Seven: Zero Year & Momentary Failures

"Why do you smell like perfume?"

"Uh...maybe it's my cologne."

"No. I know that smell, it's the same perfume my roommate wears."

"Yeah, well, funny story about that..."

In the past seven days I've drank entirely too much. By my count I've had nine Jack and Coke's and a bottle of red wine in the past week. That may not seem like too much spread over seven days, but it's too much for me.

In the past seven days I've let my "diet" go totally to shit. I ate a cheeseburger, pizza, and a chicken sandwich so covered in greasy gobby shit that I couldn't even guarantee you there was chicken in there. I also haven't exercised at all, and I was struggling for a bit with the exercise there in the first place.

In the past seven days I've spent too much money. Like enough money that I could have started my own small third world country. If you know me you don't have to guess what kinds of things I've spent this money on (expensive liquor, cheap women, giant f*ing bronze comic book statues). But you can guess what kind of numbers we're talking.

So in the past seven days I've totally failed at everything I've done. Absolutely everything. I haven't been any good at work, if I have any friends left I probably haven't been very good to them, I was useless at Antioch, I've barely spent time with the kids. I'm not reading, barely writing, and have done nothing remotely creative. I have played quite a bit of XBOX, but I'm not even doing very well at that. So in the past seven days I've totally failed.

I'm depressed, unmotivated, totally falling apart and a complete mess.

Except...I'm not.

In reality I feel better than I have in weeks. I was sort of touch and go for awhile there. I was beginning to wonder what it would take for me to break out of this one. Things had been steadily getting worse since early October and even though pretty early on there I realized that things were going to be ok, that this wasn't the big one I knew it was going to be a big one. It wasn't going to be easily to pull out of this funk. And sure enough we're quickly coming up on December and I'm still at the mercy of the beast so to speak. Right now things should be far worse than they have been at any point since things started going wrong in my head. And instead I'm sitting here at my desk, just past midnight, thinking about all the millions of little outs I have in this situation. Realizing that what's been stymieing me these past few months isn't the lack of an out, the lack of a solution, it's the lack of an obvious out, or a good solution. There are literally a million ways this could go. I just haven't chosen one yet.

Now I know I can't do the things I did tonight every night (if I did I'd probably be dead in a week), and in fact I should probably never do most of them again, but if tonight it was what I had to do to survive well...no harm, no foul. I'm still learning, still figuring this all out. I'm going to make mistakes. Lots of them. Truly horrible ones in fact. But I'll take comfort in the fact that I learn from my mistakes. I won't be making the same mistakes over and over again, no, I'll be finding new and interesting ways to make mistakes on a regular basis. And in the end I'll be ok. Not great, or fantastic, or even good...just ok.

I will never be normal, but I don't want to be normal anymore. I just want to be me, so instead of working on being normal I'm just going to try and focus on working on being a better me. If that makes any sense at all. The Zero Year kick off didn't go very well the other night, but I suppose the good thing about deciding to start over again is that it kind of leaves the door open to starting over again...again. So here we go.

Tonight I start again. The clock resets.

Zero Year...take two.