"I want a new drug, one that wont make me sick. One that wont make me crash my car or make me feel three feet thick."
That's Huey Lewis and the News, "I Wanna New Drug." One could replace the word "drug" with "life" and I would swear the tune was written in honor of me.
Hi, my name is Pilonea. Well, not really of course, but this is the internet, I can be who I wish here -- right? I am a 26 year old male with no life, no credibility and no future. One can wonder why I would waste my time posting to internet message boards about myself, especially considering my apparent disdain for life in general. My response would be that when one has nothing but four walls, an i-net connection, and a television to keep them busy during the day, well, one will waste one's time on a great many inconsequential activities, especially if you are like me and have better things to do than watch Oprah and Doktor Phil. So, this is what I find myself doing these days. You see, this has been going on since September -- the last time I held a job -- and hasn't really changed. The sad and somewhat worrisome thing about it is that I really don't care. In certain ways I am content to be cutoff, or excluded from the daily grind that is planet earth. I prefer to construct my own world and my own reality within my meager living space and not venture forth beyond these walls (unless one considers an excursion into cyberspace, such as this, a venture). My best friends are Kant and Russell right now -- two long dead thought philanthropists who are often good for nothing other than helping me with trivial thought experiments, like engendering my own philosophy from the ground up, a philosophy of mind -- my mind. How can two distinct individuals really collate their perspectives on reality, and how do these comparisons pan out? That is, how can one "objectively" judge me? Isn't "reality" itself a synthetic a priori? Enough of that.
It all began at the age of 15. That was the time when I distinctly remember my grades in school plummeting from all A's to my first ever D and then subsequently and inevitably spiraling down the pit to all F's. By the time I was a sophomore, I was ranked something like 119 out of 121 in my class as far as GPA was concerned. I didn't care then, and I really don't care now. You see, everyone else thought I was a bit odd (they had to considering the drastic change that I had went through as an adolescent). As a grade schooler and middle schooler, I was an honor student, selected for elite scholar teams that were statewide (of which I turned down, I always did have a flair for controversy), and received athletic honors. This all changed the further I progressed in the public school system. By the time I was 15, I had a teacher or two who found great merriment in exposing me for the slacker that I was and for publicly chastising me for things others did but were not punished for. I ended up being, to them, the class clown or, better yet, class freak. I can recall the glorious days of being called into the hallway for "talks" merely because I decided not to complete my homework assignment the night before. Hell, I don't recall even owning a textbook past about the 8th grade.
By the time I was 16, I was smoking pot quite often and skipping school to engage myself in extracurricular activities and began simply enjoying my time away from the confines that was school. It also didn't help that I wasn't really like the rest of the students -- that is, I didn't really like them nor care to be like them (albeit in certain ways we all strive for social acceptance).
At about this same point, I was finding myself sleeping at all hours of the day and night and letting everything that should be important go. I was taken to visit a shrink, was diagnosed as "depressed" and placed on Paxil and Lithium (the latter of which I utterly detested). Lithium withdrawal was hell and I found myself almost passing out at work after I stopped taking it (it was like having mini-seizure). I decided the best thing for me was no school, so I dropped out as soon as I hit 16.
The next several years were more of the same, until I decided I would enter college at the age of 19, which I did. I had to obtain my GED first, of course, and the arduous process of that serves as a fine illustration of the broken down bureaucracy that is public education. I was ready for the GED at the age of 15 but had to wait until the age of 17 to take the test in accordance with state law. It seems our board of education feels uncomfortable with 15 year old high school grads running the streets, especially when they didn't have to waste their time and energy fumbling through the hell that is the public school system -- a system that so many in my area seem to revere. Nonetheless, I was forced to enter the GED program after I dropped out in order to keep my driver's license. The first day I was made to attempt an achievement and ability test to gauge exactly where I stood with my educational progress. Well, I aced the test and received a rather confounded reaction from the administrator who informed me that I was the "only person in 20 years to score perfectly on the test." She later cut a deal with me, telling me if I didn't want to come to class for an entire year (as the law said I had to do), she wouldn't turn me in. Much to my chagrin, however, I was nontheless forced to wait an entire year to take the formal test. What fun!
I entered university at the age of 19 (after spending the next year screwing off and smoking plenty of pot). I quickly found myself on the Dean's list for the first two semesters. When I became a sophomore, tragedy struck my family -- my father passed away and left me with a load of responsibility and left the rest of the family in shock. To this day I still have no idea what killed him, he was an alcoholic and Vietnam combat Veteran of 66-67'. We found him dead at home alone.
As a result, my grades took a plummet and I ended up dropping out of college. I did come back, but only to end up in a heated debate with a professor during a philosophy lecture on Plato. It seemed our disagreement on some of Plato's allegories seemed to really frustrate her beyond comprehension and it forced me to vex her with some difficult to answer questions on religion and immortality. I walked out and never came back to school. Needless to say I had not been asleep for three days as I was feeling quite euphoric and had other issues on my mind like a relationship with a woman I had just met. I felt no need to remain in such a straight-jacket of intellectual confinement that was the university. I was walking circles around the professor, she knew it, I knew it, and others from my class informed me that they knew it. That was the end of my college career.
I am running long so.
All of the above occurred by the time I was 22. Fast forward four years. I am now 26, have no money, no education, no job, and live with my mother in near poverty. The last four years have been the same story revisited: find a job, work for a couple of months, quit in a fit of rage. I often feel, as my mother points out, that I have not matured emotionally above the level of about a 16 year old. I am irresponsible, cannot hold a job (as I mentioned), and just let everything go. I have debt collectors harassing me daily, I cannot get my sleep patterns on track, and my mother is near the point of a nervous breakdown. The rest of my family, including my brother, are rather successful and I feel I am nothing but a burden to them all. Friends of the family are constantly coming over to give me pep talks and many of them think I am just a bad example of a human being (they say I am lazy and just a plain sorry excuse). Now I cannot leave the house, as I cannot afford insurance on my vehicle, and I am stuck here staring out the window, authoring pointless posts on the Internet and simply lamenting the fact that I even still exist. Nihilist thoughts flood my brain and I have felt for a couple of years now that nothingness is far superior to existence. Rather than strife, I will take the serenity that defines nonexistence.
To sum it all up, I feel as if I am never going to be able to hold a job. I just cannot get along with any group of people for an extended period of time. I also loathe regimentation and punctualism. No job = no money = no help for my mother = further decline into poverty. I cannot carry on, and I feel like a quick bullet to the skull may be the best answer to ameliorate my problems and my family's; that problem is me.
I have been seeing doctors for a couple of years now -- they have diagnosed me with Bipolar disorder type I after a suicide attempt a few years back. I am on prozac, trileptal and wellbutrin now with an occasional dab of Zyprexa for leveling purposes. My friends seem to constantly chatter about my incompatibility with planet earth and carry on about whether I will "learn my lesson" inasmuch that I cannot continue on my path without dire consequences. Of course, I know this better than they do, but knowing and controlling events are two different animals. I can intellectualize my scenario until I am blue in the face, but cannot seem to gather the will to change it. I am fighting a losing battle, a battle against fate and determinism.
So that's me, a gen X'er without a cause and without a clue as to how to function and operate in society. Damned are the ones who see through the morass of human emotion and motivation -- I see no compensation for this task we call life and see no need to waste my resources, namely my mental energies, on something that will not bear fruit worth my harvesting. I have become sickened on the fruit of the normal life -- that is eating, drinking, sleeping, working a meaningless job, and then dying. Why not speed the process up? The problem is, no one else within my sphere of cognition can observe this reality quite like I do. They just don't understand what it's like.
That's the story of my ten year slump.
That's Huey Lewis and the News, "I Wanna New Drug." One could replace the word "drug" with "life" and I would swear the tune was written in honor of me.
Hi, my name is Pilonea. Well, not really of course, but this is the internet, I can be who I wish here -- right? I am a 26 year old male with no life, no credibility and no future. One can wonder why I would waste my time posting to internet message boards about myself, especially considering my apparent disdain for life in general. My response would be that when one has nothing but four walls, an i-net connection, and a television to keep them busy during the day, well, one will waste one's time on a great many inconsequential activities, especially if you are like me and have better things to do than watch Oprah and Doktor Phil. So, this is what I find myself doing these days. You see, this has been going on since September -- the last time I held a job -- and hasn't really changed. The sad and somewhat worrisome thing about it is that I really don't care. In certain ways I am content to be cutoff, or excluded from the daily grind that is planet earth. I prefer to construct my own world and my own reality within my meager living space and not venture forth beyond these walls (unless one considers an excursion into cyberspace, such as this, a venture). My best friends are Kant and Russell right now -- two long dead thought philanthropists who are often good for nothing other than helping me with trivial thought experiments, like engendering my own philosophy from the ground up, a philosophy of mind -- my mind. How can two distinct individuals really collate their perspectives on reality, and how do these comparisons pan out? That is, how can one "objectively" judge me? Isn't "reality" itself a synthetic a priori? Enough of that.
It all began at the age of 15. That was the time when I distinctly remember my grades in school plummeting from all A's to my first ever D and then subsequently and inevitably spiraling down the pit to all F's. By the time I was a sophomore, I was ranked something like 119 out of 121 in my class as far as GPA was concerned. I didn't care then, and I really don't care now. You see, everyone else thought I was a bit odd (they had to considering the drastic change that I had went through as an adolescent). As a grade schooler and middle schooler, I was an honor student, selected for elite scholar teams that were statewide (of which I turned down, I always did have a flair for controversy), and received athletic honors. This all changed the further I progressed in the public school system. By the time I was 15, I had a teacher or two who found great merriment in exposing me for the slacker that I was and for publicly chastising me for things others did but were not punished for. I ended up being, to them, the class clown or, better yet, class freak. I can recall the glorious days of being called into the hallway for "talks" merely because I decided not to complete my homework assignment the night before. Hell, I don't recall even owning a textbook past about the 8th grade.
By the time I was 16, I was smoking pot quite often and skipping school to engage myself in extracurricular activities and began simply enjoying my time away from the confines that was school. It also didn't help that I wasn't really like the rest of the students -- that is, I didn't really like them nor care to be like them (albeit in certain ways we all strive for social acceptance).
At about this same point, I was finding myself sleeping at all hours of the day and night and letting everything that should be important go. I was taken to visit a shrink, was diagnosed as "depressed" and placed on Paxil and Lithium (the latter of which I utterly detested). Lithium withdrawal was hell and I found myself almost passing out at work after I stopped taking it (it was like having mini-seizure). I decided the best thing for me was no school, so I dropped out as soon as I hit 16.
The next several years were more of the same, until I decided I would enter college at the age of 19, which I did. I had to obtain my GED first, of course, and the arduous process of that serves as a fine illustration of the broken down bureaucracy that is public education. I was ready for the GED at the age of 15 but had to wait until the age of 17 to take the test in accordance with state law. It seems our board of education feels uncomfortable with 15 year old high school grads running the streets, especially when they didn't have to waste their time and energy fumbling through the hell that is the public school system -- a system that so many in my area seem to revere. Nonetheless, I was forced to enter the GED program after I dropped out in order to keep my driver's license. The first day I was made to attempt an achievement and ability test to gauge exactly where I stood with my educational progress. Well, I aced the test and received a rather confounded reaction from the administrator who informed me that I was the "only person in 20 years to score perfectly on the test." She later cut a deal with me, telling me if I didn't want to come to class for an entire year (as the law said I had to do), she wouldn't turn me in. Much to my chagrin, however, I was nontheless forced to wait an entire year to take the formal test. What fun!
I entered university at the age of 19 (after spending the next year screwing off and smoking plenty of pot). I quickly found myself on the Dean's list for the first two semesters. When I became a sophomore, tragedy struck my family -- my father passed away and left me with a load of responsibility and left the rest of the family in shock. To this day I still have no idea what killed him, he was an alcoholic and Vietnam combat Veteran of 66-67'. We found him dead at home alone.
As a result, my grades took a plummet and I ended up dropping out of college. I did come back, but only to end up in a heated debate with a professor during a philosophy lecture on Plato. It seemed our disagreement on some of Plato's allegories seemed to really frustrate her beyond comprehension and it forced me to vex her with some difficult to answer questions on religion and immortality. I walked out and never came back to school. Needless to say I had not been asleep for three days as I was feeling quite euphoric and had other issues on my mind like a relationship with a woman I had just met. I felt no need to remain in such a straight-jacket of intellectual confinement that was the university. I was walking circles around the professor, she knew it, I knew it, and others from my class informed me that they knew it. That was the end of my college career.
I am running long so.
All of the above occurred by the time I was 22. Fast forward four years. I am now 26, have no money, no education, no job, and live with my mother in near poverty. The last four years have been the same story revisited: find a job, work for a couple of months, quit in a fit of rage. I often feel, as my mother points out, that I have not matured emotionally above the level of about a 16 year old. I am irresponsible, cannot hold a job (as I mentioned), and just let everything go. I have debt collectors harassing me daily, I cannot get my sleep patterns on track, and my mother is near the point of a nervous breakdown. The rest of my family, including my brother, are rather successful and I feel I am nothing but a burden to them all. Friends of the family are constantly coming over to give me pep talks and many of them think I am just a bad example of a human being (they say I am lazy and just a plain sorry excuse). Now I cannot leave the house, as I cannot afford insurance on my vehicle, and I am stuck here staring out the window, authoring pointless posts on the Internet and simply lamenting the fact that I even still exist. Nihilist thoughts flood my brain and I have felt for a couple of years now that nothingness is far superior to existence. Rather than strife, I will take the serenity that defines nonexistence.
To sum it all up, I feel as if I am never going to be able to hold a job. I just cannot get along with any group of people for an extended period of time. I also loathe regimentation and punctualism. No job = no money = no help for my mother = further decline into poverty. I cannot carry on, and I feel like a quick bullet to the skull may be the best answer to ameliorate my problems and my family's; that problem is me.
I have been seeing doctors for a couple of years now -- they have diagnosed me with Bipolar disorder type I after a suicide attempt a few years back. I am on prozac, trileptal and wellbutrin now with an occasional dab of Zyprexa for leveling purposes. My friends seem to constantly chatter about my incompatibility with planet earth and carry on about whether I will "learn my lesson" inasmuch that I cannot continue on my path without dire consequences. Of course, I know this better than they do, but knowing and controlling events are two different animals. I can intellectualize my scenario until I am blue in the face, but cannot seem to gather the will to change it. I am fighting a losing battle, a battle against fate and determinism.
So that's me, a gen X'er without a cause and without a clue as to how to function and operate in society. Damned are the ones who see through the morass of human emotion and motivation -- I see no compensation for this task we call life and see no need to waste my resources, namely my mental energies, on something that will not bear fruit worth my harvesting. I have become sickened on the fruit of the normal life -- that is eating, drinking, sleeping, working a meaningless job, and then dying. Why not speed the process up? The problem is, no one else within my sphere of cognition can observe this reality quite like I do. They just don't understand what it's like.
That's the story of my ten year slump.
