Time and experience press, the pains of the body creep in by every joint, thinking is boxed in by what isn’t done. Days fill in with things I believe I need to do, with the habits and cravings. I find my rut and I dig it deep. There is no destination. I live each day for its own sake, and some idea that I will be free, if I just give myself enough time. If I tread water long enough, I will become strong enough. I’ll grab enough breath and strength to assert meaning.
Nights close in though, chase the sun from the sky and me into bed. I must remain in good shape. I must be good for work. And if I wish to escape this kind of work, I must be in good shape after work. So I lock myself into a schedule. Wake up, shit, do a little remote work, exercise, shower, go to work, come home, strip naked, lie in my bed, think about the work I haven’t done, spend money on food that I should not spend, because I’m tired, because of the work. This is the ideal. Sometimes booze is thrown into the mix. For weeks at a time, it might be the only pleasure I experience aside from good eating, a few conversations.
And it’s not real pleasure, is it? That drink is euphoric, yeah. The body feels waves of pleasure, there’s a loss of care for what I actually ought to do, and I relax into whatever I want to do because of the stimulus of the booze and the anesthetic effect on the soul, but I can’t really do what I want, because what I want is to learn and grow and improve but I don’t have the mental capacity when I’m drinking, and I don’t have the mental space when I’m sober, so encroaches this sense of “might as well get drunk because I need to derive some inch of pleasure from this unthinking press of life” but then I can’t remember what I read or cohere good ideas so I become frustrated, as the simple do, and act out. Because of this sensation that the walls are closing in, that there isn’t anything good left, that the years are a trap designed to lead you through a gauntlet of disappointments building into a final set of horrible revelations that you endured your whole life because you thought things would get better, that you would’ve been better off dead at 40 in a gutter having known and loved liquor best because at 80 you can’t even enjoy a buzz without setting off a pacemaker and besides your wretched body demands attention and your mind is gone anyway so that you’re just a vessel for raw unprocessed negative experience with absolutely no filter of inner experience, just pain, just discomfort, just an itch.
The pleasure of booze, as the pleasure of any drug, is a rote button-push, and the button wears out with time. Hungers all increase around and within it. The machine of the body grinds down. And the limits time imposes on my behaviors are severe. But they are benign. No damage has been enough to overwhelm me. My experiences press me toward moderation. A heart palpitation? I must drink less. No more caffeine? I must exercise more, sleep correctly. Need more money? I must work more and manage my time more effectively. But these are all habit optimizations. There is something missing in the middle. I press down into the new shape demanded of me. But there is little time in the present to be who I want to be, do what I want to do. Foreseeably, there will be no time in the future. There will only be work.
There will be no time in the future.
Every single point of life will be structured so carefully that I merely need move through them. There is no room for deviation. I will pour through this plan laid by the guiding hand of necessity unconscious. I will make it to the end and lay down and be unbothered by thought. I, after all, forgot how to think. It wasn’t necessary. I will lay down in my coffin and expire at exactly the correct hour. At a point the entire universe will move to a script already written, and it will seem to move, but there will be no change. The scribes of our destiny will run out of matter to account for and smile. The universe will read itself, the book finished.
It’s a strange fear, a funny suffocation.
Claustrophobia.
I begin to understand the people who sit at bars and watch television. What is there to be said? What use are the thoughts they might have? A man sits down and watches other men work on a screen under the guise of gameplay or storytelling, sipping on an anesthetic between his spells of labor. It is not joy. Perhaps a moment of peace. Respite designed to kill thought. The man who spent 40 years at a job, raising his family between, not pausing for reflection. Perhaps he’s happy. Perhaps his greatest joys and his identity come from the recognition of his family. But deep thought wasn’t necessary. It probably mostly got in the way. What does it matter how you feel about things if you have to do them regardless of your native disposition? The thought is a puzzle that must be resolved to move through inaction. If discomfort persists despite some internal resolution, it must be numbed, destroyed, ignored.
It becomes necessary to wonder in scheduling your life: where am I in all of this? Who is this person whose life I am scripting?
When I am done, will that be me?
-07.20.2021
