Looking For the Road

Current Tunes: The Daily Show & The Colbert Report

It's been far too many days since I posted. I’m a slacker, I know. I’m a total pariah. Shun me.

I woke up today terribly positive.

That should strike you as weird. If it does not, you clearly haven't been paying attention. I woke up and didn’t feel anxious or stressed or depressed or anything. I felt like everything would be OK, somehow. I didn’t particularly capitalize on that mood. Today was a fairly non-constructive day. I suppose I was overwhelmed, intimidated, possibly even concerned about such a sudden shift in attitude. Caught off guard, paralyzed by the strangeness of it all.

What’s more, I don’t particularly feel bad that I didn’t achieve much today. I probably should, shouldn’t I? I procrastinate far too much, especially too much to let an opportunity like today pass by without being exploited. That generates an idea: every single day is an opportunity to do it right. There will be time enough for doing it the best, or the brightest, or the flashiest. For now, in my situation, on the cusp of creating real, genuine life for myself, I should focus on just simply doing what’s right.

Lately I’ve thought a lot about my surroundings, and how that influences me, I might even say takes hold of me. I look around my room, my apartment, and it’s all the same, all the time. It’s comfortable enough, but not comfortable enough for me to simply be. I feel crushed and imprisoned here. And I don’t understand why.

When I first moved into this apartment, I was so excited. I was thrilled to death with this place. I’ve respected and cared for this living space more than any other I’ve resided in since I moved out of my parents’. I actually clean my room, dishes, vacuum, do laundry on a very regular basis. But I don’t feel comfortable here. I don’t feel at home. I sleep well enough at night. This isn’t a place I feel myself though. For the love of me, I can’t figure out what it is. I have all sorts of idiotic ideas about how to attempt to fix the problem. Rearrange the furniture, take down most of my posters, get a new computer chair, collect all my useless trinkets and ship them off to Salvation Army, maybe even ask to be moved to a different room in my pod, even if it did mean an increase in rent.

I don’t feel like this is a place where I can get the peace of mind and clarity needed to write. So, as consequence, I’m not creating. The only thing that makes me feel alive like roller coasters and heavy metal do is writing, and I’m not doing that for any other reason than school right now. It didn’t use to be that way. I want to create; but it feels like there’s a wall between me and the place where creating happens and there’s no way around it for now. It’s tearing me apart.

I want to write a novel. Now.

I’m nevertheless skeptical about making changes, because this isn’t the first time I’ve had this problem. I had this exact same problem in the house with the guys, I had the problem in the apartment on Chisholm, I was starting to have the problem at the SCAD dorm until I moved here. If this is a perpetual problem, how do you fix something like that?

I don’t know what it is. I can’t sit still in one place. I can’t be settled. God, I feel like Kerouac now, a whinier version of him maybe. A road trip across America feels like an appropriate prescription for what ails me. What is wrong with me? This is some aspect of my staunch, stubborn spirit of individuality; I just know it. Do I need to move to another place? How do I fix this? I’m so clueless; I have no idea what to do about it. I just know it feels like it’s slowly killing me, cutting out my muscles one at a time and throwing them in the fire, never to return.