2/5
In less than five days, I’ll be twenty-four years old. Typing the number out gives it more depth, and makes the whole thing feel twice as depressing.
I said I’d stop smoking weed so goddamn much by twenty-five. Fuck.
I also thought I’d have a couple of screenplays written already, and maybe a consistent chipping away at a novel. None of that’s occurred, and none of it will unless I get to the blank page every day. Or I quit smoking weed.
The truth is, I have 3 or 4 started and unfinished piles of slop on Final Draft, and a pretty much-abandoned novel about a coming-of-age drug dealer. And the novel’s story is just a bloated version of one of the screenplay drafts! SAD
2/8
Scratch that last part.
In two short days, I’ll be twenty-four years old.
What’s happened in the past 3 days has been, for the most part, business as usual…except for one small observation. It was confirmed when re-reading the journal entry from the 5th.
Lettertoast is depressed. I’m depressed.
It’s certainly not the first time, and I’m sure it will never be the last, but it’s pretty much the first time I’ve been this hyper-aware of the switch.
Maybe it came from the serotonin dump I experienced getting back from the Jamacia trip, and back into normal life … Or not being able to start anything new since “Too Dark to See”… Perhaps the monotony of normal life has sunken her teeth into me, and my body is simply adjusting to that intrusive and numbed sensation that I expect the average American feels constantly.
But the fact remains, the poison we’ve all agreed to name ‘depression’ is coursing through my veins and affecting every possible realm of my life. However, there is a silver lining.
I’ve been here before, oh so many times. No need to panic. Simply keeping the ship afloat right now is the best possible scenario. Don’t do anything irrational, like a new personality-defining haircut, or a massive and useless purchase that only fuels the beast.
Just stay the course, only let your mind drift into the darkness hidden in those cluttered closet corners. Discover that side of you and confront it like a mirrored reflection. Take a detailed record of its appearance, the way it smells and sounds, and note the repulsion you feel when staring into its eyes. Never give that monstrous proto-type the wheel, cause deep down you know it could ruin everything if given the opportunity. You’ve worked too hard.
Do not let your mind settle in those dark corners. You enter, bear witness to what you see, and leave just as fast as you came (pause).
Just because you’re depressed, it doesn’t mean that the rest of your house shouldn’t be clean. Dishes need to be washed. Laundry done, and the trash taken out.
Make your fucking bed at least, you’ll be 24 in 2 days.
2/9
2/13
The entry to my 24th year on this planet was greeted with sickness. I must’ve caught something on the ski mountain cause all night I was puking, and haven’t felt right the past 3 days. To salvage some resemblance of ‘celebration’, and ignore the pestering itch that permeated the back of my throat that night, I chugged away at my Modelo’s. I puffed away at my pot praying that the intoxication would eliminate my feelings of shittiness. It did not…
There’s very little to do with this post now that the time has passed. It all feels pointless, except for the admission of depression. That holds value. That observation itself makes this messy and obscure post worth it. However, at the very least, the shared journal entries over the past week or so could be seen as some insight into the demanding and fragile nature of the passing of time and our experience with it. How these feelings of ours, which essentially act as unreliable antennae to our perceived experience, can distort, disrupt, and greatly disturb the one thing, the only thing, that isn’t concerned
2/16
Trying to write at work is impossible. The entry above confirms that. Even when no one is around, it’s not authentic. I can see that now, confronting the blank page at home. The 13th certainly may have sounded true, there’s a kernel in there somewhere, but there is some sort of layered ego being projected. Trying to write at work feels like completing easy homework assignments that are due the next period. Ideas come quickly, the fingers flow freely, and writing becomes just another task at work. There is no starting over, everything seems to fit exactly where my brain had imagined.
I’m now starting to think it could be useful, trying to write at work.
As opposed to at home, where hesitation and the overwhelming doom of “this is gay,” hangs over my head constantly, work writing is me phoning it in. Work writing is playing dress up, a lackadaisical rehearsal for the play that’ll never show. Sure, what I may be spewing away at the time might not be the truest effort forward, but it doesn’t matter. It’s words on the page, and in 2024, in my 24th year on this planet, that’s all I want to be concerned about. Getting words on the page.
No more of those stupid and useless self-loathing thoughts (like the ones on the 5th). Concerned about the products produced by the writing process, scripts, and drafts, why the fuck should anyone be concerned about that if their writing is honest? They wouldn't be, and neither shall I.
I always say “Someday I’ll start practicing what I preach,” and I’m not saying TODAY is that DAY, but I would like to start here.
I’m putting the writing process and my ambitions on this giant pedestal, putting all this pressure on myself that I’ll hopefully end up writing something worth a dime. And if I continue thinking like that, I never will. That is where my fork is, that’s where shit hits the fan and all I have is a rag.
And for 2024, on my 24th year on this planet, that’s all I’ll be doing… Smearing whipped shit into a wall with a single rag, and no water bucket. Essentially painting a white wall brown with whatever excrement life decides to hurl into my spinning blades.
But I’ll be happy doing it because it’s simply words on a page.
2/19
And just like that, my birthday month is over. Eyes are set on March, the extension of sunlight and patience as spring birds rejoice with their bellowing tunes. I’ve started to hear them warm up their lungs, playing with different melodies, as opposed to the deafened numbness of rigid air crashing against the siding of the apt building. Little birds have laid dormant for too long, much like the rest of us.
It’s oddly comforting how similarly insignificant we all feel during the winter months. “Winter is Coming…” I’ve never fully watched the show, yet it universally encapsulates that dread when staring down the barrel of cold. Desolate. We’ve all agreed that Hell is hot
2/20
2/21
“When the outside world is just as cruel as your inner thoughts, you stop peeking out the window for answers.” - Me from 2 months ago
While it may be pretty self-absorbed to quote myself and reflect on the philosophical intent behind the words, I’m gonna do so anyway because it’s interesting. Andre has always said, “Writing creates more writing,” in an attempt to curb that thing we’ve been classically conditioned to know as, writer’s block. So when the blank page seems to be kicking your ass more than usual that day, you can always go back to something previously written and expand on it. You're not suffering from writer’s block, you’re editing. Which then creates more writing, and so on, and so on…
This was what I wanted to do regarding the rest of the passage the opening sentence was from, it was written 2 months ago. Just a simple journal entry that described my state of being at that particular time, it went as such…
/// When the outside world is just as cruel as your inner thoughts, you stop peeking out the window for answers. And when taking that forbidden plunge down to the deepest depths of your proverbial soul, in hopes of finding any recognizable shape unclouded by the foggy window, and still coming up with nothing, most would describe that as hitting their ‘rock bottom.’
It may happen to them when they're 18, like me, it may happen when they're 40, and then there are the lucky few who get to skate past this unbearable line of sorrow. They see the line, they aren’t cutting it selfishly, but some of them reach the end never truly knowing how deep their pit can go. They sit with peaceful stagnance on the surface tension of reality, never leaning really to one side or the other. The infinite game of tug of war between complete order and absolute chaos.
It appears to be the most logical path to follow, and so we do. And continue to do so, for some time now, and I’ll have to admit, it has its perks. Like the good little sheep I am, my days are predetermined by those who feed me. And like the good little sheep I am, I am subservient to those who observe my ‘goodness’ and dispense to me my earned feed. My feed is good, and since I am a good little sheep, I can only assume that those who feed me are good too. Other sheep can be bad sometimes, and when THOSE see that the GOOD sheep have turned BAD, the BAD sheep no longer get their feed.
The rules are simple, so simple and benign that it creates a gelatinous-membraned barrier between those who live and those who survive.
The truth is I do love my job (for now that is), and I do love my life and where it seems to be headed.
I’m just scared, that’s all. ///
I certainly didn’t hit rock bottom at 18, if anything I peaked. Honestly, no idea what I was saying there, but when rereading the entry as a whole, there is a looming sensation of confirmation. Especially after the recorded entries this entire month.
“I’m just scared, that’s all.” Scared of what? Mundane reality? I now believe that the fear described there was the first confirmation of this depression, the gully where I currently find myself.
I finished my short story “Too Dark to See” in November, and since then, I have not started anything “new”. It feels like if I’m not completely committed to something imaginary I’m wasting away. Any sharpness found in my writing dulled by the passing of time, leading to the erosion of creativity. The further I stray away from make-believe, the more gray my world becomes. I want to write a more classical definition of a horror story, like Southern Gothic literature. A spooky house, a desolate setting, and an outsider battling both the external and internal forces of evil. It all sounds so glorious…in theory.
I’ve recently become enamored by the Great Molasses Flood of 1919. An industrial accident that claimed the lives of over 20 people in the Northend of Boston.
2/22
2/24