June 6

June the 6th, I did nothing. I watched the day pass by, a few chores, a computer game, making myself numb so I don't have to think about how hopeless it is.

I try not to think about what I could have done with my life. This is what I've done. I try not to think about what I might have been able to do. When I enumerate my abilities, they don't amount to much. It seems I am doing just what I was able and that was nothing at all.

No one has a use for me. Yet when I think about it, I understand what's going on. I interpret the world and not everyone can do that. I see what it is. But I never gained any ability to do anything about it. It always seemed like something I was outside, wishing someone would let me in.

No one has a use for me and I'm useless on my own. It's surely not such a sin, to need others to come alive? It takes you to places you maybe never wanted to go, sure, but that only hurts yourself.

***

I was going to write something about Bella, how she decided she loved Jesus more than she loved me, but to be honest, I'm just sick to the core of selfish cunts and dwelling on one or another won't make me feel any better. My views remain the same: only the real is worth fighting for, dying for, living for, loving. The abstract nonsense that we use to shield ourselves from looking at the real only has what impact on our lives we wish it to. In my case, not a great deal; in hers, enough to make her life torturous. So that's that.

Ex-Mrs Zen was the same: she wished only to communicate about a list of things that she was entitled to, never about what we actually had. Still, I sometimes feel I should have been less contrary, insisted less on real life and given her more of what she wanted. The problem is, these women are like terrorists. It is not enough to give them something and hope they will negotiate. They will take it for weakness and demand more. Tell Bella you respect her religious beliefs and she demands you do not talk about science; that you give up wonderment, just as she has given it up, and find that respectable. Tell ex-Mrs Zen that you will give something up for her, the next day there is something else you have to give up, and in the meantime, she is still the same bitch she was before.

You spend, and you buy nothing.

Not everyone can be like that. I mean, I am left hoping it's just Australian women -- because let's face it, it's all the Australian women I've known -- and that one day I'll be able to return home and find someone who believes I am worth more than that (not that I claim to be worth much: I simply feel that loving someone cannot be a matter simply of finding some abstract thing to bash them with).

I know B will think that unfair. But her abstractions are ultimately even more insuperable than Bella's. Sometimes you have to close your eyes and say fuck it.

***

But don't I believe in an abstraction, yearn for it even though it is contrary to anything I can expect? Of course I do, but I do not punish you for it. I know mine is impossible. I am complicated in that I have to see everything as a transaction, a trade in power (I will blog that shortly, I think), yet I want simplicity.

My friend boots -- whatever happened to boots? -- would tell me about his cabin in the wintertime. I did not believe his cabin was anything but wholly imaginary. He would talk about clearing snow, cutting wood, getting by on a little, just him and Mrs boots.

I did not believe it was anything but imaginary because it seemed like he was describing a dream. Because who really could be satisfied with that, this side of ex-Mrs Zen's dad? (Who does not have what I want -- although his life is simple, it is not warm, far from it, and warmth is the key to my dream. In boots' cabin, a stove roared and he basked in the warmth.)

I do believe in an abstraction. I believe in love. I believe it illuminates the darkness, even if the darkness must ultimately win. I know I am foolish. What did my beliefs ever get me but broke, hopeless and scared in a suburb of a hick town without a heart?

posted by Dr Zen @ 5:49 pm