shooting holes at the moon

Hello. All of you.

I have schizophrenia, but won’t take my medication because the side-effects are mostly exaggerations of all the other problems I already have. As I have a lot of problems. Sicknesses. Immune disorders. Fears. Questions.

Such as, why do I want to die?

I don’t know. The nights when I feel most numb I want to die because I don’t even have the energy to go to sleep, to change my state of consciousness. As silly as it may sound. The nights when the hallucinations are the worst I want to die either because they tell me to do so, because I am scared of them more than of death, because I feel irreparably lonely & lost, seeing things that literally nobody else could ever see, as they are my hallucinations, and so I am alone with them, alone, even when I’m at parties, binge drinking, or when I’m with friends or at coffee shops, “socially smoking” about 4 packs a day, or when I’m trying hallucinogenic drugs in a futile attempt to have some degree of control over these hallucinations I see and hear and feel, alone still even when I’m with my girlfriend, who looks at me as if she can see the insanity in my brain, who looks scared, for me and for herself both… alone still when I’m seeking other girls to try to forget the fact my girlfriend has no desire for me and that I love her too much to expect such… alone still when I cheat on her with a woman I scarily care so much for in such a different way…. alone when I listen to Twin Shadow and Godspeed and Silver Mt Zion and Mono (in an attempt to have control over my feelings, much like my attempt to have control over my hallucinations, so that they don’t stop abruptly or go out of control), sitting in my apartment, alone, smoking cigarettes and hookah at the same time between shots of bourbon, sketching the darkness I feel course through my veins (is it a hallucination? a case of synesthesia? a fear incarnate? a simple confusion? a simple metaphor brought to life in my nerve endings? because what on earth does darkness feel like in a tactile way anyway?), practicing tying nooses while looking off at the failing sun… alone when I do not smoke, do not drink, in which case I am so much more alone, stuck with myself without distraction until I’m driven rapidly to suicidal urges, accumulating pills from all sorts of sources and hiding them, hiding razors, because my roommate hides pills and razors, me testing the nooses I make on my neck, dropping with my legs drawn up so I can then extend them if the noose works because I’m still only in the process of experimentation, and I’m too alone with myself unless I’m experimenting with suicide or having sex or chain smoking until the tobacco high is maddening or reading depressing literature that will take me away from me or listening to post-rock or black metal or even dark folk music that will make me feel as if the world isn’t so dry and empty as my mind occupies it with these images, these feelings that drive me past my end, past what I imagine anybody could endure… alone when I see my family and I hug them and pretend as best I can to seem okay for my sisters, all after my parents have forcibly picked me up after an attempt at solace… alone when I’m laughing or crying while watching movies such as Breaking the Waves, or Pi, or Apocalypse Now, the latter of which gets me going, pulls me so far away from myself when Wagner comes on, when the general smells his napalm, until Marlow’s re-interpretive character gets closer and closer and closer to the heart of darkness…

And even when I’m not lonely… which… hasn’t ever happened… I am intensely confused and intensely scared of everything, scared especially of open spaces (agoraphobia) and the dark and of myself and of the things I see.

But somehow it goes past all this. Past the seven doctors (and neuroscientists and psychologists, etc) I see. And the only thing keeping me alive is my writing, my poetry, in which I take after Melville and Danielewski and Bolano and McCarthy and Beckett, and in which I feel like I’m awfully close to getting at some fundamental truth, some thing about infinity, some realization of some concept I’ve been driving at for years and years, it feels like, even though it’s only been…weeks? months? How could it possibly only be months? What, eight months? Ten? Six? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.

But the thing is that, while this idea and this drive towards literature is the only thing keeping me alive, it also draws me further and further into the darkness I’ve already barely mentioned, and it unsettles me and reinforces the hallucinations and the fears, the doubts, the depression, the disorders, the loss, the pain, the fascination above all with death and with those (fascinating, truly fascinating) mollusks (or are they jellyfish?) which scientists have found that are biologically immortal, meaning that they could only die from disease or physical trauma, since they do not age. And so theoretically could live forever. If they were to expand with the expansion of the universe, and if they were to move from solar system to solar system as the stars collapse. But what the fuck is infinity if you experience it? They couldn’t experience infinity unless they were there from the beginning. But maybe even the universe isn’t infinity. Maybe the beginning of the universe was just an arbitrary point along the number line, like, say, 0, in terms of our timescale, or -120,984 or 9,138,039 or 3.1415922… But what would be the point of living forever? We only have five of the infinite spectrum of senses we could possibly have, meaning we wouldn’t even be able to experience everything in the universe, even if we were inside of it for as long as it continues to go. So things would get repetitive. Empty. But we don’t even get immortality. We’re stuck with an impossibly tiny fraction of that repetitive emptiness. But what does this mean? Does it mean anything? If it means nothing then what is nothing? We are greater than nothing, because we exist, but we are less than infinity, or for that matter less than anything large. Less than gods. The closest we come to gods–the closest we come to mattering–is in our acts of creation. Which is precisely why I pursue the life of a writer, of an artist, so long as I haven’t taken even that away. Because to create is the closest thing to breaching into that infinitum undertow, the closest thing to making it past the limitations of our five senses, the closest thing to realizing an existence with the equivalent of, say, six senses. Even though six is hardly more than five. And is hardly an infinity. Because really?

Okay, really. The difference between five and six is nothing. If we could make the difference from five to infinity, however, that would be something. (And I’m really talking about way more than senses when I say five, or six, or infinity.) But we can’t do that. We can, however, make the difference from five to zero. As the break between zero and between 0.001, or from zero to 1–from nothingness to somethingness–is a meaningful jump. Though the jump from one brand of something to another is not. And we can’t achieve infinity. But. Well. We can achieve absolute zero. We can end our lives and make a statement of our understanding of this situation. In which sort of action maybe we could touch onto infinity? Maybe we could touch something greater than what we have now? The ultimate incarnation of an idea, the ultimate martyrdom, the ultimate art and the ultimate act of creation?

Oh my god, my palms are sweating and my brain is buzzing with the sound of the emptiness in the room. Normally I listen to white noise when I’m trying to concentrate, but right now it’s as if white noise is playing for me from out of the emptiness, as from out of the blue (as Ahab’s darkness was breaching, as Conrad’s darkness was consuming). Which is frightening. But fuck. I don’t know.

I’m not seeking comfort. I’m seeking a contribution (maybe?) to this idea, maybe another soul who can at least articulate some degree of understanding? I don’t know. I don’t know.

I wish I could end on a conclusive note but really that’s all there is. Just that I don’t know.

-twinshadow