One thing, a bit suspicious, was that when I’d mentioned how much I enjoyed last summer, and she said, “Really? I got the idea that you were not having an easy time.” This caught me off guard. She knew!?
* * *
I still feel like a depressive—or at least someone with significant fatigue issues, but for a few days I’ve been better. I’m not drinking heavily or smoking pot (I had been drinking so heavily); no math puzzle craving; no sleeping around; no trying to call or text Oreste late at night, which I earlier did multiple times to no benefit whatsoever. These are things I already know give me nothing but nevertheless give off the scent that something fortuitous might come from behaving badly, as it often felt when I was younger. If, between fifteen and twenty, everything happened by magic when I was drunk, shouldn’t I try to reclaim that magic? No. Because I’m better, clearer, and saner when sober now than I was during those years, and all it looks like is either the vacillation of some nutcase or that I really am that idiot at heart, which is not what I want anyone to think of me, in truth: that I’m foolish, that I’m scared, that I’m insecure, that I’m small. It’s true that some men would love an opportunity to exploit loyalty from those qualities, but fuck if those are the men I’ve learned to court!
I thought, during adolescence, that my private life would anchor me to the world, and that attracting others to me would make me safer. It’s not true. It just provides me disappointment and pain. I only know the pleasure of the interpersonal better than the pleasure of work because I’ve spent more time with it. However. I’ll find the same intensity of pleasure in work. I’ll develop the same masochistic attachment to one success for nine rejections that others have been able to—staying hungry, working, devoted, aching. Because that adds up to something. Some person, in the end, will add up to shit.
* * *
Setting up plans for the rest of the summer. Feels great. Know exactly when Odile’s home and that I can stay with her in Paris and that we’re both so excited. Going to spend some time at the residency with Ruby, too.
* * *
Met Caroline last night, had average-tasting dinner, quick walk in pouring rain to her friend’s house. We watched some sci-fi series she’s been into on Netflix while I flipped through a copy of Ayn Rand on selfishness, which I found on a shelf. Nathaniel Branden, identified as a contributor but not as Rand’s protege or lover, had a few short essays. Read his piece on the psychology of pleasure while thinking about Fourier, thinking about what corruptions of pleasure wouldn’t be deemed so in societal harmony. So too in Branden’s conception, virtuous pleasure is formally distinguished from vice—pleasure doesn’t seduce us. It is, indeed, every human’s driving force. It’s just that whatever the pleasure is that happens to attract someone reveals the soul of said person, their lived set of values. Whoever loves lowly, destructive pleasures will lead them to disaster, and whoever instead enjoys productive labour and high art will find through his pleasure a very good life. It’s a funny coincidence how little either Branden or Fourier, totally opposite each other on the socio-political spectrum, should speak of discipline or its need. In either conception of humanity, a good, free person doesn’t need it. Unencumbered in either case from a certain set of contemporary demands (capitalism, socialism), the subject is bound to be his best self, and he can follow his pleasure someplace good.
Still, for Branden, there are pleasures that don’t qualify—false ones too easily indulged in. There’s something that feels like pleasure, but then there’s something else that is pleasure, and they both have the same name.
What if I want to change the kind of life I live and relationships with friends and lovers where we are both, above all, silent? I wouldn’t want a silence that means stoicism, because there’s nothing ethical about that. I want a silence that means comfort, that one’s needs are being met, that one isn’t hungering for anything.
One utopian model: seeking a life that best facilitates stimulation/mania—but isn’t this, too, a little anxious? What about the utopian desire to be happy in silence—a silence that doesn’t feel stifled but satisfied. So unhinged is a utopia that wishes to always feel hunger.
If I only seek out true pleasure and never read garbage on the internet again, I can make prattle my past life.
What if there’s nothing complicated about an ideal life: it’s just a comfortable bed, a big, clean kitchen, and the humility to really give Mind Over Mood your best shot?
In other news, I could swear that one teen boy in a car of several just said to me, “Fuck our jizz,” but that couldn’t have been it.
* * *
As per style this spring, got too, too wasted drinking with Marianne and hastily tried to sleep with a friend of hers. I think I was being bossy all night, impatient with any men who wouldn’t defer to me flaunting the sheer power of sexiness, because I was wearing something revealing in a flattering colour. I didn’t quite black out, but still, eventually, we could have been talking about anything.
I have a desperate sexuality right now relating to anxieties over my expiration. I see myself as lacking the particular vulnerability I never understood made me attractive when I was younger. I wonder: is there some quality I don’t even know of, which I possess now and won’t be able to get back later, too? I couldn’t possibly be so idealistic forever, nor so lost. That isn’t even to mention the pertness and tautness I’m losing daily. My breasts will only continue to deflate; my thighs and stomach will only continue to wrinkle; my hair will keep getting coarser, and it will keep going white. What I don’t use will go to waste, and I have to profit somehow off myself before it’s too late. I feel the injunction to use myself for “profit” in a way mixing the French and the English usages. I want to use my body and being for the best experience of pleasure before it changes and I’m bound to experience different kinds—and I want to use it over others in order to get things from them: admiration or drinks or the occasional place to stay.
Still, I know there’s not much that is more attractive than softness. I just don’t know how to play soft anymore.
Part of growing older and seeing youth go is an infantile insistence on keeping it, wishing for the passions that can be invigorated by juvenile behaviour. But it’s not flattering, plus it brings more pain to life. When I was drunk again, I still called Oreste, because I thought that if I didn’t take the opportunity to accost him while drunk, I wouldn’t do it sober. Oreste has not indulged me in the idea that he might like to see me since saying he didn’t want to sleep together anymore two months ago. And though my ideal is a considerably more generous approach, this is immaterial.
I’m not entitled to the generosity of anyone. A childhood with negligent parents can lead to an adulthood anxiously trying to prove the beholdenness of others you’ve come to know, but the truth is there’s no one with the responsibility to you that your parents once had, and even if you didn’t get it then, you’re still not owed it later. That is simply the bad luck of living. I’m not entitled to the attention of anyone, even if they’d earlier chosen to give it. They are liable—and they have every right—to retreat, ignore, cut off contact, anything. Whether it’s due to boredom or carelessness or self-preservation or anything doesn’t matter a touch. It’s not up to them to explain things to me if they don’t desire to. I suspect that, as much as dating older men so young did its number on me, it gave me a false precedent: being cared for by men too guilty to abandon me totally, lest I feel used. It’s cooed me into a false standard of closure that doesn’t represent how many people come apart from each other once they’re both adults. People simply say goodbye and cease to seek any comfort from the other, and have some fucking discipline and put their libido somewhere else, or suspend it indefinitely, if that has to be done instead. No one owes me a thing. I simply owe it to myself to move on gracefully from those who’ve denied me.
If it happens that two of the more important things in life are respect and
patience, then life is indeed somewhat less fun than otherwise. But how fun has it really been so far? Has my long, lonely, indulgent, and insecure young adulthood really been so much fun for me? What, really, do I have the pleasure of feeling? Cute, quirky, attractive with strangers, and though loved by those closest to me, loved always with the understanding that there’s something in me that will never be settled, will always seek to move, often toward rejecting people—something destined for perpetual unhappiness. I think I’m so fucking good and generous, when such a good deal of what I consider pleasurable consists of seducing others against their better judgment! For a decade now, I’ve wanted people to be captive to me not because I wanted a future with them, but because I simply got off on my hold upon them. It’s supposed to be some fucking coincidence that whatever the situation has been—queasy involvements, affairs—I’ve probably spent barely a month having anyone with me not because of a frisson of lust, but because they thought they should be? Such a fucking generous woman—if I’m not turning people against themselves, I’m not turned on for a minute! The core of my sexual identity is fucking rotten. It would be no surprise to me if the rottenness made it so that I didn’t understand how it worked for others at all. Should it be any wonder that I am orgasmically impotent with others despite performing with no trouble when I’m alone? It’s not. It’s from a dishonesty with myself and others. To sit there fucking like I’m so good and free when in reality so much of what I want is to be the woman with the tits to destabilize a man because: a) I’ve never gotten what I wanted; and b) I’m not about to be getting it there. What I’ve delusionally convinced myself is that openness is rather impatience, and a disrespect for the boundaries others have drawn for themselves. I’m an embarrassing person who’s never come to terms with it who’s had the good fortune of some months that were good.
It’s valuable to you if no lover is to treat you like a child again, and it’s about fucking time. Do not embarrass yourself. Do not beg for crumbs of attention if you think you can pressure others into giving them to you. If you take others seriously—their lives, their decisions—perhaps it will come naturally that you begin to take your own life seriously, too.
I fear being empty, because nothing seems worse to me, but that’s not quite the issue. I’m not empty, but disorderly. I have got a shit ton of interiority, but as it’s still in disarray, it pulls all this garbage in, and it’s always begging. People know and recognize the pressure of those in disarray.
I think I’m recognizing how megalomaniacal even a quiet person can be. What is my depression? It’s: impotence in the face of the non-correlation of the outside world to what I want. Every once in a while, the depression seems to lift because for a time I feel my sensibility is being recognized or repaid or I’m getting fucked well and often (which is a form, perhaps, of the same thing, or at least can feel as though it were so), but the truth is, these are flukes, and I do not and will not live in a world dreamed up exactly according to my standards. What is my depression? It’s the narcissistic precedence given to my own desires and their uncedability to a world that doesn’t match them. It’s an obsession with control, and a complete collapse before the imperfect reality of living. Seen this way, my depression could easily be overcome were I only to give some of this up.
* * *
I feel, in fact, a little: sick, rejected, worried, aggravated, unsound. But do you know what? I suppose this is better than the number of days I went this year feeling next to nothing. Smothered, sleeping, ignoring myself, passionless without even the desire for passion. I was contained but I was fucking asleep. If now, perhaps, the drunkenness and the misbehaviour and the wandering about and the conscious nervous sadness makes me feel that I’m having an episode of a kind? I daresay I prefer it. I needed something.
If the fucking worst I did was text Oreste late in the night and also try to sleep with someone else in person, good fucking grief. Oreste said I was harassing him. He had never said this before. OK. I won’t do it again.
I think, if you can handle it sober, it’s useful to endure the kind of anxiety I’ve been feeling lately. It springs me into fits of thought that never quite feel proper, or logical—they feel too sentimental, they feel obsessive, they feel simply overpowered. But if the choice is between that and what feels like a void of consciousness? OK, let’s be serious—these are not the only two choices. But they are, indeed, two of the choices.
* * *
While I was working at a café, some man approached me so that he could show me the journal entry he’d drafted about me the afternoon before. Curious, of course, I told him, please! It went like this: a young woman, wearing sneakers, has walked in reading a book I can’t make out the cover of. But, it said, I’ve just recently met this other woman, whom I feel good near, and who is attractive but perhaps not beautiful, and has character, yes, but perhaps a little too much, and I don’t know if she is the woman I envision at my side in life. And then, the antidote? Me, who hadn’t spoken! Who was softer; magnetic, not seductive; and truly beautiful, not simply cute (and, indecipherable as I was, with no obnoxious surfeit of character). Disgusting. This idiot rejecting man with his fantasies who did not know that I was the too-much woman, and that to spend only an evening with me would send him back again, looking for another chesty young thing, with a book, whose voice he hadn’t heard.
* * *
I feel, again, as some lucky times previous: like I give a shit about no one. Just no particular invested shit. Before I was horny, reckless, and binge-drinking like crazy. Now I hardly give a shit about surprising myself with some hidden experience of wonder at all!
I spent a long, lazy night at Max’s on Saturday. If I’d have been asked years ago, such a night with him would have been ideal to me: lazing around, chatting, watching TV, reading or working together, and eventually sex mostly by his urgings. It makes almost no impression on me now. I like Max, and we respect each other, but I feel ultimately when I’m with him like I have so much more to say than he can begin to understand. We’re comfortable together, but we pose no challenge to each other. He’s too distractable to pay any attention to most of what I have to say, just as he’s too distractable for anything, and it’s no fault of mine! What I liked about spending so many hours with him (around 5:00 p.m. one day to 3:00 p.m. the next) was that I was less attentive to my telephone and ashamed to be as distracted as I would have been were I alone, but his distractability is too stubborn to settle down, even in my company.
I don’t regret the fucking, but the fucking with Max is never the fucking I want most, and I’ve known this for some time. Like me, he’s accustomed to porn, and he’s so used to masturbating that he cannot come without jerking himself off for a while. My fucking someone does not hinge upon sitting there jerking myself off for a while! He is not taking me for a good ride there jerking himself off. That’s not the experience I want to have fucking. It’s just not the sex I want. I’m too conscious for it—my mind is in completely the same place; the experience is totally non-transformative. It doesn’t do anything. That’s not the point of fucking. That’s just no way I want to be fucked.
All the same, merely being around him reminded me of Julian, and reminded me of all the hours I spent grateful to be witness to his life rather than to be out having my own, or to be working, or to be attending to my problems. When I ask Max questions, he hardly ever returns them. When I was with Julian, I never wanted him to. I don’t desire this way of being with another anymore. I don’t get anything but a fleeting feeling of comfort from it.
There is nothing to be sought from sex. Stop watching porn so that when I next meet someone who stimulates me, who I really want to fuck, I can train myself to get off with him, and on being with him. And then what? So I come with him? Is this going to be the cure to my relational life? Fuck no, and many skipped orgasms in the meantime. So onward instead, jerking off to this absurd image of the ecstatic that I’ve become so comfortabl
e with. I hope I never want to fuck anyone again. When I don’t, and when I’m without all the attendant anxiety and longing and confusion that comes with it, life really is better. Or life is at least without so much of the nonsense.
One should experience stress in life—at school, at work. When I have a system of disappointment and happiness that rewards hard work and clarity at school, that is good. No disappointment in love is going to teach me anything but to desire with greater caution.
The whole fuck-world causes me undue resentment, rage, and pain—and it’s all avoidable by putting my efforts and attention back to academics, where they belong. Fucking will not give me a life. Learn from the wisdom of the fucked-over women who’ve learned to lead better lives and, if you must go on any date, take advantage of an opportunity to be out in public socializing with a man who wants to impress you because gender binaries often still seem real and he really does think sex isn’t something you’re going to want to offer him unless he wins it somehow.
Even my most generous thoughts about Oreste were about the cleanness of my relationship to him as this total abstract: that in him, first, I sought something that wasn’t prohibited from me (outright), that I wasn’t afraid to talk to him (for as long as this was so), that I didn’t seek social mobility through him (only, subconsciously, through his sister). Who he is is conspicuously absent from all of this, and for all my musings about how I’d finally made improvements to my desire, I barely wanted to consider: 1) for whom; and 2) the absolute separateness of his own desire from mine. This might just be what infatuation is: an attraction that invents its own object while blind to its true qualities, and a denial that the object has some hidden desire that you can neither perceive nor accommodate. Infatuation can make you feel high and it can make you feel good, so you stick to it, but it’s a kind of psychosis, so you give it up.
Sludge Utopia Page 7