To live in this world you have to get out

Saturday 12/6/25

Every last thing in our society, our culture, our world, gets worse. It's uncanny. Unilaterally. Whether that's college football, writing, films, morals, baseball, discourse, romance, manners, neighborhoods stripped of any character. It's like this big algorithmic vortex of homogeneity and soullessness. An all-encompassing death swirl of beige. And clicks and printouts. Predetermined outcomes. Blindness. The vortex. And everything is within that vortex and nothing without.

Should any of us even really be here? What are we doing? Is it better to do this than to not exist? This isn't about football. Nothing is about anything other than the way of the world. And everything in that world goes the same way.

To live in this world, you have to find a way to get out of it. To be apart from it. To create an enclave for yourself on the outside. Where maybe you have someone you care about who cares about you. And you have or try to find something that fills up the hours that you feel lends some meaning to your life. Maybe you garden. Maybe you write poems in a journal. It's like hiding out from the world, making the best of those hours and that situation, so that in some small way you feel like there was some purpose to them, and that's what you do until you die, and it didn't matter that you were ever there.

But it feels like that's how you have to do it. You have to get out. Have as little intercourse as possible with that world that your situation--your bunker situation, you're "at a remove" situation--allows. Maybe that's going to the store. Maybe it's not interacting with anyone beyond the handful of clients you have who allow you to buy and pay off what you need back at the bunker where you and yours are locked in tight. You keep it at a minimum.

Otherwise you're just fucked and burned if you don't. Let down, hurt. Because you can't count on people--or anyone down there, beneath the place where your bunker is--for anything. There's nothing good and nothing for you down in the valley below. And if you were in that valley, if you hadn't gotten out, chances are you'd be like the people who are down there now. You are. But you got lucky. You got out. But to be down in that valley as someone smart and good and substantive? What is worse than that?

You have to get out. A form of getting out: You're a writer, you teach, without interest or effort, because you don't care, you're married, you have a little house, you got tenure, security, you can call yourself a writer, whatever you publish is the result of knowing someone like yourself that you met through the regular channels, conferences, whatever, and there it is. You breed, they eventually go to college, you get some grand kids, you have four books, you work on your short shorts, you die. But you got out.

You weren't exposed to the flames of hell that I'm exposed to every day. In the world, with the people in publishing. You had the bunker outside the margins. You were protected. You didn't have to go down into this shit and chaos and madness and evil. And you could tell yourself you were this writer. You were. For what that was worth. The ceiling was never far from the floor of this bunker, but there you were. Safe, secure. Not at risk, and not having put yourself in harm's way.

That's the trick of it.

But what if you're the best artist ever? It's not an option, is it? So what is? Just a life of the worst misery and greatest pain? You can't unbecome yourself or what you are. So that's it then? It has to be like that?

I often feel like I once had what was my out. It wasn't enough for me at the time. I could have sat there in Rockport and done my writing and said, "Oh, well, you worked on 'Dead Thomas' today, that was good," as if it didn't matter that no one would ever see it, but I had done it, at least. Trying to find meaning just in that. The doing of.

I was with a person who wasn't a good person, but I wasn't who I should have been. I wasn't who I became. I say she wasn't a good person, but I also think, "Who is? Is anyone?" I know I am now. I think it would be impossible to read this journal and not know the person I truly am. As a person. There's too much here, it's too open. It's too telling.

I wouldn't have been able to write "Dead Thomas" if that's how it had gone. But now, when I look at where I'm at, and what I think is inevitable for me, I'll think that was my one chance. To have a livable existence. And I didn't see it at the time. At all.

Afterwards, I also started becoming a different person. In stages. There was the 2012 to 2016 stage. Then the post-drinking stage. Now I'm someone who basically doesn't do any wrong. I've vetted myself so intensely morally, artistically, spiritually. I have worked with everything I have, here entirely on my own, without any love in my life, any companionship, any friendship, any hope, to make myself into the person I believe I should be. It's been work and commitment. Intention.

And that has made life worse. Life harder. Made me more alone. It's one thing to be alone in terms of actually being on your own, it's another to know that you're alone in the sense that there's no one for you, because of how you are--how you became--and how everyone else is, and what they're becoming. Different directions. We are moving in different directions. I am completely at odds with every aspect of this world. Down to the grains, the smallest particles, within those aspects.

For a time, I thought that person did care about me, and often now--it's with greater frequency than it used to be--I'll get very sad about them. I'll wonder if I'd been such and such a way, or the person I am now, if that would have made a difference. But then I come back to what they did. The idea that someone could be capable of that. Because surely that is what it is, apart from anything else, means what it does, apart from me. That its own thing. And then I'm in a bad place, a bad way, an unhealthy place; or, if not an unhealthy place, a place from which no good can come or be done, because this is the past. There's no changing it. There's no finding out from back within it.

Emotion is working now, but that's not something that distorts for me. I'm not sure anything does. That anything keeps me from seeing. But I begin to think that maybe the pain I feel, and the hopelessness, is making me think things are worse than they are, or have to be, as uniquely hellish and horrible as they are. Then I wonder if that's me trying to rationalize and give myself false hope so that I don't kill myself in the next few hours. Like I'm deluding myself. Maybe because I'm scared to die. I'm trying to get to the meaning, to see the truth.

I tell myself that things being so bad, and without any hope that they might improve, is bad enough, but when nothing good ever occurs--ever--even something minorly good--to break the pattern, and it's just unilateral steps, stages, portions, examples, installments, of a hell that is worse than hell, you don't see as well, you miss things, they feel worse than they are, no matter how bad they actually are.

But I don't think I believe that. I think I know. And that is the most terrifying thing possible for me. That I'm completely right.