An exercise in stamina.

July 24, 2007 by Deightine.

So far this blog has mostly sat idle, bits of fiction broken up and dropped into the water like bait to see if any attention would come of it. It is an interesting thing, attention, and I find myself constantly craving it in every aspect of my life. For years now I have been analyzing my childhood and much of the decisions I have made since an emotional event that truly twisted my formative years. I study neuroscience, affective and cognitive, and spend a lot of time buried up to my eyes in philosophy and children’s stories. I spend a lot more time than is probably good for me trying to determine where my drive went… Where my urges went. In effect, my drive has become figuring out where my drive ended up. A terrible paradox.
The only answer I’ve ever been able to come up with is that at some point during childhood or puberty, I changed from being primarily a creative (but logical) thinker into a mostly listless and unresponsive introvert. Then, due to the progressing state of puberty and the few hardwired instincts I listened to (sex, food, shelter, comfort) at the time, I picked up a neurochemical reaction for creature comforts. In effect, an addiction to those things you need to survive… Constantly winding up to needing more and more of the comforts in order to feel “ok” on any given day. These needs pushed me when the rest of my drive may have been hiding in the back waiting for a pat on the back from parents that didn’t notice (and couldn’t understand) and left me learning the skills needed to gather further comforts. I learned to work (but only enough to get what I wanted for the moment), live (using up what I earned), and covet (women, vices, knowledge).

On the note of coveting… Well, I spent quite a few years as a teenager absorbed in the internet (not uncommon these days), and girls. Girls online, offline, in line at the supermarket, waiting in line during lunch… Girls all the time. But after a very short stint with girls, I moved on to women. Women are in abundance on the internet, even if most people don’t realize it. They find niches on chat communities as den mothers, gossip mongers, and hostile trolls. Some of the most virulent and unpleasant trolls I’ve ever run into were women looking to cause a reaction. In all cases, I tended to be able to get an in with them… Get under their clothes, sheets, skins. Women would travel from hundreds of miles away to meet me, or wait for hours to meet me across town from where I lived because of a passing word.

But don’t get me wrong… I wasn’t well off, or even pretty to look at. It’s a certain presence, a frame of reference, a way of speaking, that drew them in. I’ve always had that presence and it has gotten me in trouble a number of times. The worst of which left me (the poor and homely) being stalked like a movie star. Worse than being stalked? When nobody is willing to believe you are in any way special enough to deserve it and dismissing it as an attempt for attention. The true contradiction of my youth caused me to suffer from this immensely. I wasn’t handsome, I wasn’t economically alluring, I didn’t have a tremendous number of friends and I spent a lot of time off in my own little world examining what made me who I was. I became a hollowly extroverted introvert, with delusions of grandeur and notions of inadequacy.

I was pulled away inside, examining everything and comparing it against the world around me — while at the same time I looked outside like a hunter seeking a food source — and what I found was a giant cold hole in my soul where nothing could fill it. A notion many people are familiar with… The elusive “What am I meant for? Who will love me?” that has been the fixated target of poetry, writing and lamentation in history only to find a new medium in movies and comic books. I’m sure Shakespeare would have loved Ultra if he had the chance to read such a thing… Well, after the apoplexy let up from the strangeness of color, language and medium. I spent a long time suffering in that sacred and old lamentation that all humans suffer a time or two. Nobody wants to feel lonely, unloved or even just invisible. It creates a burning, yearning, screaming pain in the chest that might be mistaken for cardiological trauma were it not burning deeper. Much deeper. The reason that humans have forever attached the heart to feelings is because many world altering and intense feelings originate from a core at the center of your being. Fear? Leaves your core shaking. Love? Leaves it warm and light. Rage? Your core quakes with the heat of a trapped sun.

At the center of my core for several years — even though I did not always realize it — was a marble of cold, clear glass, in place of any true sensation. Aesthetic, lust, and challenge was all that I thought love to be. I cannot help but think that somewhere in my childhood — during the events that trouble me even to this day — a switch was flipped and I could no longer see what was important in life, even if my lips payed service to it clear into my twenties. A hollow zealot preaching “the word” of what is important, without themselves believing it, even if they are in fact correct in their knowledge. In this way I cultured the appearance of knowing what was important and used it like bait to lure in the fairer gender explicitly for the warmth moist comfort of attention. I would shape myself like clay around their wants, matching their every need and using my false extroversion to cover the wants I could not meet. In some cases I would take their wants, pull a cloth over them and make the woman in my arms question if what they wanted really -was- what they wanted and not just what the world had told them to seek out. In this way, driven to question, many of them would settle their eyes on me and realize that I made them think… Made them feel… Made them remember what is was like to be cherished and loved, held and appreciated. All good things, but not for the right reasons.

Only now in life am I truly beginning to understand how hollow these years of my life were. I spent all of my latter formative time obsessed with the women around me, and ignoring all of the positive offerings others had to give me if I had only accepted. Teachers that could see potential in me for great things but always noticed my total lack of drive… Others that knew I was well beyond what they could teach me, but would still push me through a pass because I was too bored of the work to even touch it. I cannot count how many classes I passed just because I tested well, they blur too much together to make an accurate memory. But the few classes I liked as a teenager? I would achieve record numbers, highs, going well beyond and so far past expectations as to leave others breathless.

But what did I carry out of these years for my efforts (and lack thereof)? A complete misunderstanding about how the world would treat me once off the leash. It didn’t help that my parents never pushed me to try to get a job and earn some money of my own, never reacted when I got good grades and barely noticed when I got bad. The classical “mommy and daddy didn’t pay any attention to me” complex that I’ve read in dozens of books, ranging from neurochemistry through philosophy and into psychology. It is not a new condition, but one that few people can honestly say has been treated. The advice they have to offer? Take something you like, do it really well, and look to see how you can receive praise for this. Let it build up your own value, your view of self worth. Then you develop it, try to use it as a survival mechanism (aka a job) for going forward. And learn… They want you to learn.

My whole life I’ve been good with women. Not exactly a skill I can use to make a living (and like myself during or after). I face in good conscience the fact that I am not as desirable as the men on magazine pages and that my personal methods for gaining their affections might somewhat discourage the only real relationship of my whole life to date. At the time of this writing, I’ve been with the only person in the world that can tolerate the darkest parts of my nature (which get pretty dark) and have been for 6 years. So despite being my saving grace, a warm shoulder to cry on and a sexual animal capable of bringing comfort on par with therapy… I cannot use it as a way to live. Hell, ethically the idea gives me the creeps. Years ago, the idea would not have only been palatable but quite alluring. Man-Ho, latest superhero to overtake the nightclubs of the Midwest. Yeah, that’d be great for my self esteem.

So what does this leave me? A whole pile of skills for dealing with emotional and incredibly complex people. So logically, psychology seems like it might not be a bad future for me. Spend my time helping to fix people that are broken and can’t find their way out of the trauma. A noble ideal, a good thought and a stable life paved with money. Right? Well, there is the path to get there to worry about. The right school requires the right grades, which come from paying attention in classes I’ve not been in for half a decade. Classes I didn’t do particularly well in. I’ll find a way, I will. But it means that for now while I hunger and need, I need to find an alternative to pay for my lifestyle that doesn’t leave me miserable…

So here I sit. My fallback… Writing.

I’ve always had a taste for it, and I love to read the works of others… Logically, with enough English skill I should be able to pull it off. But no… It doesn’t appeal to me as much as I’d like. It doesn’t let me branch free of old types… I mean, even when I do manage to get a piece of writing out and done. Heck, in some cases I even go on to like the piece I’ve written… It always has to be sexual or romantic. Poetry, short story, novella, novel, movie script, comic script, whatever… Always, something sexual. And my personal life? Sometimes it suffers from it too. I wish I could say it were a pre-occupation and that I need help for it. But I don’t. I just don’t spend too much time thinking on it… But it always comes up when I do try to express myself. Why? Because it is where all of my life experiences come from. The entirety of my youth was spent chasing skirts (and often catching them), leaving me with a laundry list of names that are hard to remember and next to no experiences of any other sort. Yeah, I’ve worked jobs… Office jobs, clerical work, that sort of thing, but nobody on -earth- loves doing that stuff. Nobody. Not even the most ardent workaholic would tell you they wouldn’t rather be working doing something -else- than what they are.

What does that leave? A life of romance novels, chewing away at the bottom most wrung of literature trying to find my niche in erotica? No. It feels too small, too stifling, like I am meant for more. It brings memory of that ice cold marble in my middle, a dread driven by an aesthetic addiction to tugged down panties, curved hips and wet lips.
So I sit here. Staring. Trying to figure out why the ink won’t come out of the pen of my mind to write something else. I ruminate, rant, think, muse… All of this for the amusement of whomever reads this now. And yet, I still cannot find the drive to sit and write something else. Considering the title of this rant, and it’s length… I now suffer at the hands of this terrible irony.

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