It’s the day after Thanksgiving (US), I’m sitting alone with $4.29 to my name wondering where my next pack of cigarettes is coming from. For Thanksgiving I ate a can of potted meat ($1.09), two mini-bags of Cool Ranch Doritos (2/$1.00), and drank a six pack of Yuengling ($5.79), while my two roommates slept until 6:30 (nothing unusual there). I haven’t written anything in while because I have nothing good to say-that’s not true-I still have nothing good to say, but I needed to write this down anyway. I would like to leave this period of my life undocumented, but I can’t it’s going to stay with me for a while. I just didn’t want this blog to become one long train of depression. I wanted to wait until I had something more positive to say. But that doesn’t seem to be coming anytime soon. These days seem to be all depression, even the good times end in darkness. I’m angry all the time and I can’t seem to get happy. Can you blame me. Last Thanksgiving I was living in San Francisco fixing Cornish game hens. Life was good (for me), a year later it’s potted meat and stale chips.

October was my birthday month. I turned 35 (if you’re keeping track). I had some fun got wasted (a lot), saw the Afghan Whigs for the first time in 15 years. I also alienated a number of my friends, and pissed a ton of people off. I isolated myself and even discovered some new friends to quickly push away. I haven’t been happy about moving back to Atlanta and I haven’t been quite about it either. I’m upset, and want my old life back, even though I know it’s not coming back and that makes me even more angry. I’m spiraling out of control in a whirlwind of violence that can only end with me dead or in jail somewhere. I don’t give a fuck, and not in a cute punk rock kind of way. I simply do not care any more. I feel like I have been through too much in my life to walk down this road again. I was eating potted meat for Thanksgiving n 1998. Why in the fuck am I doing this again? How in the hell did I end up here again? I’m too old for this.

Ten years ago I was living in New York City. I was 25 and everything was wild and wonderful. I had spent the previous year in a Federal prison of the side of a mountain I Ohio so in large part I was just happy to be free. I was turning 25 and unsure as to the direction my life was going to take. I had chased a girl that had stopped loving me long before my bus pulled into the Greyhound Station. I had my ups and downs with her and by October we were going our separate ways. I remember it was cold a lot, and I drank more to keep myself warm. I had made a few friends and found a few bars that treated me well. Thanks to two bartenders at a bar modeled after the milk bar in A Clockwork Orange (my favorite movie of all time no less),  they even put me up on the bar and had the entire place sing happy birthday to me afterwards. I got the Anarchy symbol tattooed on my left arm for my birthday. I spent the month intoxicated and having the time of my life around the capital of the world. By Thanksgiving I was losing it again. I didn’t go home with my cousin and set in the dark playing Grand Theft Auto 3.

I haven’t enjoyed the holiday season since my mother died in 93, I tried to fake it but after my Grandmother passed in 2000 I kind of gave up. I’ve had no real interest in family gatherings because all I see is the empty hole where my Nanny used to be. I avoid them as much as I can in fear of breaking out in tears. Crying in front of people is not something I like to do instead I pour booze on the wound and sit alone in the dark.  I was told recently that I have nothing to offer, I bring nothing to the table. This is true I feel no need to bring anything. Why does it matter? You’re all just going to leave or die, or fade away for whatever reason. I don’t want to get emotionally invested in another human being. I just spent the last six years of my life with someone who told me they loved me but found it just as easy to discard me as a empty box of tissues. Over the last six months my heart has calcified to the point where you could use it to break rocks. I’m slipping away from myself. I hate my job, my life in general really. I walk to work like a ghost. When I come in the wait staff says that I look like I want to kill everyone, there is truth to this.

I have always fantasized about the end of the world (Dec 21st c’mon), but now I don’t wish for some great cataclysm, I want to strangle everyone with my bare hands. There is no joke there, it’;s how I feel. I don’t like seeing people happy, I don’t like seeing people in love. I avoid looking at Facebook because I could care less I ‘d rather you all choke on vomit and leave this world for me to wander alone. I know that’s not good, I know there is a way out, and these feeling can’t last for ever, but it’s hard to come out of this hole this time. When I was in New York I found another alcoholic to curl up with and share my misery until my cousin put me out of his apartment and I had to come back down to Atlanta dejected and broken. I picked myself up but it took some time and a shit ton of more booze. I was spiraling again when I found the one I followed across country only to be left in Oakland. I fell back to Atlanta again, pulled myself up and made my way back out West. I had three good years before hitting bottom again. Now for the third time I’m back in the ATL. I’m sick of this pattern and I’m sick of this place. It’s like I can’t survive anywhere else. Which makes me feel weak, small, not the man I thought I was.

I feel like I have wasted so much time. Wasted so much of my life. I should have been focusing more on me, on my work, on what I wanted out of life. Not on what I wanted in my bed. I don’t even have a bed now, just a futon mattress on the cold, cold floor. I don’t make enough money to even get a new pair of shoes, all mine have holed in the bottom. My work shoes are almost flip flops they’re so broken.  I’m rambling now. I need a plan. I need a way out. It won’t be a woman this time. I can’t talk to any of them anymore. I have nothing to say. When I try to talk about my life it just comes off like I’m still hung up on my ex, because I didn’t have a life out side of her for six years. It won’t be from my friends I’ve pushed most of them away because I’m still hung up on San Francisco. I need to it the lottery. But I don’t even have enough money to play it.

Filed under: Holidays, Life Tagged: alone, depression, empty, loneliness, sadness, Thanksgiving