9.13.2003

Around 7 months and I'll be 26. This is a landmark for me because Travis Bickle begins his descent in Taxi Driver at age 26. In fact, it's one of the only facts divulged about him. It occurs in the opening scene.

I think I was about 14 or 15, no later than 16 years of age when I first became entranced by Taxi Driver. I didn't exactly know why I watched it so frequently, or why I tried to buy an army jacket just like his, and wear my plaid shirts the same way. Why I attempted to ape his mannerisms escapes me, just as I can't fathom how I worked some phrases of his into daily conversation without really even thinking.

At that time in my life, I spent a lot of time looking in the mirror. Adjusting to my grown self.

The film has never left me. Around 21 I realized what it was really about: loneliness. This did not blindside me, but realizing this helped explain my fascination. Around 15 years of age I withdrew socially and began concentrating on myself. I wasn't unpopular, and I took some pride in the fact that I could, if I wanted to, be in a social group. I also enjoyed the complete solitude of my withdrawal. Their wasn't sympathetic friends who understood me. I didn't withdraw from the common culture to enter a smaller, different, counter-culture--say for example, the kids who wore all black and listened to industrial music or whatever. I had no culture. I was a loner completely in my head. I hid this from everyone. I fashioned myself a loner by choice, not by necessity because I was inept or just strange. I retreated to coffee, cigarettes and as esoteric literature and ideas as possible. I disdained the "smokers" and viewed other kids who drank coffee as having an inferior appreciation. This gave my new self which I stared at so much a feeling of achievement and superiority, even if only I understood the full import of my success.

On a visceral level I understood Travis Bickle because I was Travis Bickle. An angry man trapped in an all-male world about to combust.

I write this now because it occurred to me that I am almost his age and I am still him. When I first viewed him as me, I could never imagine being 26 and in that condition.

But I am now even moreso. I am so lonely I have no one to tell this to. So I write it to myself. Just as I began doing around age 16 on a daily basis, in journals long since lost. Imagining a future audience who paid attention and cared. About my daily thoughts and whimsical gestures that I fashioned. After enough time staring at yourself in the mirror, the most mundane features become extraordinary. It pains me to say this, and I scarcely believe it, but my journals aren't worth the paper or the magnet they're stored on. I've learned in my public speaking ventures (what few) that audiences really don't care so much unless you go out and grab them.

A loneliness this strong can only be self-imposed. There are people to know. It requires rejection of basic relations on my part to get where I am now.

There is loneliness and then there is blow-your-brains-out-loneliness--the kind where you have absolutely zero friends. Not one person who cares a whit about you.

9.11.2003

I can't masturbate anymore.
With every attempt I become troubled by the idea that the girl of my imagination is morally bankrupt and therefore distasteful.
I become disgusted with the whole business and abandon the mission altogether.

9.09.2003

This hatred has all but consumed every last ray of light in the cosmos that is my person.

I truly have no friends, beliefs, hobbies. I know no love. I hate humanity so much that I have no enemies. Their pathetic selves do not deserve my emotions. Yet I face evil when I think about certain people, and I smile internally when confronted with others. But the dark cloud of spite rains upon even those gentle souls who formerly provided a reprieval from the hateful judge that lurks....

Perhaps I wouldn't hate if everyone acted according to my will. But I'd fuck things up, things would go awry and I'd hate myself for my errors. Grinding the wheels of change begrudgingly faster, purging those faulty parts of self.

Until there is nothing left but one form of energy, directed toward the demise of its subject. That too familiar crutch, hate.