Fighting Oneself, Revisited

This is one of the strangest times of my life. I remem­ber feel­ing some­thing sim­i­lar to this over four years ago, but I haven’t had it since.

I’m fight­ing my old self again. Fighting against these feel­ings and past habits.

I wish I could define and explain it. Vincent Gallo has a song he titled “Glad To Be Unhappy”, filled his dis­tinct­ly min­i­mal­is­tic piano and acoustic gui­tar sounds, so sparse you don’t know where the down­beat falls. But there are no lyrics, and I think I’m start­ing to under­stand why.

Everything is so sim­ple when you’re set in your heart. But when you’re filled with such para­dox­i­cal, con­tra­dic­to­ry feel­ings, noth­ing makes any sense. The world is turned upside down.

It’s frus­trat­ing1 and beau­ti­ful all at once.

I think a part of me wants to think about it. I want to keep this feel­ing, where every song sounds as good as the first time you heard it, and the lead­en sky is urg­ing you for­ward with every step you take. To be so inspired.

And while part of me knows that to fight against ones inner nature is fool­ish2, anoth­er part of me knows how destruc­tive it can be.

  1. The orig­i­nal title of that post was actu­al­ly just a 5x5 pix­el square, meant to con­fuse the read­er into not know­ing what to think. Trolley tried to cor­rect me once and told me the title was bro­ken, and I had to let him know it was done on pur­pose. With my new head­line images plu­g­in, the graph­ic title does­n’t quite work so I had to change it. []
  2. To add anoth­er lev­el to this, I’m fight­ing against fight­ing myself []

2 comments

  1. A cou­ple of weeks ago at work, I remem­ber read­ing through a lot of your past entries… The ear­ly ones, the ones that were writ­ten when you first start­ed this blog… For some rea­son, because of the state of mind I was in at the time (some blind and euphor­ic state of bliss), it made me for­get what it was like to have the whole “famil­iar feel­ings” that you speak of… and read­ing through your entries made me miss those feel­ings… and in a weird way, miss see­ing that in you…

    I remem­ber you say­ing to me at one point how when you read back on your ear­ly entries you’d think: “god.. I was so emo” and as I remem­bered that quote I was skim­ming through the titles and read “STFU” and I coul­nd’t help but laugh out loud.. just real­iz­ing how things used to be so dif­fer­ent… for the both of us… but it also made me feel real­ly glad and real­ly hap­py for you, just know­ing that you’ve changed for the bet­ter so much since those times… it just makes me hap­py know­ing that you’ve gone through all that shit already and have been able to achieve the cere­bral and bliss­ful state of con­tent­ment that you are in right now

  2. Those old feel­ings cer­tain­ly have their advan­tages. Maybe it should be accept­ed that we have them every now and then. Everything in mod­er­a­tion, as Taoism teach­es.

    Sometimes I read back on my old entries too. On occa­sion, an entry will be real­ly embar­rass­ing, but at the same time, it shows how much I’ve changed for the bet­ter. How much we’ve changed since then.

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