forever5150's blog: "loveless"

I should put in something here. Since the age of 10 (probably earlier, can't recall that well, done too many drugs) I have had a strange quirk. That being that I like to run around (in a circle, straight line, anywhere really) and daydream. I think its sort of some Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, I'm not sure and I haven't been able to explain it. Most of the time (all of the time) while listening to music. While running, well when I was younger, I'd take stories, themes, music, characters from fictional works and place myself in them. When I was younger it started off with different video games and cartoons and books (Aladdin, Chrono Trigger, We're Back!: A Dinosaurs Story, Power Rangers, Spiderman,  Kirby's Adventure, you name it) and insert myself in them and change the story to whatever my imagination wanted. I grew up with this behavior, and to a extent still do it.  It's my own little escape, a coping mechanism. Some kids have a imaginary friend, I had multiple dimensions and galaxies and worlds full of imaginary friends. I've grown to still depend on this behavior as a coping tool, this time my fantasies are about playing guitar, having loads of friends, women falling in love/lust/attracted with /to me, the whole motion picture.

So that is what I had instead of a lot of friends growing up, a whole galaxy of friends in my head to comfort me, and a head full of music. You'll never catch me without headphones now, and rarely when I growing up. Another escape. Trends have come and gone, but music has always held me close. Now more so than ever. I cling to it now as the last bastion of hope that my life has now. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

So, a lot of people talk about High School being the best/worst time of their lives, but a lot of the defining subliminal moments of my life happened in Junior High. Teasing was constant, bullying was relentless, loneliness was setting in, and a social pecking order was being set for a generation. I never got into any fights, I was just a sensitive kid who was taking a lot of emotional damage. I was the school loser: shy, awkward, few friends, head in the clouds. An average student, but in elementary school I was held back for being "special," so that was one more thing to be ashamed of . My father was upset at me for being the school punching bag (he was the captain of the soccer team at his high school in mexico,) and developed a drinking problem over me. I was delivered by c-section, my mother almost died giving birth to me, my parents were immigrants who had put all their hopes and dreams into their children, and I turned out to be a charity case. Yeah, he wasn't going to take this well. In the only real time I remember my father ever hitting me regularly was while I was going through my surly early teens. My dad blamed me for his life sucking and liked to prove it by hitting me and telling me that only mother killers cry.

Girls would treat me with what I call the "ew" treatment. Sometimes girls just look, think, or regard undesirable guys with a cold "EWWW." And the "ewww" they use can be used in all sorts of different ways! Yeah I was regarded as "ew." My face was covered in deep rooted acne (inherited from both my parents, THANKS MOM AND DAD!) that can only be cured with surgery, or a very thick needle. It was really bad as a teenager,  so I tried to needle the zits out, so now I had zits and scars on my face. When I was going through puberty I had to cover my bed in talcum powder so I could keep away the pain long enough to pass out from exhaustion or crying myself to sleep.

I was sort of getting the glimpse of the world, from the mouth of babes if you will. I was (I like to think) a good kid in spite of things, but I was still treated like a outcast. People hated me, my parents thought I was a weakling, girls thought I was disgusting (un-kissable, un-date-able, and definitely UN-FUCK-ABLE,) my teachers thought I was either stupid or spooky because I was so quiet. All this was happening seemingly at once (even though it was the duration of 4 years) and I was so frustrated that for the first time in my life was contemplating suicide.

I just kept looking at everyone and all I saw were evil eyes and snide "you don't deserve to live" smiles on their faces. Asshole bullies were getting all the girls, everyone was dating or having their first kiss or fuck or feel up, and I (God's beautiful snowflake!) was sitting in the back alone and discarded. I hated real life, and ran back to my imaginary world. But even that wasn't enough, eventually during this time of the hormone hurricane I decided it had to stop.. I was 16 when I first tried to kill myself. After school day I went into my parents medicine cabinet, took a handful of barbiturates (sleeping pills) that were Tylenol PM's or some other brand. Then I took my little red wagon down to what were at the time just train tracks (I live near City of Industry, there's a Metro-link down there now, but trains still run there too.) Once I got there I went down a little farther, past the train station and into what at the time were still open plains (besides the train tracks.) Along the way I picked up the heaviest things I could find, at first just big rocks but then I found some cinder blocks and ditched the rocks. When I was a good distance from the station I hid in the bushes while I watched one train go by, just to make sure they were running. As I watched it go by I drank my handful of sleeping pills with my first beer, gagging at first, but then I got them all down. It didn't take long to hit me, and when I was feeling a bit groggy I picked up the two cinder blocks and laid them in between the rails.

Then I set myself looking forward (so I couldn't see the train coming) then laid down and put one block on my feet, then one on my chest, and laid back and let the medicine do its work. I put the blocks on in case I'd chicken out. As I looked up at the sky I felt my eyes water, thinking that this is what I wanted, and it was all going to end, I was still very scared. I blacked out, it seemed like a instant, but I woke up as the tracks started rattling and the horn blasted. As I woke up I panicked I shoved off the blocks and rolled to the side of the tracks . I started crying (still groggy) as I hid in the bushes when the train (it was about a minute away from squashing me) hit the two blocks and exploded everywhere. I got pelted in the stomach and the face, just flesh wounds. I grabbed my wagon I ran/walked/huffed my way back to my house. My parents gave me a stern look, my mom got angry over my dirty clothes, my father said nothing, they both had assumed I had gotten into a fight, and I think I recall a proud glint in my parents eyes, thinking that maybe I had finally stood my ground and fought for myself.

They wouldn't know until years later what had actually happened. My peers at school had also thought I had gotten into a fight, so they left me alone for a little awhile. As for me, my thoughts were in between recoiling in horror at what I had almost done, and also going to the fantasy life that I had going on in my head. 

A lot of the times, the only joy I have in life is pretending to be other people.

I'm writing more, I don't even think anybody else but me is reading this, but thats ok. It's good to get things off my chest, my own little way of interacting with the world, for what it's worth.
Carrying on, after I graduated Junior High I transfered on to the literally down-the-street-from-me Diamond Bar High. School life was dull, I either coasted/excelled/underachieved through all my classes (I find that last line redundant) and was a average student, still went to special study class, but only needed real help in Math. I had very few friends, but the ones I did have certainly matched me, in that we were drawn together but for no explainable reason. We didn't dress alike, we didn't look physically anything like each other, weren't in any of the same classes or clubs, didn't live near each other. In fact all of us had barely anything in common, except that we all were the ones that were "one-off" from regular people.

We didn't fall into any clique naturally, we were alright at sports but not jocks, we were good students but we weren't nerds, we were dark but not goth looking, we were radical thinkers and had attitudes but didn't fit in with punks. One off, to be sure. I sort of found a part of me in EVERY category, I was inspired and put off by everything and everyone. I guess the only thing I had in common with those guys was intelligence. I wasn't super book smart and I sure wasn't stupid. My identity was starting to take mold, and in my teens I did a lot of mimicking. Styles/fashion/drawing/singing/music/social. I've come to realize that the only way I ever seem to learn anything is by mimicking somebody else until I can take the thing I was copying and putting my own stamp on it. This is especially true now in my guitar playing, but during high school I was learning from other people ALL OF THE TIME. I'm just a sponge, and everyone I choose to hang around is both a teacher and a mirror. My friends were loner genius/starving artists I guess.

No, I didn't have a clique, and now looking back on it I don't think I ever had friends.

Needless to say I didn't have a girlfriend or have a date all through high school. I was very shy, rejection and being discarded saw to that., what are now old scars were then fresh wounds. I couldn't fathom the cruelty of it all, everyone else was being normal, everyone was interacting with the opposite sex, going on dates, dances, having sex, kissing and I had to sit back and deal with the feelings of the discarded. I was a little rough around the edges, but I was a good kid and didn't understand why I was so universally cast aside.  Last man on earth at age 16.  Resentment, anger, envy, hate, the first stabs of real hatred were going through me, so what was at first painful shyness turned into a cold, taciturn angry young man. I was no longer sitting in class with a wide eyed innocence, now I just stared out bitterly. I could now speak fluent english, but I rarely initiated conversations. If you asked me you got a quick answer, but I didn't want to make small talk.

The bitterness was starting, and when your like that it casts an aura around you. Thats for sure. None of my classmates tried to bring me out of my shell, I was still considered one of the uncool, un-dateable loonies. However, after Columbine happened, administration took one look at me knew that I was at risk for either suicide or shooting up the place. So they "nudged (heavily suggested)" my parents into making sure that I see a school psychiatrist, and be put on anti-depressants. I was given Paxil at age 16 (don't remember the dosage) and since then have been on some type of psychiatric medicine, I'm 26 now. And as a quick aside, let me tell you. THEIR DRUGS NEVER WORK.  NEVER. THEY WILL NEVER WORK.  These people have never cared about me, they just hoped that by throwing pills my way I wouldn't take vengeance out on the world that caused me to feel this way.

Prescribing anti-depressants was their way of doping me up long enough to not realize what a complete nightmare my life has turned into because of society, and if I'm not tranquilized I might start blowing people away like the Columbine killers, Cho from Virginia tech or the other school shootings. Giving me paxil or xanax or whatever was for societies peace of mind, "We can still treat him like shit, shun him, ignore him, let him boil in his sexual frustration, reject him, but he's too fucked up to realize it." Doctors consider you a case number and don't lose a second of sleep over what mistakes they ruin your life with, only to see a bunch of numbers rise on a computer screen

That's what was done to me, that's what's happening to me.

I've been fighting depression for a few years now and this shit does not help. the worst part is that if I keep writing it I feel worse and worse and worse but if i stop writing it for a few days I dread not knowing what's happening and what might happen and if I try to engage myself in another way it just ends up reminding me of this shit, and if I try to tune out by playing video games or exercising or play guitar I just feel regret for wasting the day instead of doing something, anything, however impotent and useless my actions might be, and drugs and alcohol just make my feelings of rage and smallness even more confused and irritating.  And then the absolute worst part is that when I sort of spiral out of control like this, I can catch myself, and stop thinking for a while, and replace those thoughts with something else, something a little more pertinent to my life, but nowadays the refuge from the bigger problems has become outrage and frustration at the very same financial horror stories that started me going in the first place. yeah, I can understand where the people who just snap are coming from.

I don't have that evil in me, at least I don't think. I've always had this bit in me, I guess you could call it "hope" or what my mind can communicate as hope. In spite of all the things, since I was little, through junior high, through high school, through now. I have that little bit of me that still hopes. Thats what got me through childhood, through my teens. I was more aware of it when I was in high school. It was the "beginning of my life" as they say, so I still had that childlike hope that, no matter how bad things got, one day it'll get a little bit better. Someday my day was gonna come. I was playing a lot of role-playing games and reading a lot of books and watched a lot of movies and I took the morals from them to heart. I believed that the underdog would win, that life would have good things for me, the girls would see my inner beauty, that I was a ugly duckling that would become a swan. I look back on those things with a sense of betrayal. It was another of the world's way of keeping me sedated, by giving me these fantasies they gave me the temporary escape, not realizing how bad reality was getting. Betrayed by the things I had loved so much.

I smoked pot and drank very sparingly, I hung out with a bunch of guys so there was nothing else TO do besides the usual juvenile shit. Substance abuse, another escape. Illegal substances were made for me. I started out by smoking weed and getting drunk from one 40 oz of King Cobra, by my senior year I drank heavily every other week and smoked weed (and sometimes speed, but rarely) just as much. I graduated from Diamond Bar High, a full on boozer, loser, user. I couldn't wait for death.

In all of this, sometimes I still wonder where God is.

Then sometimes, I think that if there was something bigger out there, it would have drowned me in a canvas bag a long time ago.

I'll write more on my lost years later, I'm a little upset right now. See you next time.