Negative Entertainment in 2014

Here I am, with my fifth beer of the evening moving down the hatch, and it is time to reflect. Are our entertainments negative? To what extent is all entertainment a relief from the burden of consciousness? My sixth of the evening is primed and ready to go, and I've got on headphones to make sure I'm isolated even further from the actual world around me. When I close my eyes, the room seems to light up, and I feel as though I'm nineteen experimenting with alcohol for the first time, with a beautiful naked Amanda on my bed amused at me playing being a writer. I doubt that ever happened. But I'm sure something similar did. It's good enough for the moment. When I open my eyes, I'm back in China, alone, with my empty bottles to keep me company until morning. The regret I'll feel tomorrow is far FAR less than the regret I've felt after any woman's company. Disclaimers included.
From the Summer of 2005 to the Fall of 09, I could count my days without someone at my house on one hand (discounting Japan). I hated it, but I loved it. I needed it, but it was killing me. It was such a mix, it's hard to evaluate. Hard to consider. Hard to determine. What did I want at that time? I never really told myself. I never really let myself consider it. I wanted two extremes, and in any individual moment, I may have desired to join a monastery or have plunged into an orgy that would shame Little Boots himself. How does one reconcile these different desires? I used to accuse Rachael specifically, and most women generally, about changing their memories, about contradicting their previous statements. Well, there was some truth in my accusations, but there was also a lot of truth in them changing their tunes. Or, rather, there was the potential for truth there that I'd never seen or noticed before. It's hard to say exactly what it is that makes us what we are at any given moment. Sometimes, the moment itself has no meaning, and we project backwards. Other times, our most meaningful experiences seem to occur in the natural course of events. Our perspective changes. It's impossible to think the same thing from one moment to the next, and especially impossible (if such an idea makes sense) to think the same thing for the same reason. (Sixth) We change. Our connection to ideas change. We understand more about ourselves, or less about ourselves, more about a moment, or less about a moment. Our ideas, our memories, our beliefs, they are always unreliable, and I would be hard pressed to guess whether they're less reliable with the benefit of reflection or with the initial burst of experience drawn emotion.
When I used to drink, I was confident. I was bold. I was brash. I made out with Morgan and got farther with her than I'd ever dreamed possible in the old days when I had morals. In one night. And it was lovely. She loved it, she hated it. She loved me, she hated me. She told me she hated me for being so good at what I did because she wanted to hate me. My one on and only booty call. She hated me for my affectation, for my brazenness, for my affected drunken accent, and for all the props to indicate my state. But she melted beneath my tongue in so many senses of the word. Those were the glory days. They happened just before Japan. Morgan's a mom now. And I'm an old man. At twenty seven. Though I always seem to think that I'm twenty eight. Only the dead stay seventeen forever. Since Rachael, and I've written this before, many times, I've become sad. Maudlin. Pitying. But at the same time, I love it. It's genuine in the same way my emotional masochism was genuine. I was in pursuit of the emotional highs of personal lows. I've always believed that alcohol reveals who we really are. I think that's appropriate. December seventh, 2014, the day we were bombed by the Japanese, I was happy. Though dumped, though alone, though miserable, I was happy. I had Pontikun and Katie and Peach to make me sing Man I Feel Like a Woman. December fourteenth, I was happy to be at a nearly all night party just to say goodbye to us. The next time I remember being drunk? December 31st. Reading Rachael Oscar Wilde stories. And crying. Crying for the beauty of it all (though I may have been sober at that point, I was certainly drunk after midnight). The sincerity of sobriety, after January of 2008, has diminished. When drunk, I haven't been happy since then. I suppose that's as good a sign as any that I'm truly unhappy. If a man isn't a happy drunk, if he just feels sad, reflective, macabre, upset, and worried, then that's just what he is. At least, according to all I've believed. So what do I do? As Caroline laments in Shirley, how am I to spend the next fifty years of life? Like this? In writing? In struggling against my liver for lucidity and against time for the honesty that the struggle brings me? What is honesty? What do we even mean by that? Who can say? Our lives are so full of skanks and disappointment. What victories can we count? What accomplishments can we point to and say, "There, THAT is what justifies every molecule of oxygen I've wasted in all these years of existence?" Who can point to anything? Fewer still can find anything of value. I am not one of them. So we spend years in the company of women who do nothing for us. We re re re re re re re read books whose significance we'd absorbed long ago. We take jobs that fulfill our ambition but starve our souls. We play game that let us give up quickly and try again to beat our foes. And we will win. We shall win. It is a foregone conclusion. The TV, the computer, Facebook, Kindle, booze, women, my ukulele, archery, exercise, walks, music, work, drama, socializing, The Starlight, Japanese, all these things are distractions from the reality of /me/. But what is that reality? I don't know. And, complicating things, these are also the tools by which we may find ourselves. Our distractions are our perverted tools. The mediums that we use for ideas, the things that should move us, should lift us up, should allow us to be more than what we are are the same chains we pile on ourselves to keep us in our places and to block out the view of the world outside. The difference between a home and a prison is largely in perception. Our perspective changes over time. What is one one moment is the other another. So we go on, unsure, and yet asked to act. Required to act. But on what basis? The blind flailing whims of idiots. And so I flail, and struggle to keep my head above water, hoping the current takes me someplace good. Wishing, hoping, praying, I have the strength to go to where I intend. But the view is nice from here. How relaxing to forget about where I want to go and simply float forever. Alone in the water. But a man who does not need men, so says Aristotle, is more than a man, or less than a man. And if I have learned anything, it is that I am not more.