I will become incompetent forever. What strikes me now is the guilt, the feeling of vain inadequacy, the fear of change forever, sudden death, the striking deep within the lungs: I've smoked, I've imbibed. I wonder now if perhaps my mind will lose its edge, that sharp or vivid point to it that it may have had -- if I will wander down alleyways alone, surrounded by fumes -- if I will die a lonely death, forsaken of all. Such depression hits me now. My entire actions, my entire outlook, my entire view makes me sick. I don't want to be myself. I get so depressed every weekend when I have to spend it in this dorm, this awful dorm, with no friends, no exictement, simply mountains and mountains of books and work. I want to break free! I want to shatter them forever, I want them gone.

But I know when I go out that the life of love will never be for me. I harbor the secret fear in my heart always that I am unlovable, always that should anyone get too deep, too close, too hot to the deep burning center of me they will flicker with flames and vanish in a puff of smoke. Inelegant poetic devices, but you'll have to forgive me. I live in a kind of closed off agony. Another weekend wasted. What did I do? Simply go to a party for some three or four hours maybe, imbibe, ruin myself, and now I am soiled and abandoned. I begged JD (well, I didn't beg, but I could have) not to take me back. That I didn't ever want to go back. I don't want to be alone. I need consideration, I need to escape myself. And who am I? Someone awful. No, it isn't self pity, it's a desire to atone for everything, simply to shed this skin, this detestable skin, I have no desire to be who I am.

I babble. I talk about intellectual things. I argue. I carry myself with a cruel arrogance. Don't you see? It's inexcusable...even if I like those things. I can never escape my own pale and cast. Even to have done the things which I've done, the horrible, inexcusable, that is just it! There is no escape. I cannot change my comportment and carry about on with my life. I deserve to be punished, hanged, whipped, lacerated for who I was. I can never escape it. Others never forgive me for what I've done to them, so how can I possibly forgive myself? And I know that I will do it again. I will alienate people, I will be inappropriate, I will deride myself, I will be controversial -- merely because it's in my nature. It's the only way I know how to live, how to operate. I want to scream, I want to plunge myself out the window right now and tumble, hitting the floor, falling, scattering, scattering until there's nothing of my left, not even a pinch, not even a drop.

Agony. That's the word. This horrible feeling of vested guilt over actions when one has imbibed which one cannot control. I simply rambled, I simply derided myself, that is all. But I could tell I was trying to make myself popular by cruel self-mockery, that that was always my place, that I was always the younger, the disconsolate, the unwanted. In the end there is nothing for me. Nothing at all. No person can fill the void, the gap, because I hate being here with myself and I'll always flee from my own arms into those of another, even though those others never materialize.

I don't want to be here! I don't want to be me! How can I love myself if I choose specifically not to? And where is God? I have abandoned him. For one week I supplicated myself, for one week I prepared to live a different life, as if all of the world were emerging into sharp focus, into an answer. But where is that answer? If it ever was, it has slipped through my fingers. Was it give to others? Imbibe. Enivrez-vous. No! None of it has worked. I still want, I still feel boundless, bottomless, depthless pits in my soul, pits that cannot be filled, really blemishes, blemishes and scabs, scabs all over for the sinful ways of life that I have lived.

Sinful, only removing myself from God, from others, from the world. I wanted to be recluse. That's right! I want all of it or none of it. Either complete and unconditional love and admiration from ever human being, a complete submission from others, or I am raped and cast out and dominated and could not control the spark of my own zeal and set fires ablaze and I wander off, downcast and alone. If I can have not universal love, I want not any other kind of love that there is to be had.

I've been looking in my desperation for anything -- a warm body, an escape, a fluid, a substance -- anything to clear me and cleanse me. I've been writing, I've been accomplishing. This is what this fury has produced, myself. And I am in love with a tortured idol. A tortured idol of the artist is keeping my from happiness, locking me in the garden, and I can only be surrounded by the sweet perfumes of aberration. I am a blind prophet, raving stark mad with the words of my god.

Rimbaud. Lettre du Voyant. You think I quoted the above? It existed or resided somewhere in my pitful wretch of a mind. Why can't I do things on the weekends? My complaints are few, but my world is stark. There is no room for unhappiness. Perfection has either attained or failed in the corpuscule of my soul. Soul -- an illusion, an allusion, a fluttering bird with its wings to the air. I cannot destroy my body, let the world do it for me. Bitter old age, disease, sickness, and death. Something else to kill, but by my own hand I can never. Should it be so strange that I feel this? Cannot others? No, I would never do it. I don't want to have to go into a program of rigorous avoidance. I wouldn't trust myself anymore. But I do trust myself. I trust myself to take my agony kindly, like a bitter medicine. And any others? That would be weakness. It is fine to imbibe, but to depend? No, the brain can twist and turn with new illuminations, new works, temporarily, but I don't choose the rose-colored glasses. And so to see things as darkness? Possibly, quite possibly in all hope and good fortune. Good fortune? God, everything lies sprawled out before me -- histories, ages, nation, genius, disgust, arrogance, and emptiness -- like a cold, stark, pit.