portraiture

I am now, and have always been, a disaster. Impulsive, volatile, undependable. Selfish, loutish, brimming with unyielding rage. I’ve never been able to hold a job or sustain a relationship, seldom grateful for a blessing, quick to hold a grudge in the petty vise of my heart. Thirteen years ago this October my father died, a few months after my mother broke her hip and was stuck on the floor of her house for ten hours before she was able to drag herself to the door to let help in. After a few months of commuting back and forth, I moved back to my childhood home in a town I despised and had left happily behind, ostensibly to “help” my mother. I was 41 then, I’m 53 now. The last twelve years have been a steady descent into deepening depression and madness, punctuated by a few daily routines and occasional chores. No one who knows me speaks to me without anticipating some sort of outburst of rage and vitriol, and no one who loved me hasn’t learned to regret it. I am a deficit now, as I have always been.

None of this is new. I haven’t had a good time since my early thirties. My mental illness and personality defects have remained largely untreated, self medication and unhinged furies taking the place of therapy and medicine, and other than a patch of group home work where my stubborn ability to hold the line and ability to take a punch proved assets, I have been an unmitigated burden upon the world. I lack direction, talent, and ambition. My long term plans usually end in suicide, and almost every time I awake I am saddened that I am still at it, even though we all know my particular jig is up. As the nations of the world race to extinguish life on earth, I’m here wishing I had something to smoke while all you jolly partisans burn your houses down from the inside.

I think I had a mild cardiac event earlier this evening, overcome with nausea, vertigo, and a cold clammy sweat. I haven’t dropped dead, unless I’m continuing my streak of crummy narcissism and gaudy verbiage into some baffling afterlife, but I feel poorly enough to be hopeful. As I write this, I’m sitting on the toilet thumbing the keys on this iPad, ignoring the little pains in my chest and left arm, planning on a shower before I crawl back into bed. All my aspirations are dead, no romance, no written legacy, no cabin in the woods. I am a fat, bald, diabetic without the illusions necessary to sustain the momentum of a life. I close in a cold sweat, dropping a note for some posterity that never asked to hear from me. I doubt I’m dead yet, but it feels like I have a shot at being gone. It’s not the sort of assurance I hope for, but it seems a turn for the worse on this long awful downhill slide. It’s no bullet to the head, but for the moment it is the feathered thing I am holding tight.