Going Down The Road Feeling Bad

Apologies for the sporadic posts lately. Trying to get my groove back. I’ll just tell you what’s on my mind, rip the Band-Aid off, because it’s all I know how to do and right now I don’t have any other options. Rugged, embarrassing honesty is all I have left.

The love of my life is gone. You could probably tell just from the tenor of my past writing. I’m trying to crawl my way back to happiness, back to a life in the real world, but boy is it hard. I feel like I’ve had an arm amputated. I feel like that might actually be easier.

All the things that used to be automatic are manual now; everything takes too much effort. I shake like a leaf on a willow tree. Getting out of bed in the morning is a war. Eating and sleeping are profoundly difficult and I don’t accomplish either of them very often. On those rare occasions that I sleep, I dream about her, dream that she’s with me, that we’re doing something banal and normal like planning a road trip or complaining about a bad movie we just watched together.

Every day I wake up crying. Every single day. The only way I know how to stop is by calling family members and keeping them on the line until they’re sick of me. Thank God for them. The highlight of my week is playing Mario Kart with my brothers and just talking and joking. It’s the only time I ever feel normal. Nothing else works. In those moments I know what to do with my eyes, my hands, my voice, and I feel alive for a little bit. I feel operational.

I need to work, I know that. It would be a merciful distraction from the pain. I don’t really understand why I’m not working. I wrote for Vanity Fair solely on the back of my talent, but these days I can’t even land a job at Walmart.

I’m learning how to be alone, slowly but surely. It involves listening to the radio all day, falling asleep to The Rockford Files, and smoking a lot of cigarettes. I’m trying to quit, but it’s really difficult when I feel like they’re keeping me alive, each one buying me five minutes or so.

It’s weird how everything feels therapeutic or medicinal. Nothing is enjoyable anymore, and the sensation of joy or even peace is completely gone. I’ve lost all interest in my hobbies. I don’t read very much, I don’t watch movies, I don’t get out on the open road. I don’t even listen to music, which brought me so much joy and saved my ass a thousand times.

It feels like being a newborn. There was the old me that was with her, and he was 36, and there’s the new me, who is 8 months old and lives on protein shakes and prays to God a hundred times a day to stay alive, to get me out of suffering and self-pity and masochism, to just be useful. I lack the temperament for suicide and I plan to stay alive, but it’s a constant negotiation, there’s a lot of haggling.

It’s all so desperately uncool, so boring, so average. I was a punk rock kid and now here I am praying and meditating constantly, taking baths just to kill time, which I have way too much of, unsuccessfully trying to read self-help literature. I don’t tell people I’m an anarchist, I tell them I’m a Presbyterian.

I want to get a life back so bad. I don’t want to move back in with my mom and lose my independence, lose the city that’s felt like home since the first day I set foot there 20 years ago. I want people to be proud of me and respect me. I want to write cool shit people like. I want to bring joy to others, I want to entertain, I want to be a force for good. I want to stop being so obnoxiously selfish, stop telling people I need constant help to stay alive. I don’t want to be the main character in any story, I just want to be normal. I want to be able to sit down at a table and eat real food without considering every last bite. Take out the garbage. Whistle. Sing.

Wouldn’t it be great if you weren’t reading this because I didn’t feel the need to write it? I’m 6’3 and have a full head of hair I’m not going to lose. It should all be so easy. But everything is heartbreak and sorrow and loss.

A lady at the grocery store gave me a hug last week and she said it was because I looked really sad, like I wasn’t going to make it, and I didn’t even catch her name but I think about her all the time. I thought I just missed physical touch but I think what I really missed was love. I want to have the strength and resilience to give it to others. I profoundly regret not having a child, because then I could direct my energy at someone else.

I love making people laugh and I haven’t been able to do it since last year. God I miss being funny. I miss writing good sentences. I miss working. I miss everything. I miss life.

Even though I don’t listen to music anymore, lyrics pop into my head all the time. “There’s a story in the Bible about an eagle growing old, how he grows new sets of feathers and becomes both young and strong” by Billy Joe Shaver. “I’m going down the road feeling bad, Lord, Lord, and I ain’t gonna be treated thisaway,” which I think is by Woody Guthrie but I’m not gonna check.

I want to write a novel about the dust bowl that takes place over the duration of a man’s life and begins in Oklahoma and ends in Bakersfield and opens and closes with the line “can you swing a hammer?” but I can’t sit still and write it. I cry too much. I feel too sick.

It would be nice to get a reprieve from the sensation that I’m going crazy. It would be nice to have dignity again but the only way I can stay alive is by forgetting about dignity, by admitting to anyone who will listen that I’m not making it, I’m not pulling this off, I’m confused and overwhelmed by anything beyond lying in bed listening to Art Bell reruns trying not to shake. If I were truly alone, doing this by myself, I would find a way to die. And I always feel like I’m dying. There’s nothing medically wrong with me but it just feels like I’m slipping away. Like life on earth is a waystation, like I’m a thousand miles away from home and waiting for a train.

All I know is I got rhythm and two perfectly good hands. I hope to write nice things again. I hope to work again. I hope to one day pick up an apple without thinking about it and just eat it. That day hasn’t come yet. For some reason that’s not what God wants for me right now.

Right before my grandma died, when she was wrecked with cancer, she texted me a Willie Nelson lyric, “it’s written in the good book that we’ll never be asked to take any more than we can, sounds like a good plan,” and I suppose that’s true because I’m still here. I just wish I could stop living in pain. I don’t know how. I’ll try anything if it can be done on two hours of sleep and doesn’t cost any money.

Thank you to everyone who has donated to this newsletter. It keeps me going. One of these days I want to write the best damn essay you’ve ever read. But today I have to figure out how not to die. It’s harder than you’d think.