It’s 2 am. I can’t sleep.The whole week has been like this. I’ve been crawling out of bed at 11. My brain doesn’t start processing things at full speed until 1.I missed a follow-up appointment with a psychiatrist this morning. I slept through my alarm.
Everything this week has been unsatisfying. I truly haven’t been able to care. I stopped watching a Canucks game after two periods. The game was close, the good guys were winning. I don’t think I’ve ever just gotten tired of watching my team play before.Poker has been uninspiring. Orgasms have been boring. Nothing has felt like anything. I’ve just been getting from one end of the week to the other.I needed to make it to that appointment.
There is something wrong with my brain. I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t know if anybody does, but I am out of ideas and out of my depth.I’m taking suggestions.
I talked to someone tonight about how I hadn’t played hockey in about 5 years. That is an absolutely crazy number. 5 years ago, I think the longest I had gone without playing hockey was 3 weeks.There is something wrong with my hips. I’m taking suggestions on that, too.
I sometimes joke that my parents can get me out of any trouble I get myself into. They are a doctor and a lawyer.What the hell am I going to do for my kids?
It has come to my attention recently that I am a fairly useless human being. I’m physically impaired, psychologically fragile, and have no particular skills to offer anyone. If the zombies rise tomorrow, I’ll be the first one they throw off the ferry (definitely go for the ferry, zombies won’t be able to make it over bodies of water).
I am a functioning human being only by the grace of an impossibly ridiculous system. That I can play fifty poker tournaments against thousands of people, every single day, is a minor technological miracle. That I can somehow do this well enough that I can trade my time playing cards for a place to live, food to eat, and whatever other trivial bullshit that I spend money on, is lunacy. Why do I still get money for this? Why do I have more to spend on luxuries than teachers and farmers?
About the trivial bullshit and the luxuries: I’ve noticed I’m spending on more of them. I bought two more pairs of shoes in the past six weeks. I’ve considered spending my frequent player points on a watch, which might be the most trivial and archaic thing you can own since the invention of the cell phone.I spent hundreds of dollars on a straight razor, sharpening stones, and accessories, having never shaved with one or sharpened one before in my life.This compulsion to spend (horde?) has almost exactly paralleled my apathy about the rest of my life. I’m not a material person, but I am piling up material things inside of a hole that I honestly can’t say what it was filled by before it was empty.
I should probably try to sleep. It won’t work, but I should try, because a normal sleep schedule is a thing that has value. Sunday is only two days away and I have to be up and functioning at 8 am, because otherwise I won’t be, and Sundays full of poker tournaments are a thing that have value.I should probably delete the sentence about my orgasms being boring this week. My girlfriend will take it personally, even though it is a problem with my brain, and not her. My girlfriend is someone who has value.
There are a lot of things in my life that have value. There are a lot of things in my life that don’t. I know how to distinguish between these things from past experience. I can identify the impact things will have. I can know from my previous experience which impacts I want and which impacts I don’t.Right now, I don’t really care. There are no impacts I want or don’t want. I don’t have enough motivation to choose what food to eat.I think it would be fascinating to come across a completely new thing right now and try to determine whether it had value or not. I wish there was an experience I could have that was totally un-analogous to any experience I had ever had before, so I could try to determine whether or not it was something I wanted to experience again. Not because I think I’d be able to, but because I would be fascinated by how I even began to approach the decision. I think it would be kind of like learning language for the first time.
I am getting desperate for a change. I look around, wild-eyed and starving, at things I haven’t tried before, things I’ve decided in the past did not have value. The status quo isn’t working, and any change has to be better than no change.It’s 3 am. I can’t sleep.
