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We use toxins to regulate our emotions.I use toxins to regulate my emotions.I vacillate between knowledge of my own condition and boredom. There is a chamber I retreat to. I have learned to live with isolation, notin it.My friends are important to me but they exist at a certain distance.Meeting new people is exciting at first, but later less so. Your primary world is small, and in that world is you and nobody else. Your friends exist like rings around Saturn. You want to understand yourself, but you also want the world tounderstand you. Sometimes you want the world to understand youbefore you want to understand yourself. You want to be safe and yet you carelessly endanger yourself. You want to be loved and yet you create walls between yourself andothers.Loving is something you do because you want to be loved. Your world is rootless, floating like a city beneath water; your world isrooted only in an illusory sense.Everything you find inside yourself, you find inside the world. Your reality is a hallucination that has been rehearsed so many times itappears fixed and stable.Nothing can be stated with any fixed meaning. Meanings will remainpersonal and therefore subjective. Your experience is whatever you say it is. Your experience is--after ithappens--only a record of your experience. Told by you, this is anystory you choose to tell, in any way you choose to tell it. Your friends reaffirm your stories; your parents always do not.As I grow into adulthood, I recognize the need to preserve my father'sillusions about me. For his sake, not mine.
 
 The past weighs on my father's mind.Stories weigh us down unless we are continually revising them and myfather is done revising his ideas about me.I like to think of myself as someone who is re-drafting and re-draftinghis life until it makes sense. Life, being irrational, never fully makessense and so I am continually making up new stories about myself in acreative and naive way.But this is how children think. Nothing is absolute. Everything isprovisional for a child. Tell the child one story, she will believe it,because any story to a child has the possibility of being true.Adults on the other hand conform to a rigid set of beliefs, true oruntrue only according to their own reality.I write because it is a door I once opened and I continue to go back andforth through that door. I explore the byways and the tunnels of myself.Whatever I write always has the possibility of being true--at least tome--and to write down my reality is satisfying. The question of whether what I do is art or not. Sometimes I amintentionally creating art and sometimes I am just writing. The bestwriting comes out when I am not intentionally doing anything--in factthe best writing comes out when I don't know what I am doing orsaying. But I think I like to write because it feels like someone islistening. It feels like what I am saying is not only true to me but true toothers as well.In a way, I am a compulsive writer. I will write because it's a drive.Maybe I should stop.Sometimes I do. But when I stop writing, I read a lot and readingactivates my imagination and soon I am writing again.Whatever I've been saying in the last couple pages, I'm not aiming atanything. I'm circling around the mood and the moment of myexperience, gladly touching the borders and playing with the edges. Things are going to change.
 
For example, I am going to quit smoking. I bought a carton of cigarettes a week ago and it's almost done. I have one pack left.After smoking for two weeks straight, my verdict is I feel like shit. Mybody aches, my lungs can barely breathe, and I feel dirty. Worse I feelparanoid about being dirty. Maybe "paranoid" is too strong a word. Ifeel obsessive about cleanliness. I brush my teeth fifty times a day; Iwash my hands twenty-five times a day.Right now my cat is sleeping and my notebook is resting on his midriff. The official time is 5:03 in the morning. I'm going to step outside for acigarette, again and again, until I decide to go to bed. I will not go tobed until I am finished writing this.I'm back from smoking. I learned nothing new, only that I have to quit.Everyone has their own secret life. We all have minds which areislands--between those islands flow the rivers of our hearts, but themind itself is lonely. Which is strange, because we retreat into ourminds so often. We retreat into our thoughts, our ideas, our beliefs, andwe find solace in them even though they are ridiculous.But there is safety in one's private mind, the thoughts of which no onecan read. Because they are private entertainments of the self.If you have pets, then you known the comforts of having non-humancompany. The human-animal connection is unique, and for obviousreasons, animals are incredibly loved by humans.Ultimately, I think what we are stuck with is habit. Whatever habits youcultivate within your lifetime, those are the heavens and hells of yourexistence. Many habits fall between these two extremes and for thatreason our lives are pretty mundane.Most of our habits are mundane in the everyday sense. We go to work,we eat meals, we tend to our homes and our families, we do chores.Perhaps that's why novelty is so interesting and stimulating.I seek novelty. If I am not seeking novelty in dramatic and bizarre ways,I am seeking novelty in the miniature sense.I do appreciate a well-ordered life, everything manageable and in itsright place. This stems from the pure gratification of a sense of control.But as far as I can tell, control is something that most people try toexert over themselves and their environments.
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