I am probably not safe to get close to.
Right now, there is plenty of space between my demons and the innocent public at large. But if I ever got into a relationship or even a really deep friendship with somebody , that space would disappear and God only knows what kind of darkness and insanity would come crawling out of the depths of my subconscious mind looking to party.
I’m carrying around a lot of bad juju in this capacious cranium of mine. A lot of death and rage and hate and darkness and the rapacious void.
My lack of connect to or respect for my tormented id has left it pretty fucking angry and extremely hungry for release and I can easily imagine my sweet and harmless self suddenly freaking out when, as someone ie growing closer to me, they cross some line I had no idea was there and my alarms go off and I lose my freakin’ mind.
I’m real crazy, babe. Sorry you had to find out like this. Guess I’ll just go, then.
Then again, what do I know about what happens when you get close to someone?
I’ve never been close to anyone.
Not my parents, not my siblings, not my teachers, not my friends. Nobody has ever gotten closer to me than to be my friend. Not in my adult life.
I wasn’t even that close to my own mother as a small child once she went back to work.
This is the sort of thing that makes me wonder why I’m not a serial killer,
Oh right, I lack the proper work ethic.
I mean EVERY DAY you’re dumping the bodies.
But yeah, it’s kind of amazing that I am as sane as I am (in other words, not very) given how emotionally cold my childhood was.
Somehow, I managed to make a person of myself, eventually, kind of. After my massive nervous breakdown in my early 20’s after my parents defunded my college education and made me move back home to Summerside and completely destroyed any hope I had of getting to be a competent adult, I had to claw my way back to sanity by sheer force of will and bloody-minded determination.
In the process, I invented and became the cheerful simulacrum you know and love.
Admittedly it doesn’t work that great. But it was a rush job. A first draft.
Still, it’s time to ponder an upgrade. I have a lot of good stuff about me, stuff that could be a major part of a new fresh powerful and comfortable in my own skin version of me.
My wit, my sweet nature, my natural enthusiasm, my sensitivity, how much I truly care about people, and of course, my magical mind powers.
I’m a wizard, god damn it. And not the spell books and magic wands kind. The real kind that has always existed and will always exist : scary smart people who can see more and do more than others to the point it seems like magic.
But it’s actually something much, much scarier.
More after the break.
So the answer is…?
What answer? Oh right.
No, I am not safe to get close to. Not with all this radioactive shrapnel and pestilence ridden rotting flesh lying around in my head.
And the thing is, this toxic dungheap of a soul is covered by a very friendly, enticing façade of a warm, witty, wacky, wonderful fella.
And it’s not exactly false. I am that guy.
But I’m a hell of a lot of other people too.
I am Legion, for I contain drunk veterans. many.
One of my primary existential struggles, in fact, is the fight to come up with a single identity through which I can express all that I am.
After all, identity is unity. When we ask ourselves who we are. we expect the answer to be in the singular. We can only ever be one person, no matter how keenly aware we are of all the other people running around in our heads getting themselves into trouble and jostling the furniture.
And so I strive to find that one final answer to the question of who the hell I am.
Or even what the hell I am. I have sworn to myself to stop asking that question as it seems self-pitying and unhelpful, but I keep coming back to it because I am so very unlike my fellow beach monkeys.
Big surprise, given my emotionally negligent childhood.
I have never met anyone truly “like me”. I’m a tribe of one, I suppose.
I’ve met other nerdy intellectual types with whom I have more in common than I do with most of the rest of humanity. They are my people and my tribe inasmuch as I have one.
Inasmuch as I CAN have one, for that matter.
Been thinking a lot about my antisocial nature lately. You know, the one I usually cover up by saying “I have always been ferociously myself”.
Yeah, but why? Why was I such a little psycho? Why was the idea of compromising in order to get along with others so intolerable to me?
Maybe that is what happens when you get raped as a toddler. You become one anti-social little monkey ready to attack and drive away anyone who dares to get too close.
You don’t compromise with a predator.
Let’s call this part of me Crack Monkey.
Crack Monkey cannot calm down or relax. He will never feel safe. He will never feel loved. He will always feel cold. Warmth and light will never reach down this far.
So Crack Monkey lives in a state of eternal paranoia in his fortress in the center of my soul. There he sits, surrounded by alarms and security monitors and weapons and all the rest of the elaborate apparatus he needs in order to feel safe.
It’s bad enough that Crack Monkey will never relax and be happy.
But it’s even worse that he seems to be in charge.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.