10.03.00 - 16:01:39

I am not a nice person.

I am not a good person.

I am reminded of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, the narrator's continuing deceptions, his triggers, his lies - to himself and to his reader.

I am a sick man. ... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don't consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can't explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "pay out" the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don't consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad, well--let it get worse!

I have been going on like that for a long time--twenty years. Now I am forty. I used to be in the government service, but am no longer. I was a spiteful official. I was rude and took pleasure in being so. I did not take bribes, you see, so I was bound to find a recompense in that, at least. (A poor jest, but I will not scratch it out. I wrote it thinking it would sound very witty; but now that I have seen myself that I only wanted to show off in a despicable way, I will not scratch it out on purpose!)

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I was lying when I said just now that I was a spiteful official. I was lying from spite. I was simply amusing myself with the petitioners and with the officer, and in reality I never could become spiteful. I was conscious every moment in myself of many, very many elements absolutely opposite to that. I felt them positively swarming in me, these opposite elements.

He is interior he is underground he is intelligent without mitigating grace of thought. He is interior, he crawls beneath your skin and just -lays- there with every cheap, bitter, sarcastic, selfish, self-absorbed, blind, lying, shifting, masking impulse, and - consistently - he is always changing.

So am I. And completely self-absorbed.

svetu provalit'sia, a chtob mne chaj vsegda pit

(the world can go to hell as long as I get my tea)

Fine, fine fine. I admit, I'm probably not going to degenerate as our Russian friend does, seeking some Kantian sublime in ever-increasing suffering, sensation to jar him from his internal rambles? Or something at once larger and infinitely more petty.

I feel infinitely more petty, sometimes. Sometimes I feel limitlessly small, as if my soul could be defined by one black and bitter seed buried in barren soil. I don't like people. I don't. I find them dangerously uninteresting and categorically predictable. We tread through life making the same assumptions, perpetrating the same cruelties, treading the same goddamned wheel like a hamster. But goddamnit, that's what makes life bittersweet, and I don't just hate them for their limitations, I love them in this sweeping, transforming way. It makes me all weepy.

I don't like being all weepy. I don't like being girlish.

I despair of the possibility of change.

I want to change myself. I make resolutions. I will be less vulnerable. I will not intuitively ache for another person's ache, for they could be deceiving me

(flashback: liz traveling alone several years ago, absolutely conned out of some cash by a veritable artist.

Do I learn? Do I ever, ever learn?

Of course not: flashback, much later, three months ago. Mother's Day. It's around noon, I'm leaving my apartment - likely to drive to my parents' house - and a nodding acquaintance captures my brief attention. He's locked out of his apartment. Can he use my phone? Of course. I grab the phone and watch him like a suspicious hawk. I will not be so trusting. I will not - damn damn damn. He's disappointed. His sister wasn't there, he cannot get ahold of her and tell -

- hey, could he? No. No. He won't ask. What? Could you? Could I? He wouldn't normally EVER do this, but it's mother's day, and there's the picnic for his - and he's supposed to pick up the cake - and he's locked out of - and - he INSISTS on giving me the insurance card from his car - and he's so grateful -

I. Am. A. Complete. Sucker.

...and I know it, I know it, and I hate it, I despise it, I wanna excise it completely from my psyche, and be cool and distant and unyielding. I don't want to be a walking target for anyone who might just wanna use me, and I don't wanna be ever-suspicious that everyone else is.

I would like to be less emotional, or at least have my feelings make sense. I would like to be able to speak without a weight upon my tongue.

However, I do not want to lose the intimate interior space, the secret garden of mind and body, when I curl up with myself and read poetry, or some astonishing novel, or - believe it or not - attempt to write, pen and paper style, old-fashioned.

I produce nothing of genius except for that cocooned sensation of thrumming silence, anticipatory and delighted, laced with every single possibility.

I produce nothing of genius but that sweeping sensation. I can be alone, in a darkened room, depressed, bitter, self-involved little annoying, sniveling witch - and I am suddenly, completely buoyed, I am split open and pain-fire-bright-sublime ravaged without even a sunset as trigger, only intimate pages, or intimate pen, and me, and my acute, overt, sensually intellectual, intellectually sensual consciousness of skin and breath and possibility.

I have no idea how this entry traveled so far as it did. Here I thought I was just going to maunder about my flaws.

Sometimes I surprise myself.

Interestingly, I am still vaguely depressed and headachy and self-loathing, but overall I feel pretty damn good.