Sometimes it’s not like I want to die, but it’s not like I want to live either. Like with other people I’ve read about, this tends to happen at night. Maybe the day when this finally happens during the day… well that will be the day. It's night time now. What a surprise.
I am simply not happy with anything. I have no realistic dreams; the only things I still think I would be happy with, are things that are just never going to happen, like winning the lottery, like getting rid of the retrovirus… I don’t know... maybe if I made an effort to save money and rented a place and filled it with IKEA furniture, maybe that would be it; but even that, even everything, feels as impossible as winning the lottery.
I'm sorry, but life sometimes is a piece of unadulterated shit. What I would give to be Mary Fucking Poppins. She was just great at night time. All that singing and all those chimneys. Mary Fucking Poppins really knew what she was doing. Can't sleep? Nevermind, just get to some roof with a few friends a fair few coordinated strangers and start singing and dancing. That's all. No real thinking involved. Fumes are good.
I care about nothing. Not even about myself. I am just a burden to myself. Always unhappy, always unsatisfied, always regretting, always longing for that past I used to hate, as if I hadn’t hated it, not caring much about the fact that some of the things I have now are the things I used to be so unhappy I didn’t have… always wanting what I haven’t got. And, of course, the fact that this whole thing is actually so ordinary, so unimpressive, so non-unique, only makes it worse. So very non-unique in adversity.
The morning comes and it’s not like nothing's happened, but it's not like anything's changed either. I think about cutting my hair, and I quickly make it my business to include it in my to do list for the day. I'm a little desperate today, a little edgy; but edgy, in some ways, helps; I've sensed today's not the day to ignore points in my list; today's a day to tick. To tick whatever. It's the ticking that matters. Ticking may be, in the end, the thing that saves me. It's tangible. It's tick or die. It's so fucking satisfying.
And so I cut my hair, with my father's clippers. In case you wonder, I do do the whole thing myself. How do I do the back bit? Well, just holding a hand mirror in front of my face whilst a larger mirror lies behind me, and twisting my arm and wrist and whole upper body fairly inhumanly. I like cutting my hair. It's better than having it cut anywhere I've lived... the hairdresser's: feeling ever so pathetic whilst you look at yourself in the mirror and feel weird for an eternity... subtly changing faces —you don’t want to look vain or silly, but you don’t want to look so consistently ugly either, so subtle face changes are on—… putting that eternally grateful face when the oh so skilful hairdresser holds the mirror so you can look at your own back of the neck, which is looking oh so wonderful.
I usually feel handsome after I cut my hair; though, in my defence, only for four to five days tops; after that, it’s downhill to Ugly Planet; the temples, greyer than the other bits, worry me particularly; grey hair, out of the just-cut look, is just plain ugly; I used to do the whole dyeing thing, but I don't now. That phase is over.
And now, simply, it’s night time again.
Mother of God. Will you do something?
