not important

i don't have a project to distract me from these malfunctioning mental machines, to use up the bandwidth in my brain on something positive. is not an album a project? but i am not working on it as much as i feel i should be. last night dave encouraged me to play guitar, but i didn't play. i didn't. didn't feel like it or something. felt like my bad mood would make the music bad instead of the music making my bad mood better, felt stupid and embarrassed. which is totally irrational considering dave likes my music and wanted me to play. and i would have been competing with what? a house episode we'd already seen the best parts of? just didn't have enough oomph to get out of my chair and say, hey pause the tv, let's go.

so angry at myself. so angry i can't even type the word angry multiple times in a row like is sometimes therapeutic. i feel sleepy all the time even when i get a good seven hours and food and a vitamin. not excited or interested. not important.

dave said last night that i was saying things, but none of them really seemed connected to each other. a bunch of non sequitur one-liners. this was true, and here's why it was that way. because whatever i was watching or doing, inside my head there was the "greatest hits of recent embarrassment and shame" collection. i would keep thinking of every situation where i made someone uncomfortable or embarrassed, every person i could have reached out and cheered up that i failed to, every person in my life with whom i've lost contact or not contacted enough. each of which means to my emotion-reflexes that i've disappointed and failed them. so each memory is accompanied by a guilt pang the psychic equivalent of getting whacked in the face with a rolled-up newspaper, or poked in the stomach with the end of one. not a terrible or overwhelming pain, but one nearly continuous. like emotional chinese water torture.

when this happens, i will often argue with it, in the same way i argue with commercials. of course my comments would only make contextual sense if i could display the memory i was arguing with on some sort of screen, so i cut myself off after the first word. first word always seems to slip out before i can stop it. when i was a child, it was the whole first paragraph. but now i'll be sitting there, get the twitch-thwap of a bad memory self blame thing, blurt out a word, realize i've said it out loud, then convert the word into a quip or quote or reference to something.

and i've been like that for a few days. i'm tired and listless. eye contact with me becomes unnerving very quickly unless i expend effort to emote in pleasant tones. whatever is good in me, i denigrate. whatever is bad in me, i magnify. what the hell? i am running dave ragged trying to encourage me. this is not cool or fair. i should be running myself ragged trying to encourage him, dammit.

this is something i seem to do often when dave has experienced a setback or, conversely, seems about to make progress. i freak out and hog the crazy spotlight. make myself the craziest one so we can pay attention to my problems instead of his.

the things are correlated. the extent of causation is indeterminate enough where motive should not be definitively ascribed. the nature of self-hate paranoia is that any action taken or refrained from can be interpreted negatively. if i do something, such paranoia spins, it is because i was selfishly desiring to hog all the power and glory for having done it. if i refrain from doing something else, it was so i could hurt others or disappoint them by not having done it.

i need to do something. clearly. i would ask other people for help, but what can they do? what indeed is right or appropriate help to ask of others if the thing that's making me sad is inside me?

it's like my brain is an awesome college on a boat, right. and the boat sails the high seas of everything, and below decks everyone's working on crazy art and inventions and new forms of brain-weaponry and armor. but before anyone can come out on deck and bask in the sun and swim in the pool and show off their new invention or creation, they have to get past Agnes Skinner from the Simpsons.

"Seymour, I'm tired! Make them move us to the front of the line!"
"I'm not principal of the line, mother."
"And you never will be."

"Where's your restroom? Seymour needs the toilet. His bladder's full. Full of urine!"

"No driving through tunnels! You know what that symbolizes!"
"But it cuts 90 minutes off my trip--"
"NO TUNNELS!"