taking a mental health day.

here lies my body, half naked in bed, ordering dominos pizza online.

i might as well be dead. i hardly left the bed yesterday. don’t plan on it today, except to open the door, throw some cash at the driver, and snatch up my delicious pizza. clearly, i need to get myself out of this rut. or i will end up jobless, overweight, and broke, with extraordinarily high cholesterol.

on one hand, i thought the way out might (almost seriously) be alcoholism. in the social sense, of course. perhaps i should go out, get wasted, and talk to everyone all night about all of the typical mid-twenties hipster bar topics like beat poetry. please, it hurts me to say it. i love beat poetry. and it seems i have no one to really talk to about it now. because it has become a fad. and once something has become a fad, it loses its respect in one sense of having any intellectual worth. now, beat poetry, in many cases, is void of this already. but look at the heart of it. diane di prima. she will always have my respect because she is a damn good poet. anyways. i ruled that out when i thought about the fact that despite my intoxication, i will feel just as dead talking to a bunch of strangers as i would laying in bed, living in my head.

second choice was take fifteen too many xanex. but then i wouldn’t have anything to write about.

and those were my only options. alcoholism and suicide.

instead, i am staying comfortably in bed, half naked, with a pizza. i am listening to the rain hitting the window pane and listening to the music through the brick wall beside my bed. i am thinking about all of the good feelings there are to feel. like someone’s hand in yours for the first time. or sleeping in the passenger seat while someone you love drives you through the town where they grew up, late at night. a really, really good mix tape. i haven’t forgotten about cassettes, i hope you don’t either. it can make you feel as though you are the only person in the world. and that feeling is always magnified when you listen to it on some country road, late at night, while you drive yourself home. i am thinking about really good poetry. and how sometimes there is almost no separation between the feelings someone felt when they wrote something one hundred years ago and the feeling you get when you read it one hundred years later. isn’t that a dream? and that feeling on a really cold night, when you bare the winter to stand outside and talk to a friend and have some really amazing conversation as the first snowfall begins to come down around you, standing on a rooftop, you don’t even notice the hours gone or the fact that you cannot feel your toes.

and as i write this i am realizing that every good feeling i value is dependent on the connection between two people.

so why is it so hard for me to feel that anymore? i would like to be fifteen again, and hanging on every word you say, like it the best thing i’ve ever heard, because it was probably the first time i heard it, not knowing it would wear off one day, eight years later.