that seems to accrue about me no matter the actual effort expended to collect it or discard it.

My steps, therefore, are small.

I'm beginning to see the appeal of certain behaviors that were inscrutable to me in the past: self-mutilation, unhinged babbling and screaming, belief in conspiracies devoted to my downfall.

I used to have something that I can't find anymore. I don't even know what it was — anger, a sense of identity, hope, love, ignorance — but whatever it might have been, it's gone now. The spot inside me where it used to live is like this hollowed out bone-cave, damp and echoing.

My fear is that I killed it, perhaps out of some misguided attempt to "better" myself. Or perhaps it simply died due to lack of attention.

Regardless, it is causing me to pace.

Pacing is a lot like my life: the illusion of motion, but with no actual travel. (Time passes, events fall away...)

-t

Currently Aurally Inducing: Harvey Danger, Underground
Selection of the Lyrical Vocabulary: "...and you're alone and green and cold as the sea."

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