Wednesday, August 05, 2009

flatlining!

Through neglect, I've pretty much murdered my blog. My last post was... november? Ouch. But I don't feel this is MY fault--it's just the road life has taken me down lately. Put less romantically, my life has been boring as shit. Things like opinions, motivations, and emotions that were the fuel for this blog have completely run dry. I really would not be purposefully anti-social when people ask "Dan, what's up?" "how are you doing?" "what've you been up to lately?" and all i have to respond with is a shrug. The times i did get charged up, or i guess charged down, were when I'd get drunk enough and eventually get SUPER depressed-- during those moments i'd turn to a journal,scribbling quickly, angrily, and sloppily, not to a public blog. In some sense, my drinking had come full-circle. I was a madly depressed, self pitying wretch when i used to blog at Adventures In Adversity. ( the old pages from 2001-2002) I was a freshmen in college who stayed cooped up in my room, felt sorry for myself, and never drank once and didn't talk to anyone. Soon enough, obviously, i joined the human race and was pretty happy till about... recently.
Why was I getting depressed?

So I've begun these sort of science experiments on myself. The first was sobriety-- I am a believer in the zen view of life, i find a lot of value in the ups and downs. I like the diversity of experiences. I think transcience is beautiful. After all, that's life, right? Why deny it? When you are feeling shitty, or things go bad, you need to just experience it, fully. If you're down in the mud, just roll in it. It's a powerful thing, and makes the highs feel better. Those good days are just...GREAT. You know? The problem was there was nothing to feel "good" about. Nothing I wanted to do, nowhere i wanted to go. So sobriety was the experiment-- just.... flatlining. And it was/is weird. I kind of enjoy the massochism of it. It's also put things into perspective.
For one thing, I'm back to liking the little things. When you're living the up and down rollercoaster, you completely overlook everything in the middle. I wasn't reading anymore, I wasn't painting. Except playing D&D on sundays, which were secretly the only part of the week i looked forward to, I had basically abandoned the things which interested me. Like.. as i noticed having fun was slipping through my fingers i grabbed more and more, pushing it out faster. So, now i don't feel pressure to go out or else potentially miss out on meeting an amazing girl-- i'll stay in and read. I can sit around and focus on painting. So that's where I'm at. I'm pretty freaking anti-social, and not very happy about it. I had discovered that without beer I could give a flying fuck about meeting new people, and that's too bad. But I think I'm comin 'round. I got pretty drunk last thursday and it was super fun.

I've gotten a lot of painting done. I've read a bunch of books. I want to do more of both, and have started on polyphasic sleeping. That's probably what I'll be blogging about, but I think I'll save it for when I need something to do to keep me from falling asleep....

-D