I want to try a little experiment wherein I show you what it’s like to live in my head.  I’m going to write a post as I normally would speak and/or act around you, and that will be in this typeset, but I’ll also give you my thoughts and the things I want to say (the things I want people to know that I feel but can’t quite express) in italics.  This might give you some idea.

The other day I saw a woman in the grocery store clad in a power business suit, replete with sensible skirt and devastating heels.  She strolled down the aisle on an air of haughtiness that was damn near palpable as she passed; were I holding a stack of documents, they certainly would have been scattered as though I were a NASCAR spectator.  As her heels clacked away on the cold linoleum, I thought for a split second that she was better than me.  In one hand she held a shopping basket and in the other, a giant industrial-sized jug of laundry detergent.  That’s when I remembered that she smells bad at the end of the day, that sixteen hours straight of being awake and alive takes its toll on the human body.  I even went so far as to speculate that she might defecate from time to time.  Yes, we are all the same flawed machine that creates and secretes the same fluids and gross by-products.  In that sense, physiologically, no one is better than any other human mechanism roaming the earth at this time.

Sometimes I think that everything I think, feel, and do is because I’m supposed to.  Sometimes I feel like I’m just going through the motions.  I’m sad sometimes because it seems necessary to balance my happy moments.  More often that not, I don’t feel anything.  I am a perpetual motion machine, dragging myself out of bed each day to work, laugh, love, breathe and sweat, get through the hours and go back to bed.  I stopped measuring my days by the time I spend awake a while back and now do so with the time I spend sleeping.

I got an e-mail from my father today saying that he can’t come to my wedding.  It opened with a reluctant tone, explicitly stating that he’d been waiting until the last possible moment to break the news, hoping the tide would turn in time.  With that lead-in and our somewhat flecked family history, I was immediately concerned that the letter would be a condemnation against me.  It never was, but periodically throughout the letter I felt its tone sliding in that direction.  That apprehension affected me so that it took me an hour or so before I even began to wonder what the communique’s actual message meant to me: my father isn’t coming to my wedding.  I am more than disappointed.

I feel I can’t prioritize my pains accordingly.  For instance, the people with whom I could immediately share this news have no fathers, so it seems inappropriate to bring it up to them.  That it wouldn’t illicit sympathy from these orphans wasn’t my chief concern (though it was there in some capacity) but it just seemed to be another case of the haves bitching to the have-nots.  Additionally, I have no idea what all the shit going down in Egypt is all about but I can see that it’s intense.  How, in light of that, can I justify having anyone give a shit that my daddy isn’t coming to my party?

The sound is down at work.  Our video input/RF modulator is shot.  I sent someone to CVS to get another one but they don’t have the right kind in stock.  We’re listening to the backup MP3 player and the music on it sucks.  This is not news; the music in-store most often sucks.  I get spasms in my thigh sometimes that makes me think my phone is ringing.  It seldom is.

I’m not living with enough intensity.  I’m not loving fiercely.  I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.  I feel shiftless and purposeless.  Planning the wedding and honeymoon have given me a purpose in these past few months and in the next two, but that singular focus has driven out my passions.  I do nothing, in a practical sense to save money, and in an effort to remain focused.  I get distracted so easily, my mind wide open to the world around me and in a constant desire to be fascinated.  A butterfly could hold my attention for hours and send my mind on adventures unheard of in others.  I think about dying constantly.  I died six times yesterday.  I was hit by a car, a passenger on the bus shoved a knife in the back of my head, right under the knot where my spine meets my skull, I fell into traffic, I ate glass, the bus fell off the overpass, I took a bullet meant for no one in particular, just a confused, angry person with a weapon sending hate into the world; and I caught it.

I am panicking about the wedding.  The guest list is growing astronomically (I suppose I owe my father my gratitude) and the date is hurtling at us at incomparable speeds.  I need to get shoes for my groomsmen, I need to pay the entertainer the rest of his money, I need to arrange the rehearsal dinner, I need to collate the RSVPs, I need to get fitted for my tux.  Meredith keeps jokingly asking if it’s too late to cancel the wedding and elope and I always say “Yes, it’s too late.  We’ve already put down all our deposits and besides, once it gets here, it’ll be fun.”  In light of my dad not being able to afford (neither in time nor money) to attend, I am tempted to agree with her.  Why are we doing this to people we supposedly love?  My bachelor party shrank in duration, grew in size, then doubled in duration over the course of two beers with a handful of friends.  Here’s advice for the young: Don’t make plans while you’re drinking.  Seriously, don’t make plans while you’re drinking.  I’ve been reading a lot more lately.  I’m so lonely, and there’s no reason for it.  I have a beautiful fiancée who adores me and worships me and waits day in and day out just to see my face but I still feel lonely for eighteen hours of every day.  Sartre’s autobiography is speaking to me in his love of books and the romanticism of swashbucklers and the silver screen.  I hear myself in his words, which I suppose is rather boastful, but hey, I shit too so take it for what it’s worth.  I can’t remember the last time I was genuinely happy.  Or sad.  I just work and work and work and work and sleep.  In between I eat and I laugh and I smile and I love.  I do all these things and I do them well.  But beneath it all I can’t ascertain my actual feelings.

I sat near an old couple at Denny’s the other day.  The woman was the oldest living person I’d ever seen with my eyes.  Her spine was bent from the middle of her back and sloped her head and neck down towards her torso, making her diminutive frame even smaller.  By comparison, the man was a sprightly early 80s, I figured.  As I walked in, he was feeding a dollar into the stuffed-toy crane machine.  Ten minutes later he’s walking back to his table and his old lady (hehe) with two plush animals under his arm.  I was impressed, both with his skill and the joie de vivre that he demonstrated in playing a child’s game at such an advanced age.  Shortly afterward, my heart warmed in their wake, they shuffled out of my life.  I can’t picture myself as an old man.  As a kid, I enjoyed horror movies, but after a sudden emotional growth spurt I couldn’t bear to watch them anymore; couldn’t witness so much injustice.  Human suffering is something that shouldn’t have to happen.

I appear outwardly happy, and in that I am not sad, I suppose I am.  I don’t know anything anymore.  I want the world to love me, and moreso, I want to earn it.  I want to be loved for everything I am and not everything I’m not.  Since I got my teeth fixed people can’t stop telling me how great I look, and all I can hear is “it’s such a vast improvement over what you were”.  The more people find me attractive who knew me then, the worse I feel about that old me.  I hate him.

I feel I’m rambling now but there’s so much shit in my head and I can’t get it out.  It’s virtually weightless; seven hundred permutations of the same three thoughts: I’m lonely, I’m empty, I don’t know what I’m doing with my life.  I am never at a loss for something to do with my time but when I look back over it I don’t see anything.  What have I done all this time and what can I hope to do in the future?  Who am I?  And why isn’t daddy coming to my party?

I want to be felt.